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Americans are eating less meat. And more meat. How?

4 h

vox.com

The average American’s meat consumption is among the highest in the world. | Jeffrey Greenberg/Education Images/Universal Images Group via Getty Images In recent decades, the average American has steadily increased their consumption of meat, milk, and eggs, to a staggering 224 pounds of red meat and poultry, 280 eggs, 20.5 pounds of fish, and 667 pounds of dairy per year — among the highest rates in the world. The dominance of animal products on Americans’ plates has had grave consequences for animals, nearly all of which are factory-farmed, and has also accelerated climate change and the polluting of America’s waterways. But these numbers are just population-wide averages — they don’t tell us much about the diverse range of dietary habits among 335 million Americans, nor about how many people swear off meat and other animal products altogether. Understanding rates of vegetarianism and veganism, in particular, is tricky because people aren’t always reliable narrators of their own diets. Somewhere between 2 to 6 percent of Americans surveyed say they’re vegetarian, but many of these same people also report they’ve recently consumed meat. This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter Sign up here for Future Perfect’s biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more. Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com! Surveys on vegetarianism and meat consumption are “notoriously unreliable,” Zach Freitas-Groff, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. In an attempt to understand what people are actually eating, Freitas-Groff and two fellow economists — Trevor Woolley at the University of California, Berkeley and Carl Meyer at Stanford University — reviewed people’s grocery receipts. The team analyzed tens of thousands of households’ grocery purchases from 2005 to 2020 to see how Americans’ meat consumption had changed over time. Their findings were published in June as a working paper — not yet peer-reviewed, so the results should be viewed as tentative — by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Their findings represent a growing chasm in American meat consumption: The number of households that avoid meat has increased slightly, while all other households have increased their meat purchases by an average of nearly 15 percent by weight relative to other foods. Overall grocery sales declined during this period, as Americans ate more of their meals outside the home, but as a share of groceries, meat purchases increased significantly. From 2005 to 2020, the share of households that didn’t purchase any meat at the grocery store increased from 4.1 to 4.6 percent — a 12 percent jump. The share of households purchasing no animal products — meat, milk, or eggs — doubled, from a tiny 0.5 percent to a still-tiny 1 percent. “The increase in meat avoiders is promising, but over 15 years, the increase appears very modest,” Joshua Tasoff, an economics professor at Claremont Graduate University who was not involved in the study, told Vox in an email. The authors are hesitant to make sweeping generalizations about the state of American meat consumption based on these findings. The study only looked at food purchased at the grocery store, they note, which accounts for about two-thirds of caloric intake, while the other third is eaten at restaurants and schools, which was not included in the study. The data also excludes meat sold at grocery store deli counters, including both raw meat and meat in prepared deli dishes. But the paper provides a more granular view into consumers’ relationship with meat than we’ve had before, dovetailing with other recent research findings, like a 2023 study showing that just 12 percent of Americans — mostly men and older people — eat 50 percent of the nation’s beef. Tasoff called the study an “impressive paper” that uses the best available data for consumer analysis. The study’s time period, from 2005 to 2020, coincides with a growth in news coverage of farm animal welfare — a time in which numerous animal rights groups grew from tiny grassroots organizations into well-oiled machines; undercover investigations into factory farms gained national attention; around a dozen states passed farm animal welfare laws; cultural icons like Beyoncé and Billie Eilish promoted the benefits of plant-based eating; and plant-based meat and milk, made by companies such as Beyond Meat, Impossible Foods, and Oatly, went mainstream. But can increased media attention on factory farming — resulting from a growth in animal rights activism — and better vegetarian products explain the shift away from meat among a small but increasing share of American households? That might be part of it, the researchers concluded, but most of the shift, they found, can be attributed to other factors, including rising meat prices. Digging into the data on America’s shifting meat consumption Around two-thirds of the increase in meat avoidance, the researchers estimate, is attributable to higher meat prices and to people buying less food at grocery stores and more at restaurants and elsewhere. The remaining third? Some of it could stem from older generations dying and younger people becoming heads of households. According to the paper, households in which the head was born after 1980 are 50 percent more likely to avoid meat and around twice as likely not to buy any animal products compared to other households. In 2004, these households made up just 1 percent of the sample; by 2020, they accounted for 15 percent. If this trend holds, it could lead to a continued increase in households abstaining from meat in the decades to come, representing a bright spot in the paper’s otherwise discouraging findings. (Younger generations also tend to report higher rates of vegetarianism, flexitarianism, pescetarianism, and veganism in surveys.) The difference among age groups is even more stark when looking at rates of all animal product avoidance. About 2.5 percent of households whose heads were born after 1990 didn’t purchase any animal products; for other age groups, the share hovers around 0.5 to 1 percent. Though the study didn’t attempt to explain why younger people are avoiding animal products at such higher rates, it’s not unreasonable to think that animal advocacy — often directed at younger generations — could be changing social mores. That said, younger consumers have less money, so they could be more sensitive to rising meat prices, and they’re also more likely to eat away from home. The researchers also looked at whether the growth in media coverage of factory farming played a role in meat avoidance. It “depends on the model we use,” Woolley wrote in an email. “Taken all together, it looks like media coverage probably played a role, but it’s hard to determine the magnitude of the effect given that it isn’t consistently statistically significant (unlike the effect of prices and total grocery purchase volume). It does seem to hold some explanatory power though.” A 2011 study found that from 1991 to 2008, media coverage of cruelty on pig and poultry farms led to reduced demand for pork and poultry by 2.6 percent and 5 percent, respectively. As for the role of plant-based meat alternatives, while they’ve generated a lot of buzz in the media and pop culture, and the sector’s sales have grown significantly in recent years, it’s still far too small a market to explain why more households have moved away from meat. The study found that plant-based meat products had no discernible displacement effect on animal meat sales. However, some of the most popular brands, like Beyond Meat and Impossible, didn’t become widely available in grocery stores until the final years of the data used in the paper. Plant-based milks like oat and soy, however, displaced cow’s milk on a nearly 1-to-1 basis. Meat’s price isn’t right The overall picture painted by the study is grim for factory-farmed animals and our warming planet. A small number of households have started avoiding meat at the grocery store in recent decades, but they’re overshadowed by all other households, which seem to be buying more meat. The findings illustrate how critical the price of meat is to consumer behavior — a reality that’s painfully obvious to economists but often neglected in advocacy focused on animal cruelty. Work to change people’s hearts and minds may only go so far; changing the sticker price consumers see at the grocery store would likely have a much greater impact. Despite rising food prices over the last two decades, meat and other animal products remain relatively cheap. That’s not because raising and slaughtering animals is an inexpensive endeavor, but because livestock companies have been exhaustively deregulated, which in turn has diffused their costs throughout society. Farmed animals pay the cost with their suffering, as do wild animals in the form of mass deforestation and polluted rivers. Many farmers pay the cost by taking on a mountain of debt, while slaughterhouse workers pay the cost in lost fingers and limbs. Ultimately, all of us pay it in the form of climate change and increasingly ineffective antibiotics. If livestock producers were to internalize these costs — and if we were to do away with much of the subsidies doled out to industry — meat would cost a lot more, causing some consumers to reduce or eliminate their meat purchasing. According to True Price, a Dutch nonprofit that estimates the environmental cost of food, internalizing the environmental harms alone (excluding costs like animal cruelty and public health) of certain animal products would increase their price between two- and five-fold: Beef increases from $5.34 to $27.36 per pound Cheese increases from $3.74 to $7.50 per pound Chicken increases from $2.20 to $4.03 per pound Advocating for raising meat prices, especially after an election in which inflation and rising grocery bills played a major role in ousting the incumbent party, feels — to put it lightly — insensitive and politically risky. But at the same time, consumers enjoy low meat prices at a steep cost to society, while polluting meat companies celebrate record profits. Some governments are reconsidering this longstanding deregulatory paradigm.Just this week, the Danish government passed a modest tax on livestock emissions, and it’s also investing in programs to make plant-based foods, which are much more environmentally friendly than meat, more affordable. If we’re serious about ensuring planet Earth is habitable for future generations, and mitigating one of humanity’s greatest moral crimes, the rest of us will need to follow their lead.

Vox Releases 2024 Future Perfect 50 List Celebrating Inspiring Changemakers

8 h

vox.com

Vox today released the 2024 Future Perfect 50 list, its third annual celebration of the thinkers, innovators, and changemakers who are working to make the future a better place. This year’s project is Vox’s most ambitious yet, including dedicated profiles of each honoree and interviews with a select few. The Future Perfect 50 includes both familiar names such as director Christopher Nolan, recording artist Billie Eilish, and Michelin-starred chef and founder of World Central Kitchen José Andrés, and up-and-coming changemakers such as climate educator Isaias Hernandez, neuroscientist Kaela Singleton, and AI justice advocate Sneha Revanur. The list honors individuals doing groundbreaking work across six categories: Protecting animal rights Aligning on AI Fighting global poverty and health threats Expanding the mind Combating climate change Imagining the future “The Future Perfect 50 has always been more than just a list — it’s a snapshot of human potential and a roadmap to a better tomorrow,” writes Bryan Walsh, Vox editorial director, in an introductory essay. “As you read about this year’s honorees, we hope you’ll be inspired not just by their achievements, but also by their fundamental belief that progress is possible and that individual actions can catalyze systemic change.” In addition to the list, video interviews with author and philanthropist John Green and chef José Andrés will be shared across Vox’s social media channels. The full list of this year’s honorees is below: Protecting animal rights Rune-Christoffer Drasgdahl Katie Cantrell Brenda Sanders Elissa Lane and Jayasimha Nuggehalli Billie Eilish Monica Chen Dulce Ramirez Imagining the future Christopher Nolan L.M. Sacasas Niko McCarty C. Thi Nguyen Patrick Hsu and Silvana Konermann Cixin Liu Deb Chachra Aligning on artificial intelligence Anton Korinek Ellie Pavlick Jaime Sevilla Shannon Vallor Daniel Kokotajlo Nora Belrose Scott Wiener Dan Hendrycks Sneha Revanur Fighting global poverty and health threats John Green Adar Poonawalla Shruti Rajagopalan Andrew Chan and Yin Cao José Andrés Christian Happi Lillian Musila Combating climate change Matthew Hayek Daniel Swain Ayana Elizabeth Johnson Isaias Hernandez David Keith Vaclav Smil Emma Hakansson Robin Wall Kimmerer Expanding the mind Rafael Yuste Nita Farahay Jonathan Birch Kaela Singleton Jeff Sebo Sara Imari Walker Michael Levin Alison Gopnik Iain Couzin

America’s literacy crisis isn’t what you think

8 h

vox.com

Students in the library at PS 124 in New York City on February 2, 2022. This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. “Kids can’t read anymore.” We heard this refrain earlier this month, when some connected a decline in reading among young people, as well as a shift toward getting news and information from short-form video, with the recent presidential election victory of Donald Trump. But the concerns about kids’ reading have been piling up for years, with educators and other commentators worrying that students can’t recognize letters, that kids’ novels are falling out of fashion, and that young people are getting into college without being able to read a full book. I know that the pandemic took a toll on kids’ test scores in reading and math. But I also know that older generations love to complain about ne’er-do-well young folks who can’t be bothered to crack open a book. So I reached out to educators and literacy scholars to find out how far behind kids really are, and what their reading skills (or lack thereof) mean for their future as voters, news consumers, and citizens of the world. While kids’ reading performance has slid in recent years, some experts say the language of “crisis” is overblown. In fact, reading scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), one of the most widely used nationwide measures of student achievement, haven’t changed that much since the tests were introduced in 1969, Catherine Snow, a professor of cognition and education at Harvard Graduate School of Education, told me. “They haven’t plummeted,” Snow said. “They didn’t even plummet during Covid. They went down a little bit.” What has plummeted, however, is how much kids read, especially outside of school. In 1984, the first year for which data is available, 35 percent of 13-year-olds reported reading for fun “almost every day,” according to NAEP. By 2023, that figure was down to 14 percent, and 31 percent of respondents said they never read for fun at all. Kids are also faring worse on tests that measure their information literacy, including their ability to recognize reliable sources. Those results are indicative of a broader problem. Kids may be learning basic literacy, but “they’re not reading in the ways that they need to read in order to be prepared for the tasks of learning and critical thinking,” Snow said. And a decline in those critical thinking skills has big implications not just for young people today, but for society as a whole. “These are our voters,” Christina Cover, a special education teacher in the Bronx who leads the Project for Adolescent Literacy at the nonprofit Seek Common Ground, told me. “These are people that are really going to be taking us into what’s next for our country and for our world.” Kids’ reading scores have been (relatively) stable for decades The NAEP tests, administered every two years for five decades, offer a bird’s-eye view of how American kids’ reading proficiency has changed over time. After climbing through the 2000s, scores began to dip around 2012, a trend that intensified with the pandemic. That drop has educators concerned, with many calling for expanded tutoring, summer school, and other supports to help kids get back on track. At the same time, even the post-Covid numbers aren’t that far off from historical norms. In 1971, the first year for which data is available, the average NAEP score for 9-year-olds was 208 out of a possible 500. In 2022, it was 215. To be clear, those scores aren’t great. It’s also disappointing to see students losing some of the ground they gained through the 2000s, and the pandemic dealt very real setbacks, especially for low-income students and other already-underserved groups. Teachers now have to “reach back, and maybe grab or review those previous standards” that students should have been taught in 2020 and 2021, Evelyn Rudolph, a reading interventionist at LEAD Academy, a public charter school in Montgomery, Alabama, told me. But the story of students’ reading scores over the last several decades is one of “a very stable level of mediocrity,” Snow has said, not of sudden crisis. But reading for pleasure has plummeted That’s the good-ish news. More worrisome — or at least more precipitous — is the decline in kids’ reading for pleasure. While there were hints of a decrease in the ’90s, the slide seems to have started in earnest in the 2010s — in 2012, 27 percent of 13-year-olds read for fun every day, compared with just 17 percent in 2020. Experts aren’t exactly sure why so many kids stopped reading, but the trend coincides with the widespread adoption of smartphones, said Ebony Walton, a statistician at the National Center for Education Statistics, which administers the NAEP tests. Other hypotheses include funding cuts to libraries, and an excessive focus on standardized testing that has crowded out practices that instill a love of reading, like teachers reading books aloud to students. Whatever the case, the decline of reading for fun is a problem, and not just for children’s authors. “When a student reads for fun and enjoys reading outside of school, there are so many benefits that they might not even realize,” from learning new vocabulary to gaining “the background knowledge needed to approach different academic areas in school,” Cover said. The skills that students use when reading for fun — especially reading longer texts — are also the same ones they need for everything from reading car manuals to “listening to political discourse and making sense of it,” Snow said. The importance of reading skills for civic engagement has been a hot-button topic lately, with Washington Post columnist Ishaan Tharoor calling young people today a “generation trending toward post-literacy” that “gets its information from bits and bobs of video while scrolling.” While “post-literacy” might be a stretch, Snow and other experts are concerned that the decline in reading could make young people more susceptible to disinformation. There’s some evidence that this is already happening. US eighth-graders’ average score on the International Computer and Information Literacy Study assessment, which measures skills including recognizing reliable online sources, dropped 37 points between 2018 and 2023, to 482 out of a possible 700. American students fared worse on the assessment than students in most European countries, as well as South Korea and Taiwan. The decline in reading for pleasure can feel impossible to reverse, given the number of alternatives available to kids today. But experts say some simple strategies can help. For Snow, it’s about treating reading not simply as an academic skill to master, but “as a tool for engaging in important activities, like learning about things you’re interested in.” Reading can be a way to engage with the social justice issues that many tweens and teens are passionate about — “but those connections are not always made in schools,” Snow said. It’s also important to encourage students to read what they like, in the way they like, whether that’s in a book or on an iPad or other device, Cover said. More companies are springing up to create reading materials specifically for Gen Alpha audiences, like Storyshares, which offers books written by young people themselves. Kids “are reading in the world around them every single day,” Cover said. It’s up to educators to show them that “it’s not just something in isolation, but something that can enrich every other area of their life.” What I’m reading The accessories retailer Claire’s, a staple of many ’90s mall outings, is launching a fragrance collection in an effort to appeal to what it calls “Gen Zalpha” customers. The scents, priced at $24.99 or less, include one that smells like pistachio and vanilla. Schools in California and around the country are racing to prepare for the Trump administration and its potential effects on undocumented and LGBTQ students. Trump Health and Human Services pick Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is correct that chronic diseases like diabetes and asthma are worryingly common in American children, according to the New York Times. He is wrong, however, to blame vaccines and fluoridated water for the problem. My 2-year-old and I have been enjoying Little Owl’s Night, a very sweet board book that flips the bedtime story script by having its protagonist go to sleep when morning comes. It also includes the eerie line, “Mama, tell me again how night ends.” From my inbox Last week, I asked about your kids’ experiences with reading, and one reader, Kelly, had an experience that might be helpful for kids who struggle with reading for fun. “Two of my four children have dyslexia, so we were a little slower to become a ‘read to yourself’ family,” Kelly wrote. “But audiobooks meant they still grew up loving reading from an early age… just in a different form.” The kids’ grandmother “introduced my then-3-year-old daughter to Peter Pan on audiobook on her iPod, earbuds attached, and my daughter was hooked,” Kelly wrote. “In the nine years since, we’ve checked out literal thousands of audiobooks on Libby — for free thanks to the Los Angeles Public Library — and my kids listen for several hours every day.”

There’s never been a better time to buy a used phone

9 h

vox.com

Not unlike a used car, the average iPhone has three owners throughout its lifespan. A couple years ago, just before Black Friday, I decided to replace my old, cracked Apple Watch with a non-cracked equivalent. One thing led to another, and I had spent less than I’d planned on a nicer watch than I thought I could afford. The catch: It was refurbished. The “r” word used to be a bad one in the gadget world. A decade ago, to many people, refurbished meant used, scuffed, and maybe a little bit broken. Secondhand devices didn’t always have the best reputation. However, as the right to repair movement has pushed consumer technology companies to make their products easier to fix, a new crop of marketplaces for used and refurbished goods has captured the attention of anyone who either loves a deal or cares about the environment, or both. And these cheaper options are better than ever. You may have heard of Back Market, a Paris-based refurbished marketplace that promises to sell you “tech that’s better for the planet.” Then there are more specialized sites, like Gazelle, which primarily sells refurbished phones and laptops, and VIP Outlet, which specializes in refurbishing retail returns. Decluttr sells old CDs and DVDs alongside refurbished tablets and gaming consoles. Even big retailers, including Amazon, eBay, Walmart, and Best Buy, are in the refurbished marketplace game now, too. Prices and warranties vary, based on what you’re buying and when, but no matter where you shop, purchasing secondhand comes with a certain cachet. It’s the sensible thing to do, according to Lucas Gutterman, director of the Designed to Last Campaign at the US PIRG Education Fund. “It’s not a bad thing for people to buy new phones,” Gutterman told me. “It’s just the idea that we should buy them every year, every other year — that seems like it’s way too much for the environment.” We certainly can’t make an infinite amount of devices with the finite number of rare earth metals on this planet. And extending the lives of phones already on the market comes with huge upside. A recent study from the French government claimed that buying a refurbished phone instead of a new one avoids the extraction of 180 pounds of raw materials and emitted 50 pounds of greenhouse gasses. Put differently, buying the refurbished device over the new one lowers the overall environmental impact by as much as 91 percent. Taking the refurbished route wasn’t always framed as a way to fight climate change. The practice grew out of corporate IT departments’ constant need to supply machines to employees in the early days of personal computers. If an employee left the company, rather than buy a new computer, IT wiped their machines, repaired it if needed, and then assigned it to a new employee. It didn’t take long before a cottage industry emerged to sell used but restored devices to consumers. That industry is now huge and getting bigger every year. The number of used and refurbished smartphone shipments grew nearly 10 percent from 2022 to 2023, while the number of new smartphone shipments declined by over 3 percent, according to the market intelligence firm IDC. That adds up to the secondary market for phones being worth about $65 billion in 2023, and it’s expected to grow to nearly $110 billion by 2027. These big numbers reflect an industry that’s gone from mom-and-pop shops selling fixed-up laptops to multiple mainstream marketplaces where millions of people buy everything from phones and computers to watches and video game consoles. The competition between those marketplaces also means that quality and customer experience is vastly improved. Now, refurbished gadgets often come with the same long warranties, trade-in options, and payment plans as new devices. One surprising thing The logistics of online shopping comes with a significant carbon footprint. However, the original manufacturing process for devices like phones are much more significant. Shipping a phone in a 1-pound package 500 miles produces about 1.3 pounds of greenhouse gas emissions. Manufacturing an iPhone 16 Plus, according to Apple, produces 110 to 167 pounds of emissions. Plus, the latest devices tend to have fewer new features that would make upgrading worthwhile. “People are less excited about getting another camera lens on their phone or getting a new button on the side of the iPhone,” Gutterman said. Spending less on a refurbished phone and feeling better about your environmental impact is just a better choice for a growing number of people, he explained. The refurbished market is also more transparent than it’s ever been. It all starts with a gadget that ended up in the inventory of a refurbisher or original equipment manufacturer. Often, it’s simply a device that someone else traded in or sent back for a warranty or insurance claim. Both refurbishers and manufacturers refurbish these kinds of devices by wiping them, fixing any hardware issues, repairing any cosmetic damage, cleaning them, and boxing them back up. (This can happen several times over the lifespan of a product.) Then the device goes on the market. Most marketplaces also give you options to buy items in different conditions, from poor to premium, at different prices. Some devices sold on the secondhand market are actually new, too. Cleland explained to me that some of the inventory that ends up in the refurbishers’ hands includes products that were sold and returned but never used. That’s thanks, in part, to the boom in online returns, especially since the pandemic, which has led to a liquidation market worth hundreds of billions of dollars that’s finding new homes for all kinds of secondhand goods, from furniture to construction equipment. For phones and tablets, there’s even a standardized method for grading the condition of used devices to streamline the process of reselling and refurbishing them. It all adds up to better, cheaper secondhand goods. “It’s estimated now that anytime a new iPhone comes out, it’s going to have at least three different users over its lifespan, because it’s going to get either traded or dropped and then resold,” Sean Cleland, vice president of mobile at the marketplace B-Stock Solutions, told me. “Like, back in the day, people would just put their old phone in the drawer.” If you zoom out, what’s happening with refurbished phones and other electronics is a shining example of what a circular economy can do. A circular economy aims to keep products in use as long as possible through refurbishing, repairing, and recycling to conserve resources and open up new economic opportunities. While the term has been around since the late 1980s, the circular economy concept has gained popularity in recent years. The European Union even adopted a circular economy action plan in 2020 that set forth a number of policies and strategies to promote sustainable development. These government incentives have perhaps helped marketplaces such as the Back Market to thrive in France and across Europe. “Going circular and finding ways to reuse the old inventory to create new things, I think, is necessary,” Cleland said. “As resources dip but consumer demand increases, you’ve got to figure out a new way.” American companies are embracing the circular economy model as well. Amazon now has Amazon Renewed, which launched in 2017 and features the same fast shipping you get with other Amazon products as well as a 90-day free return policy, which goes up to one year for some premium products. Meanwhile, eBay offers a two-year warranty on certified refurbished products, which are delivered like new, as well as one year on lower-grade used goods. Walmart Restored similarly has a one-year minimum warranty on premium refurbished goods, and 90 days on everything else. Target sells items refurbished by the original manufacturer with a six-month minimum warranty. Back Market’s warranty is good for one year across the board. Warranty is only one factor to consider when choosing where to buy refurbished goods, says PIRG’s Gutterman. You should avoid buying refurbished items that aren’t designed to last, like Apple AirPods, as well as bulky items like TVs, which can be easily damaged. You should also make sure manufacturers still support software updates on older devices. Here’s a list of iPhone models that support the latest iOS 18 software, for instance. (You can find more tips in this recently updated guide to buying — and gifting — refurbished products that Gutterman co-authored.) If you’re like me, you might just want to find the best deal. My Apple Watch battery is starting to fail, so I’m actually thinking about getting it repaired or getting a new one. Since the market for refurbished gadgets has blown up so much in the past few years, I have more options to upgrade than I did a few years ago. And as much as I’d like to try the new features, it might feel better to trade mine in, let it find its way to a new owner, and live a little longer. A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!

Gen Z superstar Billie Eilish doesn’t separate climate activism from animal welfare

10 h

vox.com

Billie Eilish could eat that girl for lunch — but she’s certainly not eating any animals for dinner. The 22-year-old pop star has a lot of triumphs under her belt: nine Grammys, two Oscars, and two Golden Globes. Her music has been nearly inescapable in the last year, from a sultry feature on Charli XCX’s “Guess” remix to the emotive “What Was I Made For” for the blockbuster Barbie movie. But arguably one of her biggest — yet under-recognized — achievements is making caring about animal welfare more accessible … and cool. A vegan of almost a decade, Eilish has dedicated a large portion of her career to improving the music industry’s sustainability, as well as encouraging her fans to consider plant-based diets. While she grew up vegetarian and had never eaten meat, she understands what it means to give up something you enjoy: Dairy was a fixture in her family’s life. “With dairy, my God, did I love cheese and milk,” she told Los Angeles Magazine in 2023. “I was very, very against going vegan. [Then] my mom went vegan, then my brother, then my dad. I was the only one not vegan for years.”The shift came as she learned about the horrifying consequences of the meat and dairy industries. Researchers estimate that animal agriculture is responsible for between 15 and 20 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions and takes up more than a third of the planet’s habitable land. The factory farm system brutally kills more than 80 billion land animals a year, as Future Perfect has long reported — animals that are crammed in tiny cages, forced to endure cruel abuses, and generally never go outside. It also takes a toll on the communities living near factory farms. One study found that in eastern North Carolina — a major chicken and pig factory farm state — residents who live near these farms experience higher rates of kidney disease and infant mortality compared to other rural residents. Workers, too, face higher risks of exposure to potential new viruses: So far, sick workers account for nearly all of California’s cattle-to-human transmissions of bird flu in October. “Once you know that kind of thing and you see it, it’s really hard to go back,” Eilish said in a 2021 video interview with Vogue. “And now, even though I have lots of friends that eat dairy and meat and I don’t ever want to tell anybody what to do, I just can’t go on in my life knowing what’s going on in the animal world and like, not doing anything about it.” Celebrity advocacy often boils down to raising awareness, which can be effective, especially when you have 120 million Instagram followers and a sold-out 83-stop world tour. Eilish, the first singer born in the 21st century to have a single top the Billboard 100, also has a palpable Gen Z je nais se quoi when talking about animal rights. She’s relatable. When she went on the YouTube talk show Hot Ones (where guests are challenged to eat spicy chicken wings) five years ago, she joked about growing up with the internet and bad talent shows, all while noshing on very spicy (vegan!) chicken nuggets and without making a big deal about the swap. “Vegans have a reputation of being incredibly annoying,” she told Los Angeles Magazine. “And a lot of the time, they are. Sorry. Because you know why? Nobody wants to be told what to do … I want it to be clear that I’m not preaching.” But Eilish’s work for animals also extends far beyond just speaking up about the conditions in factory farms or zoos. She subtly nudges her fans to make more environmentally friendly choices by spotlighting her 120 favorite vegan restaurants in tour cities, ensuring that plant-based meals are available at every venue, and limiting her merch drops to focus on affordable, sustainable options. (Her perfumes, too, do not test on animals.) “Sometimes people have the idea of when things are more ethical, they’re more expensive, and so it’s harder to be plant-based or environmentally conscious if you don’t have as much money,” Eilish told Billboard back in March. “And so what we’re trying to do is make it more universally accessible.” On a larger scale, the “Birds of a Feather” singer fights for progress by forcing change within large institutions, like major fashion brands. The fashion industry — from wool to leather to down — maims and kills billions of animals for clothing and footwear every year. There’s also a pervasive misconception that fabrics like leather and wool are merely byproducts of meat production, rather than co-products that make up a meaningful share of animal agriculture’s profits. The problem has only accelerated with the normalization of hyperconsumerism. In 2022, Eilish worked with Nike to create the first vegan leather Air Force 1 sneakers, made with 18 percent recycled materials. More notably, when Eilish was a co-chair for the Met Gala in 2021, she pushed for designer Oscar de la Renta to permanently stop using fur — otherwise she wouldn’t work with them. They did. “That was really important to me,” Eilish told Billboard. “It’s tough as a person who loves fashion. I’ve tried to be a big advocate of no animal products in clothing and it’s hard. People really like classic things. I get it, I’m one of them. But what’s more important: things being original or our kids being able to live on the planet and them having kids?” To Eilish, veganism isn’t a diet. It’s a way of interacting with the world. Change can be as small as opting for a mushroom burger at a concert or as big as changing an entire business model. In a culture increasingly shaped by celebrity tastes and influence, Eilish stands out as one who is using her power for good.

How Christopher Nolan made the threat of nuclear extinction feel real

10 h

vox.com

When Christopher Nolan began writing the screenplay for Oppenheimer in the early 2020s, his teenage son questioned whether anyone still cared about nuclear weapons. By the time the film was released in 2023, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Vladimir Putin’s nuclear saber-rattling had thrust atomic anxieties back into public consciousness. The timing was coincidental, but it highlighted precisely why Nolan’s recent work matters: He creates true blockbusters that force audiences to grapple with humanity’s most profound existential challenges. Oppenheimer, which won both Best Picture and Best Director in 2024, represented the culmination of Nolan’s long-running artistic exploration of how scientific advancement can simultaneously fulfill humanity’s greatest hopes and create its most terrible dangers. The film chronicles J. Robert Oppenheimer’s journey from brilliant theoretical physicist to “father of the atomic bomb,” capturing both the intoxicating intellectual achievements of the Manhattan Project — what Oppenheimer himself called the “technically sweet” — and the moral horror of unleashing nuclear weapons on the world. “Part of the intention of the film is to reiterate the unique and extraordinary danger of nuclear weapons. That’s something we should all be thinking about all the time and care about very, very deeply,” Nolan told the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists last year. But beyond just raising awareness, the director aimed to strip away decades of dry policy papers and arcane philosophical frameworks that have normalized the existence of nuclear arsenals quite literally capable of destroying the world. In Oppenheimer, Nolan renewed the terror at the heart of these weapons viewed through the eyes of those scientists who oversaw their terrible birth. This focus on making existential risk real and immediate rather than abstract has been found throughout Nolan’s recent work. His 2014 film Interstellar envisioned humanity’s desperate search for habitable planets as environmental catastrophe renders Earth increasingly uninhabitable. 2020’s Tenet, released in the teeth of the Covid pandemic, explored themes of technological knowledge that, once uncovered, cannot be put back in the box. (And even if you struggle, as I initially did, with Tenet’s non-linear chronology, you can appreciate how great stars John David Washington and Robert Pattinson look in those suits.) His films refuse to paint scientists as either heroes or villains, instead showing them as brilliant but fallible humans wrestling with the consequences of their discoveries — consequences we all now have to live with. But Oppenheimer represented his most direct confrontation yet with how scientific progress creates unprecedented moral burdens. The film’s pivotal moment — the moment that initially inspired Nolan to begin the project — comes when Oppenheimer’s team at Los Alamos realizes there was a small but real possibility that the first nuclear test might ignite the atmosphere and destroy all life on Earth. After some debate — with Matt Damon’s brusque Gen. Leslie Groves playing the shocked audience surrogate — they proceed anyway. “That struck me as the most dramatic situation in the history of the world,” Nolan told the Bulletin. “That’s a responsibility that nobody else in the history of the world had ever faced.” What makes Nolan’s treatment of these weighty themes remarkable is his insistence on tackling them through the lens of mass-market entertainment rather than niche documentary. He employs the cutting edge of big-budget filmmaking — from practical effects to IMAX cameras — to make abstract dangers feel immediate and real. For Oppenheimer, he even refused to use computer graphics for the nuclear explosions, believing that only practical effects could convey the genuine terror such weapons should inspire. And audiences’ reactions proved him right. The approach has proved remarkably effective at reaching audiences that might otherwise tune out discussions of existential risk — and as someone who has written a book on precisely that subject, I can tell you that’s no easy feat. Oppenheimer earned over $950 million globally while sparking meaningful public discourse about nuclear weapons. The director’s greatest concern now is how easily society can normalize even the most terrible risks, and why it is so important to fight back. When he accepted a BAFTA award for Oppneheimer, Nolan told the audience, “Our film ends on what is a dramatically necessary note of despair, but in the world all kinds of individuals and organizations have fought long and hard to reduce the number of nuclear weapons.” Still, he continued, “of late, that has gone the wrong way,” as the nuclear arms control regime teeters on collapse. Through films that marry entertainment with ethical weight, Nolan has emerged as one of Hollywood’s most effective voices for keeping humanity’s greatest challenges squarely in the public consciousness. He reminds us that existential risks aren’t just abstract policy issues — they’re profound human dramas that demand our attention and moral consideration. In an era when many choose to look away from humanity’s gravest threats, Nolan insists we look directly at them, in all their terrifying scope and complexity.

The climate crisis is a big problem. Marine biologist Ayana Elizabeth Johnson is dreaming of even bigger solutions.

10 h

vox.com

Here’s an exercise for you: Imagine the trajectory of our current climate crisis. You probably don’t need to imagine very hard what this future looks like because we’re seeing it play out in the present: towns torn apart by massive hurricanes, thousands displaced by wildfires, lives taken by extreme heat. All of it is enough to make a person freeze with fear. But there is a flip side to this terror. Such an all-consuming problem inherently requires innovative solutions and adaptations of epic proportions. So here’s another exercise: Close your eyes and think, what could a world that hasn’t just taken the climate crisis seriously but also risen to the challenge look like? Envisioning a better future in the face of serious climate threats might seem like lofty daydreaming, especially when we take into consideration our world leaders’ inaction. But Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, a marine biologist and climate policy wonk, has spent much of her career dreaming and coming up with climate solutions — and she knows that nihilism and avoidance won’t get us anywhere. In her recently published book, What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, Johnson tackles how we can transform our ways of being, thinking, and doing to stop the worst of climate change. She expertly intertwines her conversations with scientists, artists, and activists to create a practical and accessible guidebook for a more just future brimming with possibilities — a salve for even the most environmentally anxious. “Peril and possibility coexist,” she writes in the book. Of course, she’s well aware of just how big of an environmental mess our world is in, but you won’t catch her dwelling on the worst-case scenarios for long. “We’re pretty fucked,” Johnson said in her September interview on Vox’s The Gray Area, “but there’s a lot we could do to have a better possible future.” Johnson is particularly adept at speaking to those who know the climate crisis is real but have the instinct to bury their head in the sand at the thought of such a massive existential crisis. Though she is frank about the state of our world’s environmental health, she speaks and writes with an energizing clarity — whether it’s conversing with climate advocates for her book tour or breaking down big environmental questions as a co-host of the podcast How to Save a Planet. It’s Johnson’s understanding of our instinct to flee the climate problems that has made it essential for her to explore the possibilities to address it and take action that goes beyond protesting or voting. These are important measures, Johnson believes, but also broad ones that aren’t necessarily fine-tuned to our individual experiences, skills, and interests. For Johnson, a Brooklyn native who calls the ocean her love before it became her career, that looked like co-founding Urban Ocean Lab (UOL) in 2018. The nonprofit think tank specializes in researching coastal cities in the United States — places that one in five Americans call home and are often vulnerable to some of the worst environmental disasters — and developing equitable, pragmatic policy recommendations for these regions. One such recommendation is UOL’s climate readiness framework for coastal cities. It’s a comprehensive collection of over 70 actions that coastal communities can apply to better adapt to current and future climate risks, such as working with community-based organizations to strengthen disaster preparedness plans and developing home relocation programs for low-income residents and people of color living in climate-vulnerable places. The Caribbean region in particular has a special place in Johnson’s heart — her late father hailed from Jamaica, whose waters have suffered from pollution and overfishing. “To me, ocean conservation is in part about cultural preservation,” she writes after reflecting on her father’s life between Jamaica and New York City. “We are losing something more fundamental than a meal: a way of life.” It makes sense that Johnson has also worked to improve the waters surrounding these islands. Prior to founding UOL, she led an ocean management policy project called the Blue Halo Initiative at the Waitt Institute, where she served as executive director. Starting in Barbuda in 2013, Johnson focused on engaging with the community, interviewing hundreds of fishers and residents to develop policy recommendations for better preserving the waters and the species within it. Just a year later, the Barbuda Council signed into law a set of ocean zoning policies to protect underwater ecosystems and ensure sustainable fishing. These efforts were soon replicated in Montserrat and Curaçao. Johnson’s reverence for the ocean and the career she’s made out of it has made its way into the American political sphere, too. Back in 2019, the Green New Deal, a set of proposed progressive climate policies, was supported by left-leaning candidates up and down the ballot. Johnson had just one issue with it: It left out our seas almost entirely. “I was feeling bummed about the ocean getting short shrift in the Green New Deal Resolution — just a single, vague reference to the ocean,” Johnson wrote in What If We Get It Right? That summer, Johnson co-authored an op-ed in Grist about this big blue gap and what solutions to fill it with. Within that year, Johnson was contacted by Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s 2020 presidential campaign to help write what would become the Blue New Deal, an official policy platform for the Warren campaign. It was an extensive list of actions, like expanding marine protected areas, building climate-smart ports, and holding Big Agriculture accountable for water pollution. When Johnson later met Sen. Warren, she wrote in What If We Get It Right? that “[Senator Warren] told me it was the plan that got the most excited mentions in her selfie lines.” And while Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination and the election, his administration became the first to put out a federal Ocean Climate Action plan — which included similar elements to the Blue New Deal — after dozens of businesses and organizations (including UOL) pushed the White House to do so. There are a lot of studies that show engaging with nature helps our physical and mental well-being, so it’s not surprising that conserving our environment is important for many people. One word that Johnson often uses and embodies is “biophilia”: a love for nature and life, and in her words, “a powerful driving force for conservation.” With this in mind, I have one more exercise for you: Think of moments you’ve felt biophilia. Maybe you once walked through a lush forest, swam in a pristine lake, or witnessed snow-capped mountains up close. Perhaps you’ve encountered one of the millions of amazing creatures that inhabit these ecosystems. But how can one hold onto this sense of biophilia if much of our ways of life are destroying the very essence of it? It’s all the more reason not to let our worries immobilize us and instead try to get it right, just as Johnson has done. Her wide-ranging expertise on climate policy; deeply empathetic and inclusive lens for climate solutions; and her unwavering, contagious biophilia has made her a bold visionary to follow in the climate space. How apt that a lover of the ocean is making waves. —Sam Delgado

John Green’s crusade to make the world “suck less”

10 h

vox.com

Whether he is writing novels about young love, contemplating our species’ long-term prospects, or supporting public health projects abroad, John Green is driven by one mission: “I’m trying to make the case that humanity is worth it.” It began with a YouTube channel, Vlogbrothers, in which he and his brother, Hank, an author and entrepreneur, exchanged messages with each other and their audience ranging from the mundane to the esoteric, and in doing so, nurtured a massive community focused on global problems. John Green’s 2012 young adult novel, The Fault in Our Stars, became one of the best-selling books of this century and propelled him to celebrity status, giving him the metaphorical equivalent of a “giant robot suit,” as he put it in his characteristically nerdy parlance. With the newfound fame, the brothers aspired to make the world “suck less.”(Green credits their parents, both activists, for that passion.) In the intervening years, their YouTube following has grown to 3.8 million, and they have become genuine forces in global health philanthropy, organizing massive fundraising drives for their chosen causes and confronting global pharmaceutical giants. These interests have inspired Green’s creative pursuits, including the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed and its follow-up book, both of which grapple with the world as humanity has made it. His next book, Everything Is Tuberculosis, which is set to come out in March, will center on Green’s latest obsession: TB, the infectious disease that kills more people than any other. Last year, Green launched a successful campaign to pressure pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson to stop reported patent abuses that were inflating the cost of a lifesaving tuberculosis drug. He has also raised more than $35 million for a Partners in Health project to reduce maternal mortality in Sierra Leone, which until recently had the highest rate of women dying in childbirth in the world. That money will help pay for a new government hospital set to open in the coming months. Green and I spoke in October about his humanitarian work, how it has complicated his awkward relationship with celebrity, and why he retains a stubborn optimism about humankind. You started vlogbrothers with this idea that “We want to make the world suck less.” How do you conceptualize why the world sucks? There are ways that the world sucks that the world just sucks. This species has been around for 250,000 years; for 249,800 of those years, about half of children died before the age of 5. That just sucks. It’s completely unfair. It’s wildly unjust. But there was nothing that we could do about it. The ways the world sucks that most interest me are the ways the world sucks because of human-built systems, because those problems have human-buildable solutions. Your forthcoming book is called Everything Is Tuberculosis. What does that mean exactly? Tuberculosis is the deadliest infectious disease in the world. It kills about 1.3 million people every year. It’s gonna kill over 100,000 people this month. All of those deaths are needless because we’ve had the cure to tuberculosis since the mid-1950s. What does it mean to live in that world? What does it mean to live in a world where the deadliest infectious disease has been curable since my father was born? It means that we’re doing an extraordinarily poor job of distributing resources. Our systems of marshaling and distributing resources have obviously failed in this case. It’s clearly a human-built problem that has a human-buildable solution, which is encouraging to me. We are the cause of tuberculosis, which also means that we can be the cure of tuberculosis. When I say in the book title that everything is tuberculosis, I really do mean it. Tuberculosis radically shaped American geography. It’s the reason that cities like Pasadena and Colorado Springs and Asheville, North Carolina, exist. It’s the reason New Mexico is a state. It’s one of the reasons World War I happened. It radically reshaped almost everything about our lives. It’s been this quiet force throughout human history that’s pushing us this way and that, that we often don’t notice, but it’s a really, really profound force in human history. I just listened to your podcast episode about humanity’s temporal range. I’ve more than once heard you describe how your existence would be completely unrecognizable to somebody who lived a couple of centuries ago. Why is it so challenging for us to remember that context, the long history that has created the world in which we now live? Well, in the dreary grind of daily living, as I think Robert Penn Warren called it, it’s really hard to remember historical context because we’re busy trying to pay the mortgage and trying to make sure our kids get to school on time and trying to get them to eat some breakfast before they go. I feel that too. Believe me, I struggled to get my kids to eat breakfast this morning. It’s so easy to feel hopeless in our current moment. I’m someone who’s unusually prone to despair. Maybe I’ve been fighting this for a long time, which is why I’m so focused on it. Part of the reason we feel despair is because we don’t see long-term change when we’re just looking at crisis after crisis after crisis after crisis. When I try to contextualize my life and the world and our place in that world, I feel more hopeful because I see more examples that give me cause for hope. In the last 30 years, we’ve reduced child mortality by over 50 percent, the fastest decline in human history. Yet, the last 30 years have sucked terribly. Both of these things are true at the same time and holding those competing ideas together is really challenging, but I also think it’s essential. You’ve touched on something I wanted to ask you about, that I think about a lot. I have three kids under the age of 6. They are ignorant of all of the world’s problems. God bless you. Something that we talk about at Future Perfect is the perception among a lot of young people that the world sucks, that it’s getting worse, and that it could end catastrophically, maybe even pretty soon, whether that’s because of climate change or some other existential risk. What do you hear from your audience about their outlook on humanity’s future and how do you respond to their concerns? How do you resolve that tension for yourself? A lot of the people I hear from feel very hopeless and very scared, and they do feel like the world sucks and is getting worse. In important ways, they’re right, and I think it’s really important to acknowledge that they’re right. I don’t know what it’s like to have my high school graduation ruined by a global pandemic. I don’t know what it’s like to see housing and education and health care all become progressively less affordable than they’ve ever been. I don’t know what it’s like to grow up in the world that they’re growing up in. At the same time, they don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a world where 12 million kids die every year before the age of five, whereas now fewer than 6 million do. When I talk to young people about this, I try not to minimize their concerns because I think their concerns are real. Climate change is a catastrophe and it has the potential to be a catastrophe beyond our current imagining. There are profound and growing inequities in our world today. That’s all real. But at the same time, it is also true that people have been predicting the end of the world since the moment that they realized the world might end. By the end of the world, of course, I don’t mean the end of life on Earth. Life on Earth will be just fine without us — arguably, from its perspective, better. I mean the end of humanity in the world. I’m very afraid of that. It’s my biggest fear because I think we are good news or have the potential to be good news. It’s my biggest fear because I think we’re the most interesting thing that ever happened to this planet. It’s my biggest fear because I love humanity and I think we’re worth fighting for. What exactly is the human endeavor? We started out, as I think somebody once put it, as an animal of no consequence. Now we know approximately what’s keeping the stars apart and approximately how far away our star is from our planet. We know that we’re on a planet and we know that we can read Hamlet anytime we want. We can listen to Billie Holiday records and communicate with the dead. That’s a pretty impressive series of accomplishments to me and I think it’s worth celebrating. That’s what I mean by the human endeavor: the overall attempt by each member of our species to take care of each other and to push us forward in our knowledge and understanding of the world. I find our ability to make art everywhere all the time, no matter what, really fascinating and really encouraging. My son and I were just on a tour of World War I battle sites last week, and we saw all of this so-called trench art, which is art that was made in the trenches by soldiers on both sides of World War I, often taking exploded shells and carving onto them beautiful sunrises or landscapes or portraits. Some of these works of art are astonishing and nobody made those works of art hoping to get rich. Nobody made those works of art hoping to find an audience of millions of people. They made those works of art because there was value in the making and value in the sharing even if it was only sharing it with your buddies in the trenches. Last year, you targeted Johnson & Johnson for its patent practices and artificially inflating prices for life-saving treatments. That is a different tactic than encouraging people’s curiosity, empathy, and optimism. When is confrontation the right approach? I really dislike any form of confrontation, including confrontation with big pharmaceutical companies that have a lot of power and employ a lot of nice people. I find that very stressful. But when Doctors Without Borders and Partners in Health and Treatment Action Group were all reaching out saying this is a huge problem and it’s making it really difficult for us to get the medicine to the people we need to get it to, I felt like I had to listen. I’m a big believer in listening to people who know a lot more than I do. That’s kind of the foundational concept of my philanthropy. I’ll be honest, I tried to have some private conversations [with Johnson & Johnson], and they didn’t go anywhere. So then I felt the only conversation I can really have is a public conversation. I was thinking about the people I’ve known who died of drug-resistant tuberculosis and feeling angry on their behalf, feeling frustrated by the systemic failures on their behalf. Maybe that gave me a little more strength of conviction than I might otherwise have had. What is your project with Partners in Health in Sierra Leone? Our project is centered around the maternal mortality crisis, which is also a child mortality crisis because children are much more likely to die or otherwise experience serious disability and serious illness if their mothers die in childbirth. At the time we started this in 2019, Sierra Leone had the highest maternal mortality rate in the world. About one in 17 women could expect to die in pregnancy or childbirth, which wasn’t that different from the rate we would have seen 500 or 5,000 years ago. One of the arguments that Partners in Health and our community wanted to make is that there are no excuses for not expanding access to maternal health care. That means not just in Sierra Leone — it means everywhere. But our hope is that this project could provide a blueprint for how to do that with more community health workers, with more nurses, and also ultimately with a world-class maternal care center at Koidu Government Hospital. That is where the lion’s share of the money that we’ve raised so far will go. For the first time, there will be a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). There will also be adequate operating theaters for emergency C-sections. So many people die in Sierra Leone for want of an emergency C-section, or they die because they have high blood pressure, or they die because of hemorrhaging after giving birth. All things that are very treatable in rich countries and that should be treatable no matter who you are or where you live. Five years ago, when you were announcing your and Hank’s initial $6.5 million donation to Partners in Health for the Sierra Leone project, you said you were trying to take lessons that you had learned from earlier philanthropic ventures and apply them to this effort in Sierra Leone. Now that you’ve had five more years of experience trying to stand this up, what else have you learned? The biggest thing I’ve learned is that when you get community buy-in, things go much better than when you don’t. Most of the people building the Maternal Center of Excellence are women. Most of the welders, the masons, the steel workers. But they all had to be trained. I had no idea about the complexity of that. That was something that never crossed my mind, that you’re going to need to train up a workforce alongside building a hospital. Now that turns out to be an amazingly good investment because those people now have skills that they’re going to take with them the rest of their lives. People from rich countries or especially rich individuals kind of come into a community thinking that they have the solutions, which generally means that they don’t really understand the complexity of the problems. How do you know when your work is effective? We’re obsessed with quantifying the good that we’re doing, with testing it, with making sure that we can evaluate kids and making sure that we know that they’re learning what we think they’re learning. The risk is that it’s easy to conflate what is important with what is easily measurable. We need to be very careful not to apply what’s easily measurable and assume that it is therefore what’s most important. The obvious way that we measure the success of this project is by how many kids are surviving childbirth and how many mothers are surviving childbirth. But I also think you need to look at what, if anything, is the overall effect on reducing poverty. Is it improving educational access? Because we know that kids are more likely to be in school if their moms survive childbirth, but we haven’t yet proven that lower maternal mortality will lead to higher educational attainment. I want to look at that through a 20- or 30-year lens, not through a three- to five-year lens. I’m pretty tired of health care interventions that attempt to prove something in 18 months or with a three-year grant. What do you think is the biggest blind spot people today have that future generations will look back on and think, “What were they doing?” I think there are a lot of ways that people in the future will look back on us and think, “How did they do that?” The way that we think, “How did they let everybody smoke on airplanes?” The way that we treat non-human animals, especially the animals that we consume as meat, will be one. The ways we distribute resources and build systems will be another. I hope people of the future will be absolutely astonished that within a single country, depending on your zip code, your life expectancy could vary by 25 or 30 years. I think people will be astonished that there were places where health care systems were so robust that someone like my brother could get diagnosed with cancer and be in remission within six months and other places where somebody diagnosed with that same cancer would be dead within six months. What advice do you have for ethically minded people who are trying to figure out how to contribute to this project of improving humanity? First, it’s so easy to get overwhelmed and have decision paralysis. There are so many problems and there are so many people trying to address them and it can be so hard to know who’s addressing them most effectively or what the problems beneath all the other problems are. And that’s okay. I think it’s okay to pick a problem and trust that other people are going to be addressing other problems with the same passion and interest that you’re addressing yours. I don’t labor under the delusion that tuberculosis is the biggest problem in the world or that it’s the only problem that we should be paying attention to. I just think it’s one that we should be paying attention to and it’s the one that I happen to pay attention to. My second piece of advice would be don’t listen to the doomsayers. Don’t buy into the people who are telling you that none of this matters because it’s all worthless anyway. That’s a really compelling ethical argument in some ways because it’s so simple, it’s so straightforward. “This is all dumb.” “None of it matters.” “We should give up” is chef’s kiss from the perspective of wanting to have an explanation that has extraordinary explanatory power. The problem with despair, of course, is that it’s untrue, like any super-simplistic worldview. Fight against despair and believe that together we can make the world better for each other. Please do not judge me: I love U2, and therefore I love Bono. I think he’s a notable example of how perilous this transition can be from pop-culture curio to being an actual expert who can influence even more influential people. Yeah, I think about Bono a lot. Okay, there you go. How have you managed that transition? I want to approach it with real humility because you can do so much unintended damage when you have a lot of power and when you have a really loud voice. It’s so easy. My brother described it to me once as having a giant robot suit. I have this giant robot suit and it makes me super powerful. But when I walk around, it’s really easy for me to step on houses. I’ve been given a lot of power, and I don’t think that I should have it, to be honest with you. I think that our social order gives way too much power to celebrities, even like seventh-tier celebrities like myself. It freaks me out and I think we should be freaked out by it. I just try to remember that I’m very, very rarely the smartest person in the room. Do you see a unifying thread across your work, from The Fault in Our Stars to The Anthropocene Reviewed and Vlogbrothers to the maternal health project in Sierra Leone? I’m trying to make the case that humanity is worth it. That humanity is worth the trial and travail and suffering and injustice and oppression, the catastrophe and horrors that we visit upon ourselves and each other. That, despite all of that, it’s a blessing to be here and humanity can be good news. I really believe that. I don’t know that we are good news, but I think we can be. I don’t want to sound too pretentious about it, but I need to make that case for myself as much as I need to make it for anybody else. What do you mean by that? I’m very prone to desperate hopelessness, and I need every morning to be able to make the case to myself that it’s a good idea to get out of bed and go on. You talk about resiliency being one of humanity’s defining traits. I love how resilient we are. We’re so underrated as a species, Dylan. It drives me crazy. Does anybody think raccoons would be better at having this kind of power? Does anybody think dolphins would be better at having this kind of power? Have you read about dolphins? Which is not to say in any way that we aren’t terrible. I want to be clear that I’m very pissed off. I’m infuriated by humanity’s many failures. What kind of insanity is it to have the deadliest infectious disease in the world be something that we’ve known how to cure for 75 years? That’s monstrous. It’s just that we rate ourselves so lowly. There’s a lot to recommend about us.

Chef José Andrés knows how to feed people in a crisis

10 h

vox.com

José Andrés probably has the best reason ever to cancel an interview. The Michelin-starred celebrity chef and humanitarian is no stranger to feeding people when they need it most. Weeks before our scheduled call on Halloween, Andrés was in a helicopter, delivering food with volunteers from his nonprofit World Central Kitchen to communities affected by the devastating floods in western North Carolina. There, they mobilized to get thousands of gallons of clean water to residents in the heavily impacted town of Swannanoa, and teamed up with local chefs in Asheville to set up relief kitchens. Once the volunteers in North Carolina had what they needed to sustain their operations, Andrés returned home to Washington, DC, to decompress — but then heard the news of yet another awful climate disaster. On October 29, the region of Valencia, Spain, experienced unprecedented flash floods. More than 200 people died, but there was little support at first. Andrés, of course, got on the first plane he could. What’s the point of talking about alleviating hunger when you could be doing it? “Obviously, I went there very quickly,” Andrés, who was born in northern Spain, told me over Zoom last week. Within days, volunteers with World Central Kitchen — which Andrés founded in 2010 after the Haiti earthquake — were operating in about 70 towns in the region. They delivered meals, brought water pumps and Starlink satellites for internet access, and helped repair more than a dozen fruit shops so they could reopen their doors. Weeks later, there are still volunteers on the ground helping people rebuild their lives. Andrés attributes World Central Kitchen’s rapid response to what he calls a “software, not hardware” mentality. His team takes a people-first approach to collaboration, which has allowed them access to heavy-duty kitchens and construction materials alike. It’s rare, Andrés said, for people to tell someone they can’t do something when taking care of others. “We are the biggest organization in the world, even though we only have 140 people in the organization full time,” Andrés said. “Every person, every cook, every driver, every logistics person, every car, every truck, every helicopter, every boat, every water filtration system around the world belongs to us. It’s ours. What happened? They don’t know it yet.” But the world is a very different place than it was a decade ago. A spike in conflict, from Ukraine to Gaza to Sudan, is driving a rise in world hunger. The consequences of climate change on both food production and extreme weather have only accelerated. And if we don’t prioritize how to feed people in ways that generate life and well-being, any chance of eliminating world hunger — a goal the UN wants to achieve by 2030 — becomes much harder to reach. “I’m very worried that we don’t have smart people who are focused and understand that food is the most important source of energy we have,” Andrés told me. “Because even if we cannot drive and we cannot move, still we need to eat. We need to drink in order to keep humanity moving. Food should be given a much higher role. Let’s make sure that our food systems are strong in the right way.” I spoke with Andrés about the possible challenges of humanitarian work under a second Trump administration, the moral calling to help others, and why food is an extension of love and mutual respect. You’ve been in restaurants for almost three decades. At what point did you realize that you also wanted to enter the humanitarian space? Across the street from my restaurant, I discovered the house of Clara Barton. She was a nurse like my mom. Clara Barton was the woman who founded the Red Cross. I have a feeling that discovering across the street — 20 meters away from my first restaurant in DC — her home and her office, and seeing how this woman, like my mom, was not only taking care of the few, but created these organizations that could take care of the many, I think in a very strange way had a bigger impact on me than I realized. And with [Hurricane] Katrina, I saw the lack of response to a massive event. You realize that the plans don’t work, and you need to adapt, and that we left tens of thousands of Americans [behind]. We forgot people in the [New Orleans] Superdome — when actually feeding the people in the Superdome was the easiest thing ever. Because a Superdome and an arena is not just a venue for sports — it’s a gigantic restaurant that entertains with sports or with music, if you go to see Taylor Swift. So there’s no reason why anybody was supposed to be hungry in an arena. At Future Perfect, we write a lot about how to do humanitarian work better. “Better” tends to be subjective depending on who you ask. Is it more lives saved? Is it about not having so much overhead? For World Central Kitchen, specifically, how do you measure success? Obviously, we keep learning. At times we’re quicker, at times we are becoming a little bit slower. Sometimes [being] more organized makes you slower. Sometimes looking for more perfection makes you slower. I think quickness is the key for humanitarian emergencies because people are gonna go thirsty very quickly. People may last even longer without food, but not much longer either. But at the end, food and water for me is a no-brainer. You can deliver MREs [meals ready to eat, a kind of pre-packaged emergency food] to a fire station. And you can go a month later, and they are still in the same place behind the fire station. It’s not about bringing the assets. It’s about delivering the assets to the people that need them. We saw this in Puerto Rico. FEMA, through the National Guard, had millions of gallons of water. Then we realized — well, I knew it, because I was very involved in [Hurricane] Maria — that they were sitting somewhere. And because people kept coming and going, somebody that came and landed and brought the water through boat or plane, but then they forgot to tell the people coming after. So there we had people thirsty and water, but nobody was delivering the water. Emergency is not about filling up warehouses of things. Emergency is about getting warehouses empty of things. And not expecting that people are coming to you because they may not be able. It’s about you going to the people. I’m Puerto Rican-Mexican, and I remember in 2017 how quickly World Central Kitchen navigated Puerto Rico post-Hurricane Maria. It didn’t shock me that you were also able to get boots on the ground in Ukraine and Gaza. What about WCK allows you to mobilize so quickly, especially in conflict zones? Because we are not about hardware. We are about software. We own hardware, too. But if we start just being about hardware, you have the teams in very difficult situations. They’re gonna be in the business of bringing in your super gigantic truck kitchens and the smaller food truck kitchens and maybe mobilizing them to field kitchens — if we cannot open a restaurant, a catering company, the kitchen of a hotel, or the kitchen of a stadium. We can bring our own trucks. But let’s say in the case of Puerto Rico, if there is no airport and no port because there are no people working — because actually, the people may not be able to go to work. Because maybe their cars were destroyed, or the roads were destroyed, or maybe because they are trying to protect their family and their homes. And if people don’t go work, the system starts collapsing. So if I cannot bring anything, I have to do with whatever they have on site. It’s very funny, because sometimes some people — some organizations, which I’m not gonna mention — they ask me, “José, where are you able to get the food so quickly?” Like in the supermarkets, man? In the food warehouses? Okay. Maybe some situations where food is hard to get, like in the middle of the desert, but still there’ll be something, but usually there is always food. Usually, there are always people who are willing to join you. You try to bring people from the outside who are only there to help, and then you start capturing local volunteers who can and want to join you. Then you find kitchens or restaurants, you find whatever asset you can put up and running on day one. Even if we have no kitchen, we can always find bread. We can always find some food somewhere. We can always find water, and there you start. You start delivering food, and in the process, you get information. It’s very important that your office is not full. World Central Kitchen is able to be quick because we are highly adaptable. We come with a very high willingness to adapt to whatever we have that allows us to have a quicker response. You exist in a similar space to Médecins Sans Frontières [Doctors Without Borders], where your mission is to save any and all lives in need of saving. How do you navigate the complexities of politicized humanitarian crises? Gaza comes to mind, with the loss of seven of your team members. The loss of the seven this year was heavy. We lost people before, in Ukraine. They may not be people that were part of the World Central Kitchen family from DC, but they were people that were working with World Central Kitchen, Ukrainians, that they knew that they didn’t want to leave even if they could, because they wanted to be there, next to the elderly or next to their people. They all knew the risk they were taking. Unfortunately, we’ve seen that in the last two, three years there have been huge casualties with humanitarians. I think the message is very clear: No humanitarian, no civilians, no medical, no volunteer should ever be targeted under any circumstance. Obviously, the question will be: Why was World Central Kitchen in Ukraine? And at the beginning, it was only two people: Nate Mook, the former CEO, and myself. We didn’t let anybody in, because it was our first war zone. Gaza was exactly the same. We didn’t push for anybody to go. It’s a conundrum, right? Because we see what’s going on in Sudan, Yemen, and Haiti. How do you take care of the people that are suffering? You cannot do it by phone. You’re gonna do it overseas. You can have a lot of systems in place, but when you are in those circumstances, things may happen. I’m not trying just to excuse what happened in any way or form. Those people were there because they thought they could make a difference, helping children and women that they were suffering. and obviously they paid with their lives. I say it’s difficult, because for any humanitarian organization, we can all pull out of every single complicated situation. We can all pull out, but those people are gonna be suffering. Or we can make locals take care of it. The locals can be in peril, but us the outsiders, we can’t. So it’s kind of a philosophical, complicated conundrum. Life is a beautiful place, and the world is a beautiful place, and then life is also full of horrors. We can only make the world a little bit better if we take some risks. We all take a risk when we wake up and we go out in the world, especially in war zones. The least we can do is try to protect the people the best we can. But at the end, when you are highly coordinating with a group of people, and something like this happens, it’s almost like you feel powerless. We need to remember that humanitarians, medicals, civilians, women, children should never be ever targeted. Ever — and especially by democracies. You can agree or disagree, but if democracies are trying to protect their citizens, and democracies are trying just to create a better world. It’s gonna be a very hard, philosophical response to our children when we tell them. We don’t want our children to suffer. But why are we making the children of others suffer? Because the children have nothing to do with the wrongdoing of a few other adults. This is the history of mankind. You can use any country, any religion, any color of the skin. It seems it is the very few who make the decision of doing punishment on the many. It seems we are powerless to stop them, or we wash our hands like a bunch of Pontius Pilates. And the truth is that humanity keeps repeating the same mistakes for centuries. We never learn. When we see the horrors of the past, they belong to the past. We come to realize that the horrors of the present keep happening. Speaking of repeating history, Donald Trump is going to be back in office. Famously, you two have clashed a lot. But given the state of the world — which has seen a spike in hunger, conflict, and natural disasters — how will you approach humanitarian work with this new administration? On President-elect Trump, what happened between us, in part, was a way to see the world and business. Until then I was never sued by anybody, and until then I never sued anybody. So that was the first time in my life. I couldn’t open a restaurant in a property owned by a person that is against the core of what I believe the foundations of America are. I think it was the right thing to do. That said, when he became president, I was in the White House, meeting with Ivanka Trump, trying to see ways that we could put systems to feed people in the middle of the pandemic. In the end, I put country above politics. I did that in the past. I’m doing this in the present. I will do this in the future. But obviously I will always stand for what I believe is right, not what I believe is right for me. I will not want for others what I don’t want for me. I believe that’s a better way to be in the world. We are going through a difficult time in the world. We see global food systems and we’re taking them for granted. And I’m usually an optimist. But I’ve seen, in one year, wars that decimated the total production of countries like Ukraine. Ukraine has more food than they need to feed countries in Africa and other parts around the world. I’m an optimist, but we are creating this in our lifetime as we speak. I’ve been in all these places over the last few years, and I’ve seen the fish wash up on beaches in the Gulf of Mexico, and I’ve seen destruction in fields and droughts in fields, and we’ve seen pests in the heart of Africa. That’s why I created the Global Food Institute. One day, I want there to be a national food security adviser next to the president. We need the right regulations and, more important, the right enforcement of those regulations. I want everybody to take food seriously, where children are well fed, where school systems are strong because the way we feed our children, that our farmers are able to feed themselves. [We also need to understand] that immigrants work the fields of the richest countries of the world. We have this amazing moment that nobody wants immigrants, but then those rich societies will not work, and I will not be able to feed my children without those immigrants — that some call illegal, and some of us we call undocumented — the issue is that those economies will not properly function without those people. Immigration reform has all to do with food systems. What are your biggest hopes for WCK, in its effort to make food a universal human right not just in theory, but in practice? Well, listen — I always give my speech on longer tables and longer tables is something very simple to understand in a way. Thanksgiving is when I came up with this idea of the longer tables. I’m a Christian boy myself. When you’re a cook and you grow up as a young, Catholic boy, and you hear that Jesus was able to multiply loaves and fishes… even if you are not religious — or you are not Christian or whatever — it’s a beautiful thing, right? The idea that we can multiply fish and loaves to feed everybody. I think something that brings America and the world together is understanding … It seems a very big percentage of Americans believe that every child and every person in America should have the right to a plate of food. In the worst moments of humanity, I learned through food that the best of humanity shows up. People that may be different skin, color, religion, or political inclination and party. They put everything away, like almost naked, and they become one with the people. That’s what gives me hope. When we invite strangers to our home, to sit at our table, to meet our family, it’s one of the biggest moments of truth, love, and respect that you can show a stranger. Food is love. I do believe a world that everybody is fed and well fed will be a safer and more peaceful world than one that is not. Food is what we are and what we work for. It’s what I work for. To feed our loved ones, provide comfort, to provide the table in a home … that’s what humanity has been driving around. Let’s hope that’s not what creates wars, but that’s what ends wars, that’s what brings the best of us, not what brings the worst of us. And usually it brings the best of us. We need more of that.

Trump wants to use the military for mass deportations. Can he actually do that?

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vox.com

Delegates hold “Mass Deportations Now” campaign signs during the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Wednesday, July 17, 2024. President-elect Donald Trump said he will use the military to carry out mass deportations — the centerpiece of his immigration agenda in his second term. He has not gone into detail about his plans, but legal experts have suggested he may be able to rely on a combination of federal laws to implement the deportations with the military’s help. The notion of the president deploying the military domestically may seem like a nightmare scenario, but it’s not implausible given his broad executive powers. On Monday, Trump responded to a post on his social media network Truth Social, claiming that he would “declare a national emergency and will use military assets” to carry out mass deportations, saying it was “TRUE!!!” It’s not immediately clear what he means by that: whether he intends for the military to enforce the nation’s immigration laws, for military funds to be redirected toward supporting mass deportations, or something else. A representative for his transition team did not respond to a request for comment. But Trump has a few avenues through which he could activate the military and its resources. Those include the Insurrection Act, which gives the president the power to deploy the military domestically; emergency powers, like redirecting funds to military construction projects; and other presidential powers like requesting national guard assistance in carrying out military missions. Immigration advocates are readying to challenge mass deportations. Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union, said Monday after Trump’s announcement that his organization is preparing for litigation. However, the law does give presidents significant leeway to use the military at their discretion, and courts have historically been wary of overstepping, though they may intervene if the civil liberties of immigrants are being violated. The United States has “a very permissive legal regime regarding how the president can use the military,” said Chris Mirasola, a professor at the University of Houston Law Center. Again, those powers aren’t absolute, however. “There are downstream implementation matters that I think are more susceptible to litigation,” Mirasola said. The Insurrection Act, briefly explained According to the New York Times, Trump is planning to invoke the Insurrection Act to bring in the military to carry out mass deportations. The law is a key exception to the Posse Comitatus Act, which prohibits the use of the military to enforce federal law without the permission of Congress or the Constitution. Only in rare instances have presidents invoked the Insurrection Act. President George H.W. Bush was the last one to do so amid the 1992 Los Angeles riots that broke out in response to the acquittal of police officers in the beating of Rodney King. President Dwight D. Eisenhower also notably used the Insurrection Act to facilitate the desegregation of schools in Little Rock, Arkansas. The provision of the Insurrection Act most likely to apply in Trump’s case is one that allows the president to unilaterally activate the military domestically to enforce federal law whenever they determine that “unlawful obstructions, combinations, or assemblages, or rebellion… make it impracticable [to do so] by the ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” Mirasola said Trump would have a “relatively easy time” making the case that cartels trafficking immigrants across the border constitute an “unlawful obstruction” to the enforcement of US immigration law. Trump has in some ways appeared to begin building his case for invoking the Insurrection Act through his rhetoric on the campaign trail this year by describing an “invasion of criminals” coming across the border. But Mirasola said it would be harder for Trump to argue that it is impracticable to enforce immigration laws through the “ordinary course of judicial proceedings.” That’s because presidents have done so for decades, and border crossings are no longer unusually high: They have sharply declined this year and are down even from certain points in the first Trump administration. However, the law gives the president “sole discretion, in most instances” to determine whether the criteria necessary to activate the military have been met, according to 2022 congressional testimony given by Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the liberty and national security program at the Brennan Center for Justice, and Joseph Nunn, the Center’s counsel in the national security program. Goitein and Nunn also argued that the “vague and broad criteria for invoking the Act, combined with the lack of any provision for judicial or congressional review, render it ripe for abuse.” At that point, their concern was that Trump could have used the Insurrection Act to interfere with the certification of the 2020 election results. The use case is now different, but the potential for overreach is the same. That is to say, while advocates may challenge Trump on whether the two key criteria for invoking the law have been met, the law gives presidents a wide berth — and the courts little power. “For all practical purposes, courts have been cut out of the process,” Goitein and Nunn write. The president’s emergency and other powers There are other potential authorities that Trump could invoke to surge military resources to his mass deportation plan. As Mirasola writes in Lawfare, Trump has a nonemergency power under federal law to request the assistance of state national guards in a federal military mission. Under the National Defense Authorization Act, that mission can be to assist US Customs and Border Protection in “ongoing efforts to secure the southern land border.” The law does not provide parameters limiting the kind of assistance that the military can provide, be that boots on the ground at the border or intelligence analysis support. Emergency powers could be helpful in creating the infrastructure needed for mass deportations. Stephen Miller, one of Trump’s key immigration advisers, told the New York Times in November 2023 that a second Trump administration would construct “vast holding facilities that would function as staging centers” for immigrants facing deportation. Mirasola writes that, to do so, Trump could invoke federal law allowing the secretary of defense to “undertake military construction projects … not otherwise authorized by law that are necessary to support” the armed forces in a national emergency. If Trump declares a national emergency with respect to immigration, that law would essentially allow him to bypass the need for congressional approval to get the funds he needs to construct these holding facilities. He previously used the same law to try to get funding for his border wall during his first term. Whether he could do so was never settled. Pro-immigration advocates challenged the use of that law to fund the border wall in Trump’s first term. Their years-long litigation over the border wall became moot when President Joe Biden took office, but they were not expected to win if the issue had come before the Supreme Court. Advocates could again mount a legal challenge, but they may only succeed in delaying the construction of the facilities. However, pro-immigration advocates might have a stronger case if they file lawsuits over the conditions in these yet-to-be built holding facilities and over potential violations of civil liberties for immigrants subject to mass deportations. Those might involve, for example, violations of their constitutional right to due process. That sort of challenge, over inhumane detention conditions previously seen in CBP facilities (including a lack of access to basic hygiene products and a lack of food, water, and basic medical care) was successfully made during the first Trump administration. Immigrants might also file suits arguing their constitutional protections against unlawful searches were violated: Doris Meissner, senior fellow and director of the US Immigration Policy Program at the Migration Policy Institute, said mass deportations of the scale Trump is imagining would likely involve “violations of people’s civil rights, profiling, all of those kinds of harms that poor policing brings about.” That will present a key test for the courts, Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, said in a statement: “Will [the courts] use their power to enforce long-standing protections for individuals? Will they uphold the rule of law? Or will they bow to political pressure and allow the executive to expand its already ample power?”

The House will have its first openly trans member next year. The GOP is already attacking her.

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vox.com

Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) speaks to reporters as she heads to a House Republican Caucus meeting on Capitol Hill on November 19, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images Congress member-elect Sarah McBride became the first openly trans person ever elected to the House this November, marking a historic milestone for the body. Her arrival, however, is being met with a targeted — and anti-trans — attack by Republicans in Congress that rejects the existence of trans people. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced that he is barring trans women from women’s bathrooms in the Capitol, following a proposal from South Carolina Rep. Nancy Mace (R) to do just that. “I want to make sure that no men are in women’s private spaces, and it’s not going to end here,” Mace told reporters on Tuesday. “This kind of thing should be banned.” When asked if the action was in response to McBride coming to Congress, Mace was clear, noting, “Yes and absolutely and then some.” Mace’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment, and Johnson’s office pointed to statements he’s made about his belief in treating everyone “with dignity.” The new rule is the latest extension of ugly attacks Republicans have levied on trans people during the recent campaign cycle and in the past few years. Dozens of states have introduced anti-trans bills that restrict children’s access to gender-affirming care, that limit athletes to playing on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, and that prevent trans women from using women’s bathrooms. All of these policies are based on — and advance — a rejection of the idea that trans women are women. As Vox’s Aja Romano has explained, Republicans have used their focus on this subject to rally their base against a “common enemy,” framing trans people as threats, including to other women’s safety in bathrooms. A 2018 UCLA study on the issue found no evidence that trans people using bathrooms that match their gender identity has increased safety risks, but that data has not changed GOP rhetoric. Instead, the GOP has kept investing in anti-trans attacks and channeling more harm toward trans individuals, who are already the disproportionate subjects of violence and who already experience high rates of self-harm. Now, House Republicans’ push highlights how central such ideas have become to the GOP agenda — and how open they are to singling out a colleague to prove a point. Capitol Hill’s new, anti-trans bathroom policy, briefly explained Because the speaker of the House has wide-ranging jurisdiction over facilities in the House, Johnson has significant say in imposing rules like the new bathroom regulation. In a press release he issued on Wednesday, Johnson said, “All single-sex facilities in the Capitol and House Office Buildings — such as restrooms, changing rooms, and locker rooms — are reserved for individuals of that biological sex.” In practice, this means that trans women are not able to use women’s bathrooms. Johnson noted that each Congress member has a bathroom in their office, and there are also unisex bathrooms available in the Capitol that could theoretically serve as an alternative. “Women deserve women’s only spaces,” he said in a statement. In addition to discriminating against McBride, the rule poses serious practical obstacles: The Capitol complex is a massive set of buildings, and lawmakers are often dashing from the main chamber to committee meetings to other events. By depriving McBride of access to the women’s room, the policy is effectively asking her to run back to her office, which is located in a separate building, use the men’s restroom, or find a unisex bathroom. Limiting a member’s access to bathrooms simply makes their job much harder and more inconvenient. The Hill’s new bathroom rules are part of broader Republican anti-trans attacks McBride responded to Mace’s initial proposal in a post on X on Tuesday, calling it “a blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.” “We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars,” she added. In a post on Wednesday, McBride reiterated this message and said that while she’ll abide by Johnson’s rule, she found this whole fight to be a diversion from other policy concerns. I’m not here to fight about bathrooms. I’m here to fight for Delawareans and to bring down costs facing families. pic.twitter.com/bCuv7pIZBY— Sarah McBride (@SarahEMcBride) November 20, 2024 Republicans have made anti-trans policy a focus on par with the sorts of economic concerns McBride highlighted. During the 2024 campaign, President-elect Donald Trump invested millions in ads criticizing Vice President Kamala Harris’s past support for funding gender-affirming care for incarcerated people. And it wasn’t just Trump: Republicans and their allies spent at least $215 million on anti-trans ads last cycle. Those ads appear to have resonated with some swing voters, and the GOP now seems further emboldened when it comes to going after trans people. Ahead of the election, as Vox’s Nicole Narea and Fabiola Cineas wrote, there was an explosion of anti-trans bills in state legislatures in 2023, with at least 19 states approving such laws. As Narea and Cineas explained, those bills were fueled in part by right-wing evangelical members of the Republican base (and by lawmaker attempts to pander to that faction). But more recent actions — from the election ads to Johnson’s new rule — show an attempt to take anti-trans policy into the mainstream. Overall, Republicans’ actions signal that they plan to double down on the anti-trans culture war in the years to come.

Everything you need to know about Wicked, explained by a Wicked know-it-all

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vox.com

Ariana Grande and Cynthia Erivo in Wicked, a movie based on a musical based on a movie and a book. | Universal/Wicked Welcome to Know-It-All. In the age of intellectual property grabs, docudramas, and so very many sequels, it can be difficult to find a way into the complicated worlds we see on screen. In this series, Vox experts explain what you need to know to get into the latest hot release. Like a friendship between a popular blonde princess and a dour lime-skinned outcast, the story of Wicked is a bit more complicated than it looks. Wicked is billed as the “true story” of Glinda the Good and the Wicked Witch of the West, the very famous, very what-you-see-is-what-you-get witches from The Wizard of Oz. It’s based on a well-loved, very catchy Broadway musical that’s been around for 20-plus years. It also stars pop queen Ariana Grande and powerhouse Cynthia Erivo, and the movie’s very expansive, very expensive marketing campaign seemed determined to forever alter the way we think about pink and green. Wicked is everywhere. Surely it can’t be that impenetrable! But did you know that the Broadway musical was based on Gregory Maguire’s revisionist novels which were, in turn, inspired by L. Frank Baum’s beloved series of over a dozen books about Oz? And that a major plot in the novels involves sentient, talking animals that love sonnets and science? Or that Wicked is really a political thriller about corrupt government officials scapegoating a minority and creating an enemy of the state? Beneath the movie’s airy aesthetics and its bubblegum pop moments is a broiling, chaotic tale of power, greed, and discrimination. The more you know about Wicked, the weirder and weirder it gets. With that in mind, I asked my colleague Constance Grady to help us navigate the world of Wicked and Oz. Grady has read Gregory Maguire’s original novel multiple times, the Baum novels as a child, seen the Broadway production, and like me, saw the movie this week. We discussed everything from anti-goat fascism, to Grande’s delicious performance, to what from the book didn’t make it into the adaptations. Here’s what you need to know about the movie musical of the moment. Do I have this correct? Wicked is a movie musical adaptation of the Tony-winning Broadway show Wicked which is an adaptation of the novel Wicked which is a retelling of The Wizard of Oz. You’re right, but there’s another adaptation layer in there. All those layers. The whole thing starts with the L. Frank Baum children’s novel The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, which he published in 1900. Baum’s book was so successful that it was almost immediately adapted into a Broadway musical of its own (now largely forgotten) and an entire franchise worth of sequels, 13 of which Baum wrote himself. Then in 1939 we got the most famous and, for most people, canonical version of the story: The Wizard of Oz, the Judy Garland film based on the Baum novel. The first Wicked was Gregory Maguire’s novel, first published in 1995 as Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West. Maguire’s gimmick was to take Margaret Hamilton’s cackling, green-skinned Wicked Witch of the West from the 1939 film — surely one of childhood’s scariest villains — and make her the beating heart of his novel. He renamed her Elphaba, a name suggested by the initials of L. Frank Baum. Wicked the musical came in 2003, with music from Stephen Schwartz and a book by Winnie Holzman. It was a smash hit success when it came out, and it’s still running on Broadway now, 21 years later. The musical was such a hit that Universal, which owns the rights, has had various versions of the film in development for a very long time now. Finally and at last, in 2021, Universal put director Jon M. Chu of Crazy Rich Asians on the task. Chu split the stage musical into two halves, with Wicked Part 1 to premiere in November 2024 and Wicked Part 2 set to come in 2025. And now here we are! Do you have a favorite? At different times, all of the Oz stories have been my favorites. I grew up on the 1939 movie like everyone else. When Dorothy opens the black-and-white door to her Kansas home and walks out into brilliant, Technicolor Oz? That’s what cinema was made for, baby! When I was around 8 or 9 I came upon the L. Frank Baum novels, and I was tickled to find that they contained such an expansive and playful mythology. I gobbled up those books like candy. Then at around 11 years old, I read Wicked and was entranced by it: all that moral complexity, all the political intrigue, all those slippery, winding sentences. When the musical came along, I immediately resented it for being a glitzier, simpler story than the book was — really boiled down to the complicated friendship between Elphaba and Glinda, set against the backdrop of the Wizard’s manipulations — but when I was 17 I saw it on Broadway and was overwhelmed by the sheer spectacle of it and the gleeful drive of the songs. When Elphaba started flying at the end of act one, I burst into tears. To be fair to 17-year-old you, there is at least one person, if not 10 to 20 people bursting into tears at every performance when Elphaba defies gravity. It’s a spectacle. It’s monumental. It’s as important to Broadway as the chandelier coming down in Phantom of the Opera. God, it’s truly so good. For that moment, I even forgive Schwartz for writing the lyric “Nessa, Nessa, I’ve got something to confess-a.” Wicked is famously one of only six musicals I enjoy. And I feel like the movie sticks to the musical. How well do the musicals stick to the book? The musical is very, very loosely based on Maguire’s book. What Gregory Maguire wanted to write was a really sophisticated allegorical exploration of the nature of evil itself and what might drive Elphaba to wickedness. As such, his Wicked is bleak, at times self-indulgently so. Maguire’s Elphaba is raised by missionaries in a Southern Gothic childhood right out of Flannery O’Connor. After she abandons both religion and schooling and is politically radicalized by the cause of Ozian Animal rights, she becomes a terrorist, complicit in multiple acts of violence against civilians. By the end, however much you might sympathize with Elphaba’s cause, you understand why people call her the wicked witch. Wicked: Part I (the official name of this movie) feels less like “wow, this lady is really wicked” and more like, “oh, she’s just misunderstood.” Maybe we haven’t gotten to the full terrorist part yet, but I can’t imagine Elphaba’s morality is ever going to be as ambiguous as the novel. Absolutely. The Wicked of the stage show is a much sweeter and sillier version of the story. Schwartz and Holzman ditch as much of the religion and the politics as they possibly can to focus on the relationship between Elphaba and Glinda, the Good Witch of the North — or Galinda, as she originally calls herself. Maguire imagined Glinda as Elphaba’s college roommate, and she’s key to Elphie’s college years, but he largely abandons her after Elphie drops out of school to go into politics. Schwartz and Holzman, however, make comic, superficial Glinda into the heart of the story. Perhaps in part to make room for the shift in focus, Elphaba’s misdeeds are significantly toned down, and as for Maguire’s dark, heartbreaking ending … let’s just say it gets, um, revised. The movie convinced me that Glinda is actually the splashier, better-written role. I’ve always envisioned Glinda as an SEC-coded mean girl — blonde, bubbly, a bit passive-aggressive rather than aggressive-aggressive. Grande gets us there, and seems to really understand what makes this character so surprisingly funny. So buy or sell: Oscar nominee Ariana Grande? Oh man. I buy. This movie struggles a lot with its tone. It doesn’t know whether it wants to be as silly as the stage musical or as serious as the Maguire book, and as a result it ends up veering wildly around. The only element of this movie that never has this problem is Grande’s performance. Grande nails it top to bottom. She makes spoiled, selfish Glinda so gleefully mean, so deliciously phony in all her virtue-signaling, that you want to laugh at her the way you would laugh at Regina George — and then she shows you Glinda’s tender, insecure heart, and you fall in love with her. Grande has always had an uncanny knack for vocal mimicry, and here she pitches her speaking voice into something halfway between Judy Garland’s earnest Dorothy tones and the distinctive showbiz patter of Kristin Chenoweth, who originated the role of Glinda on Broadway. You wouldn’t think you could combine the two, but Grande does, and she makes it make sense. As for the singing — well, that kind of goes without saying, doesn’t it? She’s in phenomenal voice. Whatever happens with the Oscars race this year, I’ll know that Grande is the Academy Award nominee of my heart. Tonally, the movie goes from Legally Blonde to The Fugitive. The last 10 minutes are absolutely bonkers. What in the world? Yikes, right? For me, this tonal mismatch is the big flaw of the film, and I think it’s a byproduct of this very long and winding adaptation process. When Schwartz and Holzman adapted Maguire’s Wicked, they stripped away as much of his rather baroque mythologizing as they could while still allowing the plot to make a modicum of sense. The vibe of this musical is generally: Why go on and on about the ontological differences between humans and animals if we could be singing fun bops about being popular? It doesn’t all have to be so serious all the time. In their version of the story, the Wizard’s plans are vague, but clearly evil, and Elphaba’s resistance to his regime is likewise vague, but clearly righteous. The Wizard’s main sin in the stage musical is that he is lying to his people to stoke up their fears and marshal support to his own side, because this musical hit Broadway in 2003, when George W. Bush was just about to invade Iraq. Other than that, we don’t know that much about why he’s so bad. We don’t really care, either. It all pretty much works if you just sit back in the theater and let the songs wash over you. Chu, however, takes Wicked very seriously indeed; so much so that he’s stretched out the musical’s 90-minute first act into a lugubrious two hours and 40 minutes, mostly by keeping the pacing slow and solemn. The side effect of moving so slowly, though, is that it puts a lot of pressure on the political subplot of this musical to not only make sense, but to be emotionally impactful. Unfortunately, all of the background that could make it work got left behind in Maguire’s novel. Are we supposed to care this much about anti-animal fascism in the movie? Or the musical? Do the people who adapted Wicked care that much? Yeah, this is one of the big plotlines where the cracks in the adaptation show. It also makes for a kind of interesting timeline of how different authors have thought about Oz. One of the inconsistencies of L. Frank Baum’s Oz is that it’s a land where animals can talk and go on quests and be guests at dinner parties and so on — you’ll recall the Cowardly Lion — but also all the characters are constantly eating meat. It’s the kind of minor quirk in worldbuilding that a children’s book can skate right over, but it becomes weird and confusing in an adult novel. So when Maguire wrote Wicked, he imagined an Oz that distinguished between Animals, who are talking and intelligent beings who wear clothes and hold jobs and can be invited to dinner parties, and animals in lowercase, who are non-sentient and can be killed or treated as chattel. In Maguire’s Oz, the Wizard consolidates his power in part by making the Animals into a scapegoat race. Emphasis, quite literally, on “goat.” Over the course of the novel, we see them go from full citizens to living under restrictions to slaves who are occasionally cooked and eaten. Elphaba is radicalized into terrorism when her favorite college professor, the Goat and Animal rights agitator Doctor Dillamond, is assassinated by the government. When Schwartz and Holzman got their hands on the story, they were transforming it once again into a children’s tale, so they didn’t particularly have time for this piece of worldbuilding. They ditched the distinction between Animal and animal, so that Doctor Dillamond becomes a guy in a silly goat costume who exists to nudge Elphaba into realizing that the Wizard might not have her best interests at heart. It would be a stretch to think that the stage musical really wants the audience to care about animals in general or Doctor Dillamond in particular. Chu, characteristically, seems to want to give the animal plotline more gravitas. He makes Dillamond an eerily photorealistic CGI goat who appears in one of Elphaba’s visions shivering and cringing in a cage, in a dark foretelling of the Wizard’s eventual goals. Under Chu’s solemn and slightly heavy-handed touch, you can feel how important the animal rights plotline is to Elphaba’s character arc. But the part of Maguire’s novel that made you care about the animals, and about Elphaba’s commitment to their freedom, was jettisoned long ago. It’s an uneasy balance. This contradiction is part of why, I think, Grande’s Glinda feels so much like a breath of fresh air whenever she appears on screen. The part of this story that Schwartz and Holzman cared about was Glinda and Elphaba, so that’s the part of the story architecture that remains rock solid. No matter what happens, you can’t not root for their friendship. Are we going to get more of that in Wicked: Part II? Are people going to want to see the second half of this musical if it’s all about authoritarianism? I am very curious to see how Chu handles Wicked: Part II, because the second act of Wicked is famously much worse than the first half. All the iconic songs are over by then (although personally, I quite like “No Good Deed”), the storytelling gets bogged down in mythology that never becomes either clear or interesting, and Glinda and Elphaba spend most of the act in separate places, effectively depriving the show of its strongest dynamic for long stretches of stage time. In the stage show, you’re generally invested enough in the characters on the strength of the first half to sit through the second half with minimal complaints, but for that act two to hold its own for a full movie? Tricky! As for the anti-animal fascism, though, we can all breathe easy. As originally staged, Wicked’s act two focuses on the animal rights plotline for exactly as long as it takes to hook Elphaba up with her iconic flying monkeys and not a single second longer. We’ll see if Chu keeps it that way.

Trump wants a big expansion in fossil fuel production. Can he do that?

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vox.com

An oil pump jack on the Great Plains, southeastern Wyoming. | Marli Miller/UCG/Universal Images Group/Getty Images During his campaign, President-elect Donald Trump had a pointed tagline for his energy policy: “Drill, baby, drill.” That statement is emblematic of where Trump is poised to focus his efforts in a second term: He’s pledged US “energy dominance” and everything from “new pipelines” to “new refiners” that amp up fossil fuel production. This approach marks a stark shift from the Biden administration’s and puts the US’s emphasis more heavily on producing oil and gas than on attempting a transition to clean energy sources. In addition to touting the need to boost fossil fuels, Trump has disparaged subsidies for clean energy investments and called for “terminat[ing]” the funds that were allocated for those subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act. His stance ignores the role that burning fossil fuels has played in climate change and could cause considerable harm to US efforts to address the issue. Several of his nominations are indicative of these goals. He’s chosen oil industry executive Chris Wright — a fracking evangelist — to head up the Department of Energy. He’s named North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum — who connected Trump to oil executive donors during the campaign — as the lead for the Interior Department and as an “energy czar.” He’s also tapped former Rep. Lee Zeldin — who’s emphasized his commitment to deregulation — as his chief of the Environmental Protection Agency. There’s only so much the administration can control, however. Although Trump can take notable steps to try to increase fossil fuel production, actual upticks in oil and gas extraction will depend heavily on the private sector and the economics of the industry. Still, while Trump faces some constraints, he has significant policy levers he can pull to encourage production of fossil fuels. Wright, Burgum, and Zeldin have also signaled they’re prepared to execute on the president-elect’s vision, including changes to drilling on public lands and speedier permitting for oil and gas projects. “President Trump and his energy team — Mr. Burgum, Mr. Wright, Mr. Zeldin — can go to considerable lengths to make expanded production attractive and relatively easy,” Barry Rabe, a University of Michigan environmental policy professor, told Vox. How Trump could increase fossil fuel production Trump has two key avenues he can utilize to boost fossil fuel production. One, he can open up more public lands and waters for exploration, development, and extraction. Two, he can ease the regulatory processes that govern fossil fuel work. Trump could offer more oil and gas leases on public lands As President, Trump will oversee the Interior Department, which includes the Bureau of Land Management as well as the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, both of which manage a substantial fraction of the country’s public lands and waters. He’ll also oversee the Agriculture Department, which contains the Forest Service, another body that has oversight of some public lands. The Bureaus of Land Management and Ocean Energy Management, as well as the Forest Service, are the three main entities that issue oil and gas leases on public spaces. These leases effectively allow fossil fuel companies to rent parcels of public land from the federal government so they can extract resources from these areas. Once land is designated as available for lease, leases are typically auctioned off to the highest bidder. Those bureaus, and the Forest Service, have major discretion to determine if more leases can be issued and where. But the president can issue an executive order instructing them to prioritize the subject: Trump could call on agencies to make identifying suitable public lands a top agenda item, for example. “If you have an administration that says we want everything that could be leased to be leased, there’s a lot of discretion to be able to do that,” says Stan Meiburg, the executive director of the Center for Environment and Sustainability at Wake Forest University. Trump’s first term, during which he also made moves to expand the acreage of public lands available for oil and gas drilling, is likely a sign of what’s to come. Per a study from Science, he mounted one of the largest reductions in protected public lands in history, rolling back the acreage of Bears Ears National Monument and Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument to allow for additional oil and gas exploration in these places. Data from the Bureau of Land Management shows that there was an increase in total acres offered for oil and gas leases during Trump’s first term compared to President Barack Obama’s second term and Biden’s current term. Though Trump could again expand the number of leases available, it’s important to note that won’t necessarily translate to more production. Leases are subject to environmental rules. That means new leases could well be challenged in court for potential violations of the National Environmental Policy Act, the Endangered Species Act, or other federal laws. Another factor could limit production too: corporate interest. Companies may not be interested in these new leases since many of the parcels might not be home to fossil fuels. And businesses could also lease the land but fail to utilize it. The White House could make expanding production easier for the private sector The second avenue Trump could pursue is rolling back regulations to make fossil fuel production easier and faster for the private sector. Much of this will involve undoing policies the Biden administration put in place — like the pause on permits for liquefied natural gas exports — and expediting federal approvals for oil- and gas-related projects. Trump could use the executive branch’s authority to rescind certain proposals. For other rules, the White House could need Congress’s help. By utilizing what’s known as the Congressional Review Act, Congress has the ability to roll back rules that agencies have recently put in place. In other cases, it might need to pass new legislation: The EPA has just begun imposing a methane fee on oil and gas companies, and because that fee was included in the Inflation Reduction Act, it would need an act of Congress to undo. Under it, these businesses must curb their methane emissions or suffer a financial penalty. Repealing policies like the methane fee and the natural gas export permit pause would curb the restrictions oil and gas companies currently face, creating more opportunities to export products abroad and making fossil fuel production less costly. Another area where both the administration and Congress have power to ease regulation is on the issue of permitting reform. Currently, any oil and gas project — such as building a new pipeline — must go through many layers of approval by federal agencies like the EPA. (Many clean energy infrastructure projects also need to go through this process.) For these projects, companies have to obtain a hefty number of permits, slowing their ability to execute on these plans. The Biden administration managed to outstrip the pace at which the Trump administration issued permits for drilling on public lands. Under Trump, federal agencies could try to further streamline such approvals, says Mark Squillace, a University of Colorado-Boulder Law School professor and former staffer at the Interior Department. “We certainly could see some efforts to pull back on environmental standards, to make it easier to permit different kinds of facilities,” Squillace told Vox. Trump could also take executive action to direct agencies to cut as many unnecessary steps as possible and to simplify their processes. More expansive permitting reforms, like policies that put firm limits on the time needed for legal challenges and federal approvals of a project, would need the backing of Congress, however, and have had bipartisan support in the past. The combination of loosening restrictions currently placed on oil and gas companies and making new projects easier to pursue all tie back to Trump’s pledge to “slash the red tape” on the industry. As is the case with expanding access to public lands, it’s not clear that these policy changes will result in more fossil fuel production since much of that will depend on how private companies respond. Trump can make production a little easier, but the market for fossil fuels is also a factor During the Biden administration, the US produced more oil and gas than any country in the world. Companies’ incentives to increase production will depend on whether they think it’s financially sound for them. As more countries — including the US — have invested in clean energy sources, there is more competition in the market, which could factor in to whether businesses see it as a smart move to dial up their fossil fuel output if given the chance. “As we watch a movement toward more solar and wind development, there is less demand for the oil and gas products that we’ve been producing,” says Squillace. Though the administration has stressed that it’s all-in on fossil fuels, it’s not evident that it can turn away from clean energy investments to the degree that Trump has urged. Defunding the subsidies in the Inflation Reduction Act, for instance, would prompt legal challenges, short of an actual repeal by Congress. The administration could well take some contradictory stances, too. Although Trump has long denigrated energy sources like offshore wind and subsidies for electric vehicles, his allies include Tesla CEO Elon Musk, who’s the head of an EV company. Musk is among the tech leaders who’ve attained notable influence in the administration and who also has deep ties with the government due to his role leading SpaceX. All of this means that, ultimately, even though Trump will have the power to try making good on this campaign pledge, it may not work out the way he promised.

Trump’s coalition is a mess of contradictions — and they’re about to be exposed

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vox.com

Donald Trump with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on October 23, 2024, in Duluth, Georgia. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images There is not one contradiction at the heart of the incoming Trump administration’s political project. There are two. The first centers on economic policy — or, more fundamentally, the role of government itself. One camp, exemplified by Elon Musk and traditional big business, sees Trumpism as a celebration of individual greatness and unfettered capitalism. The second camp, including economic nationalists and RFK Jr.’s crunchy hippy types, believes Trumpism has a mandate to try to transform American society, including by attacking the practices of large corporations that do not fit their nationalist vision. The second centers on foreign policy — or, more fundamentally, the purpose of America in the world. One camp, exemplified by Secretary of State pick Marco Rubio, sees the United States as the world’s rightful leader, one that has not only a right but an obligation to assert its will across the globe. Another camp, exemplified by Secretary of Defense pick Pete Hegseth, sees the United States as a more ordinary country whose interests are served by being less involved in other countries’ issues like the Ukraine war, but being more violently involved when core American interests are at stake. Of course, there are areas of overlap between these groups. Both sides of the role-of-government divide believe that America will be well-served by a mass deportation campaign; both sides of the foreign policy divide support aggressively confronting China and waging a global war on jihadist groups like ISIS. Yet these overlaps are limited and partial points of convergence between deeply divided ideological currents. The real connective tissue between the various Trump 2.0 factions is disdain for the cultural left and the “deep state” in Washington. The anti-left culture war has become, more or less, the central ideological principle of the modern Republican Party. On the campaign trail, it’s easy for Trump’s diverse set of allies to join together based on this shared animosity. But when governing, the administration will be forced to make choices in areas where its leaders disagree at a fundamental level, leading not only to internal conflict but potentially even policy chaos. The Trump coalition’s contradictions, explained Every administration has its internal disagreements. Typically, however, those disputes take place within a relatively narrow band: The political party they hail from is mostly clear on what it stands for and why. The Biden administration, for example, has generally agreed on a more redistributionist economic policy, even if certain policy issues, like how large the post-Covid stimulus should be, were subjects of major internal debate. The Trump-dominated GOP, by contrast, is ideologically adrift. Its nominal ideology is Trumpism, but Trumpism has little in the way of a defined ideological core. Its core tenets, total personal fealty to Trump and a generalized illiberal nationalism, are flexible, admitting of a wide band of different policy visions on a host of different issues. In the first Trump administration, the main fight was over just how much deference Trumpist impulses deserved. You had Trump in the Oval Office, but he was surrounded by establishment figures like Defense Secretary Jim Mattis and chief of staff John Kelly, who saw their job as curbing his worst impulses. In the second Trump administration, the situation will be very different. The Mattis and Kelly types have either been purged from the party or forced to bend the knee. The question now is not whether Trumpism is leading the party, but what Trumpism actually stands for. One way to think about the divides on this question is which part of the classic “make America great again” slogan the various camps emphasize: America or greatness. When it comes to domestic policy, the “greatness” side includes folks like Musk, Vivek Ramaswamy, and traditional Republican business elites. They see the attack on “the deep state” as, in part, a war on government red tape that stands in the way of progress, innovation, and the entrepreneurial spirit. Trump, for them, is proof that one man can change the world if left to his own devices. They aim to unleash similar spirits across the country and, non-coincidentally, advance their own business interests in the process. The “America” camp, by contrast, is more inclined to emphasize collective solutions to America’s collective problems. The chief advocates of mass deportations and across-the-board tariffs, like Steven Miller and Peter Navarro, are almost by definition not free marketeers. JD Vance aims to rebuild America along more conservative Christian lines, including by curbing the power of secular big business when he believes it threatens the organic unity of American society properly conceived. RFK Jr. and the “make American healthy again” movement see the war on government not as a campaign to shrink government per se, but rather to redirect its energies toward the problems they think really matter (vaccines, fluoridated water, and other such crank health concerns). The foreign policy divide falls along similar lines. People like Rubio and national security adviser pick Michael Waltz fall on the “greatness” side. They believe that the United States is destined to lead the world and ought to work to ensure that it remains safely atop the global power hierarchy. Challengers to the existing American-led order like Russia and especially China must be aggressively confronted, and hostile dictatorships like Iran must be brought in line by force if necessary. The American continents must be dominated, Monroe-doctrine style, advocating a far more aggressive policy toward Latin American leftist dictatorships like Venezuela and Cuba (as Rubio did in Trump’s first term). The other camp, including Hegseth and director of national intelligence pick Tulsi Gabbard, espouses a kind of narrower nationalism. Though they believe in American military strength, they care far less about aggressively protecting the existing political order. If Russia wishes to seize part of Ukraine, they suggest, that’s not really an American concern. The United States should instead be preoccupied with killing its enemies, advancing its narrowly construed interests, and protecting its border — up to and including launching a war in Mexico to battle drug cartels and human traffickers. I don’t mean to say that these camps are fundamentally opposed. They are part of the same administration and share many of their boss’s core insights and enemies. They all agree to “make America great again” as a slogan but disagree on which parts of it to emphasize. In practice, this might lead to a whole host of predictable and significant conflicts inside the administration. When RFK Jr. moves to put new regulatory barriers in the way of pharmaceutical research, will Big Pharma and biotech executive Vivek Ramaswamy try to stop him? When billionaires suggest financing the extension of Trump tax cuts by cutting the social safety net, will Christian populist JD Vance stand up for the meek? When Marco Rubio pushes for regime change in Venezuela, will alleged anti-imperialist Tulsi Gabbard try to make him back off? None of these conflicts are hypothetical. Each is eminently predictable based on what the personalities involved have done in the past and promise to do in the future. If left unresolved, they threaten to create a kind of policy incoherence, with different aspects of the US government working at direct odds with each other, depending on who they answer to. If and when Trump steps in to resolve them, will he do so consistently? Will he say one thing publicly and do another privately, as so often happened in his first term? Or will the resolution so consistently favor one group over another that we can finally start saying Trumpism has a little more meat on its ideological bones? There is only one honest answer: We don’t know. But we can be sure the stakes are high for the Republican Party, the country, and most likely the entire world. This story was adapted from the On the Right newsletter. New editions drop every Wednesday. Sign up here.

Trump loves tariffs. Will the rest of America?

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vox.com

Donald Trump visits the Economic Club of Chicago in Chicago, Illinois, last month. Some business leaders worry his economic plans will fuel inflation. | Christopher Dilts/Bloomberg via Getty Images Long before he officially pursued the presidency, Donald Trump railed against US trade deals. In interviews dating back to the 1980s, he told journalists that deals that benefited Asian and Middle Eastern trading partners consistently “ripped off” the US. Over decades, that charge may have turned into a winning election strategy. As a first-term president and in his 2024 campaign, Trump argued that a lopsided global trading system is not only responsible for a deficit between the US and China, but also behind a decline in American manufacturing and jobs. Now, Trump has made a second-term promise to raise tariffs — the taxes on imported goods that must be paid when they enter the US — even higher on China and other countries, while resurrecting those jobs. This story was first featured in the Today, Explained newsletter Understand the world with a daily explainer plus the most compelling stories of the day. Sign up here. But footwear, apparel, and auto-part companies say they expect to pass the cost of such tariffs on to American consumers. Yale University’s Budget Lab projects that Trump’s proposed tariffs would cost the average American household up to $7,600 a year with initial price hikes as high as 5 percent. Those higher costs could potentially backfire on the president-elect’s campaign promise to make inflation “vanish completely.” Trump’s trade strategy is one that Greg Ip, chief economics commentator at the Wall Street Journal, says is a major departure from almost 80 years of US policy. In a conversation with Noel King, co-host of the Today, Explained podcast, Ip described how it might play out and have massive implications for the global economy. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and Pandora. Noel King Trade is a reality of economic life these days. What is Trump’s theory on it and how does it differ from his predecessors? Greg Ip In the United States, since the 1940s at least, there’s been a bipartisan consensus that more trade is good. And this came from a bipartisan view that this made our workers more productive, because they had bigger markets to sell into. It benefited our consumers because they got cheaper goods and a greater variety of goods. And it was also good for the US geopolitically because it helped us increase our economic bonds to countries that thought the same way we did, politically. Trump comes along and he argues: This entire regime has been much more to the advantage of other countries than it has been to the United States. Countries like Japan and then Germany and now China have taken advantage of the United States’s fixation on free trade to increase their trade surplus with the US, sell us lots of manufactured goods, and not buy very much from the United States. So his entire mission, from his first term, and now into this one, is to reverse that relationship and, he hopes, force those countries to buy more from the US, and Americans to buy more from each other instead of from importers. That’s the theory, anyway. Noel King Donald Trump had a chance to do all of this from 2016 to 2020 when he was in office. What did he do? Greg Ip He did raise tariffs, for example, in a series of rounds of tariff increases. He imposed tariffs on a wide range of products from China. And this was pursuant to a long-running case that complained that China was just systematically unfair to the United States, stealing our technology and putting up barriers to US exports to China. Then he imposed a variety of more bespoke tariffs on particular products. Noel King So at the end of that first term … had Donald Trump gotten what he wanted? Had his plan worked? Greg Ip If the test of Donald Trump’s trade policy was a smaller trade deficit, then no, he didn’t really achieve what he wanted. The trade deficit when he left office was larger in dollar terms than when he entered office. Did some manufacturing jobs come back? Possibly. But there also appear to have been some costs. There were industries that had to pay more for their inputs because of tariffs, and they lost sales and possibly jobs. And some of our trading partners retaliated. Our trade deficit with China did begin to shrink. At the same time, though, you saw our trade deficit with Mexico and Vietnam grow. And what that told us is that some businesses responded to Trump’s tariffs not necessarily by bringing production back to the United States, but by moving it to another country — out of China, into Vietnam, into Mexico — that were not quite as affected by the tariffs. Noel King What are Donald Trump’s plans for a second term? Greg Ip He wants to, number one, come down even harder on China. Instead of just putting tariffs on about half of China’s imports, he’s talked about a tariff on all Chinese imports of as much as 60 percent. And instead of sparing traditional US allies, he wants to impose an across-the-board tariff on everybody, of say, 10 to 20 percent. But there’s a very big caveat to this, which is that we don’t really know if Trump will end up doing exactly what he’s talked about. We know that Trump likes tariffs, but we also know that Trump likes to make deals. So, as in his first term, we might see that the threat of tariffs is primarily a leverage instrument — you know, a negotiating chip — in which he goes to countries that he thinks treat the United States unfairly and says, “Here are some things we want you to do differently. And if you do as we ask, then we won’t hit you with the tariffs that I’ve talked about.” Noel King How close can Donald Trump come to really and truly changing the way the world does trade? Greg Ip It’s possible that Trump presses ahead with exactly what he said, raises tariffs on everybody, and then all those countries retaliate. They export less to us, we export less to them, trade shrinks, and everybody is worse off. There’s another possibility here, which is that a lot of folks in the United States and in other countries say, “You know, he’s right. The trading system was fundamentally good, but it went off the rails at some point. We need to get together. We need to remake that thing.” So I think another possibility is that we end up a few years from now with a different trading system, and perhaps a more realistic view of how China, above all — but some other countries, [too] — have not been playing by the rules. But I think, as we learned from his first term, one thing with Donald Trump — you can be sure of this — is that you should expect the unexpected.

If Democrats could compromise with Republicans on abortion, should they?

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vox.com

Illinois Sen. Tammy Duckworth speaks at a news conference in February in support of IVF access. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images Since the fall of Roe v. Wade, Democratic lawmakers and reproductive rights advocates have maintained a clear strategy: Win a more progressive Democratic trifecta in 2024, eliminate the Senate filibuster, and pass comprehensive federal protections. When reporters asked about contingency plans — particularly given polls suggesting full Democratic control was unlikely — such questions were dismissed, cast as premature or defeatist. Now, with Donald Trump’s return to power and Republicans set to control Congress, that strategy is drawing fresh questions. The GOP has signaled some openness to compromise: While campaigning, Trump said he supported abortion exceptions in cases of “rape, incest, and protecting the life of the mother,” and he promised to mandate insurance coverage for in vitro fertilization (IVF). Several Republican lawmakers have backed their own fertility treatment bills. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) backed a Democratic-led IVF measure and speaks openly about his family’s consideration of the procedure. Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA) has pushed legislation to expand over-the-counter contraception. But reproductive rights organizations are doubtful. “We are not willing to compromise when it comes to our ability to make decisions about our bodies, lives and future,” Gretchen Borchelt, of the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), said on a press call the day after the election. “What is the compromise that would provide relief for Amber Nicole Thurman’s family who’s grieving her every single day?” added NWLC’s president Fatima Goss Graves, referring to a patient who died from sepsis after being denied care. Vox asked six major advocacy groups if they would consider pushing for new federal protections under a Republican-led Congress, be it for IVF, birth control or abortion. Most avoided giving a direct answer, instead directing the conversation to Republican accountability and the harm caused by abortion bans. The stance reflects a deeper calculation: that accepting anything less than people deserve — meaning access to the full spectrum of reproductive health care for any reason — would legitimize restrictions and undermine the broader fight for bodily autonomy. When asked about pursuing partial protections versus holding out for more Democrats, groups choose waiting. “We are really looking at this from a defensive position,” said Ryan Stitzlein, the vice president of political and government relations at Reproductive Freedom for All, the group formerly known as NARAL. “We read Project 2025, we are very familiar with the folks in leadership on the Republican side … and are preparing for them to levy attacks on reproductive freedom at all levels of government on the administrative side.” Polling suggests there may be political opportunities Despite the Biden era’s surprising bipartisan deals on thorny issues from gun control to climate change, there were never similar attempts to forge bipartisan compromise on reproductive rights. When a small group of Republican and Democratic senators introduced legislation in 2022 to codify elements of Roe, abortion rights groups quickly rejected the idea, arguing in part that it did not go far enough. Even on issues like IVF and birth control, where Republican support seemed possible and anti-abortion groups held less sway, there were no serious efforts to find common ground. To be sure, while many Republicans have sought to reassure voters that they support IVF, their voting record thus far tells a different story. Many of those same lawmakers co-sponsored the Life at Conception Act, which could severely restrict fertility treatments by granting legal personhood from the moment of conception. Republicans have largely voted against Democratic IVF legislation, while claiming they’d support narrower fertility treatment bills and criticizing Democrats for not being open to working on amendments. Still, polling suggests potential political opportunities. About 80 percent of voters say protecting contraception access is “deeply important” to them, and 72 percent of Republican voters had a favorable view of birth control. IVF is even more popular: 86 percent of Americans think it should be legal, including 78 percent of self-identified “pro-life advocates” and 83 percent of evangelical Christians. Americans’ support for abortion rights has intensified since the fall of Roe, and this reality shaped some Republicans’ rhetoric on the campaign trail. Newly elected Pennsylvania Republican Sen. Dave McCormick ran on a platform of fighting restrictions on fertility treatments and proposing a $15,000 tax credit for IVF. Some policy strategists have suggested that, regardless of Republican sincerity, Democrats and abortion rights groups might benefit from pushing votes on new IVF and birth control bills, even if they offer limited protections or codify certain provisions that advocates oppose. Such moves could either win new concrete protections or expose Republican resistance. But Democratic leadership and abortion rights groups for now seem uninterested in this approach, preferring to maintain pressure for comprehensively restoring rights. “We haven’t seen a genuine effort from Republicans that they engage in this conversation,” Stitzlein said. “We’ve seen them propose bills to try to save face in response to Dobbs and the Alabama IVF ruling.” Should Democrats keep their red line on abortion exceptions? The political math around abortion exceptions would seem straightforward. Trump ostensibly supports them. Most Americans, including many Republicans, believe abortion should be legal in cases of rape, incest, and threats to the parent’s life. And women are being demonstrably harmed by the lack of workable exceptions in state bans today. One recent study estimated that more than 3 million women in the US will experience a pregnancy from rape in their lifetime. Yet when asked whether they would consider seeking federal protections for abortion exceptions during Republican control as a harm reduction measure, established advocacy groups showed no interest, pointing to patients like Kate Cox and Amanda Zurawski who almost lost their lives or fertility despite state bans with exceptions. “As we are seeing across the country, exceptions often don’t work in practice, so people should not take comfort in those or rely on them,” Rachana Desai Martin, chief government and external relations officer at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Vox. This position stems from a core belief: that any engagement with exceptions would validate the broader framework of restrictions. Some doctors on the ground in states with restrictive bans have bemoaned the lack of support they’ve received for carving out exceptions. “I worry that reproductive rights advocates may be digging into untenable positions and failing to listen to those affected most by the current reality,” wrote one maternal-fetal medicine physician in Tennessee. On the question of codifying emergency medical protections, Planned Parenthood Action Fund stressed in an email that, “narrow health exceptions or those that focus only on emergencies are a disservice to patients and their health care providers because every pregnancy is unique.” The position is particularly notable given these same groups’ strong defense of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Active Labor Act (EMTALA) at the Supreme Court this year. The groups argued that EMTALA — which requires hospitals to provide “stabilizing treatment,” including emergency abortion care — represents a crucial federal protection for women in medical crises. Yet when asked about codifying the Biden administration’s interpretation of EMTALA or similar protections through legislation, the groups demurred. Internationally, exceptions have served as imperfect stepping stones to broader rights. Colombia’s journey from total ban to full decriminalization began with three abortion exceptions in 2006 — for health risks, fatal fetal conditions, and rape. Over 16 years, advocates used these flawed measures to help build public support and legal precedent for expanding access, ultimately leading to decriminalizing the procedure up to 24 weeks in 2022. India and Spain followed similar trajectories. India’s 1971 Medical Termination of Pregnancy Act initially permitted abortion only for specific circumstances like health risks and rape. Advocates used this limited framework to gradually build broader rights — first emphasizing public health arguments around unsafe abortions, then expanding to gender equality concerns. This incremental approach led to significant expansions in 2021 and 2022, including extended gestational limits and broader access for unmarried women. Spain’s path from its restrictive 1985 law to its 2010 legalization up to 14 weeks followed a similar pattern, with advocates particularly leveraging Spain’s mental health exception to create de facto broad access. These tensions — between principle and pragmatism, between long-term strategy and immediate needs — have taken on new urgency as patients in the US encounter the limitations of state-level abortion exceptions. In Louisiana, which has exceptions for protecting life, health, and fatal fetal conditions, almost no legal abortions have been reported since its ban took effect. Doctors say ambiguous laws and criminal penalties make them unwilling to test the rules. But rather than pursue clearer federal standards around exceptions, advocacy groups are betting on abortion rights becoming more prominent as restrictions continue. “Americans will continue waking up to stories of women who died preventable deaths because they were denied access to essential health care and voters will continue to see these bans wreak havoc on their families and communities,” declared a post-election strategy memo from Emily’s List, National Women’s Law Center Action Fund, Planned Parenthood Action Fund, and Reproductive Freedom for All. “With anti-abortion politicians in power, abortion rights will only grow in salience for voters in elections to come.” Working with Republicans on even limited protections could also undercut the narrative of GOP extremism — a message advocacy groups see as crucial for winning in 2026 and 2028. A high-stakes political bet Despite abortion rights proving less galvanizing in the most recent election than Democrats had hoped, reproductive rights groups are betting that voter attitudes will shift as restrictions continue. Currently, 28 million women, plus more trans and nonbinary people of reproductive age, live in states with abortion bans. “We have no interest in shrinking our vision,” Kimberly Inez McGuire, executive director of Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity, said, “but the politicians who will soon govern a majority pro-abortion country would do well to expand theirs.” In an interview with Vox, Democratic Sen. Tina Smith of Minnesota said she will work with anyone in Congress who wants to collaborate in good-faith to protect abortion rights, but stressed that as Democrats move into the minority, “the onus will be on Republicans” to come to the table and negotiate with them in a serious way. Asked about potential deal-breakers, Smith declined to discuss specific provisions in the abstract, saying she would wait to see complete proposals. Smith’s view captured the movement’s current predicament: “We have been saying for several years after Dobbs that the way to protect people’s access to abortion is to win elections for people who are willing to protect those rights. And that didn’t happen, so there is no magic solution here.”

Holiday travel can break the bank. Here’s how to manage expectations.

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vox.com

If the popular song is to be believed, there’s no place like home for the holidays. But getting there is going to cost you. Americans plan to spend an average of $2,330 on holiday travel this year, according to NerdWallet’s 2024 Holiday Spending Report. Factor in another $900 on gifts, per the report, and hundreds more on all the usual living expenses and you’ve got a hefty credit card bill come January 1. You would think that it’d be easy to opt out of unnecessary and pricey holiday travel, but sometimes external pressures and expectations can make it hard to say no. Parents may look forward to spending uninterrupted time with their adult children and grandchildren during this time of year. If you’re coupled, that doubles the coordination: Pairs might weigh whose hometown to visit. “We, as a culture, put so much emphasis on the holidays being the most important time — even though I don’t believe that’s true — that families get together,” says licensed marriage and family therapist Nicolle Osequeda. “[People] feel really obligated to meet the needs of their family … and moreover, not to disappoint them.” As much as you’d like to make the grandparents happy and get out of town for the holidays, sometimes your budget just won’t allow it. If you’re nervous about how to approach negotiations with your partner or break the news to your family, therapists offer some guidance on what to say and how to compromise. Set your holiday priorities Beyond just setting a budget, Osequeda suggests first getting clarity on what an ideal holiday looks like for you. During a time of year when people are often making decisions out of obligation, ask yourself what’s actually important to you this holiday season. Maybe it’s paying down debt or saving for a major purchase. Everyone’s reasons will be a little different. By focusing on what’s important to you, you can determine what you can afford. It’s not worth going into debt because you want to do it all this holiday season. “If there’s a reality that there’s three things you want to do and you can only afford to do two … just closing your eyes and putting things on credit cards is going to create bigger problems down the line,” says Matt Lundquist, founder and clinical director of Tribeca Therapy. “Those conversations go better when everybody is willing to put their cards on the table and say, ‘This is what I want, this is why it’s important to me.’” Getting clear on what you want helps you advocate for yourself when making plans with your partner, too. You may choose to prioritize some form of travel, but aren’t able to accommodate visiting both you and your partner’s families. Again, discuss your holiday goals and let your significant other know how your proposed plans align with that goal. If it’s been years since your partner’s been home, you might decide to visit them for Thanksgiving and then invite your family over for a New Year’s Eve party. “Those conversations go better when everybody is willing to put their cards on the table and say, ‘This is what I want, this is why it’s important to me,’” Lundquist says, “rather than the situation where we’re guessing what the other person wants and having to navigate reading between the lines.” Break the news as soon as possible — and be direct Many people have a tendency to delay sharing news that might be potentially upsetting, Lundquist says. But don’t string your family along. As soon as you’ve determined you can’t make it, let your loved ones know so they can deal with their disappointment or offer a compromise, Lundquist says. Then, tell your family in a “kind but clear way,” Osequeda says, why you can’t make it — but avoid over-explaining. You owe your loved ones an explanation, but you don’t need to justify your choices, she says. The more justification you proffer, the more “people start to poke holes in your argument,” Osequeda says, and may try to convince you to spend beyond your budget. If you’re unsure of how to tell your family, Osequeda suggests: “This is hard for me, but I’ve decided not to come home for the holidays this year because of the expenses involved. I understand if you’re disappointed. However, right now I really need to focus on [staying on top of my bills/not being stressed out over finances/not putting more money on my credit card/getting gifts for the kids]. Are there ways that we can still connect during the holidays that don’t include me traveling?” You might get some blowback from family members offering unsolicited criticism on what you choose to spend money on. (Which is none of their business anyway.) Remember that you’re making this choice based on your budget and financial needs, Lundquist says, and sometimes you’re going to make decisions that upset others. “I can’t get myself into debt to avoid you being upset,” he says, “And I also don’t want to organize our relationship in a way where those are the terms.” But be open to compromise Of course, your family might be entirely understanding and want to find a way to see you. It’s worth trying to find a happy medium, Osequeda says. If you have young kids and schlepping the whole family across the country is out of the question, you could ask your parents to travel to you if they’re able. Some families may offer to split the cost of travel with you. Get as creative as you want: Meeting somewhere in the middle, making a plan to visit during a cheaper time of year, promising to save up so you can come next year. Maybe these bigger asks are out of the question. You could make a smaller compromise and suggest FaceTiming the family during dinner or when the kids open presents. If you’ve determined that your holiday wouldn’t be complete if you weren’t at home, there are also other ways to make it work. For the cheapest flights, you might consider departing on the holiday itself and returning home during the week after the holidays. Try to carry on your luggage instead of checking a bag to save on fees. Driving will generally be cheaper than flying for shorter trips, but be sure to factor in extra travel time for holiday traffic. But if you’re traveling across the country, your time and money is better spent on flying. Other ways to lower the cost of holiday travel, according to NerdWallet, are to use miles or points for flights and hotels and to book rideshares to and from the airport in advance. Regardless of where you spend the holidays, you should still find time to get together with people you care about, whether it’s a local Friendsgiving or neighborhood potluck. “If you are unable to make it to your family because of financial reasons,” Osequeda says, “it doesn’t mean that you have to sit home alone miserably.”

Why do hotel lobbies smell like that?

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vox.com

Vox reader Jen Hawse asks: Why do hotels pump in very strongly smelling perfume into their lobbies and sometimes their guest rooms? What we think of as a “nice” hotel often comes down to a certain je ne sais quoi. Sure, it has all the amenities — a luxe restaurant and bar on the premises, hotel room beds with soft Egyptian cotton sheets, perhaps a decadent spa — but beyond all that, it should have an ineffable ambience that’s both welcoming and sensual, cozy and yet exotic. Scent can be what helps clinch this vibe. You might have noticed an alluring aroma wafting through the air as you enter a hotel lobby, or even a hotel room; this is likely a custom fragrance that hotels diffuse into the air. While some use mass-market scents available to consumers, many use their own signature scent developed by a master perfumer. Scent marketing, as the practice is called, isn’t just limited to the hospitality scene, but pervades the retail sector. Just think of the thick miasma of cologne that used to radiate from every Abercrombie & Fitch store. It’s (usually) a more subtle marketing tool than a giant light-up billboard, calling back to happy memories and altering your mood so you feel more satisfied in a space — which, in turn, can nudge you to stay there longer, spend more money, book a room again, and recommend the experience to someone else. Some companies are even spritzing smells in the office to make the return-to-office more pleasant. In so many of the places we spend time in, an appeal is being made to your nose. What’s the psychology behind scent marketing? Scent marketing has been around for decades, with Las Vegas casinos being some of the earliest pioneers to use it. In the 1990s and early 2000s, though, its purpose wasn’t just to invite a pleasant aroma to an otherwise neutral space — it was to counteract a lingering, distasteful odor. “There was a while there where most resorts were drawn to environmental scenting because they wanted to do something about the cigarette smoke,” Jim Reding, CEO of the environmental scenting company Aroma Retail, says. Sign up for the Explain It to Me newsletter The newsletter is part of Vox’s Explain It to Me. Each week, we tackle a question from our audience and deliver a digestible explainer from one of our journalists. Have a question you want us to answer? Ask us here. A growing number of companies outside hospitality are developing ambient scents for their retail spaces, says Caroline Fabrigas, CEO of Scent Marketing Inc. Recently, Fabrigas’s firm helped create a custom scent for Wayfair’s new Chicago store that smells like linen and fresh-cut grass. In food and drink establishments, focusing on smell makes immediate sense: You smell pizza, you think of pizza, you crave pizza. Starbucks works hard to keep its coffee aroma from being sullied by food and other smells in its stores — employees aren’t even allowed to wear fragrances. For other spaces, the basic theory is that a distinctive smell becomes something customers immediately associate with a brand — our sense of smell is connected to the part of the brain related to memory, like a certain laundry detergent taking you straight back to being wrapped up in blankets when you were home sick from school. Using an ambient scent can cement brand recognition, and improve how well customers remember aspects of a product or service. A nice smell also puts you in a good mood. A 2021 study by researchers from the Barcelona School of Tourism, Hospitality, and Gastronomy conducted a trial in a four-star hotel by comparing guest experiences in rooms scented with lavender and rooms without any scent; guests who stayed in scented rooms appeared to show higher happiness levels when in the room than those in the neutral room. Studies have also shown that a scented environment can make customers stay longer in a restaurant (while underestimating the length of their visit), thus spending more money — time flies when you’re enjoying yourself. An experiment an automaker conducted in the early ’90s even tried to determine if spraying certain scents on salespeople would make them more likely to be perceived as trustworthy, though it’s unclear what the outcome of this trial was. How do hotels decide on a “signature scent”? Hotels and resorts spend a lot of time matching up their brand image to a signature scent, especially today. (Although it might be very similar to a popular fragrance.) One of the trends in hotel design right now is to play up how distinct a space feels. “Everything has become hyper-local now,” says Lori Mukoyama, a global leader of hospitality practice at the architecture and design firm Gensler. “Gone are the days where we’re stamping out the same brand, exactly the same, in 50 different cities across the world.” Having a tailor-made scent is key to building the feel of a personalized hotel lobby, according to Mukoyama. “I totally feel like it’s a logo in the air,” says Fabrigas, whose company develops ambient scents for businesses. “It’s a backdrop against which all else plays.” For some brands, having one signature scent isn’t enough. The now-closed Mirage hotel in Las Vegas, for example, used two separate fragrances for two separate spaces. In the lobby, it used a buttery coconut vanilla scent, Reding says, to evoke a tropical theme that matched the giant aquarium behind the front desk. “It gives us a feeling of warmth and safety,” he says. But then the casino used something more energizing — a “tropical cocoa mango” — to give it a party-feel that might encourage exciting risk-taking rather than relaxation. One reason why environmental scenting is so commonplace in hotels is that it’s a place where the perception of cleanliness is sacrosanct. Reding says hotels often tell him they want something that smells fresh and clean, but tend to eschew anything that might remind people of cleaning products. It goes back to how we associate smells with certain contexts — a whiff of lemony Pine Sol is going to make you think of a bathroom, or a mop, rather than the luxurious, crisp cleanliness that hotels strive for. For some, hotel fragrances are an olfactory delight they want to recreate in their own homes. Several online retailers sell hotel and resort scents for consumers — or at least, an approximation of their bespoke scent — and Reding says this is the bulk of his business today. But not everyone is a fan of scent marketing. What’s a good or bad smell is highly subjective, and people with sensitive noses in particular might bemoan not being able to escape a headache-inducing fragrance. “That’s what really makes it tricky — that you’re diffusing in public spaces without the public’s consent,” Reding says. This story was featured in the Explain It to Me newsletter. Sign up here. For more from Explain It to Me, check out the podcast. New episodes drop every Wednesday.

Are we actually in the middle of a generosity crisis?

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vox.com

Did you donate to charity in the past, but no longer do so? If the answer is yes, you’re not alone. For the second year in a row, the philanthropy research foundation Giving USA reported that fewer Americans are donating to nonprofits than they used to, and the total amount of giving is declining once inflation is taken into account. Some in the philanthropy world are calling it a “generosity crisis” — fewer than half of American households now give cash to charity. Twenty million fewer households donated in 2016 than in 2000. And the money that is being given is increasingly coming from a small number of super-wealthy people. The only surprising thing about these findings, to me, though, is that anyone would be surprised. Why aren’t people donating to nonprofits? One big, and rather intuitive, reason why fewer people are donating money to registered nonprofits these days is the general state of the economy. The number of donors started sharply declining right around the tail end of the Great Recession in 2010. Of households that stopped donating money to nonprofits between 2000 and 2016, most earned less than $50,000 per year. Young people are also less likely to donate to registered charities than older people. The relationship between age and willingness to give away money makes sense — the younger you are, the fewer years you’ve had to earn money. The Vox guide to giving The holiday season is giving season. This year, Vox is exploring every element of charitable giving — from making the case for donating 10 percent of your income, to recommending specific charities for specific causes, to explaining what you can do to make a difference beyond donations. You can find all of our giving guide stories here. But the age gap has grown over the past few years. In part, this can be explained by high costs of living, student loan debt, and inflation. “Younger donors simply don’t have money right now,” said Rasheeda Childress, a senior editor at The Chronicle of Philanthropy. But we can’t blame the economy for everything. The decline in organized religion might be the biggest factor in the decline in charitable giving. Religious institutions are major hubs of philanthropy — highly religious adults volunteer nearly twice as much as other adults in the US, and roughly half of them volunteer through a religious organization. A report by the Do Good Institute, which conducts philanthropy research at the University of Maryland, found that people who belong to community groups, religious or otherwise, are more likely than others to volunteer and donate money. It’s not that religion necessarily makes people more charitable. Community does — specifically, community where charitable giving is centered and expected. But as participation in organized religion declines, so does giving. Beyond religion, people seem to be losing faith in institutions — the government, the media, and nongovernmental organizations like nonprofits. Nonprofits are one of the most trusted institutions in the US, but only about half of Americans have faith in them. Political polarization may be partially to blame — organizations that are colored by partisan values, like religious organizations and civil rights groups, are less trusted than nonprofits focused on more bipartisan issues like wildlife conservation. For Nonprofit Quarterly, Ruth McCambridge speculated that, as the gap between rich and poor gets wider, people are more likely to view nonprofits as “compliant handmaidens to an unjust system.” It’s not that people are less generous, it’s because they don’t trust organizations that cater to the rich donors they depend on, McCambridge added. At the same time, a survey of over 2,100 adults in the US found that, of those who stopped giving to charity over the past five years, 47 percent said that they chose to stop donating because they believed wealthier households should be pulling more weight. Historically, reaching out to small-dollar donors has not been an effective use of time for nonprofits, even though many nonprofits — particularly those in less affluent communities — depend on recurring small donations to stay afloat. Why pour energy into persuading 10,000 people to donate $10 each, when you could get all $100,000 from one wealthy donor? “It’s almost becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Childress said. By catering to the wealthy, nonprofits are “going after where the money is right now, but they’re not growing where the money is going to be.” The charitable tax deduction system was literally designed to benefit the rich. If you don’t earn a lot of money, claiming charitable donations doesn’t make much sense, especially after former President Trump’s tax cuts in 2017 reduced the need to itemize deductions. A totally reasonable reaction might be, “Who cares? Rich people have money to spare. Let them pay for everything!” But if we let rich people dominate philanthropy, we give them the power to shape how nonprofits operate. “You don’t want to be beholden to anyone,” said Phil Buchanan, president of the Center for Effective Philanthropy and author of Giving Done Right. If an organization that ought to be grounded in generosity and community is visibly propped up by a handful of billionaires and corporations, it’s not a great look. If donors are not immersed in the community an organization is trying to serve, they’re less likely to understand what that community really needs. And centering the wealthy certainly doesn’t convince already-suspicious young middle-class adults to get involved. How can we measure generosity if the IRS doesn’t know about it? The Generosity Commission, a nonpartisan team led by The Giving Institute and Giving USA Foundation, has spent years trying to figure out where all the non-wealthy donors have gone. “There’s certainly a monetary giving crisis,” Childress said. But “if you look at the data, people are being generous” — just not in ways that we’re familiar with. In other words, the apparent “generosity crisis” may not be a crisis of generosity at all. Measuring generosity is a bit like measuring “happiness” or “loneliness” — weird. Trying to nail down a feeling with statistics requires quantifying something that can’t really be quantified. Inevitably, the final score will be an imperfect reflection of the feeling, heavily skewed by what’s possible to measure. Today, measuring cash donations to registered charities is relatively simple. These gifts are reported to the IRS, leaving behind a paper trail that can be tracked by organizations like Giving USA. A 2020 study conducted by the Stanford Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society found that people in the US give in ways that extend far beyond tax-exempt donations to nonprofits. These forms of giving are harder to trace, though. When I gift a guitar to my neighbor who wants to teach his kid to play, for example, there’s no official record of that transaction — just a couple Facebook comments and a face-to-face conversation. The IRS can’t trace it, so in the eyes of Giving USA, it never happened. Mutual aid — or the reciprocal exchange of resources within a community — has existed worldwide for thousands of years. But it entered the spotlight in the US during the pandemic through community fridges, child care collectives, and healthcare funds. For a population that increasingly distrusts political institutions and craves human connection, mutual aid can feel more impactful than donating to a nonprofit — whether it really is or not. A survey conducted by GivingTuesday, the organization behind the post-Thanksgiving global day of giving, found that 76 percent of respondents between 18 and 34 prefer to give directly to individuals in need, and not nonprofits — only 46 percent of those over 50 agreed. Donations raised through crowdfunding also grew 33.7 percent in 2022, with 6,455,080 crowdfunding campaigns launched across the world that year. The crowdfunding market is projected to grow to as much as $300 billion by 2030. But while a GoFundMe donation counts as “generous” in my book, Giving USA can’t track it — so, we have a “generosity crisis.” But we know that humans, for the most part, are generous. In 2022, the Charities Aid Foundation found that 4.2 billion people — 72 percent of the world’s adult population — gave money, time, or service to someone they didn’t know that year. Over the past several years, the Generosity Commission has been working to “tell the full story” of generosity, so nonprofits can better understand how people want to make their communities better. In a report published in September, the Generosity Commission identified several possible explanations for declines in volunteering and donations, including the Great Recession, declining religiosity, and delays in traditional adult milestones like marriage, home ownership, and parenthood — but they note that further research is necessary. So, what should we do? To be clear: nonprofits do a lot of good, both in the US and abroad. Especially in smaller, less affluent communities, they absolutely depend on normal, not-super-rich donors like me — and we’re not pulling our weight. One could argue that, because I am, temporarily, a member of the richest 1 percent of the world’s population, I am morally obligated to donate a portion of my income to charity. At least in theory, if I schedule recurring donations to highly effective charities, I could save a number of lives in nations where my money will stretch much farther than it can in the US. But such effective philanthropy has always been the exception — in fact, giving to international causes actually declined by 1.6 percent after inflation in 2023. The vast majority of charitable giving in the US is domestic. Most donors aren’t paying for malaria-preventing bed nets overseas — they’re mainly donating to Ivy League schools and religious organizations. Just this week, Michael Bloomberg donated $1 billion dollars to Johns Hopkins University to pay for med students’ tuition. If I were in med school, I’d be thrilled — student debt sucks. But med students, especially from prestigious schools like the No. 2 ranked Hopkins, generally go on to make loads of money. Helping them out is less effective than, say, sending $1 billion dollars to directly help flood survivors in Kenya. Personally, I don’t currently donate a portion of my income to registered nonprofits, highly effective or otherwise. I’m still earning back the savings I drained as a freelance journalist (after spending six years on a grad student stipend). Michael Bloomberg didn’t pay for my Ivy League education, and with tens of thousands of dollars in undergraduate student loan debt hanging over my head, I laugh every time I receive, and promptly delete, a fundraising text from my alma mater. But I do give. I regularly support Kickstarter campaigns, gift household items to my neighbors, and donate to a mutual aid fund supporting sex workers in my community. That makes me like other “zillennials” in my cohort, who tend to direct their money toward more informal charities than traditional nonprofits. That may not necessarily count in the IRS’s statistics, but I don’t think it’s fair to call us ungenerous. Given the current state of democracy writ large, it makes perfect sense to me that so many of us value direct, tangible impact over indirect measurements of “effectiveness.” Informal community-centered giving can feel more impactful, even if it doesn’t score as high on a utilitarian scale. And what giving within your community can do — whether in the form of cash, time, or stuff — is build connection at a moment when we need it more than ever. Middle-class people aren’t unwilling to give. They just seem to be giving differently, and philanthropic organizations are still figuring out how to measure charitable giving beyond tax-deductible donations to 501(c)(3) nonprofits. Whether channeled through money or not, people perform acts of kindness all the time. Hopefully, the philanthropy sector will start to see them. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here! Update, November 20: This story was originally published on July 10 and has been updated to include details about the Generosity Commission’s September 2024 report.

Biden is letting Ukraine use a powerful new weapon. What happens next?

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vox.com

A person holds a self-painted picture with an inscription referring to the short-range missile of the same name at a rally for Ukraine’s Independence Day in August in Cologne, Germany. | Thomas Banniyer/picture alliance via Getty Images Nearly three years into Russia’s full-scale invasion into Ukraine, the Biden administration gave Ukraine the green light to strike deeper into Russia using US-supplied longer-range missiles. The Ukrainian military quickly put that permission to use: On Tuesday, it attacked a weapons depot about 70 miles from Ukraine’s border. The US and NATO allies have hesitated to provide sophisticated weapons like the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMS) that Ukraine used in that attack, fearing Russian retaliation against NATO sites — or even nuclear escalation. Raising that specter on Tuesday, Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a new version of the country’s nuclear doctrine, which would theoretically make it easier for Russia to use nuclear weapons in this conflict. The new doctrine specifically allows for a nuclear strike in response to a strike with conventional weapons — like the longer-range missiles Ukraine now has permission to use — if those attacks involved the “participation or support of a nuclear power,” likely referring to the US and other NATO countries. Throughout the war, Russian leaders have threatened to use the country’s nuclear weapons in the conflict if they believed they were necessary. That has led Ukraine’s allies to be cautious about the amount of aid they’ve offered, and has led to limits on what Ukrainian troops can do with those weapons. Ukraine’s new ability to use longer range missiles to strike Russian territory — and Putin’s confirmation of new nuclear rules — have again raised the question: Could Russia’s war in Ukraine escalate into a nuclear conflict? Throughout the war, experts have downplayed Russia’s appetite for nuclear conflict. But the rapid escalation of the conflict in recent weeks, and particularly Russia’s new nuclear doctrine, could mean that possibility is closer than before. What are the chances that Ukraine’s new missile capabilities lead to nuclear escalation? Since the beginning of Russia’s invasion into Ukraine, Putin and other officials have made statements, both explicit and oblique, that Russia might be pressed to use nuclear weapons. Most experts agree that the risk of Russia using such weapons is low, but it’s not negligible. A previous version of the doctrine Russia updated on Tuesday said the country would tap into its nuclear arsenal only under four circumstances: receiving credible data of a ballistic missile attack; nuclear or other WMD attack against Russia or its allies; attacks on Russian nuclear infrastructure; or conventional weapons attacks that threaten “the very existence” of the Russian state. Under the new doctrine, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov indicated attacks like Ukraine’s on Tuesday could trigger a nuclear response. That change shouldn’t be taken as a response to Ukraine’s strike, however, Samuel Charap, distinguished chair in Russia and Eurasia policy and senior political scientist at the RAND Corporation, told Vox. The new doctrine “has been in the works for a long time,” Charap said. “The timing may be tied to the attack of decision, but the substance has been brewing for a while.” Putin and other officials have not, it seems, made major preparations to actually use nuclear weapons. However as the war continues, Putin and his officials’ threats have become clearer and have involved actually demonstrating nuclear capacity. As recently as July, Russia and Belarus held joint military exercises that demonstrated Russia’s tactical nuclear capabilities. Initially, the US and NATO responded to Russia’s threats with caution, denying Ukraine weapons or placing restrictions on their use. But over the past three years, as little has come of Putin’s threats of nuclear war and of war with NATO, Western countries have given Ukraine access to increasingly sophisticated weapons systems. Besides the risk of nuclear war, Ukraine’s allies have had to balance concerns that they might be more directly drawn into the conflict. Though Ukraine is not a member of the NATO military alliance, Putin has previously warned that permission to use longer-range missiles (like those used Tuesday) inside Russia would be considered a NATO attack on Russia. US officials speaking to the Associated Press said they had anticipated a response from Russia, but that Russian officials’ warnings were viewed as inflammatory rhetoric, and would not provoke any change in US action. That suggests the US does not believe there’s much danger in Russia using its nuclear capabilities in the near term. Russia “never explicitly, on the official level, warned that they would use nuclear weapons in response to X, Y, or Z,” Charap said. “The only explicit red line that they’ve ever drawn was on the use of long range, US [or] Western weapons to strike into Russia that has now been crossed. So I can imagine people will expect their response, and it will not just be with words.” After 1,000 days of the war, the conflict appears to be approaching an impasse. There’s no clear path to decisive victory for either side. Each side is deploying new tactics to try to gain an advantage: Ukraine with longer range missiles; Russia with recruits from North Korea. And now, Russia and the US seem to be simply responding to each others’ escalations: Russia put North Korean troops on the battlefield, the US responded by authorizing the use of longer range missiles, and Russia released its new nuclear posture. That sort of behavior is both reckless and dangerous, Charap said. “You are in a spiral that is the definition of a tit-for-tat dynamic, where your actions are driven not by your goals, but by countering what the other guy is doing,” Charap said. “That only goes in one direction — continuing to up the ante. The spiral dynamic just continues until somebody gets out of control or somebody decides to stop it.”

It’s probably time you learned about the Costco Guys

2 d

vox.com

Social media personalities A.J., Big Justice, and the Rizzler on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon on October 28, 2024. | Todd Owyoung/NBC One of my colleagues has a theory: If you know the Rizzler, you might not have been surprised that Kamala Harris lost this month’s presidential election. If the name Big Justice doesn’t sound familiar, the results from the election may have been a total shock. Back in March, a Florida-based father-and-son duo named A.J. and Big Justice posted a TikTok expressing their enthusiasm for Costco Wholesale and its food court items. The pair — as well as their extended universe of relatives and non-relatives, like the Rizzler — have since become viral sensations, cementing their internet celebrity status with an appearance on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. “The Costco Guys, the Rizzler, and this whole kind of straight-bro-coded mediaverse is a stand-in for how siloed media consumption on the left has gotten,” says senior politics reporter Christian Paz. As a result, Paz suggests, some progressives may have “missed a bit of the political evolution the country was going through.” It asks the question: Does the rise of the Costco Guys — who are in no way explicitly political — help explain a cultural landscape shaped by straight bros that presaged a Trump win? Or is their presence on the internet something more innocuous, a throwback to the early days of YouTube when regular people would go viral and get airtime on Ellen? The answers are a little complicated. A history of the Costco Guys cinematic universe While they officially became viral sensations back in March, the Costco Guys’ celebrity has been years in the making. Originally from New Jersey, the family’s patriarch, Andrew Befumo (a.k.a A.J.), was a professional wrestler who went by “the American Powerchild Eric Justice” before he retired and went into mortgage lending. About a decade ago, he started a family YouTube channel, featuring his wife Erika, his daughter Ashley, and his son Eric (a.k.a. Big Justice), called All Befumo’d Up. The channel featured the sort of mundane if heartwarming content you might see on a slice-of-life reality show, like cooking meals, attending an Avengers screening, and singing Christmas songs. Since 2022, Befumo has mostly been making videos on TikTok (@a.j.befumo) with Eric — who he nicknamed Big Justice after his wrestling persona — with occasional appearances from Ashley and Erika, “The Mother of Big Justice.” Early videos show the father and son attending baseball games and reviewing local restaurants using their food review scale known as the “boom meter.” Delicious foods get a “boom!” Underwhelming or flat-out gross foods get a “doom!” — which is rare. They also recorded themselves running regular errands, like going to retail chains, with an unusual amount of enthusiasm. However, it’s that level of excitement in depicting the suburban, middle-class experience that’s part of their draw. While many famous vloggers are filming tropical vacations and helicopter rides, the Costco Guys treat a trip to Party City like a special occasion. @a.j.befumo We’re Costco Guys‼️ #costco #father #son #family #bigjustice #boom ♬ original sound – A.J. & Big Justice These videos raked up hundreds of thousands of views and earned them some sponsorship deals. However, it wasn’t until this past spring that their affinity for Costco would give them a ticket to internet stardom. On March 1, they posted their own version of the viral “We’re X, of course we Y” trend about their love for the wholesale chain. “We’re Costco guys,” says Big Justice at the beginning of the video. “Of course we go shopping while eating a chicken bake.” By July, they released a Beastie Boys-esque theme song, featuring Erika and Ashley, called “We Bring the Boom” that now has 14.4 million views. Since then, they’ve incorporated Costco and their extremely limited food court menu into much of their content, having guests rate the store’s “double chunk chocolate cookie” and come with them on shopping trips. They’ve released several remixes of “We Bring the Boom,” including a Christmas edition most recently. Ashley and Erika also emerged from the background of A.J. and Big Justice’s videos, creating their own page in October, @ashleyandmamajustice, where they mostly rank and review desserts. Despite how normal these guys seem, viewers still feel like they’re watching something off-kilter and idiosyncratic. They have a wide-eyed, unflinching gaze — almost like they’re being held hostage and forced to read off a teleprompter — when staring into the camera. While you could argue that their zeal is earnest, their mannerisms are unnatural and stilted. The rap songs are inarguably cringe. @a.j.befumo Jingle BOOM! ??#christmas #song #dance #father #son #mother #daughter #family #fun #bigjustice #boom @ItzTheRizzler @Sallyslices @Cody Chows @H00PIFY @The Makeshift Project @Cousin Angelo @Joe Felix @Real Santa Claus @Highland Bros @jerseyyjoe ♬ original sound – A.J. & Big Justice In the months since their initial virality, the “Costco boys” label has extended beyond the Befumo family to include some of their most frequent collaborators. Most notable among them is the Rizzler (a.k.a Christian Joseph), a kid influencer whose father began posting videos of him on TikTok in 2020. His father dubbed him the Rizzler, based on the slang term “rizz” that’s short for charisma. He’s since popularized the “rizz face,” a half-serious-half-smirking look similar to the alt-right meme/pose known as the “Chad face” or more broadly the “Gen Z Lip Sync Face.” A.J. said in an interview that a TikTok of the Rizzler joking around while wearing an ill-fitting Black Panther costume led him to contact the Rizzler’s father about collaborating. Other frequent guest stars include cousin Angelo, who may or may not actually be related to the Befumo family, and a TikTok dancer named Jersey Joe who posts videos dancing to Jersey Club music. Do the Costco Guys really belong to the “bro internet”? Since their rise to prominence, the Costco Guys have earned a questionable reputation on social media as alleged Trump supporters if not avatars for an increasingly MAGA-fied internet. The evidence is mostly superficial. They live in Florida. They spend much of their time in the big-box stores closely identified with the suburban American experience. Their logos and merch prominently feature the American flag. “There’s a lot of stuff about their content that is seemingly Republican-coded,” says EJ Dickson, senior culture writer at The Cut. “The main one is that they’re part of a demographic of white men in a state that overwhelmingly voted for Trump. The other aspect is the American flag imagery — very early on in their career. Actually, when A.J. was working in the mortgage industry, he was making content in front of an American flag.” Other examples are more eyebrow-raising. Their fanbase — at least based on their account’s commenters — leans heavily white and male; comments on one Costco Guys’ livestream featured rows upon rows of the N-word in all-caps. Logan Paul knows about them. Unlike Paul, though, the Befumo family has largely — and intentionally — avoided politics in their journey to fame. In an interview with internet reporter Taylor Lorenz, A.J. said that they’ve been approached by presidential candidates to collaborate but that political content was “not in their wheelhouse.” Possible political affiliations aside, Dickson, who profiled A.J. and Big Justice for Rolling Stone in July, doesn’t think this accounts for all of their popularity. “I do think people genuinely enjoy seeing this guy and his kid just being goofy and making this incredibly silly content together,” says Dickson. “A lot of people think their content is charming in its way.” She also argues that their videos may be more subversive than progressives online give them credit for: a father and son spending an immense amount of time together, showing each other affection and bonding over food. She compares them to bona fide right-wing personality Andrew Tate, who “built his brand in the thrall of his domineering and withholding father.” The fact that A.J. is monetizing time with his family has not gone without criticism. A behind-the-scenes video of A.J. sternly directing Big Justice in a video made the rounds in August and reinforced the assumption by some that he’s a stage dad. Still, the image of fatherhood he promotes is adoring and hands-on. “Even though [A.J.] performs masculinity with the way he looks and the workouts, he’s kind of doing the opposite by virtue of just clowning around on camera and spending a lot of time with his kid,” says Dickson. Regardless, the Costco Guys do ultimately exist in a lineage of influencers and celebrities that draw straight, white, right-leaning male fans. Several moments this year have shown, from the conservative appropriation of Sydney Sweeney to the overnight success of Hawk Tuah Girl, that it’s not totally up to public figures to decide who they appeal to.