Rescued chickens gather in an aviary at Farm Sanctuary’s Southern California Sanctuary on October 5, 2022, in Acton, California. | Mario Tama/Getty Images A pandemic response that amounts to hoping and praying isn’t nearly enough. The so-called “bird flu” H5N1 virus only rarely infects humans. Over the course of several decades during which it has circulated and resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of birds, about 880 cases in humans have been reported, generally in humans who work very closely with livestock. But when it does make the leap to human hosts, H5N1 is often lethal — out of 26 cases reported since 2022, seven people died. That’s why it’s troubling that H5N1 has been recently discovered to have quietly spread across the country’s dairy farms, with testing finding genetic material of the virus present in 1 in 5 milk samples across the country. (Pasteurization kills the virus, so milk remains safe to drink.) That prevalence suggests that H5N1 is now spreading in mammals — and since cows on dairy farms are in frequent contact with farm workers, it seems likely the virus will have many chances to evolve to spread more easily among humans. If it does that, we may have another pandemic on our hands. None of that is great news, but the thing that has struck me most about the bird flu outbreak is that among the general public, it’s been greeted with a weariness that borders on indifference. The dominant attitude I’ve encountered when I ask people their concerns about bird flu amounts to “Well, I hope that doesn’t happen; I don’t have it in me to go through a pandemic again.” The Covid-19 pandemic was awful for people — not just for the millions who died and the many more who it hospitalized and lastingly affected, but also for the billions whose daily life it damaged, from lockdowns and school closures to dramatic new restrictions on movement and travel. You might expect that precisely because Covid-19 was so awful, the general public would be raring to make sure it can never happen again, by insisting our leaders do whatever it takes to be prepared for the next pandemic. But that doesn’t seem to have happened. Instead, with trust in our public health institutions badly damaged and many people suffering from pandemic fatigue, we now lack the attention span for the kind of serious policy response that could feasibly prevent the next pandemic. Repeated efforts to get a serious pandemic prevention program through Congress have fizzled. Despite the desperation of Americans to not go through this again — or possibly because of the desperation of Americans to not go through this again — we’ve basically decided to handle pandemic preparedness by hoping really sincerely it doesn’t happen again. But it will. If not with this virus, another one. Crossing our fingers isn’t a policy response H5N1 has never, as far as we know, had sustained human-to-human transmission. It may never mutate to be capable of that — many viruses don’t. The CDC says “the current public health risk is low,” and while that gives me flashbacks to Covid, it’s accurate at this moment; unless you spend a lot of time with cows or poultry, or drink raw milk, you’re unlikely to be exposed unless the virus evolves new capabilities. H5N1 has been dancing along the line of human spillover for more than 25 years without making the full leap. Hoping really hard that it goes away might work out fine. But if we are truly desperate to prevent the next pandemic — if we feel very viscerally that we can’t do this again, that our normalcy and our unmasked gatherings are among the most precious things we have these days — then that’s reason to prioritize preparedness more highly, not less so. We need an actual, serious policy response aimed at looking closely at the possible origins of pandemics, at how to reduce human-wildlife interfaces. We should be closely monitoring research with pandemic potential, and work to improve our infrastructure for spotting pandemics early, developing vaccines and countermeasures. If we want to stop pandemics, then stop pandemics It’s very understandable that the general public doesn’t want to have to become an expert in the different varieties of pandemic-potential virus out there. They don’t want to check the CDC website for case numbers, don’t want to see another round of school closures, don’t want to let pandemics consume their life again. But if there’s limited public pressure to prevent the next pandemic — the issue doesn’t rank among the most important ones for the 2024 elections — policymakers will evidently just not do it. So I think we have to, somehow, process the wreckage wrought by Covid, and turn our sense that we can’t live through this again into a determination to do better so we never have to. Pandemics aren’t like earthquakes. They happen for predictable reasons, and we know how to stop them. It would be an enormous tragedy if we fail to get that work done because Covid-19 was so painful and so exhausting that we can’t even think clearly about the possibility it might happen again. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Six Supreme Court justices attend President Joe Biden’s 2024 State of the Union address. | Shawn Thew/Pool/AFP via Getty Images The justices are quietly quitting their day jobs as judges, even as they become more and more political. Young John Roberts was a funny guy. “The generally accepted notion that the court can only hear roughly 150 cases each term,” the future chief justice wrote while he was an early-career lawyer working in the Reagan White House, “gives the same sense of reassurance as the adjournment of the court in July, when we know that the Constitution is safe for the summer.” Roberts, of course, wrote this at a time when Republicans could not rely on the federal judiciary to advance its policy goals — something that Roberts has done much to change in his current job. The justices are in the middle of an unusually political term, fraught with cases that tweak many of America’s most bitter divides on issues like guns or abortion, and that seek to fundamentally restructure who wields power in the United States. That includes two cases — one already decided, the other still pending — which seem engineered to shield Donald Trump from any meaningful consequences from his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. The coming weeks will see decisions in two cases that are likely to shift an extraordinary amount of policymaking authority away from an elected president and toward an unelected judiciary. Yet, while the justices seem eager to be the final word on America’s most intractable political divides, they’ve increasingly stopped doing the traditional work of judges — resolving often technical, boring legal disputes that arise between litigants whose names will never be mentioned on cable news. The Supreme Court used to do this work. But it avoids it more and more now. Indeed, one striking thing about Roberts’s Reagan-era quip about the Court’s docket is that he describes a Court that “can only hear roughly 150 cases each term.” Now, the Court is hearing barely more than 60. Consider this chart, which was produced by Adam Feldman, a lawyer and political scientist who publishes empirical work on the Supreme Court. Although slightly dated (it ends with the Court’s 2016–17 term), the chart shows the total number of cases that the Court handed down in each of its annual terms on its merits docket — the cases that typically receive full briefing and oral argument before the justices: Adam Feldman/Empirical SCOTUS Feldman’s data shows a steady decline in the Supreme Court’s workload since the 1960s. By the mid-2010s, the Court was deciding fewer cases than it had since the Civil War and Reconstruction. And this trend is continuing. In the Court’s 2013 term, it decided 79 cases on its merits docket. This term, assuming that none of the Court’s pending cases are dismissed, it will only hand down 61 decisions. Because the size of the Court’s docket has been in steady decline for many decades, there’s been a great deal of scholarship examining why this decline is happening. The striking thing, however, is that the size of the Court’s docket continues to shrink, even after many of the most likely explanations fade into the past. Many scholars, for example, point to the Supreme Court Case Selections Act of 1988, a federal law that gave the justices more ability to turn away cases they don’t want to hear, as a significant driver of the Court’s reduced caseload. Yet, while a 1988 law can certainly explain why the Court is hearing fewer cases today than it did in the early 1980s, it does little to explain why the Court heard about 23 percent fewer cases in its 2023 term than it did in its 2013 term. It is unlikely that there’s a single explanation for the Court’s shrinking docket. Scholars and other legal experts have all proposed numerous overlapping explanations for the reduced caseload. One thing is clear, however. The overall decline in the Court’s docket does not appear to be matched by a decline in the number of political cases heard by the justices. That is, while the justices are hearing fewer total cases than they used to, they are avoiding the kind of technical legal disputes that rarely garner headlines — all while vacuuming up more power to decide the kind of political disputes that divide Democrats from Republicans. The many explanations for the Court’s diminished docket Until the late 19th century, the justices had very little control over their docket. Litigants who lost in a lower court typically could bring their case to the Supreme Court whether the justices wanted to hear that case or not. This changed in 1891, when Congress enacted legislation creating mid-level courts that would hear most federal appeals and gave the Court discretion to turn away at least some cases. Two subsequent laws, enacted in 1925 and 1988, further reduced the Court’s mandatory jurisdiction. The justices now have the freedom to turn away nearly all of the cases that are brought to their attention. Today, in the overwhelming majority of cases, four justices must agree to hear the case or the lower court’s decision stands. Beyond this 1988 law, an internal change in the Court’s process for deciding which cases to hear may contribute to its reduced caseload. In a typical year, the Court receives thousands of petitions — known as petitions for a “writ of certiorari” — asking it to hear a particular case. Prior to the 1970s, at least one law clerk in each of the nine justices’ chambers would typically review each of these petitions and advise their justice on whether the petition should be granted. After Justice Lewis Powell joined the Court in 1972, he decided that this process was needlessly inefficient, and urged his colleagues to pool their chambers’ resources. The result was the “cert pool.” Under this process, petitions asking the Court to hear a case would be randomly assigned to just one clerk among all the justices who participate in the pool. These justices would all rely on a memo drafted by that one law clerk to advise them on whether to hear the case. Initially, five justices joined the pool, though that number has fluctuated, and it now includes every member of the Court except for Justices Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch. Several court-watchers have blamed this process for the Court’s reduced docket. As Ken Starr, the former federal judge and US solicitor general best known for investigating President Bill Clinton in the 1990s, wrote in a 2006 essay, “this efficiency-driven device has been inadequately studied, but what is commonly understood is that the prevailing culture within the pool is to ‘just say no.’” That is, law clerks are reluctant to recommend that the Court hear a case because they don’t want to be embarrassed if the case turns out to be a dud. And with so many justices participating in the pool, many justices’ decisions will be influenced by a single timid clerk. Yet, while policy changes like the 1988 law and the implementation of the cert pool might explain why the Court hears fewer cases now than it did in the 1970s, they cannot explain why the size of the Court’s merits docket continues to decline to this day. These are, by now, well-entrenched, decades-old reforms. Whatever impact they might have had in the past is now baked into the Court’s year-to-year work. Other scholars point to changes in the Court’s personnel to explain the shrinking docket. In a 2010 essay, David Stras, a former law professor who Trump later put on the federal bench, argued that, in the early 1990s, three justices who voted to hear a relatively large volume of cases were replaced by justices who wanted the Court to hear fewer cases. The most dramatic shift was the replacement of Justice Byron White, who believed that the Supreme Court had an obligation to resolve disagreements among lower courts very quickly, with Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. According to Stras, White voted to hear a case an average of 215.6 times per Term between 1986 and 1992. When Ginsburg joined the Court, by contrast, she voted to hear only 63 cases during the 1993–94 term, “or 29.2% as often as her predecessor.” Yet, again, while these personnel changes might explain why the Court’s docket shrunk in the mid-to-late 1990s, they do not explain why the trend continues nearly four years after Ginsburg’s death. In a 2012 essay, scholars Ryan Owens and David Simon offer another explanation for the diminished docket. For much of the post-1960s period when the Court’s docket steadily declined, the justices were ideologically divided. As a result, any individual justice would “be less sure of outcomes and will anticipate more dissents and internal strife” if they agree to hear many cases. Owens and Simon argued that “such a Court will decide fewer cases” because justices will be reluctant to hear a particular dispute if they cannot predict how their colleagues will view the case. This thesis made a lot of sense in 2012, when the Court was divided 5-4 between conservatives and liberals, and when the balance of power had long been held by “swing” justices like Powell or Justices Sandra Day O’Connor or Anthony Kennedy, who were relatively moderate conservatives who frequently made common cause with the Court’s more liberal bloc. But the Court in 2024 is vastly different from the one that existed a dozen years ago. Now, Republicans enjoy a 6-3 supermajority on the Court, and moderate Republicans like O’Connor and Kennedy are an increasingly distant memory. The Court is far more ideologically cohesive than it was in 2012, and yet its docket continues to shrink. When I asked Owens and Simon if their views have evolved since they published their 2012 paper, Owens pointed to the Court’s decision in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020), an LGBTQ rights victory authored by the Trump-appointed Gorsuch, as evidence that there are still “sufficient differences among the conservatives that nothing is guaranteed.” But even though real divides do exist among the Court’s Republican appointees, the Court certainly has not become less ideologically coherent than it was a dozen years ago. And yet the size of the merits docket continues to shrink. So a complete explanation for why Court’s caseload has almost relentlessly declined over the course of the last six decades remains elusive — although, as Owens said to me over email, there is probably a good explanation for why the Court is unlikely to reverse course. “A small docket has become the new norm.” he told me. “It’s been so small for so many years now that going back to > 100 would be really odd.” Inertia is a powerful force, and increasing the size of the docket today would require a critical mass of new justices to break with a well-established status quo. The increasingly partisan Supreme Court appointments process may explain the Court’s behavior One area where Owens and I seem to agree is that, while the overall size of the Court’s docket is in decline, the Court continues to hear at least as many politically contentious cases as it did in previous decades. As Owens put it in his email to me, “the Court has decided to hear fewer cases—but a greater percent of cases with national importance.” Even if the current term, which has been mired in the giant sucking vortex that is Donald Trump, is an outlier, the last several terms have featured an array of highly partisan cases that have fundamentally reworked some of the most contentious areas of US law. Roe v. Wade is gone. So is affirmative action at nearly all universities. Thanks to the Supreme Court’s decision New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen (2022), gun regulations of all kinds are now in jeopardy. The Court keeps inching us closer to a world where religious conservatives can simply ignore anti-discrimination laws. The Court’s current majority has flooded the zone with decisions remaking the law in areas that the Republican Party cares deeply about. Just one month after Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation gave Republican appointees a supermajority on the Court, for example, the Court handed down one of its most significant religion cases in three decades — giving religious conservatives a broad new right to ignore state laws they object to on religious grounds. And this decision was only the first in a wave of cases revolutionizing the Court’s approach to religion. As I wrote in a 2022 article, the Supreme Court heard only seven religious liberty cases during the Obama presidency. By contrast, it decided just as many religious liberty cases before Barrett celebrated the second anniversary of her confirmation to the Court.it’ One possible explanation for why political disputes dominate so much of the Court’s docket, even as the volume of ordinary legal cases diminish more and more with each passing year, is that the process for selecting justices has become far more political — and far more partisan — than it used to be. When you consider just how much power is wielded by the Supreme Court, it’s astonishing how little thought many US presidents put into their judicial appointments. President Woodrow Wilson, for example, appointed Justice James Clark McReynolds — a lazy, tyrannical jurist that Time magazine once described as a “savagely sarcastic, incredibly reactionary Puritan anti-Semite” — in large part because the president found the future justice, who previously served as attorney general, to be so obnoxious that Wilson promoted McReynolds to get him out of the Cabinet. Similarly, President Dwight Eisenhower complained in 1958 that appointing Justice William Brennan, a titan of American liberalism who was extraordinarily effective in moving the law to the left, was one of the two biggest mistakes he made as president (the other was appointing Chief Justice Earl Warren, another highly consequential liberal appointee). But the Eisenhower White House did very little to vet Brennan ideologically, and Eisenhower selected him in large part because Brennan was Catholic and Ike wanted to appeal to Catholic voters. To this day, many Republican judicial operatives still use the battle cry “No More Souters” to describe their approach to Supreme Court nominees, a reference to Justice David Souter, a George H. W. Bush appointee who turned out to be a moderate liberal after he was appointed to the Court. Since Souter’s appointment, both political parties have grown far more sophisticated at vetting potential nominees to ensure that they won’t stray from their party’s ideological views after their elevation to the bench. On the Republican side, organizations like the Federalist Society begin to vet potential nominees almost as soon as they enter law school. And it's notable that every Republican justice except for Barrett served as a political appointee in a GOP administration, where high-level Republicans could observe their work and probe their ideological views. The Democratic vetting operation, meanwhile, is more informal but no less successful. None of President Clinton’s, Obama’s, or Biden’s Supreme Court appointments have broken with the Democratic Party’s general approach to judging in the same way that Souter broke with Republicans. So it shouldn’t surprise anyone that justices chosen largely because of their political ideology, rather than because of their records as neutral and impartial jurists, appear to be more interested in deciding political questions than they are in resolving legal disputes. A version of the story appeared in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Flights to LaGuardia Airport were delayed last June due to smoke and poor visibility. | Getty Images Flying has gotten hellish. Consumers might finally get compensated. Under a new rule from the Biden administration, passengers could soon get relief for one of the most frequently cited travel grievances. The rule, which was announced in late April, would require airlines to provide automatic refunds for flight delays, an issue that’s been a major source of consumer frustration in recent years. That’s a big change from existing policies, which give airlines significant leeway in doling out these refunds and require travelers to push for them themselves. This proposal is just the latest consumer protection policy from the Biden administration and part of the White House’s broader efforts to burnish these credentials ahead of the 2024 election this fall. While the White House has had legislative success, including the passage of bills that lower prescription drug prices and make substantial investments in infrastructure, communicating those wins can be tough because many of these proposals will take years to implement and be felt. The airline refund rule, which will go into effect in October, offers an immediate example of how the administration is trying to address a commonly expressed grievance. It also comes as negative sentiment has grown toward the airline industry in the wake of a shocking Boeing plane incident in January and subsequent scrutiny of industry-wide quality control issues. All told, delays and cancellations have cost airlines $8.3 billion and consumers $16.7 billion on an annual basis. Here’s what you need to know about how the rule works and why it’s happening in the first place. How the rule works The new rule, to be implemented by the Department of Transportation (DOT), requires airlines to provide refunds for both flight cancellations and “significant changes.” For the first time, the agency spells out what these changes entail. They include: If a domestic flight is delayed more than three hours If an international flight is delayed more than six hours If the location of the departure or arrival airport changes If more connections are added to a flight If passengers are downgraded to a different class or service than the one they paid for These criteria set a common standard for all airlines, making the basis for such refunds clear for both travelers and companies. The new rule also makes these refunds automatic. That means that consumers don’t have to file a claim with the airline, streamlining the process. The policy requires refunds to be provided within seven business days to consumers who use a credit card, and within 20 calendar days to those who use other forms of payment. Travelers will only be eligible if they turn down an alternative flight option or other compensation, like a travel voucher. That means if a passenger still took a flight after it was delayed for four hours, for example, they would not be eligible for the refund. The new rule also guarantees refunds of other fees in case wifi doesn’t work or if checked baggage does not arrive within 12 hours of a domestic flight landing, or within 15 to 30 hours of an international flight landing. Automating refunds is an important part of this policy because it puts the onus of figuring out penalties on the airlines and not the consumer. One issue that consumer advocate Christopher Elliott previously highlighted in the Washington Post, for example, was that customers in Europe would have to wait months for refunds they were seeking because airlines would take their time processing claims. The way the White House rule is written attempts to prevent companies from dragging their feet and to make them take on the logistical burdens of this process. A bipartisan group of Congress members, however, are trying to undercut this provision of the rule. In a new bill that reauthorizes funding for the Federal Aviation Administration, lawmakers have included language that would require consumers to file a claim before they could receive a refund, Skift reports. “You shouldn’t have to jump through hoops to get your money back,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said in a statement in response to this measure. Warren and Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) have also filed an amendment to the FAA bill in an attempt to preserve the White House’s rule. Biden is going in on consumer protection policies The proposed rule is one of several consumer protection policies the White House has advanced in the last year. It follows an FDA proposal that enabled hearing aids to be sold over the counter, likely reducing their cost, as well as a Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) rule that reduces late fees for credit card payments. DOT also has another rulemaking in process that would eliminate additional fees for families trying to sit together on planes, the Federal Trade Commission is working on a rule to ban the use of hidden fees, and the CFPB is targeting bank overdraft fees as well. Biden touted aspects of this push in his State of the Union address earlier this year in a bid to highlight his commitment to consumer protections. The flight refund rule is intended to combat traveler discontent with the airline industry and the time and financial losses people face when they have to change their plans or reschedule travel. In a challenging election year, the choice to focus on such concerns allows the White House to point to key policies it’s delivered on and that people can feel directly in their daily lives.

Jessica Gunning as “Martha” in Baby Reindeer. | Ed Miller/Netflix With the Baby Reindeer fallout, the paradox of true crime as entertainment strikes again. As a medium, autofiction has long been a source of controversy, but rarely has an autobiographical work of fiction come with as many built-in issues as Netflix’s hit Baby Reindeer. The show, a seven-episode limited series from British comedian Richard Gadd, chronicles Gadd’s history of allegedly being stalked for years by an older woman, as well as his experience of allegedly being sexually assaulted by a male mentor. The show is a breakout word-of-mouth phenomenon, drawing more than 13 million viewers in its first week of release and over 22 million in its second. Audiences and critics have praised the series for its wild twists and comedic yet vulnerable glimpses into a difficult story. Yet the real draw for many viewers seems to be less about Gadd’s experience and more about the mystery afforded by his extremely transparent depictions of other characters — particularly Gadd’s stalker. Gadd and his fellow cast members have quickly tried to staunch the public reaction, which has now escalated to doxing and harassing private citizens believed to be the real perpetrators behind the show’s events. The series’ grim real-life side effect seems to be both an epic case of viewers missing the point (don’t stalk people!) and an entirely predictable outcome based on Gadd’s treatment of the story. Should he have known better, or should we? Baby Reindeer combines two narratives of extreme stalking and sexual assault Baby Reindeer combines two different autobiographical plays that Gadd, an acclaimed comedian, actor, and playwright, wrote and premiered to rave reviews at the Edinburgh Fringe festival. Both shows depicted deeply disturbing events in Gadd’s life through a lens of intentional overexposure. The first, 2016’s Monkey See Monkey Do, was similar to Hannah Gatsby’s Nanette in that it subverted audience expectations for comedy and instead treated them to a harrowing confessional. Ultimately revealing the details of a long-hidden sexual assault, Gadd traces his subsequent trauma through an onstage psychological meltdown accompanied by a visceral sensory overload. The second, 2019’s Baby Reindeer, forms the backbone of the Netflix show. In the show, Gadd plays a version of himself named Donny. The fictional Donny has a random encounter with frumpy, middle-aged “Martha,” a patron at a bar similar to the one where Gadd once worked. This brief interaction allegedly led to an intense four-year period of stalking in which Gadd claims she sent him exactly 41,071 emails, 106 pages of letters, 744 tweets, and a staggering 350 hours of voicemails. Over the course of the show, Gadd digs into her past and learns he isn’t her first victim — she has a documented criminal record for stalking at least two previous families. The Netflix adaptation of the two storylines has plenty to say about criminal justice, mental health, and gender. Gadd struggles to get the police to take Martha’s stalking seriously, even as he battles his own past history of trauma and abuse at the hands of his industry mentor. Gadd’s social awkwardness and PTSD emerge alongside a lack of systemic support for male victims of sexual assault. These are all complicated themes. But the main appeal, at least for the most active audiences, seems to be the real-life mystery of it all: Who are the real people Gadd based his story on? Gadd’s clues about his alleged sexual assault were somewhat oblique, but led to difficulty for one prominent British theatre director who wound up contacting the police after fans began harassing him, convinced he was the sexual predator being depicted in the show. Gadd has since been working overtime to clear the man’s name, insisting that he’s not the perpetrator. “Please don’t speculate on who any of the real life people could be,” he posted in an Instagram story. “That’s not the point of the show.” Things with the woman Martha is based on are perhaps even more complicated. In an interview with GQ, published shortly after the show’s April 11 release, Gadd claimed he’d made his stalker an unrecognizable character. “We’ve gone to such great lengths to disguise her to the point that I don’t think she would recognise herself,” he said. It’s reasonable to assume Gadd knew whereof he spoke. After all, in Baby Reindeer, he portrays his stalker as a classic sexist and anti-fat stereotype: the lonely, socially awkward middle-aged woman with higher weight who channels her unhappiness into obsession. The first thing he tells us about her, before we’ve even met her, is that “I felt sorry for her.” It’s a trope we’ve seen countless times before from Misery to Matilda; for Gadd’s stalker to fit so easily into it, you’d think that his fictional depiction of her is informed less by reality and more by cheap Hollywood distortion. Yet Gadd seems to have left so many clear identifying details in the series about the woman Martha appears to be based on — particularly the one about her previous criminal history — that audiences turned web sleuths were easily able to identify her, journalists were able to track her down and interview her, multiple British and US tabloids doxed her, and she’s now considering suing Netflix. Media coverage of the frenzy has included a fair degree of shock and skepticism. Even the Daily Mail, never a stalwart champion of ethics, pointed out that several of the details of the show were all but taken verbatim from the stalker’s real history, and questioned “how such a deft storyteller could not have foreseen the Netflix effect which amplifies the fall-out that comes from blurring fact and fiction.” While the Daily Mail declined to out the woman, it did publish a lengthy interview with one of her previous stalking victims, Laura Wray, a woman who claimed Martha’s real-life counterpart harassed her for over five years, culminating in death threats and a false report to have her family investigated for child abuse. Wray’s story was very similar to Gadd’s initial impression of his stalker — they each felt sorry for her and engaged with her because they pitied her. And even Wray, while discussing how powerful she found the validation Baby Reindeer offered to stalking victims like herself, also marveled that the resemblance between Martha and her real-life counterpart was so “uncanny.” “It must have occurred to him that people were bound to speculate on who Martha is — and whether she’s done this to anyone else,” she said. “Martha” may be just as much a victim as Gadd himself Baby Reindeer argues that both Gadd and “Martha” are victims. “I can’t emphasize enough how much of a victim she is in all this,” Gadd told the Independent in 2019, in a profile pegged to the original stage production of Baby Reindeer. Gadd went on to stress that she was mentally unwell and that mental health support was a major theme of the play. It’s perhaps worth asking, then, why he chose to further victimize her through a depiction of her — in an internationally distributed Netflix series, no less — that apparently hewed so close to real life that it enabled her not only to recognize herself but for her other stalking victims to recognize her as well. After all, while Gadd can be forgiven for sticking close to his real life in the play, he had nearly five years to fudge the details and make it less likely that people would discover who she was. That he failed to do so could be seen as a form of targeted revenge. There’s a real and obvious cruelty in the strength of the resemblance between the pair; the woman Martha is allegedly based on has since protested that she’s not as unattractive as her double (played by Jessica Gunning), and that of the two of them, she’s the real victim. Indeed, it feels more than a little disingenuous that Gadd became mutually obsessed with her to the point of writing a hit play about her and then funneling that success into even greater heights of fame. To be fair, Gadd is by no means the first creator to confront the slippery ethics around true crime. Subjects from Amanda Knox to Vili Fualaau and the families of Jeffrey Dahmer’s victims have spoken out about the ways that fictionalized versions of their reality have revictimized them. It could also be the case that Gadd simply underestimated the power of the internet, the power of fandom, and the lure of a real-life puzzle. Many modern fans view media, even autobiographical media, as interactive texts, games they get to play, full of mysteries they have to solve — even if the “mystery” involves real life. For some Baby Reindeer fans, the sleuthing was of the traditional variety; fans analyzed the contents of the fictional Martha’s emails and found Easter eggs referencing the TV show Lost. But other fans took things further; they seemed to be motivated by the part of Baby Reindeer where Gadd’s character turns the tables and begins digging up dirt on his own stalker. As of May 2, one Facebook account claiming to be “Martha’s” doppelgänger has more than 12,000 followers, and what seems to be her apparently inactive Twitter account has over 13,000. Whether or not Gadd anticipated the show’s runaway success, it seems clear that he could have at least anticipated that if he couldn’t resist Googling his stalker, neither could anyone else.

Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) and her tennis-playing, polyamorous twinks. | Challengers/Amazon MGM Studios The relationship style has been the topic of talky articles and books. Finally, it’s the sexiest element of the year’s sexiest movie. Much has recently been made out of polyamory in the media, to the point where the prospect of dating and ostensibly having sex with multiple people who are also attracted to you seems rather unsexy. Pieces in outlets like the Atlantic, New Yorker, and New York Times (at least twice) have taken stabs at painting portraits of polyams that have resulted in the following takeaways: poly relationships are messy, but they will be the first ones to admit to you that they are messy; poly people believe in a lot of annoying rules, except for annoying rules about monogamy; poly people feel misunderstood but they also have their own acronym-filled language (NRE! Metamour!); polyamory is either popular or not popular at all and said contested popularity, if true, may or may not be the result of a housing crisis. To be clear, I do not come to bury polyamory. I’m merely pointing out that all this seeming like an exhausting hassle is what happens when something humans do in their relationships becomes a media fixation. Secrets are suddenly made un-secret, and so much is lost in translation and public consumption. No one wants to write a news article that comes from a place of horniness, and with that mentality, the subject becomes a punchline. Just when you thought that the entire idea of being communally entangled felt too examined, too picked over to ever be sexy again, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers comes swooping in. Sun-drenched and sweat-soaked, the film demystifies polyamory into something blazingly simple: being in love — physically and emotionally — with two people and being loved back can make a person as happy as they’ve ever been or ever will be. Challengers/Amazon MGM Studios Imagine if it was you that Josh O’Connor (right) was gesturing this to! In tennis terms, “challengers” are a type of B-list tournament, made for players in ranking purgatory — not good enough to be in the main draws of grand slam tournaments and not bad enough to be out of the game entirely. The title also has a double meaning, referencing the very complicated, emotionally difficult, and extremely randy tennis prodigies-turned-pros Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). The three are part of an intricate, ball-bashing love triangle, and it’s no accident that every corner is so acutely hot. Zendaya in particular knows how to wear an old money sweater. Faist and O’Connor spend a lot of time arching their backs, whether they’re wearing tiny shorts or not. Perhaps most important, this is a triangle where, as screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes told NBC, “all sides needed to touch” — and they do. That’s crystal clear when they first meet, as teens at the junior US Open. Art and Patrick are attracted to Tashi for completely different, at times murky, reasons. Patrick thinks she’s physically beautiful, the hottest girl on earth. Art admires her commanding style of tennis, which makes her the hottest girl on earth to him. When they watch her rip backhands, something clicks for both of them — so much that when she finishes off the point and screams, Patrick grabs Art’s knee. Through her they see each other’s desires and each other in a new, clear way. The boys invite her to their room, and the great American tennis hope shows up. “I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” Tashi tells them. On the surface, it comes off as a joke. Their closeness and intimacy could be seen as something that’s a little funny for two men who aren’t explicitly gay. But the comment also functions as something truthful. Minutes later, during their three-way kiss, Tashi cocks her head back in a devious, ecstatic grin not because, as one might assume, Art and Patrick are paying her attention — but because Art and Patrick are kissing each other, lost in the moment. Perhaps Tashi Duncan is telling the truth. She wants to be a homemaker, not a homewrecker! What she really wants is to see them up their game. She tells the boys that whoever wins their face-off match the next day can have her number. A year later, when Art and Tashi are at Stanford, Art tries to throw a wrench in Tashi and Patrick’s ongoing relationship. He tells Tashi that the vibe he gets from Patrick is that it isn’t that serious. Art tells Tashi that Patrick doesn’t love her, a bit of information that only bothers her so far as she’d hate for someone to think that’s what she wants. Challengers/Amazon MGM Studios Frown if you’re not into monogamy! When Patrick arrives at Palo Alto, he pulls Art close — so close you can see the sugar glistening off of his churro (not a euphemism) — and warns him that he’s onto Art’s game. He sees the wedge, and Art trying to finagle a way in. Instead of being angry, Patrick is impressed, happy to see Art go for something that he wants — even if it is his girlfriend. Patrick also wants to see Art up his game. Their competition turns Tashi on too, as the two talk about Art while they make out and undress. She tells Patrick that Art can beat him — at tennis. She tells him that she watches and knows what he needs to do better in his matches. She tells him she thinks Art is good enough. At one point Patrick asks Tashi to stop talking about his friend and their shared sport, and it’s as though someone blew out the horniness like a candle. The fight that follows precedes Tashi’s career-ending injury, and in a roundabout way, her eventual marriage to Art, which catapults the pairing to a new level of fame and aspiration. Not unlike the way Tashi was miserable with Patrick when they weren’t talking about Art, Tashi is miserable being married to Art without Patrick. Though Guadagnino and Kuritzkes wrap the couple in plenty of material success — luxury endorsements, high-end clothes, lush hotels, and six grand slam wins — Art and Tashi are not happy as “the Donaldsons.” They have everything they ever wanted, winning tennis’s biggest tournaments and having the money to do anything, but it can’t spark excitement in their lives. You can tell how miserable Art and Tashi are because Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsating score takes a breath from its thumping pace whenever we’re near the Donaldsons and their dull monogamy. When Art tells Tashi he wants to retire after the Open, the score shifts into an elegiac, string-forward, pleading love song. It’s so soft that it’s almost a little pathetic, not unlike future tennis hall of famer Art. Yet, when Art and Patrick face off on the court and Tashi watches, Reznor and Ross’s music morphs into something honey-thick, sexier, and more dangerous. The score and their exchanged glances are comically electric; the sexy molly dance music captures the thrill of their three-way relationship. Those beats fill the last moments in the movie, the final points between Art and Patrick. In that closing set, Patrick changes up his service routine and places the ball in the neck of his racket. This is his secret code to Art that he slept with Tashi, a gesture the two created together as teens without Tashi’s knowledge. Art snaps. He goes into a catatonic, post-marriage state. He lets a couple points pass, and by losing them, plunges Patrick and himself into a tiebreak — a race to seven points, like soccer’s penalty shots or basketball’s overtime but more exciting. Valery Hache/AFP via Getty Images The Challengers press tour leaned into the polyam bit of the movie. Because, why not? But who’s winning isn’t Guadagnino’s concern. Nor is he particularly interested in articulating exactly what these men are thinking or feeling. There are no distinct labels or boundaries for how these men feel about each other. There’s no neat way to articulate what it means that the woman they’re both interested in is interested in both of them. There’s no ability to explain how much of their mutual want is fueling this erotic thrill. In this fantasy, there’s no need to talk things out for the sake of respectability or to make an audience feel comfortable or understand. All that exists in this moment is an indescribable frisson and beguiling respect that you may never get with just one person. The point that follows is an exhausting, grunting, sweat-stained rally that ends with both of them at the net, Art going up for a smash and Patrick bracing for impact. We don’t see who wins the point because all the camera’s focus is on Tashi, who growls — a carnal howl — in pleasure. The only other time we’ve seen her this happy was when all three of them were together, with all their desires for each other and with each other out in the open. And they’ve found that again, finally.

Israeli and Palestinian flags on display in protests at UCLA on April 28, 2024 in Westwood, California. | Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images It’s time to take back the Israel-Palestine debate from the radicals on both sides. You may have heard of Shai Davidai, the Israeli professor at Columbia University who has launched a crusade against the school’s pro-Palestinian protestors. He’s rocketed to fame by calling students terrorists, comparing himself to Jewish victims of Nazi Germany, and demanding the National Guard forcibly break up the student encampments. After the NYPD stormed Columbia’s campus on Tuesday night, arresting hundreds of students, he retweeted a message blaming the events on “a circus of narcissists, egged on by irresponsible faculty.” (Indeed.) Davidai, like many of the loud pro-Israel voices in the national debate, is casting blanket aspersions on students who are protesting for good reasons. Well over 30,000 Palestinians are dead, many of whom are children; the devastation is so complete that a fully accurate death toll is now impossible. There is no good moral or strategic justification for Israel’s scorched-earth approach, which currently risks strengthening the terrorist group Hamas’s strategic position in the long term. Given that billions of American dollars are underwriting this atrocity, it’s easy to see why college campuses are in uproar. But while the majority of students are genuinely motivated by justifiable outrage, a smaller faction have gone to a much darker place: going so far as endorsing Hamas’s murder of Israelis and calling for the violent destruction of Israel. All too often, they are tolerated by — or even members of — protest leadership. Students for Justice in Palestine, the biggest national force behind the college protests, has described Hamas’s mass slaughter on October 7 as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Khymani James, one of the leaders of the Columbia protests, publicly fantasized about murdering “Zionists.” University of Pennsylvania students chanted in support of Hamas’s military wing (“al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier down”). An organizer at UC-Berkeley distributed pamphlets explaining, in his words, how the Hamas attack “was an act of decolonization.” The reciprocal extremism on college campuses, egged on by irresponsible university administrators who have heightened tensions by calling in the cops, is a window into a reality everyone knows: The American conversation about Israel-Palestine is broken. Anyone who even touches the issue knows it’s toxic. The conversation is dominated by extremists who aggressively police the slightest misstep and punish internal dissent, a longstanding dynamic supercharged in recent years by social media. Recently, a prominent person in American politics privately told me that they see engagement on the topic as a no-win proposition. About half of all young American Jewish adults have stopped talking to someone they know over the conflict. There are deep reasons why America’s Israel-Palestine discourse is so dysfunctional. They range from the pro-Israel movement’s embrace of Israeli extremists to the pro-Palestinian movement’s radical-chic culture to the uninspiring alternative on offer in official Washington. Put together, they create an environment where the loudest and most influential voices on each side are all too often the most aggressive and uncompromising ones. In such an environment, the most reasonable people on each side — the ones that recognize that neither Israelis or Palestinians are going anywhere, and that peace can only be found through negotiated compromise — are sidelined. They are getting very little help from some alleged supporters of a two-state solution in Washington, where an insipid and out-of-touch approach does its own work to discredit the center. Understanding these dynamics can help us grasp the dueling narratives around the campus protests. But more importantly, it can help us comprehend why the space for creating pro-peace coalitions seems to have shrunk — and what can be done to rebuild it. Inside the pro-Israel movement’s radicalization In the United States, the Israel-Palestine debate has gone through a long process of polarization and radicalization that has only gotten worse in recent years. I know the dynamics on the pro-Israel side firsthand: When I was in college in the late 2000s, I was the president of my university’s pro-Israel campus group. I abandoned the post shortly after I got into a public argument with one of my own members after he endorsed West Bank settlement, an enterprise that I always thought was both morally wrong and politically suicidal. As Israel’s government moved more and more to the right, increasingly captured by the anti-Palestinian settler movement, the pro-Israel movement moved with them — leaving no place for people like me. Today, I spend much of my professional life criticizing Israel from the anti-occupation left. There are deep reasons why the pro-Israel movement is the way that it is. When I used to attend closed-door events for student activists held by AIPAC, the leading American pro-Israel lobby, they would tell us that they do not see second-guessing the Israeli government as part of the job description. Israel’s leaders determined what was in the country’s best interests; AIPAC and its activists worked merely to support that agenda on Capitol Hill. Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at AIPAC’s Policy Conference in DC in 2018. This “we don’t judge” policy, rooted in an uncompromising version of Zionism that grants little weight to Palestinian rights, has turned AIPAC and its allies into lobbyists for colonialism. In this, they have enthusiastically linked up with outright right-wing extremists like Pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel. The pro-Israel movement, once comfortable with a two-state solution when Israel’s leadership supported it, is now doing everything in its power to back a government bent on destroying it. What was once called “liberal Zionism” — the view, held by a majority of American Jews, that Israel has a right to exist but no right to occupy Palestinian land — no longer has a place in the organized pro-Israel movement. AIPAC and other mainstream pro-Israel groups treat the smaller liberal Zionist organizations, like J Street and Americans for Peace Now, as mortal enemies. The pro-Israel movement’s current job is mainstreaming Israeli extremism. And it has long been willing to threaten people’s careers and livelihoods — through tools like a public blacklist of pro-Palestinian scholars and students — in order to accomplish that end. When “pro-Palestine” becomes “anti-peace” The pro-Palestinian movement in the United States is far weaker than its pro-Israel twin. There is no Palestinian AIPAC capable of leading $100 million campaigns to unseat members of Congress. But as Americans’ sympathy with Palestinians continues to grow, the movement is poised to wield greater influence down the line — making its own radicalization process a subject of real concern. In his book The Movement and the Middle East, historian Michael Fischbach argues that the 1960s-era radical left in the United States fractured over Israel-Palestine, and the events of that period determined “where progressive Americans stand on these issues today.” During the Cold War, the most hardline factions took an uncompromising pro-Palestine stance, seeing armed Arab struggle against Israel as part of the global fight against Western imperialism. More moderate groups, by contrast, supported Israel in existential conflicts like the 1967 Six-Day War. With extreme left factions playing a disproportionate role in shaping pro-Palestine activism, a significant chunk of the movement took on a similarly radical cast. In this, they were aided by the censorious efforts of the pro-Israel extremists, who worked to turn “Palestine” into a dirty word in mainstream American political discourse. This meant that, for many years, young people passionate about the Palestinian cause were drawn toward far-left factions who called for Israel’s destruction, lionized Palestinian violence, and saw the two-state solution as a sellout compromise. Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images A University of Washington student and Revolutionary Communist International member holds a publication during an on-campus protest. “It became a far-left issue because it was so stigmatized,” says Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “You had to be on the far left … in order to fit being a champion of the Palestinians into your professional career path.” In the 2000s, Ibish helped found the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), a DC-based group that aimed to promote the Palestinian cause from a pro-peace standpoint. He recalls unremitting hostility from both the AIPAC-style pro-Israel groups and the existing far-left pro-Palestinian infrastructure. ATFP was chronically short of money, maxing out at three full-time policy staffers. It ultimately shuttered its doors in 2016. “We failed,” Ibish says, “because no one supported us.” Today, the Palestinian cause is far more mainstream than it once was — especially among young people and liberals. This is primarily the result of Israel’s rightward political drift: As Israel continues West Bank colonization and pulverizing Gaza, the injustice of the status quo becomes increasingly hard to deny. Yet far-left maximalists still wield disproportionate influence in the pro-Palestine activist and intellectual communities. This is why prominent voices on the issue today — like the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, “dirtbag left” podcasters, the president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and academics like Judith Butler — have been able to praise or sanitize Hamas’s actions on October 7 without meaningful pushback on their own side. Breaking the radicalization doom loop The most radical voices on both sides are not representative of broader public opinion. Polling shows that Americans favor a two-state solution by a roughly 20-point margin. About 30 percent support Israeli annexation of the West Bank; only 5 percent believe that Hamas’s action on October 7 was acceptable. A sizable majority of American Jews are uncomfortable with actions of the Israeli state; only a small minority of American Muslims endorse terrorism against Israelis. The radicalism you see in the news or on social media reflects neither the mass public nor the views of Americans from the most affected groups. Instead, it reflects the views of the extremely engaged. Their every utterance or action is magnified by their extreme allies and enemies alike, making it seem as if the worst and most marginal voices stand in for everyone else. Extreme activists polarizing public debates is not an uncommon phenomenon: Look, for example, at the way anti-abortion activists or climate change radicals push well beyond what the average person in their coalition supports. Once people get locked into mutually hostile camps, the rank-and-file becomes more tolerant of any kind of extremism directed at their opponents — and less tolerant of any internal voices calling for compromise and mutual dialogue. The more radical one side appears, the more the other radicalizes in response. What’s happening on Israel-Palestine is an especially bitter version of this standard political polarization doom loop. So what can be done? The obvious answer is to make space for pro-peace voices. And that starts, counterintuitively, by creating room for more challenges to what appears like a moderate Washington consensus — but in reality is a debate heavily tilted toward Israel. Both major American political parties have long been staunchly pro-Israel. The Republican version of this is rabid, increasingly aligned with Netanyahu and his far-right government. The Democratic version is pallid, mouthing empty support for two states and bromides about shared liberal values even as Israel starves Palestinian children. The handful of dissenters, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) or Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), have been relentlessly attacked as anti-Israel or even antisemitic (though there’s more room for them today than there has been in the past). Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during the 2019 National Conference hosted by J Street, a pro-peace lobby in Washington. When the establishment seems out of touch with reality, extremism tends to flourish. Republicans may be fine with that, but Democrats clearly are not. If they wish to defang campus radicals on their left flank, they need to create more space in the system for taking legitimate concerns with Israel’s behavior seriously. Cease unconditional support for the war in Gaza and start thinking more creatively about how to pressure Israel into taking up Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s recently reiterated offer to negotiate. As horribly polarized as the Israel-Palestine debate seems, there actually is space for productive coalition-building that can contribute toward the cause of peace. Let’s not let the extremist voices in the discourse distract us from that fact.

Andrew Huberman, a neurobiology professor and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, attending INBOUND 2023 in Boston, Mass. | Photo by Chance Yeh/Getty Images for HubSpot The Huberman Lab has credentials and millions of fans, but it sometimes oversteps medical fact. Sometimes, misleading information is easy to spot, traveling in the same conspiracy-theory-slicked grooves it has for decades. The same ideas that undermined belief in the safety of Covid-19 vaccines have been around for more than a century, adapting the same message to suit new media formats, new epidemics, and new influential endorsements. In a way, George Bernard Shaw’s outspoken opposition to the smallpox vaccine in the first half of the 20th century is not unlike that of, say, Aaron Rodgers’s misleading statements about the Covid-19 vaccines. Such misleading information is relatively easy to see. But spotting other kinds of misleading information is more like identifying planets in other star systems. It’s difficult to find such a planet by just taking a direct image; the radiation from the star the planet orbits can obscure it. Instead, you might look for the shadow in front of the star or the “wobble” of a star caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. You find it by looking around it. Over time, with this kind of misleading information, you learn to spot the wobble, the tells that something might not be right. This is what happened for me when I began to listen to Huberman Lab last fall. Huberman Lab is one of the most popular podcasts in the country, led by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. His most ardent fans — and there are millions — tend to be fitness enthusiasts, self-optimizers, and crossover listeners who heard about his podcast from other influencers in the Joe Rogan Extended Universe. Huberman looms large in the minds of his biggest fans. If you’re outside of that circle, perhaps you heard of his work after a New York magazine profile earlier this year detailed his personal conduct. The podcast’s premise is simple: presenting science-based overviews and conversations on a broad range of topics, from longevity to mental health to nutrition. A fawning profile in Time magazine last summer credited Huberman with getting America to care about science again. More than anything, though, the episodes I listened to conveyed a promise: If you want to optimize your body and mind, science has the answers, and all we need to do is listen. It’s a riveting promise, one that Huberman is not alone in making. Silicon Valley, in particular, is filled with wellness guides and well-funded laboratories seeking the secret to living the best and longest life. There are other well-credentialed promises of cures and solutions circulating, especially on podcasts, a format that seems to lend itself to this slippage between the reputable and the freewheeling. Huberman’s rise to popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic should have been a win for information: Huberman, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford with an active lab, it seemed, was a respected researcher in his field of visual neuroscience, and he filled his multi-hour podcast episodes with citations and caution. Popular science communication isn’t always the best science communication. The implicit pact that Huberman’s podcast makes with its audience — that it will, if you listen and follow, help you optimize your life — has turned the podcast into a powerful force that shapes how his audience of millions understands science. But listeners of Huberman Lab may be, at times, hearing what some call an illusion. When good communication goes bad In late March, New York magazine reported that Huberman’s Stanford laboratory “barely exists” and that, according to multiple women who dated him during his rise to fame, Huberman had manipulated and lied to his partners (Huberman’s spokesperson denied both of these allegations to the magazine, which shares a corporate owner with Vox). The profile was one tell — obscuring aspects of his personal and professional lives. But even before it came out, the same subject experts on the topics Huberman covered had been questioning some of the science of the podcast itself. This liminality, or in-betweenness, of Huberman Lab is key to its success. When speaking about vaccines, Huberman is no Alex Jones or Aaron Rodgers. He’s a real scientist who cites real studies. He approaches topics that might end up drawing scrutiny with a great deal of caution. For example, Huberman never tells his audience to avoid the flu vaccine. All he’s saying is that he doesn’t take it himself. And yet, the subtext is there. “Now, personally, I don’t typically get the flu shot. And the reason for that is that I don’t tend to go into environments where I am particularly susceptible to getting the flu,” Huberman said in an episode earlier this year on avoiding and treating the cold and flu. He went on: “When you take the flu shot, you’re really hedging a bet. You’re hedging a bet against the fact that you will be or not be exposed to that particular strain of flu virus that’s most abundant that season, or strains of flu virus that are most abundant that season, and that the flu shot that you’re taking is directed at those particular strains.” Make the choice that’s right for you, Huberman says. Talk to your doctor. “He’s a good communicator, right? That’s why he’s a star,” Tim Caulfield, a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta, told me in late 2023. Huberman often does a “very good job” talking about the science behind a topic he’s exploring in an episode, Caulfield added, but “in the end, the overall takeaway, I think, is less supported by the science than the impression you’re given listening to the episode.” Instead of recommending a flu shot, Huberman introduces his listeners to a series of other ideas. Andrea Love, a microbiologist, immunologist, and science communicator herself, wrote a four-part newsletter series addressing Huberman’s claims in greater detail. She says he promoted possibly using a sauna to improve immune function, citing a study that had just 20 participants and did not directly measure immune function. She says he promoted the potential use of unproven supplements, including those sold by AG1, a company that partners with Huberman and sponsors his podcast. Huberman and his spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Love’s characterization of this episode. For Love, it was easy to see Huberman Lab as sleight of hand even before the New York magazine story was published. The ingredients were there: Huberman is a magnetic personality capable of capturing attention with implied promises of the secrets to longevity, a perfect body, a perfect mind, even perfect sleep — much of which he says can be achieved with the help of the supplements that he himself advertises. Love was part of a cohort of scientists and public health communicators who raised concerns about Huberman’s wildly popular podcast over several months. When Huberman had Robert Lustig on as a guest, those concerns grew louder. Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), but he’s perhaps best known for arguing that sugar, particularly fructose, is a “toxin.” Love, who said that Lustig’s claims about the uniquely causal relationship between fructose and childhood obesity remain unproven, listened to the conversation between the two scientists. (Disclosure: I recently accepted a contract for non-editorial freelance work at UCSF Health.) “I was floored with how many different types of misinformation he was able to shove into a single episode,” Love said earlier this year, after listening to the majority of Huberman’s 3-hour interview with Lustig. Like many of Huberman’s lengthy episodes, this one racked up millions of views on YouTube alone. In 2023, Huberman Lab was the eighth most listened to podcast on Apple Podcasts, and the third most popular on Spotify. As she listened, she took notes, marking moments where she felt the podcast omitted important facts, misinterpreted the progression of disease, or provided confusing information to listeners. At one point, Lustig cited a study that he said “showed” ultra-processed foods inhibit bone growth — one that, according to Huberman’s exchange with Lustig, used human subjects in Israel to test its claims. Love tracked down the 2021 paper easily. “This was in vivo - IN RODENTS,” she wrote in her notes. In her view, the podcast was “outright LYING to listeners.” A spokesperson for Andrew Huberman responded to a request for comment by noting that the podcast team “review studies mentioned on the podcast by guests, however the conclusions drawn by guests are their own and our guests are the foremost experts in their fields.” The show links to referenced studies in the show notes for each episode. Misleading information can be hard to see Nailing down Huberman’s beliefs is, likewise, tricky, straddling the line between endorsement and implication. In October, Huberman commented on an Instagram post by his friend Joe Rogan promoting an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the presidential candidate who was once a respected environmental lawyer but is now perhaps best known for promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines, including those for Covid-19. “I’m eager to listen to this and to learn more about Robert’s stance on a number of issues. Whenever I run into him at the gym, he is extremely gracious and asks lots of questions about science and, by my observation, trains hard too!” Huberman’s verified Instagram account posted. When I told Caulfield about this post, he described it as “infuriating.” Huberman and his spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on his post about Kennedy. “Any kind of legitimization and normalization of that rhetoric, especially by someone who professes to be informed by science and has the credentials of a renowned institution behind him should be ashamed of doing that,” he said. Huberman’s relationship to the information in his podcast can be viewed through a series of glancing blows; through the subtext of deciding not to take the flu vaccine himself and telling that to his audience; through serious questions about how he handles himself in romantic relationships; and through the selection of his guests, the framing of his episodes, and his friends. Although Huberman has not directly responded to the New York magazine piece after its publication, his friends in the podcasting world, along with several more right-leaning media personalities, have called it a hit piece, and dismissed criticism of Huberman as either sloppy or mean-spirited. “Andrew should be celebrated. Period,” wrote Lex Fridman, a computer scientist and podcaster who has long been one of Huberman’s friends. And it appears his podcast viewers are still tuning in.

Canceling people’s debt from unpaid medical bills does not lead to improvements in their health or finances, according to a new study. | Getty Images The US leaves millions of people with outstanding medical bills. How do we help them? Four in 10 Americans carry some kind of medical debt, an affliction that is unique to the United States among wealthy nations. The country does not guarantee medical insurance to everyone, and the costs even to people who carry coverage are much higher on average than they are for patients in the rest of the developed world. It’s a fundamental flaw in the design of the US health care system. Those debts weigh on the people who carry them: Research has found that people who incur substantial medical bills (after a cancer diagnosis, for example) report cutting back on everyday spending, depleting their savings, and even downsizing their homes. Medical debt is associated with poorer general health, as well as higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and overall mortality. People end up sicker because they can’t afford their health care. In the absence of politically difficult health care reform, activists and some state and local governments have set up medical debt relief programs, purchasing the debts of people in difficult financial circumstances for much less than face value and wiping them out at no cost to the patient. But a new study of medical debt relief by a group of top economists has called its value into question. Participants who had their debt erased did not see their mental or physical health or their access to credit improve much after debt relief. There was even evidence that some people felt more depressed. “It would be great if we could improve people’s mental health, we could ease their finances, we could get them to go to the doctor more often by buying debt for less than a penny on a dollar,” Francis Wong, a University of Munich economist who co-authored the study, told me. “But it just didn’t work.” The findings stunned the researchers. While it might still be premature to discard medical debt relief based on one study, the research raises important questions about the limits of debt relief, and about how to use finite government and philanthropic resources to alleviate high health care costs. One lesson of the paper may be that relieving debt long after it’s accrued is ultimately a Band-Aid on the structural problems within US health care. Many people with medical debt are contending with other financial problems compounded by their health expenses, which are not easily undone by eliminating hospital bills. Preventing medical debt in the first place may be more effective. “The punchline for me is that you really need to tackle the root cause that created all of these issues in the first place, that created the financial distress and poor mental health,” Wong said. “That’s a matter of addressing the holes in the American health care system.” Medical debt relief didn’t do much to improve people’s finances The research team — including Wong, Harvard’s Raymond Kluender, Stanford’s Neale Mahoney, and UCLA’s Wesley Yin — was commissioned to study a group of 83,400 people who collectively had $169 million in medical debt relieved through the organization RIP Medical Debt (recently renamed Undue Medical Debt). The study analyzed two groups of patients: one had held their debts for seven years on average, the other for a little more than a year. Using surveys and financial data, the experiment tracked most patients for about a year after they received debt relief. Compared to patients who did not have their debt wiped out, the researchers found, the relief had negligible effects on participants’ access to credit and other measures of financial well-being. Credit scores increased by a marginal 3.6 points on average, though for people whose only debt had been medical debt, there was a more sizable 13.4-point increase. The average increase in credit limits was just $342. Participants whose debt was relieved actually became less likely to pay future medical bills, the study found. The results showed no improvements in objective and subjective measures of financial distress. One reason may be that although participants had an average of $2,167 in debt relieved, they had plenty of other, non-medical debt. The group averaged $28,000 in debts including things like credit card balances and car loans. An average of $4,000 in bills had already reached collections. “The most striking thing to me was just how much financial distress that folks with medical debt are experiencing broadly,” Kluender said. “The debt relief that we were able to execute through the experiment was insufficient to address their financial deprivation.” People in medical debt are often pestered by collectors and forced into even more debt to pay their bills and cut their spending on necessities such as food and rent. People did not report feeling happier or healthier after debt relief The study also found that measures of depression, stress, anxiety, subjective feelings of well-being, and general health barely budged after debt was wiped out. One finding is especially telling. Before the experiment began, the authors asked a panel of 45 experts what they expected the study to find. Panelists anticipated on average a 7 percentage point reduction in the number of patients reporting moderate or worse depression. Instead, the study showed a 3.2-percentage point increase in patients reporting that they were depressed. That’s on top of the 45 percent of participants who reported having at least moderate depression before the experiment began. The worst mental health effects were found among the 25 percent of participants with the most medical debt: They experienced a 12.4-percent increase in depression along with “worsening of anxiety, stress, general health, and subjective well-being” after debt relief. “That’s just staggeringly high rates of poor mental health,” Wong said. How can that be? One possibility is that the relief came too late to undo the severe mental health burden of carrying debt for months or years. Such patients have “already been scarred by the collection process,” Mahoney told me, and will continue to struggle with non-medical debts. “That’s the sort of person who on a weekly basis is getting hounded by debt collectors, not just sort of the medical debt collectors that we study, but debt collectors of all sorts,” Wong said. Medical debt relief “really doesn’t do anything to alleviate any of those other conditions, not to mention whatever health condition led them to incur medical debt in the first place.” The researchers identified another plausible theory through a sub-experiment included in the study, which tested the reactions of patients based on how they were informed of their debt relief, either by phone call or by letter. Among the people who received a direct phone call to let them know, the negative mental health effects were greater. Prior research has found that Americans tend to feel shame and stigma when receiving charitable or government aid to pay their bills. Participants had not requested debt relief, the study noted, but rather had it purchased and wiped out by RIP Medical Debt without their prior knowledge (this is often how medical debt relief programs work). It’s possible that the very act of filling out the study’s surveys may have affected how the respondents perceived their own situation. “We’re reminding people of this unpleasant experience that they had,” Kluender told me. “And maybe they were going through some unpleasant negotiations with their insurer or they feel a lot of guilt and shame about being unable to pay the bill.” What do we do with this information? The disappointing findings are especially surprising in light of research on relief programs for other types of debt, like credit card debt and student loan debt, that has found improvements in financial health and job prospects. Medical debt, like those other types of debt, has been associated with worse health and a weaker financial situation. But medical debt has some distinct characteristics. Repayment rates are much lower than they are for student loans or mortgages. Once a medical bill reaches collections, it’s often resolved with a negotiated settlement, which can result in much lower payments than what the patient originally owed. So the study participants, who had carried their debt for more than a year at a minimum, may have already been subconsciously writing off the medical debt by the time relief came, the authors said. That limits the impact they may feel when it’s wiped out. Some experts not involved in the study think the findings may understate the benefits of medical debt relief, especially on people’s finances, based on earlier studies of medical debt relief that had found larger benefits for people’s credit scores and credit access. The effect on credit scores is increasingly a moot point, however. Credit agencies have agreed to stop reporting most medical debt on people’s credit reports, after urging from the Biden administration, a step taken in the midst of the experiment. (The study relied on a subset of people whose debt was relieved prior to that announcement.) Amy Finkelstein, a leading researcher on health care costs at MIT whose nonprofit J-PAL North America helped fund the study, said she was shocked by the results but grateful to have them. Part of the difficult work of policymaking is to soberly assess the results of what you are doing. “Yes, it’s disappointing. But another way of saying it is: This was true whether or not we had done the study,” Finkelstein told me. “So it’s good to know so that we can try to learn from it and move on.” Everybody I spoke to agreed on one thing: Preventing people from accruing medical debt in the first place would likely be more effective in improving their finances and health than relieving debts after the fact. One-time debt relief may not make it any easier or less stressful to access health care in the future, but providing people with health coverage that eliminates the risk of debt does. That hypothesis is supported by existing evidence. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a totemic work in health care research, found that low-income adults who received Medicaid saw a 9 percent reduction in depression. They were also less likely to end up in debt because of a medical bill and less likely to take out loans or skip payments on their other necessities to cover their health care balance. Experts I spoke to named more robust interventions that could lead to less medical debt and better health and financial outcomes, including more generous insurance benefits for people already covered. Covering the 26 million Americans who remain uninsured would be another step. Most states in the Deep South still haven’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), leaving millions of low-income people without coverage. Other proposals, such as more public insurance options, have gained increasing support among Democrats. “As a consumer advocate, the best solution would be single-payer, Medicare for all,” Chi Chi Wu, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said. But major overhauls are easier said than done. The history of US health care reform is one of a country inching toward universal health coverage: Medicare and Medicaid passed in the 1960s, and the ACA didn’t come along until 2010. Our byzantine insurance system with weak cost controls persists, with a massive health care industry invested in maintaining the status quo. In the meantime, experts said, policymakers could focus on making sure that hospital financial assistance programs are accessible to more people. Many patients are eligible for aid that would significantly reduce what they owe — but they often have no idea it’s available. The New York Times reported in 2022 that some hospitals were making it extremely difficult for eligible patients to find out about and use assistance programs, while aggressively seeking payment even from patients who should qualify for aid. The long-term project of universal health care continues. The debt relief study, disappointing as its results might be, may spur some fresh thinking about how to better help people.

Nude images shared without consent can be traumatic, whether they’re real or not. | Getty Images/iStockphoto How do you stop deepfake nudes? There’s a lot of debate about the role of technology in kids’ lives, but sometimes we come across something unequivocally bad. That’s the case with AI “nudification” apps, which teenagers are using to generate and share fake naked photos of their classmates. At Issaquah High School in Washington state, boys used an app to “strip” photos of girls who attended last fall’s homecoming dance, according to the New York Times. At Westfield High School in New Jersey, 10th grade boys created fabricated explicit images of some of their female classmates and shared them around school. Students from California to Illinois have had deepfake nudes shared without their consent, in what experts call a form of “image-based sexual abuse.” Now advocates — including some teens — are backing laws that impose penalties for creating and sharing deepfake nudes. Legislation has passed in Washington, South Dakota, and Louisiana, and is in the works in California and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Rep. Joseph Morelle (D-NY) has reintroduced a bill that would make sharing the images a federal crime. Francesca Mani, a 15-year-old Westfield student whose deepfaked image was shared, started pushing for legislative and policy change after she saw her male classmates making fun of girls over the images. “I got super angry, and, like, enough was enough,” she told Vox in an email sent via her mother. “I stopped crying and decided to stand up for myself.” Supporters say the laws are necessary to keep students safe. But some experts who study technology and sexual abuse argue that they’re likely to be insufficient, since the criminal justice system has been so inefficient at rooting out other sex crimes. “It just feels like it’s going to be a symbolic gesture,” said Amy Hasinoff, a communications professor at the University of Colorado Denver who has studied image-based sexual abuse. She and others recommend tighter regulation of the apps themselves so the tools people use to make deepfake nudes are less accessible in the first place. “I am struggling to imagine a reason why these apps should exist’’ without some form of consent verification, Hasinoff said. Deepfake nudes are a new kind of sexual abuse So-called revenge porn — nude photos or videos shared without consent — has been a problem for years. But with deepfake technology, “anybody can just put a face into this app and get an image of somebody — friends, classmates, coworkers, whomever — completely without clothes,” said Britt Paris, an assistant professor of library and information science at Rutgers who has studied deepfakes. There’s no hard data on how many American high school students have experienced deepfake nude abuse, but one 2021 study conducted in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia found that 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 64 had been victimized with deepfake imagery. Nude images shared without consent can be traumatic, whether they’re real or not. When she first found out about the deepfakes at her school, “I was in the counselor’s office, emotional and crying,” Mani said. “I couldn’t believe I was one of the victims.” When sexual images of students are shared around school, they can experience “shaming and blaming and stigmatization,” thanks to stereotypes that denigrate girls and women, especially, for being or appearing to be sexually active, Hasinoff said. That’s the case even if the images are fake because other students may not be able to tell the difference. Moreover, fake images can follow people throughout their lives, causing real harm. “These images put these young women at risk of being barred from future employment opportunities and also make them vulnerable to physical violence if they are recognized,” Yeshi Milner, founder of the nonprofit Data for Black Lives, told Vox in an email. Stopping deepfake abuse may require reckoning with AI To combat the problem, at least nine states have passed or updated laws targeting deepfake nude images in some way, and many others are considering them. In Louisiana, for example, anyone who creates or distributes deepfakes of minors can be sentenced to five or more years in prison. Washington’s new law, which takes effect in June, treats a first offense as a misdemeanor. The federal bill, first introduced in 2023, would give victims or parents the ability to sue perpetrators for damages, in addition to imposing criminal penalties. It has not yet received a vote in Congress but has attracted bipartisan support. However, some experts worry that the laws, while potentially helpful as a statement of values, won’t do much to fix the problem. “We don’t have a legal system that can handle sexual abuse,” Hasinoff said, noting that only a small percentage of people who commit sexual violence are ever charged. “There’s no reason to think that this image-based abuse stuff is any different.” Some states have tried to address the problem by updating their existing laws on child sexual abuse images and videos to include deepfakes. While this might not eliminate the images, it would close some loopholes. (In one recent New Jersey lawsuit, lawyers for a male high school student argued he should not be barred from sharing deepfaked photos of a classmate because federal laws were not designed to apply “to computer-generated synthetic images.”) Meanwhile, some lawyers and legal scholars say that the way to really stop deepfake abuse is to target the apps that make it possible. Lawmakers could regulate app stores to bar them from carrying nudification apps without clear consent provisions, Hasinoff said. Apple and Google have already removed several apps that offered deepfake nudes from the App Store and Google Play. However, users don’t need a specific app to make nonconsensual nude images; many AI image generators could potentially be used in this way. Legislators could require developers to put guardrails in place to make it harder for users to generate nonconsensual nude images, Paris said. But that would require challenging the “unchecked ethos” of AI today, in which developers are allowed to release products to the public first and figure out the consequences later, she said. “Until companies can be held accountable for the types of harms they produce,” Paris said, “I don’t see a whole lot changing.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Anne Hathaway as Solène and Nicholas Galitzine as Hayes in The Idea of You. | Courtesy of Prime From The Idea of You to viral essays, the discourse is rarely about the people inside the relationships. There’s something about age gaps right now. They’re all over the place. The Idea of You, out on Amazon Prime this week, features Anne Hathaway as a 39-year-old mom falling in love with a 24-year-old boy band star, only to be haunted by tabloid covers calling her a cougar. It’s based on a novel of the same title by Robinne Lee, dubbed by Vogue “the sleeper hit of the pandemic.” Meanwhile, over the past few months, the Cut has twice gone viral with articles about age gaps. In December, it published a reported article by Lila Shapiro interviewing multiple couples with significant age gaps. In March came a personal essay by Grazie Sophia Christie about her relationship with her husband, who’s 10 years older. On social media, Shapiro’s report was largely met with fascination and Christie’s with recriminations; both were widely distributed and discussed. In her new memoir Consent, writer Jill Ciment revisits her celebrated memoir of 20 years ago, Half a Life, about her marriage to the man she met when she was 17 and he was her 47-year-old art professor. “Should I refer to him in the language of today — sexual offender, transgressor, abuser of power?” Ciment asks, referring to her late husband, as she describes their first kiss. “Or do I refer to him in the language of 1970, at the apex of the sexual revolution, when the kiss took place — Casanova, silver fox?” The ways we talk about age-gap relationships have changed so completely so fast. They’ve come to be a stand-in for the way the Me Too movement changed our whole erotic vocabulary: Before, titillating; after, abusive. When Taylor Swift first releases “All Too Well” in 2012, it’s received as a tragic breakup song about Swift’s relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal, who she dated when she was 20 and he was 29. When she rereleases it in 2021, it’s received as an account of predatory behavior. Age-gap relationships in the abstract have become a place of talking through our newly heightened societal awareness of power dynamics and the potential therein for abuse — especially when the standard gender roles flip. Frequently, the discourse has almost nothing to do with the people actually in the relationships in question. Historically, men were expected to be older than their wives. The reasons why are as gross as you think. “Haven’t you ever heard that the girl is supposed to be half the man’s age, plus seven?” asks Patty O’Neill in the 1951 play turned 1953 film The Moon Is Blue. Patty, 22, is wooing a 30-year-old man at the time, and she is delighted to find that the math “just works out.” Today, the rule “half your age plus seven years” is popularly held to tell you the youngest possible person you can date without being creepy. A 30-year-old, the idea is, can just about get away with dating a 22-year-old of any gender, but get down to 21 and things start to feel weird. Historically, however, the equation was supposed to dictate the ideal age gap between a man and a woman. It seems to have been fairly common around the midcentury. In 2014, the New Republic found the idea turning up in sources as disparate as The Moon Is Blue (1951) and quotes from Elijah Muhammad in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). American newspapers of the 1930s ascribed the rule to Maurice Chevalier, or, more vaguely, to the French. The ideology that considers this age-gap ideal is profoundly misogynistic. Part of the reason the husband is supposed to be the older figure (twice his wife’s age minus seven years) is to increase his status. Wiser than his wife, the husband could have his own established source of income and his own established adult life before he entered into marriage. The wife would rely on her husband for all of the above. In exchange, the wife would grant her husband her youthful beauty, and the common wisdom held that this exchange was equal. The tricky thing, though, was that the wife’s youth is by its nature fleeting, while the husband’s wealth would with any luck only increase with time. The wife had a ticking clock placed on her social value, and it was up to her to make a good marriage before the clock struck midnight and her social value disappeared. This is a worldview in which a woman’s access to adulthood depends upon her erotic value. Her beauty is all she has to trade to the world in order to be granted the status of full personhood — and even that personhood is contingent, because the wife can only ever access it through her husband. In Christie’s Cut essay, she positions her own marriage as being part of this very legacy. Christie consciously set out to choose an older husband, she writes, because she wanted to benefit from the financial security of an older and wealthier partner, and she thought her best bet was to use the currency of her youth and beauty before they became devalued by age. “I had, like all women, a calculator in my head,” she writes. “I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we [Christie and her fellow female classmates at Harvard] really ought to have been preparing.” The asymmetry in power between Christie and her husband, she writes, benefits her so much that she feels no real need to right it. “Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself?” she asks rhetorically. “I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.” It’s only fair to take Christie at her word that she’s happy in her marriage. Yet the exchange she describes sits oddly in the modern era, particularly in the post-Me Too era’s heightened awareness of sexual power dynamics. You run across the same dilemma in all the age-gap think pieces. “It’s perfectly possible for two consenting adults to have a healthy and equitable relationship despite a significant age gap,” mused a Guardian article from 2020 on Leonardo DiCaprio’s habit of dating only 25-year-olds. However, the article continued, “​It feels like a major flag if a man consistently dates women half his age. One suspects that person isn’t actually looking for a partner, but an admirer.” In her Cut article, Shapiro outlines the basic problem. The anti-age-gap discourse, she writes, emerged from the Me Too movement’s “concern with power differentials and with coercion and consent.” On the other hand: “It also sits at odds with Me Too’s core ethos — ‘Believe women’ — by raising an outcry on behalf of women who, by all available public accounts, have no complaints about their relationships. Even if they say they are happy, the age-gap critics don’t believe them.” In the wake of the new discourse, even the people involved in the relationships can’t always believe themselves or the things they say. Much of the tension of Consent comes from Ciment’s anguished and untrusting analysis of her old memoir, the one where she told the story of her marriage as a straight love story. In her first memoir, 1996’s Half a Life, Ciment consistently describes herself as the sexual aggressor in her early encounters with her future husband, Arnold. Yet looking back over the manuscript 25 years later in Consent, she feels her old account cannot be trusted. “Am I as delusional as Humbert Humbert when he narrates (Lolita is twelve at the time), ‘It was she who seduced me’?” Ciment writes. “When I wrote this, was I protecting Arnold? The statute of limitations had long ago passed. Was I protecting my marriage? We had just celebrated our twenty-seventh anniversary.” Ciment and Arnold were married until Arnold’s death in 2016, and according to Ciment, their marriage was a happy one. Still, she keeps interrogating herself. “Had Arnold experienced the sea change of the MeToo era, would he have come to believe that he crossed a line when he first kissed me?” she writes. “Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? … Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?” Things get even more complicated when we reverse the gender roles. Is there a gender swap exception? Discussions about age-gap relationships in which the woman is older than the man tend, on average, to be less about whether or not the woman is a predator and more about whether or not she should be humiliated for dating a younger man. Her detractors might dismiss her as a desperate cougar; her supporters might frame her dating decisions as a feminist triumph. That’s the tension at the heart of The Idea of You, both the Hathaway film and the novel it’s based on by Robinne Lee. The story centers around Solène, a 39-year-old whose ex-husband is dating a younger woman. Solène grits her teeth at his choices, but she’s not surprised by them: “Because that’s what divorced men in their forties did,” she narrates. “His stock was still rising. His power still intact. Daniel had become more desirable, and I somehow less so. As if time were paced differently for each of us.” Shortly thereafter, Solène finds herself entangled in a love affair with the much younger Hayes Campbell, lead singer of her daughter’s favorite boy band. In the book, Hayes is 20. In the movie, he’s 24. Either way, he’s a lot younger than Solène. When she suggests that the age gap might become a problem, however, Hayes scoffs. “If our ages were reversed, no one would bat an eyelash. Am I right?” says Hayes in Lee’s novel. “So now it’s just some sexist, patriarchal crap, and you don’t strike me as the kind of woman who’s going to let that dictate her happiness. All right? Next issue.” Part of the fantasy of The Idea of You is the idea of a woman whose social currency increases as she ages in the same way that her husband’s does. Solène’s beauty and sophistication are so potent that she does not need to be young to be a catch. Her social value is confirmed by her attractiveness to a man who is not only youthful and beautiful himself but also bears the traditional markers of male power: Young Hayes is richer than Solène’s middle-aged ex-husband will ever be, so that he can fulfill both sides of the old age-gap bargain at once. The fantasy here is not a world in which women’s social power doesn’t depend on their sexual currency. The fantasy here is that a woman’s sexual currency might not depreciate over the course of her 30s — particularly if the woman in question is played by Anne Hathaway, long celebrated for her eternal youthfulness. The result is a sort of mirrorverse version of Christie’s worldview: These are the rules, so let’s maximize our power within them. For some readers, this fantasy is intensely potent and affirming. “It teaches that women remain desirable, strong, and sexually viable as they age: there is no end date,” wrote one reader on Goodreads. “It calls out gender-based double standards. It empowers women to block out all the patriarchal noise and build the life they want. When we change our thoughts, we change our world. This. This is what I needed.” For other readers, the fact of Solène’s gender doesn’t change what they see as the fundamental problem with an age-gap romance: the age part. “idk who lied to this woman,” wrote another Goodreads reviewer, “but f*cking some kid 20 years younger than you is not the feminist slay you think it is.” What happens in the end? There is a question neither The Idea of You nor Christie engages with, which is: What happens as time and age come for all of us? The problem of aging rarely appears in the stories about age-gap relationships, but it is central to the people living in those relationships. “It’s only when the two people actually love each other and want to build a life together that the age gap, as an age gap, not as a gap that stands in for various inequities, actually matters,” says the writer B.D. McClay in an essay on Substack responding to Shapiro’s Cut piece. “If you want to get married and have kids, then you have to deal with what I think of as the sad math: how long the older partner is likely to see your mutual children get to become. Any parent can die, but what makes this different is that the absolute best case scenario might involve, for some, not seeing your kids ever graduate from college.” The problem of aging fills the final pages of Consent, which sees Ciment caring for Arnold toward the end of his life. These scenes are not, she feels, literary. “Who would believe a scene in which Lolita takes Humbert Humbert for cataract surgery?” she writes. “Or worries about his prostate? How would I compose the scene where Lolita arranges hospice care for the man who supposedly stole her childhood? Wouldn’t I have to include the day Lolita is at Humbert Humbert’s bedside when he dies? Isn’t that what happily ever after means? A love that lasts long enough that one lover is there to close the other lover’s eyelids?” Ciment is able to come to a resolution of sorts on her questions in her description of the day of Arnold’s death. She sees him lying in their bed, in “the same position he was in when I went to seduce him forty-five years before,” she writes. As she goes to kiss him, she knows that for all her fretful wondering about their first kiss and what it signifies, “there could be none about our last.” Their final kiss is for the pair of them alone, as individuals and as a couple, and what it signifies is them and their long marriage. It is separate from the asymmetry of power from which they began. The fantasy of The Idea of You, however, cannot quite stand up to such realism. It cringes away from the idea of a Solène who might be past middle age and into old age, who might require caregiving or who might even look significantly older than her boyfriend when they’re lounging by a European poolside together. In Lee’s novel, Hayes and Solène split up at the end of the book and don’t reunite, with Solène explaining that the public scrutiny of their relationship is too difficult for her 12-year-old daughter. The film mostly preserves this ending while tacking on a brief epilogue that suggests Hayes and Solène might reunite after her daughter is off at college. In either case, the relationship presented to the audience is preserved in amber, crystallized at the moment in which the age gap is sexy and not potentially tragic. That age-gap fiction and discourse tends to avoid those tragedies is one of the tells that that age-gap discourse is never about individual people, or even individual couples. It is about the whole history of misogynistic ideology from which our age-gap expectations emerge, and how drastically the way we think about sex and power changed in the space of a few years. The age-gap discourse is a metaphor for the way Me Too changed the world — even if the people in age-gap relationships would rather that it weren’t.

A nurse administers a dosage of the cholera vaccine during the launch of the campaign to immunize people in affected areas, at the Kuwadzana Polyclinic in Harare on January 29, 2024. | Jekesai Njikizana/AFP via Getty Images “A billion people at risk”: How worldwide cholera outbreaks are threatening lives. Amid a global resurgence of cholera, the world is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. The global stockpile of the oral cholera vaccine — a supply whose needs are difficult to predict and fill anyway — has dwindled to nearly nothing after the Indian drug manufacturer that produced about 15 percent of the world’s supply stopped making the vaccine last year. While other companies are setting up new production capacity, the stockpile is now effectively nonexistent. Demand is so great that as soon as doses are produced, they must immediately ship to one of the world’s current cholera hot spots. This crisis is symptomatic of a larger problem: the persistent lack of political will and financial investment to dramatically reduce cholera deaths. Cholera flourishes in areas where there is contaminated water, poor sanitation, and people living in crowded conditions — like the city of Rafah, currently home to more than 1 million Palestinians displaced by Israel’s war in Gaza. Cholera has not yet been detected there, since no one from outside Gaza can bring it in, but an outbreak would be catastrophic given the decimation of Gaza’s health care system and the lack of access to humanitarian goods like clean water and medication. The disease is typically spread when an infected person or people contaminate a water source by defecating in or near it. People get sick after drinking the contaminated water, suffering from acute diarrhea and vomiting — which can, without treatment, kill an infected person within a day. It’s a disease that rich countries with clean water and good sanitation infrastructure do not have to worry about anymore. But cholera cases are rising worldwide now after a period of decline from 2017 through 2021, according to the World Health Organization’s cholera team leader Philippe Barboza. There are currently active cholera outbreaks in Zambia, Mozambique, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and Haiti. “Once it is there in these situations, because of the very poor water and sanitation and hygiene situation, it can spread like wildfire,” Paul Spiegel, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, told Vox. As many as 143,000 people die from this preventable disease each year — which could even be an underestimate, since some countries do not have the capacity to detect or compile data on cholera cases. According to some metrics, it is becoming more fatal because many infected people do not have adequate access to health care. Concurrent outbreaks throughout the world are straining the global health sector’s resources to respond. “It’s a really horrible way to die,” Mohammad Fadlalla, an Ohio-based physician who volunteers with Medecins Sans Frontieres and has responded to multiple cholera outbreaks, told Vox. With the increase in outbreaks and limited countermeasures, particularly vaccines, “We are talking about a billion people at risk” in the immediate term, Barboza said. “And this is an underestimate. This is a very conservative estimate.” Why aren’t there enough cholera vaccine doses? There are a few intersecting crises that have led to cholera’s comeback and the world’s limited capacity to combat it. One pivotal moment came in 2020, when Shantha (now Sanofi India), a fully owned subsidiary of French pharmaceutical company Sanofi based in India, announced that it would stop manufacturing its oral cholera vaccine at the end of 2022. “We took this decision in a context where we were already producing very small volumes versus the total demand for cholera vaccines and in the knowledge that other cholera vaccine manufacturers (current and new entrants) had already announced an increased supply capacity in the years to come,” Sanofi told the Guardian in 2022. The company said at the time that it had shared information about how its vaccine was manufactured with public health partners like the International Vaccine Institute (IVI), which has transferred the vaccine technology to new manufacturers. But those contingencies weren’t enough to offset a total shutdown by the company that was manufacturing about 15 percent of the global vaccine supply depending on the year, as Jerome Kim, director general of the IVI, told Vox. That left just one other manufacturer, South Korea’s EuBiologics, in the market as global cholera cases surged. “WHO has contacted [Sanofi] several times to ask first to increase [vaccine production], second to maintain, and third, to postpone their decision,” Barboza said. “So we have tried all the possible things and the rationale of [Sanofi is], ‘Oh, no, there will be other manufacturers that are coming.’” In an email to Vox, Sanofi said that the decision to exit the cholera vaccine market was not about profitability, but rather based on an understanding that EuBiologics would increase its output and other manufacturers would enter the market. EuBiologics will produce as many as 50 million doses of an oral cholera vaccine this year. The WHO announced in April that it approved a simplified, but still effective, version of the present formula for use, which will help mitigate the vaccine shortage. The world has already been forced to start rationing vaccine doses. In 2022, the WHO recommended halving the vaccine dose from two to one, which downgrades the vaccine’s efficacy but does offer protection for a year or more, and obviously increases the number of people who can receive someprotection with limited supplies. Last year, all of the 36 million regimens were distributed to 72 million people to take one dose each. Today, with only EuBiologics now producing a cholera vaccine, doses are allocated as soon as they are made to one of the areas with an active outbreak, said DerrickSim, managing director of vaccine markets and health security at Gavi, the international vaccine alliance. Because of the global shortfall, there are no vaccine doses available for preventive campaigns that would keep cholera out of communities in the first place. And absent an international commitment to improve the water supply and sanitation in poor countries at risk for cholera outbreaks — an approximately $114 billion yearly commitment — vaccination would be a powerful tool for preventing sickness and death from cholera in areas where outbreaks could occur. There are some important developments in vaccine technology in the pipeline, such as a temperature-stable pill form that would be much easier to transport and administer than the current liquid form, which must be kept between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. At least three companies are currently working to develop new cholera vaccines, but they won’t be on the market until at least the end of 2025, and potentially years later. Gavi, which supports vaccine programs in developing countries and has contributed to the vaccination of nearly 1 billion children since its founding in 2000,is also working with smaller manufacturers in developing countries in Africa to bolster the global supply and produce the vaccine closer to where it will ultimately be used, Sim said. But developing cholera vaccines — from research to improve them to transferring the vaccine technology to new manufacturers, from clinical trials to purchasing and distributing them — also requires money. The WHO budgeted about $12 million for its cholera vaccination efforts last year, but that number will need to increase as cases do. That could potentially help address some of these supply issues — but it also highlights why they exist in the first place. “The big manufacturers are not interested in investing in a vaccine that only the poor countr[ies] can buy,” Barboza said, “and that will cost only $1.50 or $1 per dose.” Why are cholera cases rising in the first place, in the 21st century no less? At the time Sanofi decided to exit the cholera vaccine market in 2020, cholera was trending downward after a 20-year high in 2017. The Global Task Force for Cholera Control — a collaboration between the WHO, GAVI, and other stakeholders — had released a road map to reducing cholera deaths by 90 percent by 2030, and poor and developing countries where cholera is endemic or an active concern were implementing national cholera vaccination plans. In retrospect, experts believe the world missed an opportunity to work aggressively toward prevention, an effort that would have been aided by Sanofi’s continued production of its cholera vaccines. But Covid-19, which diverted resources and attention away from most other global diseases including cholera; an increase in displacement due to violence and conflict; and extreme weather events caused by climate change that both displace people and make environments more conducive to cholera have combined to allow the disease to spread more rapidly. Four of the five worst years for cholera in recent history have come since 2017. This is all the more concerning because cholera is fairly simple to prevent, with the supplies to provide clean drinking water and sanitation. It’s easy to treat, too: All it takes to cure cholera in most cases is clean water and oral rehydration salts, antibiotics in the worst-case scenarios. With proper medical intervention, no one should die from it. In situations of extreme instability like in Sudan, or where the medical sector has been decimated as in Gaza, those interventions become more challenging. And while some countries have long had routine cholera outbreaks, it’s not always easy to predict when or where they’ll hit, or how big they will grow, because contaminated water sources and infected people can cross borders, as likely occurred in Lebanon in 2022. Cholera is common in neighboring Syria, where the Assad regime has decimated local infrastructure and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Though Lebanon had not experienced an outbreak since 1993, conditions were ripe for it. Years of government corruption and incompetence have led to a breakdown in public infrastructure including health care and sanitation — all of which helped trigger the outbreak in 2022. That outbreak saw at least 6,000 confirmed and suspectd cases. In August 2023, Fadlalla was responding to an outbreak in Al Qadarif, Sudan, which has been in a devastating civil conflict for a year now. “A lot of the governmental institutions were [at the time] eight months without their people getting paid their salaries, and the bureaucracy was not really functioning or operating,” he said. “And this is including the Ministries of Health. The whole medical sector was not getting paid, supplies were not getting restocked.” Climate change and the conflict and displacement related to it also significantly contribute to the uptick in cholera outbreaks, according to experts Vox spoke with. Higher temperatures and changing weather patterns make the environmental conditions ripe for outbreaks in new places unused to the disease. But climate change is not going to be reversed any time soon, nor is the global community going to commit to improving sanitation in developing countries or mitigating displacement. So in the meantime, vaccines remain one of the most important ways to prevent cholera deaths. “It’s not that nothing is happening,” Barboza said. “There are a lot of things that are happening, but are they acting fast enough, with enough money?”

Farmer protests in Nîmes, France, in March. According to reports, large tires were set on fire during the blockade. | Luc Auffret/Anadolu via Getty Images Road-clogging, manure-dumping farmers reveal the paradox at the heart of EU agriculture. In February 2021, in the midst of the deadly second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grégory Doucet, mayor of Lyon, France, temporarily took red meat off the menus of the city’s school cafeterias. While the change was environmentally friendly, the decision was driven by social distancing protocols: Preparing one hot meal that could be served to meat-eaters, vegetarians, and those with religious restrictions rather than serving multiple options was safer and more efficient. The response from the French agricultural establishment was hysterical. “We need to stop putting ideology on our children’s plates!,” then-Minister of Agriculture Julien Denormandie tweeted. Livestock farmers clogged Lyon’s downtown with tractors and paraded cows in front of city hall, brandishing banners declaring, “Stopping meat is a guarantee of weakness against future viruses.” An impromptu coalition of livestock producers, politicians, and parents unsuccessfully petitioned the city’s court to overturn the change. It may have seemed a tempest in a teacup — a quintessentially French squabble. But it was a microcosm of European agricultural politics, reflecting the great paradox of European Union (EU) farmers’ relationship to the state. On one hand, farmers are wards of the welfare state, dependent on national governments and the European Union for the generous subsidies and suite of protectionist trade policies that keep them in business. On the other, they are business people who balk at regulations, restrictions, and perceived government overreach. The tension between these positions regularly erupts into farmer revolts when governments attempt to regulate food or farming in the public interest as it might any other industry. EU politicians, meanwhile, often feel the need to kowtow to agribusiness because of its ability to mobilize protesters and voters alike. This year, it has become clear these protests have the power to transform Europe’s future. This past February, three years almost to the day after Doucet’s school lunch announcement, roads around Lyon were again blocked by farmers raging against the French government and the EU. It was one surge in the wave of protests that has swept through Europe in recent months, set off by a litany of demands, including continued subsidies and no new environmental regulations. In short, all the benefits of government with none of the governance. In Paris, farmers traded blows with police at the country’s Salon de l’Agriculture trade fair. In Germany, they tried storming a ferry carrying the country’s economy minister. In Brussels, they rammed through police barricades with tractors. In the Netherlands, they lit asbestos on fire alongside highways. In Poland, they massed along the Ukrainian border to prevent the import of cheap grain. In Czechia, they paved Prague’s streets with manure. The protests have come as the EU seeks to pass a slate of laws as part of its Green Deal, a sweeping climate plan that includes checking the worst harms of industrial agriculture, which takes up more than a third of the continent’s landmass and contributes disproportionately to its ecological footprint. That agenda is colliding with Europe’s longtime paradigm of few-strings-attached welfare for agribusiness. Agribusiness interests have been working to foil the Farm to Fork strategy, the crown jewel of the Green Deal meant to overhaul Europe’s food system, since its inception in 2020. This year, with the specter of right-wing populism looming over upcoming European Parliament elections (part of the EU’s legislative branch), farmers’ protests across the continent have succeeded at not only stalling new sustainability reforms, but also undermining existing environmental regulations. Now, plans to make Europe a global leader in sustainable agriculture appear to be dead on arrival. Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images Farmers dump manure on streets in the EU quarter of Brussels in March. How European agriculture got this way Despite its centrality to European politics and policy, agriculture is a very small industry within the bloc’s economy, making up about 1.4 percent of the EU’s GDP and no more than 5 percent of GDP in any of the Union’s 27 countries. The sector is also one of the biggest recipients of EU funds, with subsidies to farmers and investment in rural development consuming about a quarter of the EU’s budget, on top of often generous national subsidies. Meanwhile, European agriculture’s environmental footprint is vastly disproportionate to its economic contribution. It uses a third of all water on the increasingly arid continent. It’s responsible for 10 percent of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, including much of its methane and nitrous oxide, both highly potent greenhouse gases primarily released by animal agriculture. It accounts for about a quarter of global pesticide use, which has been linked to soil and water contamination, biodiversity loss, and a slew of impacts on human health. Of course, we need to eat, and food needs to be produced. But Europe’s monocrop- and livestock-intensive agriculture system is anything but sustainable. Yet the EU continues to pour massive amounts of money into subsidizing an economically negligible sector that is responsible for many of the continent’s environmental problems and that, off the back of those subsidies, organizes to prevent environmental regulations or even conditions on those very subsidies. Many countries around the world generously subsidize food production — including, famously, the United States, where agriculture makes up less than 1 percent of GDP and punches far above its weight politically. But much of the US ag sector’s billions in annual federal payouts comes in indirect forms like subsidized crop insurance, including more than a third of the $24 billion it received in 2021 — and these subsidies make up a much smaller share of the industry’s contribution to GDP relative to agriculture subsidies in the EU. In Europe, decades of government policy have integrated food production into an extensive state welfare framework where, on paper, the good of farmers is equated with the public good. That system emerged from the ruins of World War II, when shoring up farming and food security became an existential policy imperative on the devastated and often starved continent. Post-war policies were designed to secure the food supply, provide farming families with a stable income, and stimulate rural economies in the interest of the public good. European agriculture policy became its own welfare system defined by subsidies and protection from foreign competition. It worked. By 1950, agricultural production in Western Europe had recovered to pre-war levels. When the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to the EU, formed in 1957, agriculture was central to the discussions, as economic integration would require dealing with the problem of highly subsidized and protected farming in member states. The answer was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), launched in 1962, a centerpiece of EEC and later EU policy. An extension of national-level agricultural welfare policies, the goal of the CAP was “to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, in particular by increasing the individual earnings of persons engaged in agriculture.” In other words, rather than using policy to build agriculture into a viable competitive business, the goal was to protect agriculture from the market and commit to a long-term policy of keeping farmers in business. CAP was “from the outset a public policy reflecting highly subjective political ‘preferences,’ not rational commercial interests,” economic historian Ann-Christina Knudsen argues in her book Farmers on Welfare: The Making of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy. For decades, CAP has been the EU’s biggest budget line. As recently as the 1980s, it made up about two-thirds of the Union’s budget. While bouts of trade liberalization and the rise of other priorities have steadily reduced its relative size, about a third of the EU’s 2021-2027 budget was earmarked for CAP. Over 70 percent of this money is distributed as direct payments to farmers. Since payments are primarily based on farm size, the biggest farms get the lion’s share of that money. Over half of the EU’s 9 million farms produce less than 4,000 euros of products per year and make up a combined 2 percent of Europe’s farm production, while the top 1 percent of farms — those that bring in over 500,000 euros — control 19 percent of all farmland and are responsible for over 40 percent of output. The top 0.5 percent of farms receive over 16 percent of all CAP payments. Lavish subsidies have helped make Europe a net exporter of agricultural products, with early concerns about food security long since displaced by a global thirst for Irish whiskey and Dutch beer and hunger for Irish butter and French cheese. Coupled with decades of government policy incentivizing industrial production methods that favor big operations, such as factory farming and large-scale monocropping, CAP has served to push Europe’s farmers to get big or get out. Between 2005 and 2020, the EU lost over 5 million farms, virtually all of them small operations sold by retiring farmers or those simply unable to compete with their larger neighbors. Large farmers, in turn, have organized into powerful political interest groups that aim to dictate agricultural policy to their governments. Farmers and their political allies pack the EU’s agriculture committee. Lobby organizations like Copa-Cogeca, which represents large farmers’ unions across the EU, and CropLife Europe, a pesticide trade group, pressure governments to entrench the status quo, including maintaining CAP as an ever-open spigot gushing taxpayer money. And where governments are seen as truant in delivering on their promises, cities and nations can be brought to a standstill by blockades of tractors, helping galvanize public opinion and push politicians into acquiescence. Europe’s turn toward environmental protections is clashing with farming interests Today, the growing importance of environmental goals in EU politics has driven a wedge into the sometimes contentious but mostly cozy relationship between farming interests and governments. While EU subsidies do come with some environmental strings attached, such as requirements to protect wetlands or engage in soil-friendly crop rotation, these are often poorly enforced and noncompliance is common. In Europe, much like in the US, agriculture is governed with a lighter touch compared to other industries, a paradigm often known as agricultural exceptionalism. In the Netherlands, for instance, farms have for decades been granted a derogation on nitrogen emissions, allowed to emit more than any other industry. This meant that, over the years, dairy farms and heavily fertilized crop fields leached nitrogen into the soil and water, poisoning rivers and wetlands. In 2019, the Dutch government sought to close the loophole and buy out livestock farmers unable to comply with the restriction. Farmers launched a series of protests marked by the now-ubiquitous use of tractors to block roads and public spaces in a show of force against government bureaucrats. Many felt aggrieved that government, by pushing the resource-intensive industrial farming that had made the Netherlands into an agricultural powerhouse, had helped create the very environmental problems now being blamed on farmers. Peter Boer/Bloomberg via Getty Images A two-week old calf on a dairy farm in Hazerswoude, Netherlands. Livestock farmers have been protesting the Dutch government’s efforts to limit polluting nitrogen emissions from farms. Cities across the country ground to a halt, and the protesters formed a new political party, the far-right-aligned BoerBurgerBeweging (the Farmer-Citizen Movement, or BBB). Last year, it won the country’s provincial elections in a landslide on the back of rural votes as well as broader anti-government and anti-EU sentiment, controlling 20 percent of seats in the Dutch senate. It was a portent of things to come. 2019 was also the year the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, proposed the Green Deal, which aims to achieve net zero emissions across the EU by 2050 through emissions reduction across all industries, renewable energy and electric vehicle adoption, and reforestation programs. Farm to Fork, the food system component of the plan, calls for dramatically reducing pesticide use and food waste, and promoting more sustainable dietary choices through product labeling and school lunches; independent modeling suggested it could cut agricultural emissions by up to 20 percent and halve biodiversity destruction. Environmental policies are broadly popular with the European electorate, and that plan was arrived at through the EU’s highly bureaucratic — but nonetheless democratically deliberative — process. But because it originated with the European Commission, whose members are unelected, it was seen by some as being mandated by unaccountable functionaries. Farmers bristled at the idea of being told to devote some of their land to biodiversity and nature restoration. Growers of monocrop products like grains and grapes for wine balked at drastic pesticide reductions. The pesticide industry and its lobby saw its profits threatened. But most impacted would be livestock, the sector least able to meet stringent environmental or animal welfare standards. Animal agriculture makes up 40 percent of European agricultural production, releases more than 80 percent of the continent’s emissions from agriculture, and receives more than 80 percent of CAP subsidies, according to a recent study using data from 2013. Immediately, the agricultural lobby began petitioning politicians to delay or do away with the proposed rules, starting with the proposed pesticide reduction measures. At first, EU politicians held in their support for reforms, voting in 2021 to implement Farm to Fork. But as Covid-19, with its disruption of food supply chains, dragged on and Russia invaded Ukraine, raising the specter of a food shortage, ag lobby groups gained new ammunition to fire at what they framed as the Green Deal’s attack on food security and the livelihood of farmers. Attacks on pro-Green Deal politicians escalated, including threats of violence against its staunchest supporters. Bit by bit, political support for Farm to Fork began to erode. By the end of 2023, before most of Farm to Fork had even been implemented, many of its core initiatives were already watered down or abandoned, including pesticide reduction mandates and farm animal welfare improvements. Also declawed was the nature restoration law, which would require EU member states to restore 20 percent of degraded habitats to preserve biodiversity, by calling on farmers to plant tree and flower strips along the edges of fields, for example. Industrial beef and dairy operations were also granted an exemption from industrial emissions targets despite being among the food system’s biggest emitters, responsible for most agricultural methane emissions. Throughout, political allies of agricultural lobbies like the right-wing European People’s Party have celebrated these wins over the specter of “NGO environmental dictatorship.” Farming interests are blocking the development of sustainable alternatives The same groups pushing against environmental regulation in the name of keeping the government out of business have few compunctions about turning to governments to thwart their competition. Meat producers in particular are threatened not only by environmental regulations that would affect them most, as the food system’s biggest emitters, but also by meat alternatives that have the potential to cut into their market share. Cell-cultivated meat, a novel technology that can harvest animal tissue from stem cells rather than slaughtered animals, has not yet received regulatory approval for sale in the EU and remains largely theoretical. That did not stop politicians in Italy, under pressure from agricultural lobby groups, from passing legislation last November banning not just the sale of cellular agriculture products, but also scientific research into the technology. Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, a member of the country’s far-right ruling party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), declared cultivated meat a threat to Italian culture and civilization. Soon thereafter, members of the Italian delegation to the EU, joined by representatives from 11 other countries, called on the Council of Europe to “ensure that artificially lab-grown products must never be promoted as or confused for authentic foods,” ostensibly in the public interest. Farming lends itself to populism, which often acts as a cover for cold business calculations. The cultivated meat ban reveals that agricultural lobby group demands are generally about realpolitik rather than a principled position about state intervention — no different from any business that aims to protect its bottom line. Political scientist Leah Stokes, in her book Short Circuiting Policy, has described such policy fights as “organized combat” between interest groups, which tends to favor powerful incumbents over new constituencies aiming to build political support for social or economic change. In Italy, an entrenched and politically well-connected agricultural lobby had the power to write its preferences into policy while proponents of cellular agriculture did not, allowing them to nip potential competition in the bud. Something similar is at work in the unraveling of the EU’s green agenda. Proponents of environmental legislation, while technically having science and public support on their side, were either unprepared or lacked the heart for a fight with the battle-tested farming lobby. All that took place before Europe became engulfed by protests. Then came the tractors. Last December, a proposed cut to diesel subsidies (used to power tractors and other farm machinery) in Germany, which had more to do with the country’s budgetary crisis than with environmental regulations, sent aggrieved farmers into the streets. Dozens of other protests erupted around Europe stemming from particular national issues. But as they grew, they coalesced into a generalized grievance about the failure of government and the EU to sufficiently support farmers, with new environmental policies offering a particularly easy target for ire. Alan Matthews, an Irish economist and preeminent expert on the CAP, recently argued that part of the problem is the changing social capital of farmers: “Instead of being seen as heroic producers of a vital commodity, they are increasingly described as environmental villains and climate destroyers. ... Instead of taking responsibility for these problems, farmers often adopt a defensive position of denial.” The protests have brought farmers of all stripes to the streets, big and small, organic and conventional. Despite their differences and the historic exclusion of small farmers from EU policymaking, most of Europe’s farmers share a common interest in maintaining subsidies and reducing regulation. They also raise some valid points about the contradictions in EU policy, such as in their calls for more protection from foreign competitors that produce with lower standards than in Europe, including livestock produced in jurisdictions with no animal welfare protections or raised using growth stimulants banned in Europe. But this argument is undermined by farmers’ calls to weaken those very standards. By late February, when a massive protest by farmers from across the continent ran amok through the EU quarter of Brussels, politicians across the continent were buckling to farmers’ demand. At the EU, even the watered-down version of the nature restoration law that had passed a vote in EU Parliament despite protests was stalled — perhaps indefinitely — as states including Belgium and Italy withdrew their support. But perhaps most worrying has been the willingness of EU politicians to weaken already existing environmental standards, including loosening environmental conditions and reporting requirements for all farms smaller than 10 hectares. These decisions may have also been motivated by upcoming EU elections. Many Europeans support the farmers’ cause, and as the Dutch case showed, the protests have the potential to galvanize voters to support parties seen as “pro-farmer.” With widespread concern about large gains for right and far-right parties in the EU Parliamentary elections next month, even ostensibly pro-Green Deal politicians, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have been forced to act appropriately deferential to the protesters. Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks at the European Parliament on February 6, the same day that she recommended shelving a plan to cut pesticide use as a concession to protesting farmers. Sooner or later, climate change will force a reckoning with farming practices The latest progress report on the EU’s quest for carbon neutrality, released by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change amid the protests in January, showed little improvement, especially in agriculture. It called for reductions in production of meat and dairy, higher consumer prices of highly emitting foods, more incentives for farmers to embrace green practices, and, as a political hint, more ambitious policy plans. In short: the opposite of the situation on the ground. Arriving at a viable agricultural policy that marries support for farmers, green goals, and liberal trade policies is a difficult balancing act with few clear-cut solutions. It is unlikely that these could be achieved without continued state and EU involvement in shaping how food is produced in Europe through some mix of protectionism, policy nudges, and regulation. CAP, in one form or another, isn’t going anywhere. But to the extent that it remains primarily a subsidy program, there is no reason why conditions on meeting strict climate and environmental targets should not be massively strengthened, rather than weakened, and enforcement ramped up. And there is no reason not to use policy to steer production away from highly polluting industries like meat and dairy toward less harmful ones. To be in favor of more sustainable farming is not to be against farmers; it is to be against unsustainable farming practices. To allow these two to be conflated is to lose the fight, as the EU is currently doing. After all, to the extent farmers see themselves as businessmen, a sign of business acumen is making a profit within regulatory and market constraints. One thing is certain: Bowing to the demands of special interests whose only interest is maintaining agricultural exceptionalism only precipitates a sooner reckoning with environmental crises, which will force farming to change whether farmers want to or not. The EU, however, seems to be taking marching orders from a parasite of its own creation, abandoning the very notions of public good that led to the creation of its agricultural policies in the first place.

A protester holds a sign reading “My body my choice” at a Women’s March rally where Arizona Secretary of State and then-Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs spoke outside the State Capitol on October 8, 2022, in Phoenix, Arizona. | Mario Tama/Getty Images How conspiring doctors, questionable tonics, and twisted patriotism led to the 1864 Arizona abortion ban that has finally been repealed. Arizona lawmakers voted Wednesday to repeal a Civil War-era state law that amounts to a near-total ban on abortion following an Arizona Supreme Court ruling last month that the law could be enforced. Democrats in the chamber — as well as both former President Donald Trump and Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, in an election-year shift toward a more moderate stance on abortion — had pushed the Arizona legislature to overturn the law. If it had gone into effect, it would have threatened access to reproductive care for about 1.6 million people of reproductive age. It’s one of several abortion laws enacted before the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that had been revived since the justices overturned Roe in 2022. Resuscitating these laws has created legal headaches, in part because they were written in a very different time for reasons that have little in common with the concerns of anti-abortion advocates today. Arizona’s ban, first passed in 1864 and codified again in 1901 and 1913, says anyone who “provides, supplies or administers” an abortion or abortion drugs will face a state prison sentence of two to five years unless the abortion is necessary to save the life of the person who is pregnant. Taken out of the 19th-century context in which it was passed, that language would seem to amount to a near-total ban on abortion. But that’s not how the law was originally enforced. Few people were prosecuted under the Arizona law or similar ones in other states. At the time, first-trimester abortions were widespread and widely accepted in the public conscience. Abortion laws of the mid-1800s were the product of discussions among lawyers and doctors and were designed to professionalize abortion services and medicine writ large — a seemingly noble cause, but also one driven by physicians’ self-interests and the desire to both boost (white) women’s birth rates and weaken a nascent feminist movement. There was no national abortion debate to speak of. Religion wasn’t yet a major factor in Americans’ views on abortion in the way it is today, and scientists had not yet developed methods to detect pregnancy during the first months of gestation. All of that meant abortion was a common, if not always safe, part of American life, despite what the old laws might suggest. “I think people imagine nobody did it because it was illegal. But we know that’s not true,” said Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a history professor at Kennesaw State University focusing on women’s rights and public health. Abortion was common and widely accepted in the 19th century For much of the first half of the 19th century, there were few laws in the US that were specifically concerned with abortion. Rather, abortion was understood in the tradition of British common law: It was only a crime after “quickening,” when a fetus’s movement could be detected — around four or five months of gestation. Before quickening, people could be ignorant (or have plausible deniability) about being pregnant. Generally, the American public at this time had few moral qualms about abortion before quickening. In particular, it was a service that many believed should be offered to unmarried women, who risked reputational ruin if they proceeded with the pregnancy and often came from poor backgrounds, as historian James Mohr writes in his 1978 book, Abortion in America. But around the mid-1800s, things started to shift. More people appeared to be seeking abortions, not just those who were unmarried. One estimate by physicians at the time that Mohr cites suggests that as many as one in five pregnancies ended in abortion. Partially because of this, birth rates fell dramatically: from 7.04 children per woman in 1800 to 3.56 by 1900, according to Mohr. Starting around the 1830s, abortion became a lucrative industry. It was still mostly unregulated but perceived as largely safe, especially when weighed against the risks of pregnancy. There is little available data on maternal mortality rates in the US at the time, but even by 1915, after the development of antisepsis, it was about 600 in every 100,000 births — higher than in some European countries at the time. In 2021, the US maternal mortality rate was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births. As Mohr writes, home medical manuals and midwifery texts advised readers on abortifacient substances (such as black hellebore) and practices that could bring about an abortion (such as bloodletting and “raising great weights”). Abortifacient tonics of varying effectiveness were prolifically advertised. Physicians, midwives, and even untrained practitioners offered procedures to clear “obstructed menses.” One abortion provider to the elites, known as “Madame Restell,” amassed a fortune estimated at up to $1 million. Increased access to abortion seen throughout the 19th century led to increased scrutiny, however, and that led to many of the laws and attitudes still with us today. The beginnings of the anti-abortion movement The anti-abortion movement began to take off in the 1850s for a few reasons. For one, anti-abortionists resented the fact that wealthy, white Protestant women were starting to drive demand for abortions, usually to limit their family size or delay having their first child. These women were seen as shirking their duties to “republican motherhood” — a concept that involved raising the next generation of productive citizens instilled with the values espoused by the young American republic and that excluded nonwhite women. They were maligned for indulging priorities outside of the home at a time when the women’s suffrage movement was taking shape. Some men were seen as complicit in this phenomenon, urging their wives to get abortions and paying for them. Anti-abortionists argued that laws specifically restricting abortion were necessary because otherwise, “nice white ladies who don’t want to be pregnant just won’t fulfill their obligation,” as MacIvor Thompson put it. Around this time, there were also a few highly publicized trials involving botched abortions, typically cases where the pregnant person died. This raised the profile of abortion as a safety issue for legislators. A broader movement to professionalize the American medical system also contributed to the first laws restricting abortion in the US. The Civil War laid bare the need for more competent medical professionals, and credentialed physicians known as “regulars” lobbied for laws on abortion for the stated reason of protecting people from quacks. But they also had selfish motivations to essentially establish a monopoly over the market for abortions and sideline their competition. Physicians — who, at that point, were nearly all white and male — had lost income and stature as a result of this competition with other medical practitioners, and performing abortions was a way to attract loyal long-term patients, Mohr writes. “What they’re trying to do is consolidate their professional dominance because they don’t want to be competing with midwives or competing with what they call ‘the irregulars,’” MacIvor Thompson said. This was despite the fact, she added, that the “outcomes that doctors got in terms of treating patients were really not that much better than people who didn’t have medical training.” Arizona’s abortion ban came amid a wave of early anti-abortion legislation The first standalone law to specifically prohibit abortion in the US was passed in Massachusetts in 1845. It made performing an abortion a misdemeanor for which an offender could serve five to seven years in jail and face up to a $2,000 fine — about $74,000 in 2024 dollars — or a felony in cases where the person having the procedure died. But as would be the case with others that came after it, the law was rarely enforced: No one was convicted under it between 1849 and 1857, according to Mohr. Generally, such early abortion laws mostly did not create penalties for the pregnant person who sought an abortion but only for those who performed them — and messed up. “Historians have argued that a lot of these initial laws were meant to protect women. They’re either next to poisoning laws, or they’re framed in a way where it’s like, this is to protect women from quacks,” said Shannon Withycombe, a history professor at the University of New Mexico who studies early abortion laws. Few religious leaders wanted to get involved in abortion politics. Some Catholic bishops espoused the position, as the church does now, that abortion is wrong because life begins at conception. But at the time, Catholicism was associated with European immigrants who weren’t “welcomed into white middle-class American society,” MacIvor Thompson said. However, Horatio Storer, a Harvard physician who converted to Catholicism in his 40s, set out to consolidate support for anti-abortion laws in the 1850s. He ultimately led the charge to criminalize those who sought abortions and to make the punishment more severe if the person was married. He even pushed physicians and legislators to abandon the earlier understanding of abortion as acceptable before quickening and to suppress it at any stage of pregnancy. Storer’s writings came to inform anti-abortion legislation across the country, though the physician lobby didn’t agree with everything he wrote. Many believed he had gone too far in framing abortion as a religious and moral issue, insisting that it was really a medical issue, Withycombe said. But physicians latched on to one particular point Storer made in his 1860 book On Criminal Abortion in America: that “doctors need to be able to practice abortion because there are lots of reasons why an abortion is important for the health and life of a woman,” Withycombe said. This supported physicians as the definitive source of medical expertise about when and how an abortion should be safely administered over other abortion practitioners. And Withycombe notes that in her readings of medical articles and obstetrical teaching texts of the time, she has found a broad array of circumstances in which physicians believed it was their medical duty to perform an abortion — including circumstances in which failing to do so wouldn’t necessarily result in a pregnant person’s death, such as “pernicious anemia,” “obstinate vomiting,” and “advancing jaundice.” Withycombe said the 1864 Arizona law was part of a wave of legislation, all with similar provisions informed by Storer’s writings, that swept the West in the 1860s while the Civil War was raging. Colorado passed a ban in 1861, Nevada in 1861, Idaho in 1864, and Montana in 1864. At the time, these states were trying to prove that they were part of modern America, emulating medical licensing laws and protections that had already been enacted in more cosmopolitan parts of the country. In that sense, the passage of these laws was more about professionalizing medicine than the moralistic arguments that later motivated the 1873 Comstock Act, a federal anti-obscenity law that also prohibited the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” However, Storer’s moral philosophy on abortion did eventually gain traction, and it influenced the next wave of anti-abortion lawmaking in the decades thereafter. About 40 states banned abortion by 1880. Where the battle over the Arizona ban stands now Arizona isn’t alone in dealing with a pre-Roe anti-abortion law. Oklahoma is currently enforcing a 1910 abortion ban. Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general has asked the state Supreme Court to strike down that state’s 1849 ban. Delaware, New Mexico, and Michigan have repealed their pre-Roe bans only in the last few years. West Virginia’s 19th-century ban was blocked in court in 2022, but the state legislature moved quickly to codify a new abortion ban that allows few exceptions. As part of the Arizona Supreme Court ruling, the state was supposed to ensure the 19th-century law was “harmonized” with a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy passed in March 2022. It’s not clear what that meant in practice. But now that the Arizona legislature has repealed the law, it’s a moot issue. If lawmakers had not intervened, though, its enforcement would have looked very different from the way the law was interpreted in the years immediately after its passage. As mentioned, enforcement was spotty in the 19th century, and unlike now, abortion providers continued to operate despite facing potential legal repercussions. Producers of abortifacients often circumvented bans by using euphemistic language to describe their products. Early abortion laws, including the Arizona ban, also empowered physicians to make decisions about abortion. “A lot of these laws were at least supported if not written by physicians,” Withycombe said. “Physicians agreed that they have complete discretion over whether an abortion is medically necessary.” However, doctors have often been sidelined in the enforcement of abortion bans post-Roe, with many choosing to leave states with restrictive laws because they feel they cannot perform lifesaving care. The medical and popular understanding of pregnancy and abortion has also evolved since 1864. We can now detect pregnancy much earlier than “quickening” using urine and blood tests. In the 1860s, early abortions were generally seen as morally equivalent to contraception, Mohr writes — a concept that the American right largely rejects today. “These laws are being upheld as proof that everyone was completely against abortion in all cases, from the moment of conception,” Withycombe said. “Given the understanding of human development at the time, that is not true in the 1860s.” Update, May 1, 5:15 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 14 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with news that the Arizona legislature has repealed the 1864 ban.

Federal law requires all research in federally funded laboratories to use only marijuana from a single facility located in Oxford, Mississippi. | Brad Horrigan/Hartford Courant/Tribune News Service/Getty Images A potential policy change could have big benefits for marijuana businesses. The United States Department of Drug Enforcement and Administration (DEA) reportedly now plans to reclassify marijuana as a lower-risk drug, a change that could further destigmatize the substance’s use and have a major impact on how the cannabis industry operates. In the US, marijuana is currently classified as a Schedule I drug, in the same category as heroin, and treated as more dangerous than fentanyl and cocaine. Schedule I drugs are described by DEA as drugs with “no accepted medical use and and a high potential for abuse.” After a request from the Biden administration for the relevant agencies to review its status, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) suggested the DEA — which is in charge of scheduling drugs — alter its classification to Schedule III, a category that includes anabolic steroids and ketamine. This week, the DEA moved forward with that plan, which now awaits approval from the Office of Management and Budget. Once it receives that sign-off, the agency will field public comments about its decision to reschedule the drug before officially implementing this update. Practically, a move to reschedule marijuana could be a major boon to weed businesses, allowing them to access tax breaks that they currently aren’t able to use. Rescheduling marijuana does not legalize it federally, however. And while individuals could see reduced federal penalties for weed possession, having marijuana could still be criminalized at the federal level, meaning drug charges would remain a risk. Many criminal justice reform advocates and lawmakers have called for weed to be descheduled — much like alcohol — which would mean that it can be regulated, but that states would have more leeway for reforms. Rescheduling falls short of this, though it could still meaningfully dilute some of the stigma around the medical and recreational use of the drug, and may pave the way for other policy changes. Drug scheduling, briefly explained There are five categories that a drug can be “scheduled” as under the Controlled Substances Act (CSA), with each demarcating its medical uses and potential for abuse. Schedule I is the harshest classification that’s available, while Schedule V is the least, signaling that a drug is less likely to be abused. Weed could be moved to Schedule III. Schedule III drugs are described by the DEA as drugs with “moderate to low potential for physical and psychological dependence,” and believed to have some medical applications. Some drugs, like nicotine and alcohol, are descheduled, which means there’s limited federal oversight and that they’re not regulated as part of the CSA at all. Instead, descheduled drugs are subject to public health laws and state-level regulations. Many activists and advocates, as well as a group of Senate Democrats, have argued that cannabis should be descheduled rather than rescheduled in order to truly decriminalize it and remove harmful legal penalties altogether. “The case for removing marijuana from Schedule I is overwhelming. The DEA should do so by removing cannabis from the CSA altogether, rather than simply placing it in a lower schedule,” a dozen senators including Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Chuck Schumer (D-NY) previously wrote in a letter to the agency. [Related: The federal drug scheduling system, explained] What a change to weed’s federal classification could mean The changing of weed’s classification could portend key changes for weed businesses and for drug researchers. Because weed is currently a Schedule I drug, businesses that sell it are subject to a high tax rate and limited deductions, something that marijuana businesses often claim make for difficult margins. One marijuana CEO told Politico access to federal financial business incentives would create a “healthier cannabis industry.” A reclassification could also open up possibilities for scientific research on the medical benefits of weed and other questions, since Schedule III drugs aren’t subject to as onerous of an approval process for such studies. A rescheduling of marijuana could also mean that more medicinal products that contain it could be approved by the Food and Drug Administration. And that could lead to a more regulated medical marijuana industry for those who use the drug to treat conditions like Parkinson’s disease or lupus. Other Schedule III drugs like ketamine, for example, can be obtained via a prescription. For individuals, access to recreational marijuana could still vary depending on their specific state’s laws, as could access to medicinal marijuana, depending on if the FDA chooses to approve more specific treatments. Recreational use at the federal level would also still be illegal. Legislation to legalize marijuana federally has had some bipartisan support in Congress from the likes of House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) and Rep. Dave Joyce (R-OH), but it still hasn’t picked up sufficient backing to pass both chambers. That’s despite a majority of Americans supporting marijuana legalization and growing momentum to pass such laws at the state level: 23 states have legalized the use of recreational marijuana and 38 states have approved access to medical marijuana. All that means, however, that there could still be risk of arrest and federal charges for marijuana. There is a chance that rescheduling could “reduce or potentially eliminate criminal penalties for possession,” according to the Associated Press. Activists, however, warn that it’s not yet clear just how much such penalties would change. “Rescheduling cannabis from 1 to 3 does not end criminalization, it just rebrands it. People will still be subject to criminal penalties for mere possession, regardless of their legal status in a state-level medical program,” cannabis advocate Justin Strekal told Politico. One thing rescheduling would have is significant symbolic heft. It would alter the way that weed is formally being treated at the federal level, and would do more to normalize its use. Theoretically, that could act as an early step to more transformative federal policy that could one day legalize marijuana more broadly and provide more consistent regulations on the subject. Update, May 1, 5:10 pm ET: This piece was originally published on August 31, 2023, and has been updated with the DEA’s recent decision.

New Vox Crossword puzzles come out Monday through Saturday | Amanda Northrop For the curious in all of us. Can you solve it? Welcome to the Vox crossword. Puzzles come out Monday through Saturday. Make sure to bookmark this page (or add to your phone’s home screen) to find new ones each day. You can also get a weekly email reminder by signing up for our crossword newsletter. Puzzles are constructed by these great people and edited by Elizabeth Crane. If you want to get in touch, email us at crosswords@vox.com. And if you solve our crosswords often, consider chipping in to help keep them free for everybody. Looking for even more crosswords? Our first-ever crosswords books are now available for purchase wherever you buy books. The first,theVox Mega Book of Mini Crosswords, features 150 of our bite-sized weekday puzzles. The second, theVox Pop Culture Crosswords book, highlights pop culture references in our big Saturday puzzles ranging from Mario Kart to iCarly. More crossword puzzles

Courtesy of Naureen Khan Khan joins from Cosmopolitan, will shape and edit culture features Today, Vox announced that Naureen Khan has joined the team as senior editor for culture and features. In addition to shaping the outlet’s culture coverage, Khan will lead its service journalism-focused vertical, Even Better, which is focused on helping people live better lives individually and collectively — from mental health to relationships of all kinds to work, money, and more. “Naureen has an expansive view of both culture and service coverage, and a keen eye for a wide range of stories that will resonate with Vox’s audience,” said senior editorial director Julia Rubin. “I’m excited to welcome such a sharp editor to the team, where she will play a pivotal role in building upon our track record of powerful journalism.” Previously, Khan was senior editor of news analysis and opinion at Cosmopolitan, editing culture and lifestyle coverage for the website. Prior to that role, she was co-executive producer and senior researcher at Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for the show’s entire six-year run. Khan also served as a campaign and politics reporter for National Journal and Al Jazeera America. She resides in Brooklyn, NY and is originally from Texas.

If the Ancient Greek philosophers had had access to the internet, perhaps they would have created something like Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” | Getty Images In which philosophy tries to understand how normal people think about morality. Philosophers, bless them, are trying to understand how normal people think about morality. Normal people, as you may have heard, hang out on the internet. And what is the internet’s biggest trove of everyday moral dilemmas? Why, it’s Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” forum! So, why not comb through millions of comments there to find out how people make moral decisions? This might sound like a joke, but it’s actually been the past four years of Daniel Yudkin’s life. As he was doing a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania, Yudkin thought about how moral psychology and moral philosophy — his fields of research — mostly focus on hypothetical, contextless scenarios involving strangers. For example, the famous “trolley problem” asks if you should actively choose to divert a runaway trolley so that it kills one person if, by doing so, you can save five people along a different track from getting killed. That’s a pretty weird way to study moral decision-making. In real life, the trade-offs we face often involve people we actually know, but the trolley problem imagines a world where you have no special relationship to anybody. It doesn’t ask whether you should make a different decision if one of the people tied to the tracks is, say, your mother. Yudkin, now a visiting scholar at Penn, hypothesized that this style of investigating morality overlooks an important aspect of real life: the relational context. And Yudkin worried about that omission. Philosophy doesn’t only matter for the ivory tower — it can shape how we set up our societies. “If we’re living in a society that omits the importance of relational obligations,” he told me, “​​there’s a risk that we see ourselves as atomic individuals and we aren’t focused enough on what we owe each other.” So, together with a group of co-authors on a recent preprint paper, he set about studying the popular subreddit where people describe how they acted in a moral conflict — whether with a spouse, a roommate, a boss, or someone else — and then ask that all-important question: Am I the asshole? What studying morality on Reddit reveals Yudkin and his co-authors scraped roughly 369,000 posts and 11 million comments written between 2018 and 2021 on “Am I the Asshole?” (AITA for short). Then they used AI to sort the dilemmas into several categories. Those include procedural fairness (like “AITA for skipping the line?”), honesty ( “AITA for saying I don’t speak English in awkward situations?”), and relational obligations ( “AITA for expecting my girlfriend to lint roll my jacket?”). The researchers found that the most common dilemmas had to do with relational obligations: dilemmas about what we owe to others. Courtesy of Daniel Yudkin With the help of AI, Yudkin and his co-authors categorized posts on Reddit’s “Am I the Asshole?” according to their moral themes. Next, they wanted to find out whether certain types of dilemmas were more likely to pop up in certain types of relationships. Will some dilemmas arise more often with your sister, say, than with your manager? So the researchers examined how often each dilemma popped up in 38 different relationships. Surprise, surprise: The likelihood of encountering different dilemmas, they found, does depend on whom you’re dealing with. If you’re hanging out with your sister, you’re more likely to be worrying about relational obligations, while interactions with your manager are more likely to get you thinking about procedural fairness. The truth is, you don’t need a fancy study to tell you this.If you’ve ever had a sister or a manager — or if you’ve ever had the experience of being, you know, a human — you probably already know this in your bones. It’s probably obvious to most of us that relational context is super important when it comes to judging the morality of actions. It’s common to think we have different moral obligations to different categories of people — to your sister versus to your manager versus to a total stranger. So what does it say about modern philosophy that it’s largely ignored relational context? Uncovering philosophy’s blind spots Let’s get a bit more precise: It’s not as though allof philosophy has ignored relational context. But one branch — utilitarianism — is strongly inclined in this direction. Utilitarians believe we should seek the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people — and we have to consider everybody’s happiness equally. So we’re not supposed to be partial to our own friends or family members. This ethical approach took off in the 18th century. Today, it’s extremely influential in Western philosophy — and not just in the halls of academia. Famous philosophers like Peter Singer have popularized it in the public sphere, too. Increasingly, though, some are challenging it. “Moral philosophy has for so long been about trying to identify universal moral principles that apply to all people regardless of their identity,” Yudkin told me. “And it’s because of this effort that moral philosophers have really moved away from the relational perspective. But the more that I think about the data, the more clear to me it is that you’re losing something essential from the moral equation when you abstract away from relationships.” Moral psychologists like Princeton’s Molly Crockett and Yale’s Margaret Clark have likewise been investigating the idea that moral obligations are relationship-specific. “Here’s a classic example,” Crockett told me a few years ago. “Consider a woman, Wendy, who could easily provide a meal to a young child but fails to do so. Has Wendy done anything wrong? It depends on who the child is. If she’s failing to provide a meal to her own child, then absolutely she’s done something wrong! But if Wendy is a restaurant owner and the child is not otherwise starving, then they don’t have a relationship that creates special obligations prompting her to feed the child.” According to Crockett, being a moral agent has become trickier for us with the rise of globalization, which forces us to think about how our actions might affect people we’re never going to meet.“Being a good global citizen now butts up against our very powerful psychological tendencies to prioritize our families and friends,” Crockett told me. Utilitarians would say that we should overcome those powerful psychological tendencies, but many others would beg to differ. Philosopher Patricia Churchland once told me that utilitarianism is unrealistic because “there’s no special consideration for your own children, family, friends. Biologically, that’s just ridiculous. People can’t live that way.” But just because our brains may incline us to care for some more than others doesn’t necessarily mean we ought to bow to that, does it? “No, it doesn’t,” Churchland said, “but you would have a hard time arguing for the morality of abandoning your own two children in order to save 20 orphans. Even [Immanuel] Kant thought that ‘ought’ implies ‘can,’ and I can’t abandon my children for the sake of orphans on the other side of the planet whom I don’t know, just because there’s 20 of them and only two of mine. It’s not psychologically feasible.” If you ask me, that’s fair enough. While I’d respect the decision of those who choose to save the 20 orphans, I certainly wouldn’t fault someone for acting in line with an impulse that is hardwired into them. So ... am I the asshole?

Jerome Powell, chairman of the US Federal Reserve, at the Wilson Center in Washington, DC, on April 16, 2024. | Samuel Corum/Bloomberg via Getty Images The Federal Reserve will give an announcement on interest rates during its May meeting Wednesday. Even borrowing money is more expensive these days — and the Federal Reserve might decide to keep it that way for a while. All eyes are on the Fed’s May meeting today, where Fed chair Jerome Powell will make an announcement about interest rates. Though analysts do not expect the Fed to cut rates just yet, some had projected a cut might be coming soon. That now appears increasingly unlikely. Instead, his remarks are expected to shed light on how much longer the US economy will have to endure high interest rates, which are squeezing everyone from prospective home buyers to people who have racked up credit card debt. High interest rates have helped cool a too-hot economy, significantly bringing down inflation to 3.5 percent from its 9.1 percent peak in June 2022. But it’s still well above the Fed’s target rate of 2 percent, and inflation has increased slightly in the last few months, which means we might not see a rate cut anytime soon. “The ‘last mile’ ... to the Fed’s target range was expected to be more difficult than what came before it,” said Matt Colyar, an economist at Moody’s Analytics. “Even with that expectation, however, inflation data in the first three months of 2024 has been surprisingly high.” Why inflation has remained high A few factors are driving stubborn inflation. Housing costs have been the biggest contributor by far. Inflation in rent and homeowners’ cost of living in their own homes has moderated somewhat but by less than expected, Colyar said. Auto insurance and repair costs have also risen sharply even though car prices have fallen. And health care costs have also picked up. Nicole Narea/Vox But this isn’t necessarily a “strong indication that inflation will remain similarly high for the rest of 2024,” Preston Caldwell, chief US economist at Morningstar, said in a note to investors Friday. The US economy has so far staved off a recession, growing at a slower but still solid pace in the first quarter of 2024 in part because Americans are continuing to spend a lot. The job market also remains strong, with the US blowing past projections to add 303,000 jobs in March. That hasn’t given the Fed much urgency to cut rates anytime soon. “It’s not an economy in obvious need of the pick-me-up that a rate cut would deliver,” Colyar said. Strong consumer spending, though, isn’t expected to last as Americans deplete any savings they accrued in the pandemic and rack up more household debt. That will likely cause US economic growth to slow in the coming year, which “should be sufficient to cool off remaining excess inflation,” Caldwell told Vox. When will the Fed cut interest rates? After the Fed’s December meeting, financial analysts were expecting six interest rate cuts in 2024, beginning in June. But given that inflation has remained high and the economy is still going strong, that doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon. Caldwell said he’s now expecting three cuts this year starting in September. Other top economists at UBS, Barclays, Goldman Sachs, and Bank of America have also pushed back their projections for a rate cut. For example, Bank of America is projecting only a single rate cut in December. Some Fed officials also have not ruled out the possibility of another rate hike, which would be the first since last July. Fed Governor Michelle Bowman recently said she would support a rate hike “should progress on inflation stall or even reverse.” But Caldwell said that still seems a far-off possibility. “The mere fact that they’re delaying rate cuts already has a contractionary effect on the economy,” he said. Colyar said he will be watching Powell’s remarks to discern “how spooked they have been by the hotter-than-expected inflation data in the first quarter” and to what extent he attributes the stickiness of inflation to a few industries, rather than an indication of current overall cost pressures. What continued higher interest rates might mean for the economy Recent economic data has already dampened earlier enthusiasm in the stock market about an imminent interest rate cut. Powell’s remarks might have a similar depressive effect, depending on how pessimistic he is about the Fed winning its battle against inflation in the near term. “The first effect is psychological,” Colyar said. “Persistently high borrowing costs are painful and will eventually break something.” It’s already slowing down the real estate market significantly. Mortgage rates have surpassed 7 percent, and that’s keeping prospective home buyers and sellers on the bench. People who secured lower interest rates just a few years ago don’t want to sell and would have to secure a higher-rate mortgage for their new lodging, so there are fewer homes on the market, keeping prices higher than many buyers can afford. Americans’ total credit card debt also hit a record $1.13 trillion earlier this year, and repaying that in a high interest rate environment is bound to hurt their wallets. At the same time, the US economy has proved resilient even in a high interest rate environment. The Fed doesn’t need to step in just yet given steady job growth and economic growth, as well as strong consumer spending. “However, I would argue that the time to start loosening policy is before things are flashing red,” Colyar said. “Waiting too long because shelter prices are slow in moderating I think is an unnecessary risk.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

People walk through downtown Detroit, Michigan, on April 3, 2024. The city has experienced a historic turnaround on crime that is both part of a national trend and the result of a transformation in the city’s policing. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Last year, Detroit saw its fewest homicides since 1966. Here’s how it did it — and how other cities can do the same. In 2021, Detroit was in trouble. The city, which already had one of the highest murder rates in the country, was experiencing a surge in gun violence coinciding with the Covid-19 pandemic. In the first five months of the year, homicides were up 27 percent, and nonfatal shootings were up 44 percent. James White, who was Detroit’s assistant police chief from 2012 to 2020, had only been retired from the department for a year when he got the call to return, this time as chief of police, in June 2021. When he came back, he said, “policing had completely changed.” “It was on the heels of the George Floyd murder, it was the pandemic — all those things kind of intersected,” White told Vox. It wasn’t just Detroit: Homicide spiked 30 percent across the US in 2020, the largest single-year increase since the FBI began tracking it. “We found ourselves [facing] a really big question, and rightly so, about the validity of policing and the model of policing that was happening around the country.” Three years into his time as chief, White and others in the community have much to celebrate. At the end of 2023, the city reported the fewest homicides since 1966, a decline of 18 percent over the previous year. Nonfatal shootings fell nearly 16 percent, and carjackings dropped by a third. By the end of 2023, the city’s homicide rate had returned to pre-pandemic levels. Detroit is on the leading edge of a national trend. Across US cities last year, homicides fell more than 12 percent, the largest single-year decline in violent crime since the FBI began keeping track. In Buffalo, they fell 46 percent from a year earlier — the fewest homicides since 2011. In Philadelphia, they dropped 21 percent. New York and Los Angeles also saw double-digit declines, according to preliminary data. What explains the precipitous rise — and sharp fall — in violent crime? Experts caution that several complex, intersecting factors drive crime trends, and no single explanation can easily answer the question. The best working theory is that multiple overlapping social crises — including pandemic-related disruptions that kept more people stuck at home and out of work, and the unrest across major cities after the murder of George Floyd — contributed to a breakdown of trust between the public and police, and created conditions ripe for violence in a country awash in too many guns. The decrease, meanwhile, may have much to do with society reopening and stabilizing, but it also probably has something to do with changes to the way some police, prosecutors, and civic leaders — in Detroit and elsewhere — have been operating after the major challenges of 2020. For Detroit, what worked was a coordinated effort across multiple agencies and community organizations that was targeted at reducing and preventing gun crime and mobilizing the judicial system after a pandemic-era shutdown seriously hampered the courts. That’s not to say Detroit, like other cities in the US, doesn’t face severe challenges when it comes to reducing violent crime. Though the city saw the fewest killings since 1966, it also had a much larger population back then, meaning 2023’s per capita homicide rate of around 41 people per 100,000 is much higher than the 1966 homicide rate of 15 people per 100,000. Still, White says, elected officials and community leaders in Detroit are encouraged by the fact that homicide fell back to the pre-pandemic baselines. “We’re not satisfied,” White says, but there’s satisfaction in “knowing our plans are working.” Jim Watson/AFP via Getty Images US President Joe Biden shakes hands with Detroit Police Chief James White in February in Washington. Biden met with White to tout Detroit’s efforts to reduce crime, including using federal funds to transform policing and community interventions. It’s not just the chief of police saying that, either. “I think our people are hardwired to be skeptical of any news that comes from top to bottom, like, is this a political ploy? Is it real?” says Alia Harvey-Quinn, the founder of FORCE Detroit, a community violence intervention program that is active in northwest Detroit and is part of the effort to reduce gun violence. “We’re hearing people actually feel safer as of late, and that’s exciting.” Violent crime is continuing to fall across the US this year, but it’s still a major voter concern, driving politicians to pass laws aimed at reducing it further. Here’s how Detroit is reducing crime, and what other cities can learn from their success. Detroit changed the way police respond to some calls In 2020, in response to the murder of George Floyd, the city came up with plans for a Crisis Intervention Team, a partnership between mental and behavioral health specialists and police. The Detroit Wayne Integrated Health Network (DWIHN) staffs 911 call centers with mental health professionals and offers week-long training programs for police officers to learn about trauma-informed policing. The network also partners with police on a centralized mental health unit co-response team, where officers are paired with behavioral health specialists who can respond to people experiencing mental health crises. DWIHN’s Andrea Smith, who has answered 911 calls and worked with the crisis response team on in-person calls, says the goal is always “to bring a situation down instead of contributing to an escalation of the crisis,” and to help officers find other ways of responding to certain calls. The approach, modeled on methods first implemented by a team in Memphis, Tennessee, “contributes to a lower number of incidents of use of force,” says Smith. “It’s allowed us to have more of a focus on, ‘OK, this person might not have a behavior problem. It might be a behavioral health problem.’ … When you have the community that knows that the police are looking at alternatives to just pulling out their gun, that enhances or improves the relationship between the police and citizens.” For White, who in addition to being police chief is also a licensed mental health counselor, paying attention to the mental health needs of community members makes sense, but it was far from the only strategy. The city also unveiled a 12-point “summer surge” plan that increased police presence, curfew enforcement, and strategic traffic restrictions to secure downtown Detroit following the murder of a security guard last year. Police also cracked down on drag racing and stepped up their presence at community events where they had reason to believe there might be a risk of gun violence. The city council also approved a contract that gave officers a roughly $10,000 raise at the end of 2022 to help offset the recruiting problem other police departments are also facing across the country. White was careful to point out, though, that the work is far from over: “The challenge is to continue to drive down violent crime while providing policing excellence to our community and treating everyone fairly,” he says. Prosecutors made community outreach a key priority Courts across the country shut down because of Covid-19, delaying trials and preventing felony charges from moving through the adjudication process. To get the system moving again and to reduce the backlog of felony gun cases, district and circuit courts moved to get more hearings on the calendar. The US attorney for Eastern Michigan, Dawn Ison, also partnered with federal agencies to prosecute gun crimes and take illegal weapons off the street. Ison also led violence prevention and reentry efforts for formerly incarcerated people. “The studies show enforcement alone has never been effective at moving the needle to reduce violent crime. We have to be transparent and bring legitimacy. We can’t do this work without the community,” Ison says. When developing One Detroit, her office’s program to reduce violence in the two city precincts with the highest rates of gun crime, Ison drew upon several evidence-based strategies outlined in the bookBleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence—and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets by Thomas Abt, founding director of the Violence Reduction Center at the University of Maryland. This included reaching out last summer to 200 individuals who, based on their previous interaction with the state’s legal system, were believed to be at highest risk of becoming a victim of, or perpetrating, gun violence. They were invited to a roundtable to hear from people who’d been incarcerated in an effort to deter them from violence. Ison’s office also focused on engagement with the city’s residents. In the summer, she goes into the precincts with high rates of gun crime and hands out fliers letting the public know that her office is looking to prosecute the small number of people driving most of the gun violence in the city. The office also puts on what they call “peacenics,” or summer block parties with DJs, bounce castles, and vendors from the city and local government who help people with basic services, like getting a driver’s license or having their record expunged for low-level offenses. “My vision is for it to be our non-enforcement engagement with the community,” Ison says. “We have to be talking to them, and not only there when we’re kicking in their doors or arresting somebody.” By the end of 2023, the city reported that homicides were down 17 percent in the precincts targeted by One Detroit, and carjackings were down 63 percent. Kirby Lee/Getty Images The Detroit skyline. Ison isn’t the only prosecutor focusing on violent crime reduction. At the direction of the Office of the Attorney General, each US attorney was asked to come up with their own district-specific violence reduction plan in response to the pandemic-related spike. But Thomas Abt says that the energy Ison brings to the effort is unusual. “The US attorney and Chief White are demonstrating an exciting new form of collaborative leadership,” Abt says. “They’re people who can celebrate the successes of others. I think that’s really positive and constructive.” Detroit invested in community violence interruption Detroit received $826 million through the American Rescue Plan Act in 2021, and in 2023, the city allocated a small slice of the money to a handful of community-based programs working to reduce gun violence in the neighborhoods that suffered from it the most. One of those programs is FORCE Detroit, which works on the west side of Detroit in a neighborhood that saw a significant reduction in gun violence last year. “Our goal is to create peace, so we’re dealing with people on multiple sides of conflict,” says Harvey-Quinn, the group’s founder. “They understand that our space is a neutral zone.” Since FORCE has begun its work, she says, the group has had at least 87 instances of intervention or deescalation. Those incidents range from getting someone to take down a threat made on social media before it escalates into violence to convening rival gang members and saying, “Let’s sit everyone down, and as long as people don’t want to go to prison, or die, there has to be a solution.” Mostly, it’s about connecting young people with credible messengers who have served time and lost friends to gun violence and are now trained by her organization in deescalation and crisis mitigation strategies. FORCE Detroit was touted by city leaders when the neighborhood they serve saw no homicides between November 2023 and January 2024. “We’re working with the people who shoot guns, and we’re encouraging them not to,” Harvey-Quinn says. “Statistically, less than 2 percent of our community is ever going to shoot a gun.” By designing programs focused on meeting that 2 percent in their own neighborhoods, she says, “you have a real opportunity to deeply impact them. It really matters whether or not they get the good, wraparound services. It really matters that they have mentors that care.” With polls showing that voters think of crime as a major concern this election year, political leaders are looking to show that they’re serious about reducing it. If they’re interested in what reduces crime, they should look at what worked in Detroit. It wasn’t the “tough on crime” approach that so many leaders are now pursuing as a too-late reaction to the crime surge of 2020 and 2021. Detroit succeeded by thinking creatively, working cooperatively, and asking the city’s residents to partner with them in the effort. City leaders demonstrated that they were willing to offer resources to help, even as they acknowledge there’s so much more work to be done. It’s a strategy designed for long-term improvement, not election-year grandstanding.

Heat waves have begun to take hold in Asia as El Nino begins to wane. | Kazi Salahuddin Razu/NurPhoto via Getty Images Climate change and the outgoing El Niño will likely ignite more weather extremes. The Pacific Ocean — Earth’s largest body of water — is an engine for weather around the planet, and it’s about to shift gears this year. The warm phase of the Pacific Ocean’s temperature cycle, known as El Niño, is now winding down and is poised to move into its counterphase, La Niña. During an El Niño year, warm water starts to spread eastward across the surface of the equatorial Pacific. That warm water evaporates readily, adding moisture to the atmosphere and triggering a cascade that alters rainfall, heat waves, and drought patterns across the world. The current El Niño is among the strongest humans have ever experienced. It fueled wildfires, droughts, and floods in South America. It bent the jet stream, trapping heat over the southern United States last summer, and ended the year with the warmest winter on record for much of the country. It fueled both heavy rain and extreme dry conditions in southern Africa, killing crops and putting millions at risk of hunger. It heated the world’s oceans to the highest levels ever measured. It raised global temperatures to their tallest peaks scientists have ever recorded. “The last year has been an amazing year in terms of records set around the world for extreme heat,” said Michael McPhaden, a senior scientist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). The periodic swings between El Niño and La Niña, collectively known as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO), is a natural phenomenon cycling every three to seven years. Over the past year, the El Niño also synced with other natural patterns like the warm phase of the Atlantic Ocean’s temperature cycle, driving thermometers up further. But humanity’s relentless injection of heat-trapping gases into the atmosphere is pushing these changes to greater extremes. Forecasters now expect that warm water across the Pacific to begin retreating westward, heralding a shift to La Niña. McPhaden said one of the most common definitions of La Niña is when surface water temperatures over a large area of the Pacific drop by at least 0.5 degrees Celsius below the historical average for three months or more. El Niño is typically defined when the same region is a half-degree Celsius hotter. NOAA projects an 85 percent chance that the ENSO cycle will shift to its neutral phase between April and June 2024, and then a 60 percent chance a La Niña will develop between June and August 2024. Historically, strong El Niños are followed by short neutral phases, about three to five months, before switching to La Niña. “The handwriting is on the wall with regard to this La Niña,” McPhaden said. “The question is exactly when will it come and how strong will it be?” It also takes several months between when ENSO changes and when it starts to influence weather. So the warming impact of the outgoing El Niño is likely to persist and could raise global temperatures this year even higher than they were last year if the rising La Niña is weak or moderate. Heat waves are currently baking Southeast Asia, triggering school closures and health warnings. When La Niña does set in, it will slow and reverse some of the intense weather patterns the world experienced over the past year. But it will also set the stage for more hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. To make this all even more complicated, this is all occurring in a world that’s warmed to the highest levels humans have ever experienced, so it’s not clear yet how far some of these extremes will go. How La Niña will likely play out in different parts of the world Though they are on opposite sides of a cycle, the effects of El Niño and La Niña are not quite mirror images of each other. “It’s a bit more complicated than that,” said Pamela Knox, an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia Extension. The specific types of weather impacts also vary by region, but looming shifts in the cycle can help forecasters calculate what kinds of heat, rain, and drought conditions are in store in the coming months. For instance, ENSO makes it easier to predict climate variability in the southeastern US, particularly in cooler months. “We have a pretty strong signal here compared to the central plains,” Knox said. During a La Niña, the cooler waters in the equatorial Pacific soak up heat energy from the atmosphere while air currents deflect the jet stream — a narrow, high-altitude band of fast-moving air — pushing it northward. NOAA La Niña tends to push the jet stream northward, leading to cooler weather to its north and drier conditions to the south. That air current then tends to box in cold weather to its north in places like Canada and Alaska while trapping moisture in regions like the Pacific Northwest. States like Alabama, Georgia, and South Carolina tend to be warmer and drier during La Niña winters, while the Midwest tends to be cloudier, cooler, and wetter. (NOAA has published maps of the globe showing how these patterns typically play out around the world). Mickey Glantz, director of the Consortium for Capacity Building at the University of Colorado Boulder, who studies the impacts of ENSO, noted that La Niña doesn’t just shift weather — it can also intensify existing rain and heat patterns in some regions. “La Niña, to me, is ‘extreme normal,’” Glantz said. “You have a wet season, it’s going to be really wet. If you have a dry season, the probability is it’s going to be really dry.” La Niña may bring about a more severe hurricane season One of the biggest consequences of a shift to La Niña is the higher likelihood of major hurricanes in the Atlantic Ocean. Hurricanes are built from several ingredients, but two parameters are especially important when it comes to ENSO: water temperature and air stability. The ocean needs to be around 80 degrees Fahrenheit or hotter to form a hurricane, and the air above it needs to hold steady. El Niño years tend to heat up the Atlantic Ocean, but they also induce wind shear, where air rapidly changes speed and direction in the atmosphere, disrupting tropical storms before they can form. Still, the Atlantic was so abnormally hot last year that it fueled an above-average hurricane season. The Atlantic Ocean is still startlingly hot, but now the looming La Niña is likely to stabilize the air above the sea — creating a foundation for more hurricanes. The Weather Company and Atmospheric G2 projected that the 2024 hurricane season, which runs from June 1 to November 30, would see 24 named storms compared to an average of 14. They projected six hurricanes will reach above Category 3 strength, compared to just three in a typical year. Researchers at Colorado State University expect 23 named storms. University of Pennsylvania scientists anticipate 33 named storms in the Atlantic this year, the highest count ever projected. Why ENSO cycles are becoming harder to predict The added difficulty in predicting how La Niña will play out is that people have heated up the planet. A “cool” La Niña year is now hotter than an El Niño year from 20 years ago. “It’s not the same climate regime that we forecasted the earlier [ENSO cycles] so it’s getting a bit harder to forecast,” Glantz said. How will future climate change in turn affect ENSO? NOAA illustrated the answer with a helpful albeit highly technical schematic (bear with me): Anna Eshelman/NOAA Climate change is likely to amplify the swings in the ENSO cycle. The swings between the cool and warm phases of the ENSO are likely to get stronger if greenhouse gas emissions continue at the current pace. So many of the most densely populated parts of the world, like the Andean region in South America, sub-Saharan Africa, and Southeast Asia, are going to experience a more aggressive whiplash between wet and dry years, between calm and stormy summers, and between warmer and cooler winters. For scientists, the rest of 2024 is going to be an important case study in the impacts of climate change and natural variability, sorting out where they diverge, where they intersect, and where they lead to more disasters. The world will be a real-world laboratory, showcasing severe weather that could become more typical as average temperatures continue to rise. “It’s going to be a very interesting year,” McPhaden said. “We’ll have to wait and see and be ready for more extremes.”

Gov. Kristi Noem recently wrote about killing a puppy. It’s not going over well. | Kent Nishimura/Bloomberg via Getty Images Noem wanted to look decisive. That’s not what happened. In the past, politicians have bragged about raising puppies as a way to seem more approachable. South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, meanwhile, recently wrote about killing one. Noem, one of the top contenders to be former President Donald Trump’s vice presidential nominee, recalled the shooting in a new book, No Going Back. In it, she says she killed Cricket, her 14-month-old wirehaired pointer, because the dog had behavioral issues and wasn’t taking to the training provided. The anecdote is included as an attempt at touting Noem’s decision-making skills, and to highlight how the governor can make “difficult, messy and ugly” choices when needed. Instead of conveying that idea, however, Noem’s revelation has prompted a wave of backlash, angering animal rights experts and pretty much anyone who likes dogs — which is a lot of the US voting public. More than 60 million US households have at least one dog, according to the American Veterinary Medicine Association, and a 2023 study by the Pew Research Center found that 97 percent of pet owners see their companions as part of the family. Americans’ affinity for pets — and attachment to dogs, especially — helps explain the visceral reaction Noem has faced over the news. The seriousness with which Americans approach canine welfare has helped and hurt politicians in the past. The uproar over Noem’s decision has political insiders suggesting that it could be enough to sink her chances for VP and that it will harm her political image overall. “Trump isn’t a dog person necessarily, but I think he understands that you can’t choose a puppy killer as your pick, for blatantly obvious reasons,” an unnamed Trump ally told the New York Post. The puppy-killing incident, explained Noem is a second-term governor of South Dakota who is known for her embrace of gun rights, for keeping the state open during the Covid-19 pandemic, and for adhering to broadly MAGA policy positions. In No Going Back, which is set to hit shelves in May, Noem describes Cricket as extremely energetic and not receptive to any training she was using to help Cricket become a pheasant hunting dog. Beyond that, Noem says she was concerned Cricket was potentially dangerous and that she had an “aggressive personality.” Noem cites an incident when Cricket jumped from her truck and attacked a neighbor’s chickens, killing several, as a breaking point. During that incident, Cricket also attempted to bite her, according to Noem. Following that attack, Noem argues that she had to make the difficult choice, and ultimately led Cricket to a gravel pit and put the dog down. “It was not a pleasant job, but it had to be done,” Noem writes. Additionally, she also mentions killing a goat that was causing trouble and harassing her children. Noem’s recounting of the incident has been met with severe backlash, with some wirehaired pointer experts arguing that Noem should have invested in more training rather than killing the dog. They noted, too, that the breed is inherently high-energy and that Cricket was likely too young to serve effectively as a hunting dog. PETA, the animal rights group, similarly lambasted Noem’s choices and said she should have either trained the dog further or rehomed Cricket rather than shooting her. Broadly, dog lovers have expressed their horror at Noem’s decisions, with the incident also prompting a wave of reactions from Democrats and some Republicans. “Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz wrote on X. “She can’t be VP now,” right-wing commentator Laura Loomer wrote in a post. “You can’t shoot your dog and then be VP.” Noem has stood by her decision. “As I explained in the book, it wasn’t easy. But often the easy way isn’t the right way,” she wrote in a statement on X. I can understand why some people are upset about a 20 year old story of Cricket, one of the working dogs at our ranch, in my upcoming book — No Going Back. The book is filled with many honest stories of my life, good and bad days, challenges, painful decisions, and lessons…— Kristi Noem (@KristiNoem) April 28, 2024 Amid the blowback to Noem’s admission, MSNBC Morning Joe hosts Mika Brzezinski and Joe Scarborough theorized Noem’s attempt to focus on the puppy killing was a bid to look strong and try to win support from the GOP’s hard-line conservative base. Meanwhile, South Dakota Senate Democratic Majority Leader Reynold Nesiba speculated that she was trying to spin a negative story into a positive one. According to Nesiba, there have long been rumors that Noem killed this dog in a “fit of anger,” and this anecdote was a chance to frame these actions in a more positive light. “She knew that this was a political vulnerability, and she needed to put it out there, before it came up in some other venue,” he told the Associated Press. “Why else would she write about it? Pets have long played a role in politics The Noem fracas is only the most recent to showcase how pets and the treatment of them have political heft. Sen. Mitt Romney, for instance, got significant flack for forcing a dog to ride in a carrier on top of his car during a 12-hour family road trip in the 1980s. As part of his presidential run in 2012, critics frequently cited that incident to attack Romney’s character and judgment over alleged neglect of the dog and a lack of humane treatment of his family pet. President Joe Biden has also made headlines for challenges his German Shepherd, Commander, has faced when it came to biting Secret Service and the eventual removal of the dog from the White House. His critics were quick to suggest the incidents were evidence of Biden’s lack of administrative skill. On Fox News’ The Five, for instance, host Greg Gutfeld asked viewers, “If a president can’t control his dogs that attack brave Americans, how can he govern a country that’s being invaded on both borders?” For decades, pets have played a role in politicians’ attempts to soften their images and seem more accessible. Sen. Elizabeth Warren was known for bringing her golden retriever, Bailey, to campaign events for her presidential run, while Sen. Raphael Warnock was often accompanied by a beagle named Alvin (who was not actually his dog), when he was vying for the Georgia Senate seat. The Clintons had Socks the cat and Buddy the Labrador, the Obamas had Bo and Sunny the Portuguese water dogs, and the Bushes had Barney and Miss Beazley the Scottish terriers. Overall, people’s ownership of pets and their treatment of them are often seen as a stand-in for character, telling voters how they would behave in leadership roles. “How we treat animals is a direct reflection of our character, both as individuals and a nation,” Rep. Steve Cohen (D-TN) previously said in a statement about animal cruelty legislation. Noem’s new image problem, ultimately, stems from what her actions appear to say about her.

A dairy farm worker prepares cows for milking in Ontario, Canada, in July 2022. | Irfan Khan/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images Here’s what’s worrying experts right now about H5N1’s spread among dairy cows — and what isn’t. Last year, when an H5N1 avian flu virus — commonly known as bird flu — was spilling over from bird populations into a variety of wild mammals, Seema Lakdawala, a virologist and influenza A transmission specialist at Emory University, was “not overly concerned” about human risk. We don’t have “much of an interface with seals or with foxes, for that matter, or polar bears,” she says. But when it comes to cows, that interface is vast. People on dairy farms regularly interact with cows and their milk; when the animals and their milk are infected with a virus that can cause disease in humans, and that mutates constantly, each of those interactions functions as an opportunity for the virus to workshop its adaptability. Now, says Lakdawala, “I am more concerned than I have been, and it’s not for the general public — it is for dairy workers.” The H5N1 outbreak among cows on 34 dairy farms in nine states has so far led to only one very mild human infection. However, the virus was likely spreading among cows for months before it was detected. Lakdawala’s greatest concern is that this highly changeable virus has now arrived at an important point of human-animal convergence, and that we are not prepared. For a virus to cause a human pandemic, it has to have three important characteristics, say flu experts. It has to cause human disease; it has to be something our immune systems haven’t encountered before; and it must spread easily among humans, especially through the air. The latest events do not yet demonstrate that H5N1 has new capacities in any of these categories. However, they hint that the virus has the machinery to evolve those capacities — and that it could do so before we know it. In dairy cows, H5N1 has found an excellent laboratory for evolving traits dangerous to humans Although Lakdawala was concerned when mink, seals, and other mammals were infected with H5N1 last year and the year before, cows are different. An outbreak among “mammals with a large interface with humans” is a red flag to her. It’s a numbers game. Although all viruses mutate routinely, flu viruses are particularly good at shapeshifting and can even swap entire chunks of genetic material with other flu viruses if an animal is co-infected with more than one of them. These mutations happen randomly, and most don’t make the viruses more dangerous to humans — but it’s entirely realistic to imagine that some occasionally do. If that occasionally human-threatening mutation happens to a flu virus that has infected, say, a wild fox, it doesn’t pose a particularly high risk of causing a pandemic among humans. After all, few wild foxes have contact with humans. If it happens in a cow, however, there are far more opportunities for the virus to effectively workshop its new features. People who work on dairy farms are constantly interacting with cows and their milk — they check udders, hook and unhook milking machines, and perform other tasks to care for the animals. That puts them in lots of contact with any virus infecting the cows. If the virus were one that didn’t infect and kill people or that doesn’t mutate and adapt as easily as the flu does, perhaps it wouldn’t be as concerning — but H5N1 does infect people at close proximity to animals, and at least half of the more than 900 people who’ve been infected with the virus since it came on the scene in 1996 have died. “There is a high viral load in milk of these infected cows, and so it is a concern to me in terms of spillover [from] cows into workers,” says Lakdawala. “And the more often the virus has an attempt to spill over, the more likely it is to adapt.” We already know the virus is adapting in mammals, she says. “The more spillover events, the more attempts that the virus has to find a successful variant that can take off or infect the human — and then one infected individual, three infected individuals, go home” to their families, where they could potentially spread the virus further. It’s not a pandemic right now, she says, but now is the time to act to reduce the opportunities for spillover events. For the first time, we have proof of H5N1 spreading among a mammalian species When a virus leaps from one species into another, that’s not usually enough to cause a large outbreak. You could look at H5N1’s history: Although the virus has leapt from animals into people hundreds of times, it has very rarely spread among people. When infections effectively stop spreading once they cross species lines, the non-transmitting species is called a “dead-end host.” Birds readily transmit H5N1 to other birds, but until recently, scientists have thought mammals getting infected with H5N1 were dead-end hosts. In the past couple of years, they’ve had some sneaking suspicion that minks and other mammals getting infected with the virus were spreading it among themselves — but they never had definitive proof. That is, they couldn’t rule out the possibility that all the animals had gotten infected by eating bits of the same sick bird, or through another so-called “common source” exposure. It’s much harder to contain a pathogen’s spread within a species if members of that species can transmit it to each other. What the dairy cow outbreak shows for the first time is that mammals can indeed now infect each other with H5N1 — and can do it efficiently. “Genetic data and epidemiologic data are all quite strongly suggesting that these viruses are getting transmitted in some way between these cows,” says Louise Moncla, a veterinary pathobiologist at the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine whose team has analyzed genetic data from infected cows that the US government recently made available. This virus’s mode of transmission isn’t apparent yet — and it matters It’s not yet clear how the virus is being spread through and between dairy cow herds. High viral loads in cows’ udders and in their unpasteurized milk make it possible that contact with contaminated milking machines is doing most of the transmission. However, it’s also possible the virus is spreading through the fecal-oral route or through contaminated air; the latter would be particularly concerning because it’s so much harder to prevent. (Moncla notes that while the classic genetic fingerprint for a bird flu’s ability to spread through air between mammals is absent from this strain of H5N1, that doesn’t mean we’ve ruled out respiratory spread.) Regardless of exactly how H5N1 is spreading among cows, the significance that they’re transmitting the virus to each other is clear to flu experts: If the virus has adapted to spread among one mammalian species, it raises the specter that it can also adapt to spread among humans. There is a precedent for flu viruses to spread from livestock to humans, leading to a pandemic: The H1N1 flu outbreak began when a flu virus spread from pigs to humans. It caused far less death than expected through a stroke of luck — because the virus had similarities to strains that circulated in the first few decades of the 20th century, many older adults still had some flu immunity left over from childhood infections. If H5N1 develops the ability to spread among humans, it would be a novel infection to most immune systems, giving us much less protection from old flu infections. There are “no signs of that [ability] so far in the cattle sequences,” says Andrew Pekosz, a virologist who studies respiratory virus biology at Johns Hopkins University’s Bloomberg School of Public Health. “That’s a good thing.” Still, because we don’t know much about how influenza A viruses like H5N1 behave in cows, we don’t yet know what cautionary measures will do the most to slow their spread. In 2011, scientists learned that the influenza D virus causes respiratory illness in cattle. However, not all flu viruses are created equal: “I did not ever anticipate seeing an influenza A in cattle,” says Lakdawala. While influenza D infections don’t appear to cause much disease in humans, influenza A viruses very much do: All of the past global flu pandemics have been caused by influenza A viruses. Because this is such an unusual event, says Moncla, “we know very little about how flu replicates and transmits in cows.” That makes it hard to quickly design and implement precautions to prevent the virus from spreading to the people who handle them. “What would calm me down is if we started implementing interventions that would mitigate the presence of the virus and its transmission amongst cattle, and spilling over into humans,” says Lakdawala. “Say, okay: Every dairy farm worker is gonna wear a face shield,” she said. It would help to know whether cows that are infected but asymptomatic have infectious virus in their milk, and whether they can transmit virus to each other, says Pekosz. Ongoing studies by academics and federal agencies should help answer those questions. Here’s why you shouldn’t panic At the moment, there are more “coulds” than “ares” with H5N1: Although the virus is showing that it couldadapt further to spread among humans, so far it hasn’t; and while it’s reasonable to conduct studies to ensure pasteurization works against this particular strain of H5N1, there’s no reason to think it won’t. It’s also worth noting that according to the USDA spokesperson, the virus has so far not caused severe disease or death in the cows it has infected — they’ve all recovered with supportive care. In that way, this outbreak is very different from the ones we’ve seen in some other mammals. Furthermore, testing at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has already demonstrated that existing antiviral medications are effective at preventing human infections with this strain of H5N1 and that two existing candidate vaccines could be used to rapidly scale up mass production of human vaccines against this virus if needed. So for now, the general public shouldn’t be overly concerned about the virus, says Pekosz. “Scientists are … working extra overtime for this. But the general public should still feel safe.”

With a new wave of bird flu affecting hens, egg prices are ticking up again. | Matthew Hatcher/Bloomberg via Getty Images How corporate greed plays a role in making bird flu outbreaks — and egg prices — worse. Egg prices are rising again. The culprit, again: bird flu. At least, that’s the surface-level reason. In the current wave, according to the CDC, the H5N1 bird flu has been found in over 90 million poultry birds across almost every state since 2022, and has even spread to dairy cattle, with over 30 herds in nine states dealing with an outbreak at the time of this writing. The last time bird flu struck US farms, in early 2022, egg prices more than doubled during the year, reaching a peak of $4.82 for a dozen in January 2023. During the bird flu outbreak in 2014 to 2015, egg prices also briefly soared. While prices now are still nowhere near the peak they reached in January 2023, they’ve been creeping up again since last August, when a dozen large eggs cost $2.04. As of March, we’re bumping up against the $3 mark, which is a nearly 47 percent increase. It’s also a huge increase from the price we were used to a few years ago: In early 2020, a dozen eggs were just $1.46 on average. The H5N1 strain of bird flu is highly contagious and obviously poses a big risk to hens. But the fact that bird flu outbreaks keep battering our food system points to a deeper problem: an agriculture industry that has become brittle thanks to intense market concentration. The egg market is dominated by some major players The egg industry, like much of the agricultural sector, is commanded by a few heavyweights — the biggest, Cal-Maine Foods, controls 20 percent of the market — that leave little slack in the system to absorb and isolate shocks like disease. Hundreds of thousands of animals are packed tightly together on a single farm, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has explained, where disease can spread like wildfire. According to the government and corporate accountability group Food & Water Watch, three-quarters of the country’s hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens are crammed into just 347 factory farms. The system also uses genetically similar animals that farms believe will maximize egg production — but that lack of genetic diversity means animal populations are less resistant to disease. When a hen gets infected, stopping the spread is an ugly, cruel business; since 2022 it has led to the killing of 85 million poultry birds. For the consumer, it often means paying a lot more than usual for a carton of eggs. Preventing any outbreaks of disease from ever happening isn’t realistic, but the model of modern industrial farming is making outbreaks more disruptive. And it’s not just these disruptions driving price spikes. Egg producers also appear to be taking advantage of these moments and hiking prices beyond what they’d need to maintain their old profit margins. “It is absolutely a story of corporate profiteering,” says Rebecca Wolf, senior food policy analyst at Food & Water Watch. Cal-Maine’s net profit in 2023 was about $758 million — 471 percent higher than the year prior, according to its annual financial report. Most of this fortune was made through hoisting up prices; the number of eggs sold, measured in dozens, rose only 5.9 percent. Last year, several food conglomerates, including Kraft and General Mills, were awarded almost $18 million in damages in a lawsuit alleging that egg producers Cal-Maine and Rose Acre Farms had constrained the supply of eggs in the mid- to late 2000s, artificially bumping prices. A farmer advocacy group last year called on the FTC to look into whether top egg producers were price gouging consumers. Are we doomed to semi-regular price surges for eggs? Our food system didn’t become so consolidated — and fragile — by accident. We got here because of three big reasons, Wolf says: by not enforcing environmental laws, by not enforcing antitrust laws, and by giving away “tons of money” to the agriculture industry. During the New Deal era, the federal government put in place policies that would help manage food supply and protect both farmers and consumers from sharp deviations in what the former earned and the latter paid. Under Secretary of Agriculture Earl Butz in the 1970s, though, those policies started getting chipped away; Butz’s famous motto was for farmers to “get big or get out.” The spread of giant factory farms is in part a product of this about-face in managing supply. Because our food system is so concentrated and intermingled, it also means any single supply chain hiccup — whether due to disease, wars, or any other reason — can have ripple effects on others, affecting prices in a vast number of essential consumer goods and services. “When we have things like E. coli outbreaks, it’s hard to know where the problem lies because the way that we process and manufacture is so hyper-industrialized that you then have a problem with millions of pounds of food,” says Wolf. Thankfully, the Biden administration has been making some strides in loosening up food industry consolidation, often by shoring up enforcement of long-existing antitrust laws. But there’s still more we could do. There are bills that have been introduced to Congress, like Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s Price Gouging Prevention Act, that would give the FTC the authority to first define what counts as price gouging and then crack down on companies that raise prices excessively. The cycle of food chain snags and higher prices doesn’t have to keep repeating. “We are maximizing profit truly over everything else — over the welfare of the animals, over the rights and wages of people who work in the food system, for even consumers who are at the grocery store,” Wolf says. “None of this is inevitable — we shouldn’t have to be here.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom at a press conference on September 28, 2022, in San Francisco, California. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images The affordability crisis is forcing politicians’ hands. For years, the easiest thing to doaboutbuilding new housing was nothing. The federal government largely deferred to state and local governments on matters of land use, and states mostly deferred to local governments, which typically defer to their home-owning constituents who back restrictive zoning laws that bar new construction. That’s slowly changing as the housing supply crisis ripples across the country. Experts say the US is short somewhere between 3.8 millionand 6.8 million homes, and most renters feel priced out of the idea of homeownership altogether. The lack of affordable housing is causing homelessness to rise. In Washington, DC, Congress has held more hearings on housing affordability recently than it has in decades, and President Joe Biden has been ramping up attention on the housing crisis, promising to “build, build, build” to “bring housing costs down for good.” But it’s at the state level where some of the most consequential change is taking place. Over the last five years, Republican and Democratic legislators and governors in a slew of states have looked to update zoning codes, transform residential planning processes, and improve home-building and design requirements. Some states that have stepped up include Oregon, Florida, Montana, and California, as well as states like Utah and Washington. This year, Maryland, New York, and New Jersey passed state-level housing legislation, and Colorado may soon follow suit. Not all state-level bills have been equally ambitious in addressing the supply crisis, and not all states have been successful at passing new laws, especially on their first few tries. And some states have succeeded in passing housing reform one year, only to strike out with additional bills the next. Real housing reform requires iterative and sustained legislative attention; it almost never succeeds with just one bill signing. Trying to determine why exactly a housing reform bill passes or fails on the state level can be difficult, though advocates say it certainly helps when a governor or other powerful state lawmaker invests time and political capital in mobilizing stakeholders together. Given that housing challenges are not spread equally across a state, sometimes it can be hard to decide whether to pass statewide laws that apply equally to all communities or to pass more targeted legislation aimed only at certain areas. Partly due to pressure from voters and from more organized pro-housing activists, legislative trends are starting to emerge. More states and housing experts are thinking not only about passing laws to boost housing production, but also about how best to enforce those laws, close loopholes, and demand compliance. States can make it easier to build more housing in a wider variety of places While states typically grant local communities a lot of discretion in land use policy, more lawmakers are realizing that balance may have tilted too far. As researchers with the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis outlined last fall, some states are now looking to increase housing production by enabling more multifamily housing and accessory dwelling units (ADUs) to be built without having developers first seek approval from local planning agencies or elected boards. This accelerated construction process is known as building “by right.” For example, Oregon passed a law in 2019 allowing fourplexes (a multifamily home that typically houses four families under one roof) to be built anywhere in large cities and for duplexes to be built anywhere in mid-size cities. Before, a developer would have needed to seek special permission to build such housing. States like Utah and Massachusetts are incentivizing the construction of new multifamily housing near public transit, while states like California and Florida are making it easier to build residential housing in places zoned for retail. Other states, like Maine and Vermont, are making it easier to build ADUs, which are second (and smaller) residential units on the same plot of land as one’s primary residence, like apartments or converted garages. State lawmakers sometimes impose new rules on localities to adjust their housing planning requirements, which can mean lowering the barriers builders must go through to begin construction or incentivizing cities to set more ambitious targets for production. Sometimes it means easing requirements like minimum lot sizes or parking spot mandates. Not all state-level bills will move the needle on the housing crisis Under pressure to do something about the housing crisis, some state lawmakers are advancing bills that allow politicians to claim they’re taking action, although the legislation itself is weak and unlikely to make big dents on the various problems. Some bills may even make affordability issues worse over the long term. For example, after failing to pass housing reform last year, lawmakers in New York came together again this year to push something through. Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul and her allies in the state legislature are cheering their recently agreed-upon housing package, which includes tenant protections and incentives to spur new construction,but experts and activists say it lacks real ambitious zoning and productionmeasures and will be unlikely to drive new affordability. Likewise in Maryland, Democratic politicians are cheering the passage of a new statewide housing reform package that includes renter protections and incentives to spur new affordable and dense development,though Yes-In-My-Backyard pro-housing advocates concede they do not expect the legislation to create much new housing, at least in the near term. Still, given that it was housing advocates’ first real attempt at passing statewide legislation in Maryland, they are hailing it as an impressive first step. “This is the first time the Maryland legislature overrode local zoning in a pro-housing way, and I would say this is a surprisingly drastic shift from the status quo even though it’s not enough,” said Tom Coale, a housing lobbyist in Maryland. When it comes to state-level housing reform, implementation and compliance matter Passing legislation for housing reform on the state level is often just the first step, as opponents then sometimes seek to challenge the new laws in court or localities search for loopholes or other ways to avoid compliance. Sometimes lawmakers water down housing production mandates and other enforcement mechanisms before the bills even pass through the legislature. While it’s not uncommon for local communities to try and avoid compliance when a housing law is first passed, somestates have also been firing back in subsequent sessions to close loopholes and ramp up penalties for local governments. While some statutes have strong enforcement mechanisms built in to begin with, many lawmakers are recognizing the housing reform process will just need to be dogged and responsiveto resistance and new challenges. Housing experts with the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy say it’s likely to take at least three to five years after a statewide policy is passed before the public should expect to see any real changes in housing production, and they urge patience before claiming a reform has failed or succeeded. “Many of the ambitious state housing policies that have been adopted are still in the early stages of implementation, so we don’t yet have definitive evidence about what works and what doesn’t,” they wrote in September. “Without realistic expectations about this time frame, pro-housing advocates may get discouraged, while opponents claim that zoning changes are ineffective—all before the policies have kicked in.”

Harvey Weinstein in court at the Clara Shortridge Foltz Criminal Justice Center on October 4, 2022, in Los Angeles, California.  | Etienne Laurent/Getty Images A public defender on the judge at the first Weinstein trial: “He was behaving like a prosecutor.” For the past seven years, Harvey Weinstein has been the bogeyman of popular culture. His depravity seems to the public to be so established that other monstrous men’s misconduct is measured by his misdeeds: Well, sure, he might have done something wrong, but he’s not exactly Harvey Weinstein, is he? Yet while Weinstein’s guilt might be thoroughly determined in the eyes of the public, the eyes of the legal system are a different matter. On April 25, the New York State Court of Appeals overturned Weinstein’s 2020 sex crime conviction. Weinstein’s legal victory here hinges on a procedural issue, and an ironic one at that. Part of what convinced the public so thoroughly of Weinstein’s guilt was the sheer number of accusations against him. There were dozens upon dozens of them; at Vox, we kept a running tally that topped out around 80. Such an enormous flood of accusations seemed to suggest that at least some of them had to be accurate. It was those very additional accusations, however, that got this trial overturned. When Weinstein originally came before the court in 2020, he was being tried for various sex crimes against three different women. Over the course of the trial, however, Judge James Burke allowed prosecutors to present testimony from three other Weinstein accusers, even though Weinstein wasn’t being prosecuted for attacking these women. Burke also said that if Weinstein chose to testify, prosecutors would be able to ask Weinstein about all the accusations against him during cross-examination, even the ones he hadn’t been charged for. (In the end, Weinstein did not testify.) In the press, unprosecuted accusations against Weinstein went a long way toward establishing the pattern of behavior that convinced the public of his guilt. In the courts, however, New York state law holds that you can’t use an accusation of an uncharged crime as evidence against someone who you are currently prosecuting for a different crime. “Under our system of justice, the accused has a right to be held to account only for the crime charged,” said the Court of Appeals in their 4–3 decision. “It is our solemn duty to diligently guard these rights regardless of the crime charged, the reputation of the accused, or the pressure to convict.” Currently, Weinstein is in a New York City hospital, where he’s receiving a variety of health tests. He remains in custody, serving out the 16-year term he was sentenced to in California after having been convicted there of rape in 2022. New York prosecutors have said they intend to recharge him, but it’s unclear if he’ll be transferred to California in the interim. To understand exactly how the legal mechanisms at play here worked, I called up Eliza Orlins. Orlins is a public defender based in New York City who, as part of her job, sees how these rules affect people with a lot fewer resources than Harvey Weinstein. Together, we talked through the court’s decision; the difference between the way journalists gather proof and the way courts do; and how the justice system fails survivors of sexual violence. Our conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity. As I understand it, one of the issues here is the testimony from previous alleged victims of Weinstein. The judge in the first trial agreed to let them testify, and then the appeals court concluded that they shouldn’t have been allowed to testify. What is the nuance here? What’s the disagreement? The trial court’s ruling was overturned on two different grounds. There’s Molineux and then there’s Sandoval, and they’re different. In the decision, I think they clearly lay out the two different ways in which those things are applied. Essentially, the Molineux rule begins with the premise that uncharged crimes are inadmissible. And then they carve out exceptions. Uncharged crimes have to meet a qualifying test. You have to figure out the relevance and weigh the probative value against the potential for prejudice. Just to differentiate before we go into both of these things, Sandoval is differentiated from Molineux. Typically, there’s a Sandoval hearing pretrial which [looks at] the things that the prosecutor wants to utilize on a potential cross-examination of the defendant, if they choose to testify at trial, and [determines] what would be allowed to be employed for impeachment purposes. Essentially, there’s a two-part test for admission of Molineux evidence. First, it has to be logically relevant to prove one or more specific material issues in the case. Secondly, it has to have legitimate probative value that outweighs its prejudicial effects. Here the court of appeals determined, frankly correctly, that this evidence of these allegations of prior bad acts should not have been admitted. The admission of them was not harmless error, and there would have been the potential for an acquittal but for this testimony. Okay, so you’re saying that for evidence to get admitted, it has to prove the facts of this specific case that’s being tried currently, not just demonstrate that Weinstein’s the kind of guy who’s likely to do something like this. Can you tell us how this evidence fails the test? I really recommend people read the majority’s decision, because the court lays it out quite well and quite clearly. The Molineux rule is that things shouldn’t come in as propensity evidence. It can’t come in as proof of bad character alone. The prosecution shouldn’t be proving against a defendant a crime that is not alleged in the indictment. The evidence shouldn’t be admissible, simply because it’s very easy for a jury to misconstrue that evidence and say, “If he did that, he probably also did this.” This is so interesting to me. In journalism, when you’re reporting on a sexual violence case, you’re taught to look for multiple accusations and patterns of behavior because, of course, it’s very hard to work with classical forms of evidence for sexual violence cases. There usually aren’t witnesses. A lot of times the accusations are coming out years and years after the event. So we usually tend to feel that if we can find multiple credible accusations that establish a pattern, that’s compelling and that is worth reporting. Obviously the standards of evidence are very different in journalism from how they are in courtrooms, because we’re doing different things. Journalists aren’t trying to figure out someone’s legal guilt or innocence, and we can’t put anyone in jail. But I’m wondering if you can talk me through some of the differences in how the legal system thinks about establishing these patterns. First of all, I think that the legal system does a poor job of addressing the harms that are caused, especially in cases of sexual assault, sexual violence, domestic violence, intimate partner violence. Even if someone is charged and goes to jail, it’s very hard to feel as though there’s any sort of way in which victims are being made whole. There’s some really interesting jurisprudence on this. Danielle Sered wrote an incredible book called Until We Reckon about restorative justice and how poorly the legal system addresses the harms to victims to begin with. In terms of the way that we need to think about trying cases, for crimes to be charged, even for a case to be indicted, there has to be reasonable cause to believe that the crime has occurred. Then the case goes forward. Then at a trial, obviously, there has to be proof beyond a reasonable doubt. When we’re dealing with uncharged crimes, there’s a reason why those crimes weren’t charged, right? These are things that the prosecution either feels they couldn’t even find reasonable cause to believe occurred, or they certainly don’t feel they could prove it beyond a reasonable doubt. By admitting these other uncharged crimes, it is just a way to bolster the prosecution’s claim and show that this person had the propensity to do this. It flies in the face of what due process looks like. Really the problem is that the charges have to be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, based on things that are within the framework of that specific charge. While there are exceptions to the Molineux rule about keeping out uncharged crimes, the reason why those exceptions exist is because there are certain times when that evidence does necessitate admission to explain something. There are specifically laid out exceptions in the law. They tend to establish motive, intent, absence of mistake or accident, a common scheme or plan, the identity of the person who’s charged with the commission of the crime. That list is not exhaustive, but those are the main categories. It’s really critical that those things aren’t admitted just to show propensity evidence. Do you think that anything about this ruling will change anything about how sexual violence cases are prosecuted going forward? I appeared before the judge who was the trial judge in the Weinstein case many times for over a decade. I found him, even within a system that is unbelievably cruel, to stand out as someone who was immeasurably cruel. There are certain things that he did over the years to clients of mine that I will truly never forget for as long as I live. I think his legacy will be that he made these rulings to try to stick it to Weinstein, to try to make sure that there was a conviction, and that has now resulted in the retraumatization of victims. He was behaving like a prosecutor, and the reality is that the prosecutors are also at fault. They are the ones who brought up evidence that wasn’t admissible and convinced the judge to admit that evidence. So, is it going to change the way we prosecute cases? I don’t know. Maybe. I hope so. I think that using outside evidence should only be done in the most limited of circumstances when it’s truly appropriate. So we’ve talked about the Molineaux rule. How does Sandoval play into this? That’s about what the prosecutors are able to cross-examine Weinstein on, right? This decision is just saying: People should have the right to testify in their own defense. By making a ruling that makes it so that if you testify your cross-examination will be devastating, that makes it hard for people to then do that. I think that it is important for people to remember that. This case is horrifying and it’s so upsetting and I feel so deeply for the victims, but the decision should be looked upon as one that is ultimately going to help people who are far less privileged than Harvey Weinstein. The majority of my clients, they’re all poor and they’re people of color and people from marginalized communities who really don’t have all of those advantages. I think that the ways in which prosecutors overreach just to try to show jurors how loathsome of a person someone is, to try to garner a conviction is not the right thing. Ultimately, that leads to reversals of convictions. This is the perfect example of how prosecution really isn’t about getting justice for the victims. They’re not actually looking out for the people who’ve been hurt here.

Amanita muscaria mushrooms, a poisonous variety, are seen at a garden in Poland on October 2, 2022. | Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images When AI comes for mushroom foragers. Six months ago, I spoke with a man named Elan Trybuch about a problem he was seeing online. He kept coming across different ebooks about mushroom foraging that looked somehow off. Off as in: maybe poisonous. The books were shorter than most foraging guides were, and way, way cheaper, says Trybuch. He’s a software engineer and volunteer secretary for the New York Mycological Society, a nonprofit devoted to “spreading knowledge, love and appreciation of fungi.” He knows mushrooms and he knows AI, and he thought the covers of these books were probably AI-generated. “They had mushroom structures that don’t quite make sense,” says Trybuch. They were the mycological equivalent of a picture of a hot blonde with six fingers and too many teeth. Most disturbing was the information inside the books was totally wrong. “They aren’t even giving you descriptions of real mushrooms. They’re giving you something completely made up,” Trybuch says. Any readers looking to try to use these books to figure out which mushrooms were safe to eat and which weren’t would be out of luck, which to Trybuch was seriously concerning. “It could literally mean life or death” if you eat the wrong mushroom, he says. The problem of very low-quality, very low-priced, probably at least partially AI-generated ebooks is not confined to mushroom foraging. Garbage ebooks have been a problem on Amazon for at least a decade, but — not unlike many strains of fungi — they’ve exploded over the last few years. I spent months investigating the shadowy economy where they’re produced, and what I learned took me by surprise. Inside the scammy world of garbage ebook publishing Garbage ebooks are all over Amazon’s Kindle store, on every topic. Searching for Jonathan Haidt’s bestselling new book The Anxious Generation, I found Jonathan Haidt: The Biography of Jonathan David Haidt, Navigating Morality and Policy; A Joosr Guide to... The Happiness Hypothesis by Jonathan Haidt: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom; and The Jonathan Haidt Story: Exploring the Life and Work of a Renowned Social Psychologist, Author, and Advocate. None of these are actually books so much as book-shaped digital files, designed to be picked up in keyword searches and get clicked on in a hurry by someone a tiny bit distracted or not digitally savvy enough to notice what they’re doing. This kind of grift has been around for a while. Now, with the rise of large language models, garbage ebooks have become easier and cheaper than ever to make. Garbage book grifters often don’t use AI to write their books, but they do use it to pick a topic and build an outline. Then they give the outline to a wildly underpaid ghostwriter to flesh it out into something that will pass muster as a real book. The model is a dangerously inviting prospect for anyone who’s ever toyed with the idea of publishing a book but doesn’t want to actually write one. It turns out, though, that the people who make garbage ebooks mostly lose money. The real cash seems to come from the people who teach others the garbage ebook scheme. These teachers claim they’ve shared the key to a life of passive income, but their students say all their courses offer is demands for more and more money, with the ever-deferred promise to teach you the real secrets to easy money once you’ve paid just a few thousand more dollars. Even these grifters are not the real villains. They are often small-time operators working one level of a very big grift industry. The grift is that technology and retail platforms have incentivized a race to the bottom when it comes to selling books. They’ve built an ecosystem where all the incentives are to sell at high volume and low cost. In book production, the biggest cost-saving and time-saving measure you can take is cutting out the labor of writing the actual book. Together, without ever caring enough about the issue to deliberately try to do so, these corporations have built a landscape in which it’s hard to trust what you read and hard to sell what you write. In the end, everyone loses: the would-be writers getting grifted in a fake publishing school, the real writers whose products are getting choked out of the marketplace by floods of cheap garbage, and the readers who just want to be able to buy a book without having to check to make sure the author isn’t a robot. I asked Elan Trybuch if he thought anyone was buying all those fake mushroom foraging guides. “Yeah,” he said. “I mean, there’s a sucker born every minute.” Read the full article here. This version of the story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Yuliia Antoshchenko/Getty Images The costly procedure was supposed to give women a new kind of freedom. Is that what it really offers? “For me, it was almost like a message from the universe,” says MeiMei Fox. It was 2009, and Fox was a 36-year-old divorced writer and editor when she sat down to interview a fertility specialist for an upcoming book. He pulled out a chart showing female fertility after age 35 — in her memory, a curve swooping exponentially downward. “I was like, holy moly, this is not a pretty picture,” Fox recalled. She’d always wanted a family, but since her divorce, she hadn’t met the right person to share it with. That’s why she took notice when she and the doctor discussed a technology called egg freezing, still experimental, that could help preserve people’s eggs until they were ready to have kids. At about $10,000, it was expensive, and typically not covered by insurance. She started pulling the money together right away. Fox was an early adopter of a technology that was about to explode in popularity. Initially used primarily by people undergoing chemotherapy or other treatments that can harm fertility, the procedure became more mainstream after the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) announced in 2012 that it should no longer be considered “experimental.” Since then, the number of egg-freezing cycles performed each year has skyrocketed, from around 7,600 in 2015 to 29,803 in 2022, the most recent year for which data is available, according to the Society of Assisted Reproductive Technology. In the beginning, expectations were high. Despite the eye-popping cost of the procedure, experts predicted it would usher in a new era of gender equality and career advancement for women. A now-famous 2014 Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover story promised a new option for professional women: “Freeze Your Eggs, Free Your Career.” Big companies such as Facebook and Apple started covering egg-freezing expenses for employees. Startups devoted to the procedure began wooing potential customers with parties and prosecco — and attracting millions in VC funding. Egg freezing was also hailed as the next big step in reproductive health. “It was supposed to revolutionize the whole field just as much as the birth control pill did,” says Janet Takefman, a reproductive health psychologist at McGill University. For Fox and for many, many people who underwent the procedure, however, freezing their eggs was more than just a medical decision; after an increasingly frantic race against the clock to find a partner, it felt like a way to take back control over their own lives. “Oh my god, I just bought myself years,” Fox remembers thinking. “The stress level went way down.” Many patients report the same sense of relief after making the decision to freeze eggs. Marcia Inhorn, a professor of anthropology and international affairs at Yale, interviewed more than 100 women about their egg-freezing experiences for her 2023 book, Motherhood on Ice: The Mating Gap and Why Women Freeze Their Eggs. After the procedure, more than 90 percent of women had something positive to say. But in other ways, egg freezing has failed to live up to its early hype. For many years, the effectiveness of the procedure was a bit of a black box: Not enough people had tried to use their frozen eggs for scientists to pull together reliable data. Now, however, a picture is emerging. “It was supposed to revolutionize the whole field just as much as the birth control pill did” In one groundbreaking 2022 study conducted at NYU Langone Fertility Center and looking at 543 patients over 15 years, the chance of a live birth from frozen eggs was 39 percent. “There isn’t a guarantee of having a baby from egg freezing,” says Sarah Druckenmiller Cascante, a reproductive endocrinologist at NYU Langone Fertility Center and one of the study’s authors. The study made a splash because it provided numbers where little comprehensive national data exists, though experts at other clinics tell Vox that its results are in line with what they’ve found. And far from ushering in a new era of gender equality, some experts say, the procedure serves as another way for companies to make money from stoking women’s anxieties. Sales pitches about egg freezing, rather than liberating women from their biological clocks, simply became another way to put pressure on them, says Jody Madeira, a law professor at Indiana University Bloomington and author of the book Taking Baby Steps: How Patients and Fertility Clinics Collaborate in Conception. “In a capitalist society, you’re going to have that incentive to get women’s dollars by piggybacking on this guilt, shame, anxiety, whatever you want to call it, about how we’re supposed to reproduce and we haven’t done so yet.” About a decade after it shed its “experimental” label, the procedure has become ubiquitous in pop culture and ballooned in popularity, with over a million frozen eggs or embryos stored in the United States today. It has done little, however, to materially change women’s lives. The first successful births from frozen eggs were twins, born in Australia in 1986. But the procedure used in this case was difficult to replicate, and egg freezing didn’t begin to take off until the 1990s, starting at a clinic in Bologna, Italy. The Italian government had passed a law, backed by Catholic politicians, that gave embryos the same rights as citizens and restricted freezing them. Freezing eggs instead became a way to circumvent the law and still treat patients with infertility. In the early 2000s, the procedure spread to the US and around the world, gaining more interest after 2012, when the ASRM removed the “experimental” label. For patients, egg freezing can be an arduous process. It starts with 10–14 days of hormone injections, often two or three per day, to stimulate the ovaries to produce large numbers of eggs at once, Cascante said. On top of that, the patient also has to visit a clinic two or three times a week for ultrasounds and bloodwork. Finally, when the eggs are the right size, another injection known as a “trigger shot” gets the eggs ready for collection. “Physically, you go through a lot,” says Fawziah Qadir, a 38-year-old education professor at Barnard College who froze her eggs in 2022. If all goes well, patients under 38 can expect to retrieve between 10 and 20 eggs, which are frozen using liquid nitrogen and stored in a lab until they’re ready to be used. If it doesn’t, more cycles may be necessary — meaning more shots, and more money. When egg freezing first became widely available, there wasn’t a lot of long-term data on its effectiveness. But there was buzz — lots of it — especially around the idea that it would give women more time to focus on their careers. “Imagine a world in which life isn’t dictated by a biological clock,” Emma Rosenblum wrote in the 2014 Bloomberg BusinessWeek story. “If a 25-year-old banks her eggs and, at 35, is up for a huge promotion, she can go for it wholeheartedly without worrying about missing out on having a baby.” In the next few years, new companies sprang up to market the procedure to women, often with a millennial-pink, girlboss sheen. Extend Fertility, launched in 2016 in New York City, offered Instagram influencers reduced rates in exchange for posts. Trellis, a “fertility studio” in Manhattan’s fancy Flatiron district that opened in 2018, offered Turkish-cotton bathrobes and called itself “the Equinox of egg freezing,” a reference to the upscale gym chain. One wall bore the slogan, “It’s up to each of us to invent our own future.” The startup Kindbody, also launched in 2018, hosted parties with drinks and scented candles and peppered its social media ads with taglines like “Plan your path.” “Egg freezing has become like a mantra for how to be an independent woman,” Rebecca Silver, director of marketing for Kindbody, told NBC in 2018. “The people who have frozen their eggs are doing the cool new thing.” That cool new thing, however, was pricey. It took Fox a year to save up the money. Today, with the process still coming in at $10,000 to $15,000 per cycle, several companies offer loans specifically for egg freezing. Qadir’s procedure in 2022 cost about $14,000, which her mom paid as a gift to her, Qadir says. That included storage fees, which are rising rapidly and can run to $800 a year or more. The costs of egg freezing and storage usually aren’t covered by insurance, although more large companies are beginning to offer fertility benefits that include them. The price tag of the procedure limits who can access it; the majority of egg-freezing patients are white women with professional jobs. For Black women like herself, “sometimes it’s unattainable just because it’s so expensive, or we don’t have the jobs that would cover it,” Qadir said. Some experts say stigma and stereotypes, dating back to the history of slavery in America, also contribute to lower rates of fertility treatment among Black women. Startups have attracted enough customers to draw interest from deep-pocketed backers, with fertility companies gaining more than $150 million in investment in 2019, according to the New York Times. “It is an attractive investment for venture capitalists who are looking to make money because it’s an almost unlimited market, potentially, of people who think they need to extend their fertility,” says Karey Harwood, a professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at North Carolina State University and the author of The Infertility Treadmill: Feminist Ethics, Personal Choice, and the Use of Reproductive Technologies. It’s no surprise that people will pay tens of thousands of dollars, or even go into debt, for the chance to build the family they’ve always imagined. But that key word — chance — can fall by the wayside in an industry built on selling optimism. Getty Images The year after she froze her eggs, Fox got together with her now-husband. After about a year of trying to get pregnant and one miscarriage, the couple had Fox’s frozen eggs shipped from the San Francisco Bay Area, where they were stored, to Los Angeles, where Fox and her husband lived. “Here’s where the story goes rotten,” Fox says. The Bay Area clinic had failed to pack the vials properly, and when they arrived in LA, all the eggs were destroyed. It was “one of the worst days of my life,” Fox recalls. She’s not the only patient to fall victim to storage or transportation mistakes. One 2022 study found at least nine storage tank failures over 15 years, affecting 1,800 patients. Egg-freezing patients also have had to contend with the unpredictable nature of the human body. The process can fail at many points, Cascante said. The ovaries may not produce enough eggs, the eggs may not survive the freezing process, they may not fertilize properly, or the fertilized embryos may not implant in the uterus. One UK-based woman, who asked to remain anonymous because she was concerned about professional ramifications, told Vox she froze 14 eggs, beginning about 10 years ago when she was 36. At the equivalent of about $1,200 per egg, the process wasn’t cheap. But by the end, she says, “I felt really proud that I was doing something proactive, and something that gave me options.” When she decided to use the frozen eggs to conceive on her own at 40, however, none of them fertilized. “I felt really angry at the universe,” she says. She later married and had a child using a donor egg. “In a single cycle of egg collection and fertilization, our donor produced more eggs and created more embryos than I had done in seven cycles.” Despite her experience, “I never felt like I was mis-sold,” the woman says. “I’m a nerd; I did my research.” At the same time, when she was freezing her eggs a decade ago, there wasn’t much research to do. “There weren’t a lot of people who had frozen their eggs, and there were even fewer who had gone back to try and conceive.” Today, there’s more data available, and mainstream fertility clinics are likely to be frank with patients about success rates, says Madeira, the author of Taking Baby Steps. Findings at other clinics have been in line with the NYU study, with another study finding that about a third of patients who returned to use their eggs ended up having a live birth. “Clinics have an actual ethical imperative to give accurate information.” But egg-freezing parties hosted by for-profit companies may be another story. There’s also a difference between listing success rates in fine print and really emphasizing the uncertainty of a procedure. Even Brigitte Adams, the woman featured on the 2014 Bloomberg cover after freezing her eggs, eventually told the Washington Post that she was unable to conceive using her frozen eggs. “They’re going to tell you, in all the paperwork you sign, that this is no guarantee, but you’re still going to have a sense of, oh, this works,” Fox says. Some of that feeling may stem from a kind of relentless optimism in American culture — or, perhaps, a Protestant work ethic — around the idea of having biological children, the message that if people simply try hard enough and long enough, they will eventually be rewarded with a child. This messaging has led some women to open up in recent years about their unsuccessful infertility treatments, to destigmatize their experiences. “For those of us who close our infertility chapters without a baby, we’re often met with unsolicited advice, reinforcing the narrative that we obviously gave up too early,” one woman, Katy Seppi, told CNN. For their part, fertility companies and practices say they work hard to make patients aware of the possibility of failure. At Extend Fertility, every prospective egg-freezing patient gets a free consultation session that includes information on their odds of a live birth from frozen eggs, based on their age and initial test results, says Joshua Klein, the company’s chief clinical officer. After that, “we try to trust women” to make an informed decision, he said. Kindbody also provides every prospective client with “expected outcomes based on their individual hormones and sonograms,” and offers a fertility calculator that estimates a patient’s chance of a live birth based on test results and number of eggs retrieved, Margaret Ryan, the company’s VP of communications, said in an email. “They’re going to tell you, in all the paperwork you sign, that this is no guarantee, but you’re still going to have a sense of, oh, this works” For some people, egg freezing isn’t the only option on the table. Another path is freezing embryos, which are denser and have a lower water content, making them “less sensitive to the freeze-thaw process,” said Amanda Adeleye, a reproductive endocrinologist and the medical director of CCRM Fertility of Chicago. Doctors also are able to screen embryos to help give patients a better sense of how likely they are to have a successful pregnancy. The process has even found its way into the American cultural imagination, with Succession’s Shiv Roy suggesting to her beleaguered husband Tom that they freeze embryos because they “survive way longer than eggs.” Embryos, however, require sperm. The majority of people freezing eggs are single, and they’re often hoping to have biological children with a partner one day. Using donor sperm would defeat that purpose. Fox, for example, was told that freezing embryos might be more effective but “I had zero interest,” she says. “I did not want to be a single mom.” If a patient has a partner or is comfortable using a donor, doctors may recommend embryo freezing. But “if you’re doing all of this to expand your flexibility and time to build your family, to prematurely close the door on part of that by fertilizing the eggs doesn’t necessarily help you,” Adeleye said. Eggs, embryos, freezing, thawing, shots, ultrasounds, thousands of dollars — it’s a lot for patients to navigate, often without much guidance. For example, there’s no single regulatory agency overseeing fertility centers in the US, as NBC has reported. That means no one is ensuring that patients are given a clear picture of the effectiveness of procedures. A lack of oversight also allows companies to use sales pitches that experts say are misleading, like an Instagram ad for Extend Fertility that claimed, “When you freeze your eggs, you #freezetime.” Klein calls that message “oversimplified,” but says it contains a kernel of truth because the procedure gives patients a chance to get pregnant with younger, more viable eggs. Advertising egg freezing is always a difficult balance, he tells Vox. The company doesn’t want to be too aggressive, but at the same time, to keep silent about a technology that can be “life-changingly impactful” risks doing a disservice to all the people who could benefit, Klein says. Others, however, argue that egg-freezing companies are being too aggressive, not just about the effectiveness of the procedure but about its necessity. Companies can “scare women into freezing their own eggs when they might not really need to,” Madeira says. In recent years, fertility startups have reached out to younger and younger groups of women. “We are now targeting women in their 20s and early 30s,” Susan Herzberg, the president of Prelude Fertility, told the New York Times in 2018. “Fertility declines at 22,” Jennifer Lannon, founder of the website Freeze.Health, told the publication. It’s true that egg quality declines with age and that younger patients have better luck with egg freezing. But the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists puts the age of significant fertility decline at 32, not 22 (the chance of conceiving drops more precipitously after 37). In the NYU study, the success rate rose to 51 percent for patients who froze their eggs when they were under 38. But the idea that large numbers of people should be freezing eggs in their 20s to guard against future infertility is misguided, some experts say. People in their 20s and early 30s often have time to conceive naturally, without the need for a lengthy, expensive medical procedure. Indeed, only about 12 percent of patients worldwide actually go back for their frozen eggs. Many patients conceive without assistance, Takefman says, while others decide not to become parents. Patients who froze eggs when they were younger than 34 are especially unlikely to use them, Madeira says. Those numbers don’t capture people who froze eggs only a few years ago and might still return, Klein says. And it’s not necessarily a problem that not everyone uses frozen eggs — after all, the process is meant as a “proactive investment,” he says. “You don’t know if you’ll need it.” To some, that investment comes at too high a cost. “More women are freezing eggs, and paying a lot to freeze eggs, than are actually ever going to need [them],” Madeira says. Ten years ago, egg freezing was seen as a path to economic and social empowerment for women. But most people aren’t freezing their eggs so they can work; they’re freezing their eggs so they can date. Eliza Brown, now a sociology professor at the University of California Berkeley, and her team interviewed 52 women who had frozen or were considering freezing their eggs in 2016 and 2017. None of them cited a desire to climb the corporate ladder. Instead, almost all were interested in egg freezing because they lacked a romantic partner. “Most of our participants understood egg freezing as a way to actually temporarily disentangle romantic and reproductive trajectories,” Brown tells Vox. However, in many cases, egg freezing was a bandage on a bigger problem. The women Inhorn interviewed for her book Motherhood on Ice were largely educated professionals who could afford a five-figure elective medical procedure. “They wanted an eligible, educated, equal partner,” Inhorn said, and “they were having trouble finding that.” Both Brown and Inhorn spoke with some egg-freezing patients who were seeking female partners. However, the majority were dating or seeking men, and struggling with the process. Some had tried dating men with less education or career success, but found “there was a lot of intimidation,” Inhorn said. “Men were not comfortable with who they were.” Others were frustrated with “men who will just wine you and dine you, but really have no intention of committing.” MeiMei Fox describes the sense of rush and pressure that can be attached to dating for women in their late 30s: “You go on the first date and you’re like, well, do you want to have kids? No? Okay, bye.” Egg freezing doesn’t change the fact that women are outpacing men in educational attainment, nor that social norms still fetishize the male-breadwinner family, pressuring women and men alike to look for something that may no longer fit them or the times they live in. It also doesn’t change the fact that many women find dating men to be a frustrating and demoralizing experience, as Anna Louie Sussman writes in the New York Times. Daniel Cox, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has surveyed more than 5,000 Americans about dating, told the Times that many men were “limited in their ability and willingness to be fully emotionally present and available” and that dating today “requires a level of emotional sensitivity that I think some men probably just lack.” To actually fix straight women’s dating problems, you would need to “fix men,” one of Inhorn’s study participants told her. Until then, Inhorn writes in her book, “egg freezing will remain educated thirty-something women’s single best reproductive option — a techno-medical solution to a fundamental gender inequality that provides them with some hope and allows them to retain their motherhood dreams.” For Fox, freezing her eggs indeed took the feeling of time pressure away. She felt more relaxed and confident. “It was really positive for me,” she says. “Until I tried to use them.” After Fox’s frozen eggs were destroyed, she and her husband went through three rounds of IVF. It cost about $100,000, but she eventually got pregnant and gave birth to twin sons. Today, she’s not against egg freezing but says, “I tell people it is no guarantee.” Fertility centers don’t always “present that to their clients in an honest way,” she adds. Only about 12 percent of patients worldwide actually go back for their frozen eggs Better regulation would help, experts say. Creating a single regulatory agency to oversee fertility centers — as the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority does in the UK — could make it easier to require those centers to educate patients on the risks and effectiveness of egg freezing and to follow accuracy guidelines in their advertising, Rachel Strodel argues in an NBC op-ed. “I still certainly respect people’s freedom to make the decision that’s best for them, but they’ve got to be armed with the facts and realize that it’s a gamble,” says Harwood, the Infertility Treadmill author. Federal lawmakers should also require that egg storage facilities follow proper freezing protocol and report any failures, legal scholars Naomi Cahn and Dena Sharp write at the Conversation. Meanwhile, helping women with the relationship problems that push many to freeze eggs in the first place may require bigger social changes. “Maybe men are going to need to get more comfortable marrying women who are more educated than they are and make more money than they do,” Harwood said. “Maybe the change happens there, in our gender ideologies and how we think of family.” Greater support for single parents and other family forms beyond the heterosexual two-parent household could also take the pressure off of women to bank eggs in hopes of meeting a male partner. So, too, could a greater social acceptance of the value of a child-free life, especially since more and more people are choosing not to have children. While many people who freeze eggs have a deep and personal desire for children, it’s also the case that women, especially, experience enormous social and even political pressure to reproduce — and reducing that pressure could free some people to pursue other shapes for their lives. Patients and scholars alike are clear that they don’t want to see egg freezing disappear as an option. “Reproductive choices are being eclipsed in this country,” Inhorn said. “This is a technology that does give women some help with difficult situations they find themselves in.” The process could take on added importance now that an Alabama court ruling has cast doubt on the future of IVF using frozen embryos. Federal oversight of and research into fertility technology and treatment in general have been hampered by opposition to abortion in the US, which has made it difficult to form nationwide policies around reproductive health. Egg freezing also remains an especially important option for people dealing with cancer or other conditions or treatments that can damage ovarian function, and it can be a useful tool for trans people who want to remove their ovaries or who are taking hormones that affect them, Adeleye said. For many patients, however, experts say that the sense of control that egg freezing offers — at a high price — turns out to be illusory. If anything, Fox’s experience with the procedure was an exercise in letting go. “It’s taught me some more patience with life and the universe,” she says. “There are many different pathways to getting what you dream of.”

Getty Images Here’s how to understand the difference between everyday anxiety and an anxiety disorder. When you run a therapy practice called the Center for Anxiety, as David H. Rosmarin does, you encounter a breadth of anxiety-related experiences. Sometimes, after talking with new patients, Rosmarin will determine their distress may not be related — or solely related — to anxiety at all. Because anxiety intersects with so many other aspects of mental health, like depression and substance abuse, Rosmarin says, many people are quick to attribute their emotional pain to anxiety alone. They may even mistake anxiety for something else entirely. He’s told patients they’re not anxious at all, but stressed. “I’ll say, sleep eight hours a night for the next two weeks,” he says. “Come back and tell me how you’re feeling. I’ve tried that trick many times with stressed-out patients, and they’re at 50 percent of their stress level two weeks later with no therapy at all.” More Americans are seeking professional mental health treatment than ever before. Nearly a quarter of adults visited a psychologist, therapist, psychiatrist, or other mental health professional in 2022, compared to 13 percent who did so in 2004, according to a Gallup poll. No longer stigmatized or discussed in secret, mental health terms — and mental health-adjacent terms — have trickled out of the therapy room and into casual conversation. “Narcissism,” “gaslighting,” “and “boundaries” are just as readily discussed at brunch or online as in clinical settings. Self-diagnosis based on simplified videos and memes on social media can result in pathologizing seemingly mundane behaviors and thought patterns. Normalization of mental health is undoubtedly positive: More people can feel empowered to seek care and to openly discuss their experiences. However, increased awareness has resulted in more people confusing “milder forms of distress as mental health problems,” according to one academic paper. Despite therapy’s wider cultural acceptance, we still don’t have a grasp on what we really feel. Without a nuanced vocabulary to describe these experiences, complex emotions are flattened with blanket terms. “We don’t have a sophisticated lexicon,” Rosmarin says. “We end up labeling everything as anxiety.” When we don’t accurately define our emotions, we don’t know how to properly address them. If we approach our feelings with curiosity, we can improve our emotional intelligence. What is anxiety? Anxiety is both a normal response as well as a pathological experience, says psychiatrist Tracey Marks. People often endure everyday levels of anxiety or nervousness before a first date or if they have to make a presentation at work. You might have physiological effects, like sweating, racing heartbeat, or butterflies in your stomach. Momentary anxiety can be functional, a signal to be on the lookout for potential danger or to prepare for that work presentation. After the nerve-wracking event is over, the feeling usually passes. In an increasingly anxiety-inducing world, where climate change, wars, and a contentious upcoming presidential election instill plenty of anxiety, “it’s normal for us to have some kind of distressing reaction to something that is threatening to us,” Marks says. A sign of an anxiety disorder is when anxiety interferes with your daily life. If the thought of going to a social event elicits physical symptoms like vomiting and/or persistent worried thoughts of how others will perceive you, you may have social anxiety, Marks says. Avoiding people, missing work or school, a baseline level of fear (that may not be logical), and inability to relax are some of the signs of generalized anxiety disorder. “One of the characteristics of generalized anxiety,” she says, “is that you can worry about anything. You can worry about world peace.” Someone with debilitating anxiety might want to work with a therapist to better cope. People may mistake anxiety for stress. Stress is when you have too many demands and not enough resources, like time or money to outsource some responsibilities, Rosmarin says. “Anxiety often happens in the context of an abundance of resources,” he says. You may be getting enough sleep, have a supportive partner, and a job you love, for instance, but still spiral over would-be worst-case scenarios that may never materialize. Even fear can be confused with anxiety. Fear is in response to a concrete threat, whereas anxiety is triggered by an amorphous or future risk. The importance of emotional intelligence The boundaries of anxiety are blurry and subjective, says Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, so it makes sense that lay people would label all of their upsetting experiences as “anxiety.” But we can stand to improve our emotional intelligence — the ability to accurately identify what we’re feeling, Haslam says. Because many don’t receive emotional education beyond primary school, says Rosmarin, we have a limited emotional vocabulary. Feeling “bad” is a significantly different experience from feeling “distressed,” “frustrated,” “jealous,” “overwhelmed,” or “anxious.” An emotional binary of “good” and “bad” emotions actually makes matters more confusing. “You don’t understand how you should respond to what’s going on,” Haslam says, “whether you should flee or fight, whether you should bite your tongue.” People who struggle to put their emotions into words have more difficulty coping with complex feelings, Haslam says. When we don’t have a deep knowledge of common human emotions, we may pathologize normal experiences. Feeling uncomfortable in a room of new people is incredibly common. It is not, however, social anxiety, Marks says. Online and social media content created by non-professionals may paint anxiety with broad strokes, leading viewers to self-diagnose as having an anxiety disorder. “Even if you do have anxiety, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an anxiety disorder,” says psychologist Juli Fraga. What’s often at the root of situational anxiety — like feeling anxious in social scenarios — may be relational trauma dating back to unhealthy social interactions during childhood, Fraga says. What’s lost when every experience is “anxiety” Labeling yourself as an anxious person, even if you do have a diagnosis, can make it more difficult to overcome your emotions. If anxiety is so baked into how you see yourself, you could use it as a crutch or an excuse to avoid social situations, new experiences, or other potentially enriching events. “As soon as you attribute some sort of noun label to yourself — I’m an anxious person or anxiety is who I am,” Haslam says, “people tend to infer that they’ve got something deep-seated and lasting and a reason not to engage with the world.” Avoidance is generally the wrong way to address anxiety, Haslam says. Believing you have social anxiety, for example, may lead you to isolate, which only entrenches the anxiety. Avoidance may offer temporary relief, but doesn’t offer a long-term solution. When we don’t have the appropriate vocabulary to describe our emotions, we lose the ability to effectively intervene, Rosmarin says. “Imagine going into a board meeting with a sophisticated company that has a lot of different projects,” he says, “and you have one word to describe anything negative that’s going on in any of those projects.” Determining whether we’re stressed or anxious greatly impacts how we move forward: It’s the difference between getting a good night’s sleep and moving your body (effective ways to manage stress) and working with a therapist to confront what makes you anxious. How to get a little better at defining anxiety Getting to the root of emotions takes some thought. When it comes to anxiety, Marks says to consider how much disruption it causes. Do you feel anxious in certain situations or does it significantly impair your ability to perform day-to-day tasks? For example, if you experience such intense, constant distress about the safety of your loved ones — even if there is no present threat to their safety — that it actually damages your relationships, you may feel inspired to seek professional help for your anxiety. If you have trouble sleeping and feel nervous during exam time, you may be stressed. “Maybe [try] exercising more, or making sure that you’re trying to get the best sleep you can,” Marks says, “things that you can do to help you cope better as these situations come.” Whenever feelings of anxiety do arise, get curious about its causes, Fraga suggests. Think about what it is about parties that deters you from social gatherings. Maybe you don’t like talking to strangers. Again, ask yourself why. Perhaps you had an embarrassing rebuff in the past. Anxiety isn’t a truth-teller. Just because you had a negative previous experience doesn’t mean you’re doomed to repeat the same patterns or should feel afraid of repeating those patterns. Rather than relying on labels to describe our emotions, we owe it to ourselves to use a vocabulary as vast and complex as our experiences. Accurately describing the causes of anxiety, how it physically manifests, and when and how often it occurs, allows us to pinpoint the exact form of support we need, too, whether it’s therapy or just talking to a loved one. That’s how we move forward. It can be helpful to depersonalize anxiety. Try reminding yourself, “Yes, I’m anxious but that’s a temporary thing which I can do something about, and I’m actually pretty courageous to be able to deal with it,” Haslam says. “I’m not just a damaged individual.”

Getty Images Derek Thompson on what the end of monoculture could mean for American democracy. Is damn near everything a cult now? That’s a glib distillation of an interesting idea I recently encountered. The basic thesis was that the internet has shattered the possibility of a monoculture and the result of that is a highly fragmented society that feels increasingly like a loose connection of cults stacked on top of each other. To say that everything is a cult is a bit of an overstatement, but as a general framework for understanding the world at the moment, it is helpful. The way we consume content, the way fandom works, the ways we sort ourselves into tribes and camps online, even the way lots of industries work, including the news business — it all has shades of culthood. This is easier to see if you set aside the more extreme examples of cults, like the ones that end in mass suicide or shootouts with the ATF, and instead think of cults as movements or institutions that organize themselves around the belief that the mainstream is fundamentally broken. Understood this way, there are lots of cults, or cult-adjacent groups, and not all of them are bad. But if society keeps drifting in this direction, what will that mean for our shared democratic culture? How much fragmentation can we sustain? To think all of this through, I invited Derek Thompson to The Gray Area. He’s a staff writer at the Atlantic, the host of the podcast Plain English, and the person who originally floated this idea about the cultification of society. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. Sean Illing Tell me why you think everything’s become a cult. Derek Thompson I’ve always been very interested in culture, which I suppose is worth defining. Culture is the way that we think about the world and the way that we influence each other’s thoughts about the world. And that can be through entertainment, it can be through religion, it can be through fashion and clothes, but it’s the memes and ideas and ideologies that not only influence our own sense of reality but other people’s sense of reality. And I’ve always been interested in how people’s sense of reality comes to be. So you can start with the late 19th century when the concept of a national reality was first possible, at least in America. You had technologies like the telephone and the telegraph that allowed newspapers to share information and report on information that truly was national. It allowed information to travel much faster than it had ever traveled before. And so suddenly in the late 19th century, we had the possibility of a national and even international real-time shared reality. And that shared reality might have come to its fullest expression in the middle of the 20th century with the rise of television technology. You had just a handful of channels that were reaching tens of millions of people. At the same time, you also had the rise of national newspapers and maybe the apogee of national newspapers in terms of their ability to monopolize local advertising revenue and become enormous machines for getting tens of millions of Americans to read about a shared reality. And so you move from the 19th century with the birth of this possibility of a shared reality, to the 20th century, where you really have the rise of a kind of monoculture, which was never really possible for the vast majority of human history. What I’m interested in is the possibility that the internet has forever shattered that reality, that we are in a way going back to the pre-20th century where culture is actually just a bunch of cults stacked on top of each other, a bunch of mini local realities stacked on top of each other. Sean Illing How do you define a cult? Derek Thompson I think of a cult as a nascent movement outside the mainstream that often criticizes the mainstream and organizes itself around the idea that the mainstream is bad or broken in some way. So I suppose when I think about a cult, I’m not just thinking about a small movement with a lot of people who believe something fiercely. I’m also interested in the modern idea of cults being oriented against the mainstream. They form as a criticism of what the people in that cult understand to be the mainstream. And cults, especially when we talk about them in religion, tend to be extreme, tend to be radical, tend to have really high social costs to belonging to them. Today, especially in the media and entertainment space, we have this really interesting popularity of new influencers or new media makers adapting as their core personality the idea that the mainstream is broken, that news is broken, that mass institutions are broken, that the elite are in some way broken and elite institutions are broken. The fragmentation of media that we’re seeing and the rise of this anti-institutional, somewhat paranoid style of understanding reality, I see these things as rising together in a way that I find very interesting. Sean Illing You were talking about the phone and the telegraph earlier, but the thing about newer technologies like radio and TV, for instance, is that they helped create something like a mass culture. The public was more or less watching the same movie we call reality, and for all the downsides of that, and there were many, it did have the benefit of grounding society in a shared reality. Do you think of that loss as a genuine cultural and political crisis? Or is it possible that this is just another period of technological change, not that different from earlier periods and we’ll figure it out? Derek Thompson I do think that in so many ways, we’re just going back to the middle of the 19th century. We’re going back to the historical norm rather than being flung into the exosphere, into some unprecedented state of popular discombobulation. The idea that a shared reality, a shared national reality in real time, is even possible is so historically young. Just one quick aside, I was doing some reporting for the book that I’m writing right now and saw in an Eric Hobsbawm book called The Age of Revolutions that when the Bastille fell in 1789, a Canton 30 minutes away from Paris didn’t realize the French Revolution had happened for a full month. That was the speed at which information used to travel. It was the speed at which a man could ride a horse or walk next to his horse. You need a whiz-bang technology that can somehow transmit at something like the speed of light, certainly one would hope the speed of sound, information across vast distances. You only had that with the invention of the telegram and the telephone, and then later radio. So if you want to know where we’re going, look where we came from. In the 19th century, of course, we had lots of chaos, but we also had an American democracy for decades and decades. So it’s not obvious to me that the erosion of the monoculture or the erosion of the news mainstream is anathema to American democracy. Sean Illing I don’t think it’s incompatible with American democracy as such, but it might be incompatible with the model of liberal democracy we’ve become accustomed to since mid-20th century or so, which is also a historical aberration. Derek Thompson You might be totally be right. This is one place where the bridge goes too far for me to have a ready-made answer. I’m not exactly sure why a more riotously antagonistic and fragmented news ecosystem would be perilous to liberal democracy. It’s possible that it would be, but what’s the causal mechanism by which a wildly fragmented media leads to a backlash in liberal democracy? Sean Illing I guess I’m thinking about how this environment creates a collective action problem that makes dealing with the sorts of challenges we’re dealing with today almost insoluble. Martin Gurri had a useful metaphor in his 2018 book The Revolt of the Public. The way he put it was to say that for a long time we looked into the same mirror of mass culture and the internet shattered that mirror into a billion little pieces, which meant that governments could no longer dictate the stories societies were telling about themselves, which is a great thing in lots of ways, but it also produced a lot social turbulence. Derek Thompson I agree with the idea that we’re all looking into fewer mirrors, but it’s not obvious to me that the mirrors we were looking into were reflecting reality. They were reflecting a version of reality that left out a lot. The news of the 20th century did not report on racial justice at anything like the level of quality that we now expect reports in racial justice to do. The mirrors of the 20th century and news reports of the 20th century did not, I think, uncover all sorts of problems of governance that took years to understand. Didn’t report on the environmental degradation of industrial America in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Protests had to fill the void of media that was under-representing minorities in urban America. None of this is to accuse you personally of overlooking those problems because I’m sure you would agree with all of them, but it’s to remind all of us that when we feel nostalgia for the media environment of the 1940s and 1950s, we are feeling nostalgia for a news media ecosystem that in many ways was inferior to and even blind to the problems that we know to pay attention to today. And I do think that in many ways, the fragmentation of the media can sometimes create competition that allows us to see behind corners and understand things, root out problems that we didn’t see before. I’m a capitalist overall, and I think that more competition in most markets is good. I just think it’s important to understand, as we do in some markets, that there can be negative externalities. A huge gaping negative externality of abundance in media is that superabundant media creates a scenario where news entrants feel like they have to be antagonistic. A news environment like that is going to create a lot of distrust, it’s going to create a lot of disharmony, it’s going to confuse a lot of people, and it will replace a world with a small number of flawed mirrors with a riotous and unthinkable number of mirrors, some of which are absolute bullshit mirrors and some of which are quite good. Sean Illing The problem of “distrust” is what I was getting at. I never liked the phrase “post-truth” because it implied there was a golden age in which we lived in truth. That’s bullshit. So I’m not nostalgic in that way and I’m not making the case that we understood our world better, or that society was more just, when everyone was watching the same handful of networks or reading the same handful of newspapers. I’m just saying that was a period where there was more trust in authority, in part because of this near-monopoly on information at the top. And when that near-monopoly shattered, people could see and hear more and that eroded trust in authority, trust in experts, trust in information. Is that a good thing in the long term? Probably. I don’t know. But I don’t think our institutions were equipped to manage the transition from that world to this one. Derek Thompson I think I agree with a lot of that. What I most want to hold down on is the idea that almost all nostalgia for a past golden age is nostalgia for a world that did not exist or a world that we would find inexcusably terrible today. If someone believes that the world of 1950s or ’60s was better in this way, then why didn’t that shared reality lead to a world where we fixed our problems faster? Why didn’t a shared reality more expeditiously reveal the injustice of Jim Crow and voting laws before the 1965 Act? Why didn’t it help us see the terrible things that we were doing to leaded gasoline and the air and the water? Why, essentially, was the world of monocultural news so flawed if monocultural news is so useful for showing the electorate what’s important in the world? That’s the question that I feel like is never answered when people start waxing nostalgic about the middle of the 20th century. To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Jared Bartman for Vox Dangerous, polluting SUVs and pickups took over America. Lawmakers are partly to blame. Cars, you might have noticed, have grown enormous. Low-slung station wagons are all but extinct on American roads, and even sedans have become an endangered species. (Ford, producer of the iconic Model T a century ago, no longer sells any sedans in its home market.) Bulky SUVs and pickup trucks — which have themselves steadily added pounds and inches — now comprise more than four out of every five new cars sold in the US, up from just over half in 2013, even as national household size steadily declines. The expanding size of automobiles — a phenomenon I call car bloat — has deepened a slew of national problems. Take road safety: Unlike peer nations, the US has endured a steep rise in traffic deaths, with fatalities among pedestrians and cyclists, who are at elevated risk in a crash with a huge car, recently hitting 40-year highs. Vehicle occupants face danger as well. A 2019 study concluded that compared to a smaller vehicle, an SUV or a pickup colliding with a smaller car was 28 percent and 159 percent, respectively, more likely to kill that car’s driver. Car bloat also threatens the planet. Because heavier vehicles require more energy to move, they tend to gulp rather than sip the gasoline or electricity that powers them, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Extra weight also accelerates the erosion of roadways and tires, straining highway maintenance budgets and releasing microplastics that damage ecosystems. Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images SUVs and pickup trucks make up more than 80 percent of new car sales in the US. Their height and weight make them significantly more likely to injure pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users, and they also make it harder to see pedestrians crossing the street. Here, a pickup truck crashed into and seriously injured a pedestrian before smashing into a storefront in Los Angeles in 2014. What lies behind this shift? Some Americans prefer bigger cars, especially when gas prices are low, for their ample storage space, ability to see over other vehicles on the road, and perceived safety benefits (more on that later). But shifting consumer demands tell only part of the story. For half a century, a litany of federal policies has favored large SUVs and trucks, pushing automakers and American buyers toward larger models. Instead of counteracting car bloat through regulation, policymakers have subtly encouraged it. That has been a boon for car companies, but a disaster for everyone else. Here are some of the most egregious examples. Why we let bigger cars pollute more After the 1970s OPEC oil embargo triggered a spike in gas prices, the federal government adopted an array of policies intended to reduce energy demand. One of Congress’s most consequential moves was creating the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which require that the average fuel economy (miles per gallon, or MPG) of a carmaker’s vehicles remain below a set threshold. Pressed by auto lobbyists, Congress made a fateful decision when it established CAFE. Instead of setting a single fuel economy standard that applies to all cars, CAFE has two of them: one for passenger cars, such as sedans and station wagons, and a separate, more lenient standard for “light trucks,” including pickups and SUVs. In 1982, for instance, the CAFE standard for passenger cars was 24 mph and only 17.5 mpg for light trucks. That dual structure didn’t initially seem like a big deal, because in the 1970s SUVs and trucks together accounted for less than a quarter of new cars sold. But as gas prices fell in the 1980s, the “light truck loophole” encouraged automakers to shift away from sedans and churn out more pickups and SUVs (which were also more profitable). Car ads of the 1980s and 1990s frequently featured owners of SUVs and trucks taking family trips or going out with friends, activities that could also be done in a sedan or station wagon. The messaging seemed to resonate: By 2002, light trucks comprised more than half of new car sales. In the early 2000s, the federal government made these distortions even worse. During the George W. Bush administration, CAFE was revised to further loosen rules for the biggest cars by tying a car model’s efficiency standard to its physical footprint (which is basically the shadow cast by the vehicle when the sun is directly above it). President Obama then incorporated similar footprint rules into new greenhouse gas emissions standards that are overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Dan Becker, who led the Sierra Club’s global warming program from 1989 to 2007, told me that he and others warned federal lawmakers that adopting footprint-based standards was a mistake. “People like me were saying, ‘give carmakers another loophole and they’ll use it,’” he said. “But we lost.” Those concerns proved justified. The average vehicle footprint expanded 6 percent between 2008 and 2023, a “historic high,” according to an EPA report, which also found that some carmakers, such as General Motors, actually had lower average fuel economy and higher average carbon emissions in 2022 than in 2017. To its credit, the EPA recently announced revisions to its vehicle GHG rules that would narrow (but not close) the gaps between standards for large and small cars. But the shift toward electric vehicles may further entrench car bloat. The EPA’s rules assume that all EVs, regardless of their design, generate no emissions — a questionable assumption, because EVs create emissions indirectly through the production and transmission of power that flows into their batteries. A huge or inefficient battery requires more electricity, which can lead to significant pollution (especially in regions where fossil fuels dominate the energy mix). The EPA’s policy of treating all EVs equally makes a monstrously wasteful vehicle like the Hummer EV seem cleaner than it is, encouraging carmakers to manufacture more of them. To counteract EV bloat, Peter Huether, a senior research associate at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, would like to see the EPA revise its GHG rules to consider emissions from power generation and transmission: “If these standards look at upstream emissions, it could have a downstream effect on shape and size of EVs.” Blocking smaller cars from abroad What does a 60-year-old trade dispute have to do with car bloat? More than you might imagine. In the early 1960s, Europe raised the ire of American officials by slapping a 50 percent tariff on chicken exported from the United States. In retaliation, the US enacted a 25 percent tax on pickup trucks imported from abroad. The dispute is long forgotten, but the “Chicken Tax” lives on. Although the tariff was initially aimed at Germany’s immense auto industry (Volkswagen in particular), it also applies to pickups imported from newer automaking powers such as Japan and South Korea, where carmakers are often adept at building vehicles much smaller than those available to Americans. Toyota’s Hilux Double Cab pickup, for instance, weighs several hundred pounds less than a 2024 Ford F-150 Tremor or Lariat and is about half a foot shorter. But Americans who might want it are out of luck. Toyota does not sell the Hilux in the US (but does in countries like India and Britain); the 25 percent tariff would make it prohibitively expensive. “The Chicken Tax has prevented competitive Asian or European truck makers from entering the US market,” said Jason Torchinsky, a co-founder of the Autopian, a media outlet focused on the auto industry. “American manufacturers have really never had to compete.” John Krafcik, who previously led Hyundai, has called the Chicken Tax “one of the most important determinants of how the [auto] industry looks today and how it operates today in the US.” The tariff has been condemned by everyone from the Libertarian Cato Institute, the center-right American Enterprise Institute, and the left-leaning Tax Policy Center. “Tariffs in general hurt consumers, and the Chicken Tax is no exception,” wrote Robert McClelland of the Tax Policy Center. There are other protectionist rules blocking smaller vehicles from abroad: Carmakers from China, an emerging automaking behemoth, face a 25 percent tariff enacted by Donald Trump. As a result, Americans cannot buy small Chinese EV sedans like the BYD Seagull that cost around $10,000, barely a fifth the price of an average American car. VCG/VCG via Getty Images The Seagull, a small, low-cost electric sedan from Chinese automaker BYD Nicolas Datiche/AFP via Getty Images Refrigerators are transported on a Japanese mini truck, also known as a kei truck. These often have bed lengths comparable to American-style pickup trucks but are much shorter in height, lighter, and safer for other road users — yet they’re exceedingly hard to obtain in the US. And those hoping to import a kei truck, a miniature pickup common in Japan, must navigate a labyrinth of federal and state rules. (Even Afghanistan seems ahead of the US in minitruck offerings, as the Wichita Eagle’s Dion Lefler noted in a tongue-in-cheek 2023 column: “In the land of the free, why can’t we have mini-pickup trucks like the Taliban?”) These policies have established a regulatory moat protecting US automakers whose profits disproportionately come from pricey, hulking SUVs and trucks. The Hummer Tax Loophole In 1984, Congress stopped allowing small business owners to take a tax deduction for the purchase price of cars used for work. But the bill included a giant loophole: To protect those who need a heavy-duty vehicle (think farmers or construction workers), Congress made an exception, known as Section 179, for cars that weigh over 6,000 pounds when fully loaded with passengers and cargo. Today such behemoths are eligible for a tax deduction of up to $30,500, while business owners who opt for a smaller car can claim nothing at all. Few car models were heavy enough to qualify for the tax break 40 years ago, but that is no longer the case: A Hummer 1, for instance, weighs about 10,300 pounds (leading Section 179 to be dubbed the “Hummer Tax Loophole”). Other huge cars, such as a Chevrolet Suburban or an F-250 Ford Super Duty truck can qualify, too. “Few folks at EPA know about Section 179,” said Becker, the former Sierra Club executive. “But every auto dealer does.” Some car dealerships even offer handy Section 179 guides on their websites. The tax advantage of buying a behemoth may be powerful enough to tilt the vehicle purchase decisions of individuals like real estate agents, who use their vehicles for both professional and personal use. And as cars electrify, the added tonnage from batteries will allow more models to qualify for favorable tax treatment. If Section 179 sounds crazy, consider another federal loophole that has endured for decades. In 1978, Congress established the “Gas Guzzler Tax,” requiring automakers to pay between $1,000 and $7,700 for every car produced that gets less than 22.5 miles per gallon. But the tax only applies to passenger vehicles like sedans and station wagons. SUVs and pickups, which often have much worse gas mileage, are exempt. That omission makes no sense from a policy perspective, but it is good news for carmakers producing inefficient behemoths. Freezing the gas tax Every time a car owner fills her gas tank, a portion of the bill goes into the federal Highway Trust Fund, a central source of funding for roads and mass transit. That tax rate is set at $0.184 per gallon, a level that has been frozen since 1993, when Bill Clinton was less than a year into his presidency. Congressional proposals to increase the gas tax to close a yawning highway budget gap, or at least tie it to inflation, have gone nowhere. Over the last 31 years, consumer prices have risen 113 percent, making the real value of the gas tax less than half what it was in 1993. That decline has reduced the cost of powering a huge SUV or truck with abysmal gas mileage, like the 6,270-lb 2024 Cadillac Escalade that gets around 16 mpg. A 2018 OECD study found that the US had the lowest average gas tax (including both federal and state taxes) among rich nations, which averaged $2.24 per gallon — four times the typical US rate. “Why are European cars so small?” said McClelland, of the Tax Policy Center. “One reason has got to be the much higher gasoline tax.” Federal policy ignores crash risk for anyone outside a car A vehicle’s design affects not just the safety of its occupants, but also people walking, biking, or inside other cars. Although seemingly obvious, this basic truth has eluded federal regulators for decades. Car safety rules are laid out in the encyclopedic Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), which touches on everything from power windows to seat belts. But the FMVSS revolves around protecting a vehicle’s occupants; nothing within its 562 pages limits a car’s physical design to protect someone who might come into contact with it in a collision. That omission invites an arms race of vehicle size — precisely what the US is experiencing. Nor does the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) consider pedestrians, cyclists, or other car occupants when calculating its safety ratings from crash tests. Unlike safety ratings in Europe and elsewhere, the American crash ratings program also ignores the danger that vehicle designs pose to those walking and biking. NHTSA’s myopic focus on car occupants is a boon for the heaviest and tallest cars, which pose disproportionate risk to those outside of them. Weightier vehicles exert more force in a crash, and they require additional time to come to a halt when a driver slams on the brakes. A 2023 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that vehicles with tall, flat front ends (common on big pickups and SUVs) are significantly more likely to kill pedestrians in crashes. An earlier IIHS study found that large cars also make it harder to see pedestrians at intersections. Mindy Schauer/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images The US is in the midst of a car fatality crisis, exacerbated by the risks large cars pose to pedestrians. Here, a pickup truck driver in Santa Ana, California, quickly applies brakes as two pedestrians cross in front. One is not visible. With pedestrian and cyclist deaths now soaring, NHTSA last year took its first, tentative step toward protecting so-called vulnerable road users by proposing that its vehicle safety ratings be revised to include an evaluation of automatic pedestrian braking technology, which can force a vehicle to halt before striking someone on foot. But even if adopted, it would not affect NCAP’s 5-star safety rating, the hallmark of the program. And NHTSA’s focus on automatic pedestrian braking, an imperfect tech fix, ignores car bloat, a root cause of America’s traffic safety crisis. Earlier this year, a paper co-authored by former NHTSA executive Missy Cummings gave an ominous assessment of automatic braking systems, concluding that they did not work consistently. By contrast, the potential safety benefits of constraining vehicles’ weight and height have been well established. Why can’t we fix things? All of these policies have distorted the US car market, leading the 278 million vehicles plying American roads to become ever bigger, more dangerous, and more destructive. So why have they remained on the books after the growing societal costs of car bloat became impossible to miss? To find an answer, consider who benefits from oversized vehicles. American carmakers like Ford and GM (which are headquartered in Michigan, a crucial swing state) rely on juicy margins from big SUVs and pickups, which are more expensive and profitable than smaller models. They enjoy protection from foreign competition through tariffs like the Chicken Tax, as well as favorable policies like CAFE’s light-truck loophole. The regulatory status quo suits domestic automakers just fine — and they act as a roadblock to even modest attempts to change it. In 2022, for example, the largest auto industry association lobbied District of Columbia council members against a proposal to charge owners of the most egregiously oversized cars $500 per year, seven times more than a light sedan (the District adopted the policy anyway). Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images SUVs and trucks now overwhelmingly dominate the offerings of US carmakers. Here, a Cadillac SUV is on display at the 2019 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. As American sales of big SUVs and trucks have surged, their owners are likely to resist policy moves they see as penalizing them. Many are likely to be unaware of the federal loopholes and policy oversights that have distorted their vehicle choices. The negative externalities of supersized cars — in emissions, crash deaths, and the erosion of tires and pavement — are what economists call a market failure, since their costs are borne by society writ large, not the people who buy big pickups and SUVs. Left unaddressed, those societal costs will grow as more people replace their modest-sized cars with big SUVs or trucks. After all, everyone else seems to be doing it — why not do the same, if only for self-preservation? Regulation can end such a cycle toward enormity. Countries including France and Norway have enacted weight-based taxes to counteract car bloat’s collective costs and avoid giving huge vehicles implicit subsidies. But American policymakers have done the exact opposite, and they rarely even acknowledge the problem. Asked explicitly about ways that the Department of Transportation could address car bloat, Secretary Pete Buttigieg ducked, calling merely for “further research.” With the feds refusing to lead, it has fallen on state and local leaders to try and address car bloat themselves. Colorado and California, for instance, have proposed weight-based vehicle registration fees, following the District of Columbia’s lead. But such moves are an imperfect solution to a national problem (vehicles can, after all, be driven across state lines). A true policy fix will require action from Congress, NHTSA, and the EPA. It need not begin with new regulations or taxes. Federal leaders could do a world of good if they simply unwind the ill-advised policies already on the books. Kendra Levine contributed research assistance.