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Equipment for canceled commencement exercises sits at the main campus of Columbia University on May 6, 2024, in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. What’s the latest? After canceling $400 million in federal grants for Columbia University last week, Trump officials sent a letter demanding the school make sweeping changes to its policies and governance or risk losing the rest of its federal money. What are the demands? Broadly, to punish protesters of Israel’s war in Gaza severely, with expulsions or years-long suspensions. The letter, from Trump’s “Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism,” also demands Columbia put the college president’s office directly in charge of discipline, make a plan to hold student groups “accountable,” write new rules to prevent “disruption” of campus life by protests, take the Middle Eastern Studies department away from its current leadership, and completely overhaul its admissions process. Is this legal? No, according to Cornell law professor Michael Dorf. The federal government can cut off funding to punish civil rights violations, but only after a lengthy process. So far, though, Columbia hasn’t challenged this in court, hoping instead to seek a compromise — and perhaps fearing a lawsuit would trigger even worse retribution. Why is this happening? Secretary of Education Linda McMahon has claimed that, since the protests began, Jewish students at Columbia “have faced relentless violence, intimidation, and anti-Semitic harassment on their campuses” and that university officials’ purported inaction in protecting them amounts to a violation of civil rights law. Critics argue, though, that this is a blatant effort to use federal power to chill criticism of Israel. This is also part of a larger Trump administration strategy of using federal funds as leverage against universities they view as incubators of “woke” progressivism. Back in 2021, Senate candidate JD Vance said it was time to “honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country.” More recently, activist Christopher Rufo called for using the cut-off of federal funds to put universities into “an existential terror” and better “discipline” them. And with that, it’s time to log off… Things on Earth may be messy, but have you seen the news that astronomers have discovered more than 100 new moons around Saturn? That means Saturn now has 274 moons, putting it well ahead of Jupiter (95) in our solar system’s moon power ranking.
Scarlett, a visually impaired grade 3 student, uses a cane to walk to class at the Inclusive Education Community Resource Center in the Philippines, part of the GABAY project impacted by the Trump administration’s freeze on foreign aid. | Ezra Acayan/Getty Images President Donald Trump has put millions of lives at risk by shutting down most of America’s humanitarian and development work abroad. After freezing almost all spending on foreign aid, the administration this week finished its purge at the US Agency for International Development (USAID), announcing that 83 percent of its programs are being axed. But you can help keep some of these lifesaving programs going. Experts who see the immense value of these programs — which prevent and treat diseases, supply food and clean water to people living in extreme poverty, and help refugees fleeing war — have spun up new emergency funds to enable the programs to continue their operations. And they’re seeking donations. So if you’re unhappy with Trump’s purge, you are not powerless here. Donating to one of these funds can be a way to resist the administration’s “America First” ethos. And because the funds are supporting programs that are extremely cost-effective — meaning they save more lives than others would with the same amount of money — they offer an unusually powerful opportunity to help the world’s most disenfranchised groups. Some may question whether it should fall to private donors to fill in the funding gaps this way; isn’t this the government’s job? It is. But in moments when the government isn’t doing nearly enough, individual generosity can really shine by stepping in with emergency aid. This is one of those moments. If you’re concerned that private donors stepping in now will reduce pressure to restore USAID later on, consider this: There’s no way donors will manage to fill the massive gap that the government has left behind. Philanthropy may yield millions of dollars, but that’s a drop in the bucket compared to the billions that the government was providing. Besides, USAID was doing a lot of things donors just can’t do, like steering very large and highly trained staffs and working directly with other organizations and governments. So most experts I spoke with said it won’t be plausible to argue that philanthropy can just replace government aid. And people in urgent situations around the world need help now. They can’t simply keep waiting for their next meal or their next dose of medication. That’s what the three funds below are designed to address immediately. Let’s check them out. 1) The Rapid Response Fund This fund was co-created on February 17 by two organizations: The Life You Can Save, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting extreme poverty, and Founders Pledge, a nonprofit empowering entrepreneurs to do the most good possible with their charitable giving. These nonprofits have a specialty in finding the most high-impact and cost-effective lifesaving programs out there. They’ve spent years rigorously evaluating programs, finding the ones with the strongest evidence base, and recommending them to donors who want to be sure they’re getting the most bang for their charitable buck. Less than a month after its launch, the Rapid Response Fund has pulled in over $1.5 million and is already disbursing cash to organizations that it has high confidence in based on past evaluations. They include: The International Rescue Committee, which fights childhood malnutrition — linked to almost half of deaths among children under 5 years old — through programs led by community health workers. These programs cost only $130 per child treated and multiple studies have found recovery rates of 53 percent to 82 percent. The Iodine Global Network, which prevents iodine deficiency, the most common cause of brain damage in newborns. This work not only saves lives but also improves educational outcomes and breaks cycles of poverty — all at the low cost of 5 cents to 10 cents per person annually. Goal 3’s IMPALA project, which equips African health care workers with tools like vital signs monitors so they can detect patient deterioration early and intervene when treatments are most effective. Initial results from a Malawian hospital showed a remarkable 59 percent drop in child mortality compared to the previous year. Jessica La Mesa, co-CEO of The Life You Can Save, told me programs like these were severely underfunded relative to their potential impact even before the USAID cuts. “We needed more before, and we need even more now,” she said. “There’s still a massive funding gap, even just within the organizations we recommend — a $77 million gap across everything we’re looking at funding. So we have a long way to go.” Want to help fund crucial work like this? You can donate to the Rapid Response Fund here. 2) Unlock Aid’s Foreign Bridge Fund Unlock Aid is a coalition group aimed at making global development more effective. Its new Foreign Aid Bridge Fund is meant to help sustain the organizations that were impacted by the US government’s cuts. This fund is prioritizing organizations that are not only high-impact and cost-effective, but that have a sustainable business model — rather than being dependent on a single source of revenue, like the US government. Since the fund will be temporary, it’s looking for organizations that will be well positioned to continue even after the fund expires. Unlike The Life You Can Save and Founders Pledge, which are funding organizations they’d already evaluated in the past, Unlock Aid is accepting fresh applications from programs in need. They’ve already received applications from hundreds of organizations. The benefit of that is that they have the chance to encounter groups that aren’t on their radar yet but are doing critical work. But it means their grants committee has to assess a whole lot of material in a short timeframe. That said, they’ve been able to move fast: Just days after launching on February 13, they awarded their first four grants, noting, “This rapid turnaround demonstrates our commitment to functioning as a true emergency fund, getting critical resources out quickly to organizations that need them most.” Those grants are going to two African organizations that provide lifesaving treatment to people living with HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis; another African organization that gives communities access to malaria care; and a humanitarian organization in the Caribbean. If you want to fund more similar work, you can donate to Unlock Aid’s Foreign Aid Bridge Fund here. 3) GiveDirectly GiveDirectly is an organization based on one big idea: If you want to help the world’s poorest people effectively, why not just give them cash? The organization has been giving out no-strings-attached cash transfers for years, and along the way, it’s built up an impressive evidence base showing the benefits of these transfers. Cash gives people the agency to buy the things they really need, as opposed to what outsiders think they need. And it can be disseminated much faster than goods, thanks to cellphone-based banking. Cash is now considered the baseline standard for challenges like poverty alleviation, with other interventions judged on whether they’re superior to cash. GiveDirectly had about 38,000 families across Mozambique, Malawi, Morocco, and Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) slated to receive $20 million in life-changing cash transfers this year, funded by the US government’s foreign aid budget. Unfortunately, seven GiveDirectly programs were among those impacted by the USAID cuts; the organization recently received termination letters. “I think in DRC it’s been particularly terrible,” Anthea Gordon, GiveDirectly’s country director based there, told me. Over 500,000 people in eastern DRC have been displaced by fighting between M23 rebels and Congolese government forces. When M23 took over the city of Goma, where GiveDirectly’s office is, Gordon lost power and internet — so she initially had no idea about the USAID cuts. “I was hiding in a corridor,” she said. “When I resurfaced a couple days later, I couldn’t believe it. Out of the DRC humanitarian aid budget, the US funded about 70 percent, so this has had a massive, massive impact — at a time when there was more need than ever for humanitarian aid. It was complete disaster.” For the families who were supposed to be receiving cash transfers, the cuts mean they’ll be at risk of being unable to afford essentials like food, medicine, and safe housing. So GiveDirectly has launched its own fundraising campaign, with the hope that it can still deliver cash to as many of the families as possible. If you like the idea of showing solidarity with the world’s poorest people in an effective and non-paternalistic way, you can donate to GiveDirectly’s campaign here. And if you want to support one of these three funds, but aren’t sure which, don’t spend too much time worrying about it: Though they each vary a bit in their approach, all three support high-impact, cost-effective programs that can achieve an unusual amount of good with your money at an urgent time like this. That urgency is what Gordon, in the DRC, wants people to remember. “In terms of individuals’ lives, if you have HIV and you’re taking retrovirals and you don’t have your supply resumed very quickly, it’s game over,” she said. “We need something now to keep the health centers open, to give people cash, to have their next meal.”
A new memoir by a former Facebook employee promoted Meta to take legal action this month. | Kenny Holston/Pool/AFP via Getty Images In a 2019 speech at Georgetown University, Mark Zuckerberg made a bold statement. Rather than to help college kids get dates, he claimed, Facebook was invented as a platform for “free expression.” Six short years later, Zuckerberg’s company is trying to muzzle yet another whistleblower — one who happens to have written a book full of alleged anecdotes about him and fellow Facebook executives that aren’t just embarrassing but also politically damning. Sarah Wynn-Williams, the whistleblower and author, was a director of global policy at Facebook from 2011 until 2017, when she was fired. The book came out on March 11 and is called Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism, a reference to The Great Gatsby, which refers to its wealthy characters as “careless people” who “smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money.” The analogy is not subtle, and neither are the allegations Wynn-Williams makes about her former bosses, including Sheryl Sandberg, former COO of Facebook, and Zuckerberg himself. Meta took legal action against Wynn-Williams last week, arguing that she violated a nondisparagement agreement she signed when she was a Facebook employee. An arbitrator ruled in Meta’s favor on Wednesday, instructing Wynn-Williams to stop promoting the book and “amplifying any further disparaging, critical or otherwise detrimental comments.” The book’s publisher, Flatiron Books, and its parent company, Macmillan Publishers, were not part of the arbitration case, and the book remains on sale. Among the more salacious claims Wynn-Williams makes in the book are that Sandberg once allegedly made her assistant buy $13,000 worth of lingerie for both Sandberg and the assistant. And on a trip home from Davos, Sandberg took the only bed on the plane, and then allegedly told Wynn-Williams, who was visibly pregnant at the time, to “come to bed” with her. Things get darker from there. Joel Kaplan, who was vice president of global policy and Wynn-Williams’ boss, allegedly did several inappropriate things around this time, including but not limited to telling Wynn-Williams that she looked “sultry.” When Wynn-Williams reported that she couldn’t work while on maternity leave because she was still bleeding from surgery, Kaplan allegedly asked where she was bleeding from. Wynn-Williams reported Kaplan for sexual harassment, and Meta said it conducted a lengthy investigation, including interviews with 17 witness, that cleared Kaplan. Zuckerberg comes off looking bad, too, based on early reviews and reporting on the book’s allegations. NBC News sums up what Wynn-Williams claimed about the Facebook co-founder, now Meta CEO, thusly: “His belief that Andrew Jackson was the greatest American president, his interest in collecting wine from the Jackson era in the 1830s, his desire to have a ‘tribe’ of children and his professed ignorance that Facebook employees were letting him win at the board game Settlers of Catan.” All these personal details frankly look quaint compared to what Wynn-Williams has to share about Facebook’s attempts to enter China. Under Zuckerberg’s leadership, the company was prepared to do almost anything to shut down dissent and comply with the Chinese Communist Party’s censorship rules in order to gain access to the country’s billion-plus potential users, according to the book, as well as a 78-page whistleblower complaint that Wynn-Williams filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. According to the complaint, Facebook even planned to employ a “chief editor” to take down unacceptable posts and to share all user data with the Chinese government. Wynn-Williams also alleges that Zuckerberg later told an incomplete version of the truth about its China plan effort to Congress. A Meta spokesperson told Vox that details of its plan to enter China were “widely reported beginning a decade ago.” Meta does not like that whistleblower complaint or this book. The company said in a statement to Vox that the book contains “a mix of out-of-date and previously reported claims about the company and false accusations about our executives” and that Wynn-Williams was fired for “poor performance and toxic behavior.” Meta also claims that Wynn-Williams “has been paid by anti-Facebook activists.” Getting lawyers involved in a nondisparagement agreement dispute and book banning are not the same thing, but it’s still not a great look for a self-professed free speech champion, like Mark Zuckerberg. This is the same tech executive who, just a couple weeks before Donald Trump’s second inauguration, announced that his platforms were doing away with fact-checking in favor of “community notes” in the interest of promoting free expression. That new feature launches next week, by the way, with the help of some open source technology from Elon Musk’s X.
Israeli army soldiers walk past tanks near the Gaza Strip. | Menahem Kahana/AFP via Getty Images From the start, the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas has been extremely fragile. Since the agreement took effect in January, Israel has only escalated its raids in the West Bank, displacing more than 40,000 Palestinians — the highest level of displacement there since the occupation began in 1967. And after the first phase of the ceasefire ended earlier this month — with Israel and Hamas at an impasse — Israel cut off electricity and blocked humanitarian aid from entering Gaza again. This all comes after over a year of war that has devastated Gaza. Since October 2023, Israel has killed over 61,000 Palestinians, decimated the enclave’s health care infrastructure, and displaced some 90 percent of the population. It’s a staggering human toll that Israel and its allies have justified with one simple refrain: “Israel has a right to defend itself.” It’s a familiar line that’s been repeated for decades. George Bush, Barack Obama, and Donald Trump all said it during their time in the White House. Former President Joe Biden said it in the wake of the October 7 attack on Israel in 2023, when Hamas killed about 1,200 people and took at least 250 people hostage. Since then, American politicians — from governors to mayors to members of Congress — have all turned to that phrase to reiterate their support for Israel. But it’s important to break down what this “right” actually means, because preventing this kind of catastrophe in Gaza from happening again requires an interrogation of the legal justifications that have led to this outcome. Inside this story Why Israel’s claim of self-defense relies on murky legal arguments Israel’s self-defense argument, explained How Israel can legally respond to an attack like October 7 Why defining self-defense matters So here’s the problem with politicians so often invoking Israel’s “right to defend itself” when trying to justify the state’s lack of restraint or defend it against accusations of genocide: In the occupied territories, which include the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, Israel’s right to self-defense might not even exist — at least not from a legal standpoint. Under international law, any recognized sovereign state has the right to defend itself against an armed attack from another country. Ukraine, for example, has a widely recognized right to defend itself against Russia’s invasion. Israel has that same right — except what’s different about October 7 is that Israel was not invaded or attacked by another sovereign country. Hamas’s attacks, and other instances of armed rebellion by Palestinians, have come from territories that Israel controls. Because of that, some legal experts argue that Israel cannot reflexively invoke a right to self-defense, at least as understood in a legal context. This interpretation of international law isn’t a fringe legal viewpoint. Over the decades, it’s been repeated by practitioners and scholars and even reiterated in an advisory opinion at the International Court of Justice in 2004. Some argue that, morally, Israel had no choice but to act with force to deliver some form of accountability for October 7. But moral arguments only go so far: After all, what could morally justify killing tens of thousands of innocent men, women, and children? And morals, in any case, do not govern the world; laws do. International law does not, of course, require that Israel sit idly by after an event like October 7. Israel can respond with proportionate force — like using law enforcement to repel an attack and restore order. But launching a war and definitively claiming that it is an act of self-defense rests on shaky legal ground. On the surface, this might seem like a tedious semantic exercise. Whether Israel can claim self-defense doesn’t materially change how it might continue to conduct itself in Gaza and the West Bank, nor would it suddenly make all of Israel’s actions during this war legal. (Whatever legal right Israel might invoke to use force, it cannot be given carte blanche.) But a better understanding of what Israel’s right to defend itself actually means would help clarify whether Israel’s war was indeed an act of self-defense or an act of aggression. And if it’s the latter, then that ought to make Israel’s allies rethink the kind of blanket political support they often provide Israel during times like these. Israel’s claim of self-defense relies on murky legal arguments There are two main legal frameworks for considering the right to self-defense. First, the Charter of the United Nations, the founding document of the UN and a legally binding treaty for member states. Second, international humanitarian law, which establishes the rules of conduct around armed conflict. Though some form of international humanitarian law has existed for centuries, today’s version is rooted in the Geneva Conventions of 1949 as well as other binding treaties. Entities like the International Court of Justice (ICJ) and the International Criminal Court are responsible for adjudicating it. Israel’s right to defend itself is a reference to Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, which states that, “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations.” While “armed attack” is not explicitly defined, the phrase has historically been interpreted to mean an attack from another state. That charter is what Israel and its allies have invoked since it was attacked on October 7 to defend its actions in Gaza. The problem, however, is that since 1967, Israel has been occupying Palestinian territories — the longest military occupation in modern history — and has been in routine violation of international humanitarian law. In fact, just last summer, the ICJ deemed the Israeli occupation to be illegal in its entirety. (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu called the ruling a “decision of lies,” and falsely asserted that the legality of Israeli settlements “cannot be disputed.” Other Israeli politicians called the decision antisemitic.) “Every state that suffers an attack or a serious threat of an attack has the right to defend its territory and its citizens using force,” Francesca Albanese, the UN special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territories, told me in October. “But in the case of Israel, there was no right to self-defense on October 7 simply because Israel was not attacked by another state.” In other words, since the attack came from an armed group within a territory that Israel not only controls but is widely recognized as illegally occupying, it cannot claim the right to self-defense. Albanese caught flak for similar comments she made early on in the war, but there is legal precedent to back her point. In 2004, the ICJ issued an advisory opinion on the wall Israel was constructing around the West Bank, arguing that the barrier was illegal. (While advisory opinions are nonbinding, they are respected as authoritative interpretations of international law, and are often cited in legal proceedings.) The court argued that because the wall would defend against threats from an area that Israel already controls, Israel was not acting, as it had claimed, in self-defense. “Israel could not in any event invoke those resolutions in support of its claim to be exercising a right of self-defense,” the ICJ wrote. In the context of that advisory opinion, any action that’s taken to further solidify or perpetuate Israel’s military grip on Palestinians can be seen as an extension of the occupation, not an act of self-defense. In South Africa v. Israel — the case brought before the ICJ last year accusing Israel of committing genocide — South Africa’s legal team reiterated that line of reasoning. “What Israel is doing in Gaza, it is doing in territory under its own control,” South Africa’s lawyers said. “Its actions are enforcing its occupation. The law on self-defense under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter has no application.” Even though the attacks on Israel come from within territories that are under its control, the situation is not akin to a civil war. It is still an international conflict: Israel is illegally occupying foreign territory and must abide by international humanitarian law, not its own domestic laws or any rules governing civil wars. Ultimately, as the occupying power, Israel is responsible for winding down and eventually ending its occupation, not further entrenching it. “The State of Israel is under an obligation to bring an end to its unlawful presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible,” the president of the ICJ wrote when delivering the court’s advisory opinion that determined the occupation is illegal. But over the decades, Israel has only dug in deeper, continuing to build illegal settlements on occupied territory, blockading Gaza, and imposing military rule on Palestinians that violates their human rights. That’s what makes Israel an aggressor under international law, both before and after October 7. And so long as Israel is an aggressor, then it cannot claim the right to self-defense. “By maintaining an occupation that deeply, irreversibly violates the right of self-determination of the Palestinian people, it constitutes a permanent and enduring form of aggression,” Albanese said. Israel’s argument, explained Some experts argue that Israel’s justification for the war does fit into an international legal framework. One argument is that October 7 amounts to an “armed attack” — what Article 51 of the UN Charter says would trigger a state’s right to self-defense. Prior to the attacks of September 11, 2001, the prevailing interpretation of the UN Charter was that only states can carry out “armed attacks.” In that sense, Hamas, which much of the international community considers a “non-state actor,” could not trigger Israel’s right to self-defense. The United States, however, challenged that view when it invoked its right to self-defense after 9/11 and launched the “war on terror,” which specifically targeted non-state actors. In a journal article published by the US Army War College, Eric A. Heinze, an international studies professor at the University of Oklahoma, makes the case for why Israel could invoke self-defense in the aftermath of October 7. One of his arguments includes the point that the scale of the attack on October 7, with the number of civilian casualties, would constitute an “armed attack” and make a military response justifiable. “In the case of the Israel-Hamas conflict, there seems to be little doubt that the October 7 attacks met and exceeded the levels of violence required to rise to the level of an ‘armed attack’ under Article 51,” Heinze wrote. But whether October 7 amounts to an “armed attack” or not is beside the point. “There’s no doubt that in terms of the definition of armed attack, per se, what took place on the seventh of October amounts to an armed attack,” Ardi Imseis, an international law professor at Queen’s University and former UN official, said in October. “The question is not that, though. The question is whether or not it qualifies as an armed attack that allows a state, subject to said attack, to invoke a right of self-defense under Article 51 of the UN Charter.” The answer to that question is a resounding no, Imseis says, because the ICJ — as the principal judicial arm of the United Nations — already determined, in its 2004 opinion on the wall, that the claim of self-defense does not apply within territory that is under Israeli control. In other words, the key distinction here is not the “armed attack” part, but the fact that Israel unlawfully occupies Gaza. That’s also what makes this situation fundamentally different from the US invoking a right to self-defense in response to actions by al-Qaeda after 9/11: al-Qaeda was not attacking its occupier. This leads to the second part of the rationale behind Israel’s argument: the common refrain that Gaza hasn’t been under occupation since Israel withdrew its settlements and military from the strip in 2005. Therefore, legal reasoning like the 2004 advisory opinion on the separation wall doesn’t apply, the argument goes, because Israel doesn’t control that territory. That characterization, however, is widely rejected by human rights groups and the international community; even the US State Department includes the Gaza Strip in its definition of the occupied Palestinian territories, alongside the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Most recently, in its advisory opinion that declared that the occupation is illegal, the ICJ reaffirmed that Gaza is, from a legal standpoint, under occupation. While the Israeli military no longer had a daily presence in the enclave after 2005, Israel still controlled Gaza’s borders, airspace, and territorial waters. As a result, Israel has largely been the one deciding which goods and basic necessities could flow in and out of Gaza. The kinds of goods Israel banned from entering Gaza through the years have included wedding dresses, diapers, baby bottles, paper, and pasta. Even Palestinian fishermen were only able to access very limited parts of the sea. Put another way, while Israel does have legal recourse against threats emanating from the Palestinian territories, Israel lost its right to invoke self-defense when it started its military occupation nearly 58 years ago. “The only way for Israel to ensure the security of its territory and its citizens,” Albanese said, “is to stop abusing another people, to stop occupying the Occupied Palestinian Territories.” The problem, however, is that the occupation has no end in sight. So how can Israel legally respond? After an attack like October 7, there are various legal avenues that Israel can pursue. But whatever actions it takes, Israel must abide by Occupation Law, a branch of international humanitarian law, which defines how to address attacks that come from the occupied territories. The basic answer to the question of how Israel is legally allowed to respond is through law enforcement. A proportional police crackdown on perpetrators of violence, for example, might be justified if it doesn’t violate people’s rights; an overwhelming show of military force is not. While there’s no objective measure for what would constitute a proportional response, international humanitarian law lays out some guidelines. It explicitly prohibits military force that would be “expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.” That means that Israel must limit the damage it inflicts solely to legitimate military objectives. As an occupying power, Israel could have used “necessary and proportionate force to repel the attack. But that’s where they have to stop,” Imseis said. For any use of force to be lawful under international law, “it must be necessary and proportionate in relation to the force being used against it,” he added. Israel might argue that it has been acting with proportionate force because it was not just stopping the attacks of October 7, but any potential future attacks by Hamas or other Palestinian armed groups. But this argument is complicated by Israel’s obligations as the occupying power. As Israel is charged with ensuring the welfare of the people it occupies, it cannot wage a war under the guise of stopping “future attacks.” That’s why Israel and its allies argue that this war is against a single entity — in this case, Hamas — rather than the Palestinians more broadly. It’s hard, though, for Israel to claim that its war on Gaza has been an act of self-defense, or a war against only Hamas — let alone a proportionate response to October 7. In just over a year, Israel has used mass starvation as a weapon of war, imposing famine conditions across the Gaza Strip. It has brought Gaza’s health care infrastructure to the brink of collapse and created conditions for the spread of preventable diseases. And it has killed more than 150 journalists. This kind of harsh collective punishment was even articulated by Israeli officials at the onset of the war. “What we know for certain, and this is beyond doubt, is that the measure, character, quality of the use of force used by Israel to respond to the seventh of October — even arguing that they had a right to self-defense under [Article] 51 — went well beyond anything reasonably proportionate or necessary to repel that attack,” Imseis said. All of this means that even if Israel could claim that it initiated the war out of self-defense, the actions of the war itself could not be considered legal. “Whatever the possible legal justifications for the use of force, all sides must always comply with the law of armed conflict and know that war crimes are never justified,” Clive Baldwin, a senior legal adviser for the legal and policy office of Human Rights Watch, said in October. “No matter what the other side has done, reprisals are not justified either.” There is also an inconvenient truth for Israel and its allies when they argue that the principles of self-defense ought to give Israel license to wage this kind of war in Gaza. The other side of that coin is that Palestinians, as an occupied people, have a right to resist under international law, which includes armed resistance — as various legal scholars have argued and as the UN General Assembly has articulated in a resolution. Of course, Palestinian militants do not have the right to commit war crimes, such as killing innocent civilians or taking hostages, when carrying out an attack. But it does mean that the rationale behind an armed attack, depending on intent and action, can be rooted in the law. Why defining self-defense matters There are two main reasons why it’s important to challenge the reflexive talking point used to justify use of force against Palestinians — that Israel has a “right to defend itself.” And it’s especially important now because a ceasefire is not a guarantee that Israel will rein in its belligerence. The first is that Israel’s allies, particularly the United States, ought to have pushed the country to abide by the principles of international humanitarian law — not simply invoking the UN Charter and leaving it at that — and limited their support to include a proportional law enforcement response. The blank check that the Biden administration gave the Israeli government in the aftermath of October 7, under the guise of supporting self-defense, enabled Israel’s worst impulses — giving it ample resources to wage a horrific war that has resulted in one of the defining humanitarian catastrophes of the century. The second is that allowing Israel’s claim of self-defense to go unchecked essentially absolves it of its role as an aggressor by ignoring the fact that Israel is administering an unlawful, brutal military occupation — one that various leading human rights organizations have deemed an apartheid regime. “Under almost every possible scenario in which we analyze Israeli attacks on the Gaza Strip under international humanitarian law, Israel fails,” Ata Hindi, an international law scholar and professor at Tulane University Law School, said in October. “So they remove themselves from the law,” he added, by using “self-defense” as an umbrella term that justifies all of its actions. Accepting that Israel has been acting in self-defense rather than as an occupier expanding its military control means that Israel’s allies are willing to flout international law whenever it’s convenient to do so. And since last year, Israel has shown how dangerous that is, committing atrocities and human rights violations while ignoring injunctions imposed by the world’s highest court. That kind of hypocrisy — a selective approach to determining which laws ought to apply to Israel and which it should conveniently dismiss — is bound to have global consequences. It undermines the legitimacy of the international legal system, emboldening Israel and other states to continue violating laws with impunity. Russia, for example, has already pointed to the United States’ unequivocal support for Israel’s war as evidence of the West’s lack of respect for the rules-based order. So the next time a politician says Israel has a right to defend itself, ask yourself: Is this what self-defense actually looks like?
People have known for centuries that drinking too much alcohol is bad for you. The short-term physical effects on cognition and motor function speak for themselves. The longer-term physical consequences of abusing alcohol — liver damage, jaundice, and cancer — have long been impossible to ignore. So why, in that case, has there been a widespread belief, even among many physicians, that moderate drinking might actually be good for you? We can thank the so-called French paradox for this. In the early 1990s, French scientist Serge Renaud concluded that the French had low rates of cardiovascular disease despite their affinity for fatty foods like beef and cheese because they otherwise adhere to a healthy Mediterranean diet — and because they consumed “moderate” amounts of red wine. Scientists have theorized that the antioxidants in red wine could play a role in reducing cholesterol, for example. Subsequent studies appeared to affirm the correlation, strengthening the belief among the general public about the benefits of red wine. But over the past decade, new studies and public health warnings have called that conventional wisdom into question, stating emphatically that no level of alcohol consumption could be considered safe — much less beneficial. Alcohol after all, absolutely is a toxin, and has long been recognized by experts, if not the broader public, as a carcinogen, after all. Since many people enjoy alcohol to some extent, says Timothy Naimi, director of the University of Victoria’s Canadian Institute for Substance Use Research, “there’s been a far more relaxed scientific standard.” “We all love studies that show, ‘oh, sex makes us live longer, or coffee is good for us, or chocolate is good for us.’ There is this irresistible idea.” Science has clearly established that excessive drinking is bad for you. But what remains confusing, especially with the steady stream of new studies that sometimes seem to contradict each other, is how bad moderate drinking is — and what “moderate” even means. Here’s what we actually know. “Moderate” drinking is elusive — and it’s very easy to drink too much One of the most important things to understand about drinking and its health effects is what amount of alcohol is actually considered to be excessive. It is a common trope among doctors and alcohol researchers that people misunderstand what moderate drinking means. “None of us like to think of ourselves as drinking to excess, right?” Naimi said. “Who among us wants to think of ourselves as immoderate? Of course, we’re all moderate drinkers.” Even if we agree in colloquial terms that “one drink a night” is moderate, the details matter. Medical science has far more precise definitions for what constitutes a “drink” than the average person pouring themselves a glass of Chablis. One 12-ounce can of 5-percent alcohol beer, a 5-ounce glass of wine with 12-percent alcohol, or a 1.5-ounce glass of 80-proof liquor are all what constitutes a “standard drink.” So when we pour an extra-large glass of wine at night, we may consider it only one drink, but a doctor sees two or even three. The kind of beer or wine matters too: Your favorite 9 percent IPA is actually closer to two drinks than it is to one, according to medical definition. People today are considered by the medical establishment to be heavy drinkers if, by these definitions, they consume more than 15 drinks in a week for men or more than eight drinks for women. (You are considered to have alcohol use disorder if you have tried to stop drinking in the past year but failed, have alcohol cravings, or believe drinking interferes with your life. It’s less about specific amounts.) Below that threshold, based on these scientific standards, you might consider yourself to be a so-called moderate drinker. This reflects a lot of progress in our understanding of problematic drinking. For centuries, people have known that excessive drinking could damage the liver, cause long-term health problems, and lead to alcohol dependence. The US temperance movement of the 1800s and early 1900s sought to eradicate those personal and social harms and briefly succeeded in outlawing alcohol during the Prohibition era. But, as the failure of Prohibition attests, drinking is deeply embedded in our society. Some popular historians like to say that alcohol (along with caffeine) helped define human civilization. There may even be an evolutionary angle: Many animals consume alcohol (called ethanol when it is encountered naturally). Perhaps it’s because finding fruit with some fermented ethanol means you’re good at finding fruit, period — a natural advantage for survival. That is how deeply rooted our ancestral relationship to alcohol might be. Even today, one of the biggest challenges in trying to convince people to drink less is the fact that so much of our collective social calendar is scheduled around drinking — let’s go to happy hour or grab some drinks for the big game, for example. Given the seemingly implacability of social drinking, the focus for a long time has been trying to reduce the kind of habitual, excessive drinking that we have historically called alcoholism. And there was some progress made: Americans collectively report consuming less alcohol than they did in the 1970s and ’80s. Today, an estimated 10 percent of Americans 12 and older are classified as having alcohol use disorder, a number that has stayed fairly stable over the past decade. There is even evidence that younger people are drinking less than millennials or Gen X. At the same time, however, alcohol-related deaths have been increasing, rising by 70 percent from 2012 to 2022, even with a definition of alcohol-related deaths that is limited to liver disease, poisoning and accidents. The actual count, when considering deaths to which alcohol was at least a contributor, such as cancer in heavy drinkers, is more difficult to quantify but likely much higher. A 2024 estimate by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention put the number at 178,000 deaths attributable to alcohol overuse annually in the US. These seemingly contradictory trends — stable rates of alcoholism, but increasing deaths — could be explained by a few things. For one, alcohol use disorder is likely underdiagnosed. Second, “heavy” drinkers may not be alcoholics, but they can still feel the negative health effects of their alcohol use. And then there is an issue that has been worrying doctors for years: binge drinking, usually defined as consuming four (for women) or five (for men) drinks in two hours or less. You may not necessarily be considered an alcoholic if you binge-drink; you may not even be a heavy drinker much of the time. But even more limited episodes of such intense drinking can do serious damages; the immediate risk is death from an accident or alcohol poisoning, but repeated binge drinking raises the risk of longer-term consequences. Put it all together and what’s become clear is that more people’s health is being put at risk by their alcohol use than was previously realized. And that means even people whose drinking is considered socially acceptable need to be aware of the threats it poses to their health. Is any level of drinking safe or even beneficial? Once you are having more than two drinks a day if you’re a man or one drink a day if you’re a woman, pretty much every researcher agrees that the health risks warrant trying to cut back. But the consensus fractures below that. If we imagine the conversation about alcohol’s health effects as a football field, the consensus covers 95 yards of the 100-yard field — almost all the way to the goal of general unanimity. We all agree heavy drinking is bad, but the fight remains on the issue — the remaining five yards — of whether light drinking is truly bad and that is still being debated. But a quarter century after that conventional wisdom about red wine benefitting the human heart really took hold, a growing number of public health organizations and researchers started to aggressively dispute the idea that moderate alcohol consumption could be “safe” or beneficial. “All of the arguing in the past 20 years has been around the health effects of very, very small amounts of alcohol,” Naimi said. “But I don’t think that other than small amounts of alcohol, there’s any question that alcohol consumption is a leading and preventable cause of health and social problems in the US.” One watershed moment was a 2017 publication from the American Society of Clinical Oncology that established that even modest drinking could increase a person’s risk of developing cancer. The ASCO was alarmed by surveys that found only one in three Americans knew about the finding decades after medical literature had documented a link between, for example, alcohol use and breast cancer. And with its report, the group aimed to increase awareness among the public that alcohol is a carcinogen and advocate for specific policy strategies to try to reduce excessive alcohol use. Another meta-analysis, also published in 2017, examined prior research alleging positive cardiovascular effects from moderate alcohol consumption. This analysis, which Naimi co-authored, found possible statistical errors and other countervailing factors in the earlier studies that appeared to support the French paradox’s framework. For example, moderate wine drinkers tend to be more moderate in general, more active, and in better overall health — all of which could help explain their better health outcomes, without alcohol factoring into it. Additionally, some of the apparent abstainers studied in the various observational studies of alcohol use and health outcomes may be former drinkers who could still feel the health effects years later, which would explain the finding that some moderate drinkers live longer than both non-drinkers and heavy drinkers. More recent studies with more rigorous statistical randomization reported that “alcohol consumption of all amounts was associated with increased cardiovascular risk,” with the risk increasing with every drink. In 2022, the World Health Organization took an even stronger position, stating that “no level of alcohol consumption is safe for our health” based on available evidence. As they put it, one’s risk appears to increase “from the first drop.” The board of scientists who advise the US government on diet guidelines, too, has advised that the guidance reduce the maximum recommended drinks for men from two to one daily, for example. Their input hasn’t yet been incorporated into the final federal dietary guidelines. At the same time, you still have studies that came out in the past decade that acknowledged the cancer risks but continued to report cardiovascular benefits and a possible reduction in the risk of diabetes with modest drinking. Some research suggests that adhering to certain patterns — such as spacing your weekly allotment of drinks out over a few days and consuming them with a meal — may be beneficial. It’s understandable that people are confused. Here’s what you should know: This is really hard to study. We are mostly relying on observational data, not randomized controlled experiments, which could be compromised by all kinds of confounding factors. In an ideal world, you could compare two groups of people who are alike, except one drinks and the other doesn’t, for life. But in practice, that’s very difficult to do. Industry influence has shaped our ideas about alcohol consumption Our ability to make sense of all of the confusing science around drinking is further complicated by the influence of the alcohol industry, which airs advertising campaigns with messages like “drink responsibly” that reinforce the idea that a certain level of drinking can be responsible. The industry also lobbies lawmakers to stymie any attempt to place new restrictions, requirements or taxes on them. One attempt to stand up a randomized alcohol study, which was to be overseen by Kenneth Mukamal of Harvard, was shut down in 2018 because the alcohol industry had provided improper input on the study. All of the researchers I spoke to acknowledged the challenge in substantiating alcohol’s effects, positive or negative, but again: Alcohol is a carcinogen; no one needs a randomized control trial to know that, it’s been the international consensus for decades. There’s a reckoning with alcohol right now, which can leave people feeling unmoored. But all of this noise obscures the simple way to synthesize all of this: Less is better. “I think for people that are light drinkers, they probably don’t need to put a ton of brain space here,” Noelle LoConte, who co-authored the ASCO’s 2017 statement on alcohol and cancer, told me. If you want to drink less but not abstain completely, there are some obvious things you can do. Don’t pour too much wine in that glass. Maybe skip the 10 percent double IPA. In my own life, I have moderated my drinking by limiting myself to at most two nights per week and at most two drinks per night. I still get to enjoy my coveted Cabernet once in a while, but having some loose rules for myself has made it easier to reduce my intake. “The people who have one drink with dinner or two drinks with dinner, I think it’s exactly the right way to do it; that’s the right way to calibrate it,” Kenneth Mukamal, a Harvard doctor who authored several of the studies finding some cardiovascular benefits to moderate alcohol consumption, said. “You should have it with food. You should have it with friends and have it in a way that you’re naturally limited in how much you’re going to drink.” It is also getting easier — and less awkward — to not drink at all if that’s your preference or you simply want to make a change. The nonalcoholic drink market is flourishing, with better and better options coming to bars and restaurants. It should be more socially accepted not to drink, as fewer people do. All things in moderation is classic health advice — and the same applies to alcohol: Don’t overthink (or over-drink).
China introduced the invite-only AI agent Manus this week. Modern large language models are really good at a lot of tasks, like coding, essay writing, translation, and research. But there are still a lot of basic tasks, especially in the “personal assistant” realm, that the most highly trained AIs in the world remain hopeless at. You can’t ask ChatGPT or Claude “order me a burrito from Chipotle” and get one, let alone “book me a train from New York to Philadelphia.” OpenAI and Anthropic both offer AIs that can view your screen, move your cursor, and do some things on your computer as if they were a person (through their “Operator” and “Computer Use” functions, respectively). This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. That such “AI agents” sometimes work, sort of, is about the strongest thing you can say for them right now. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) This week, China launched a competitor: the AI agent Manus. It produced a blizzard of glowing posts and testimonials from highly selected influencers, along with some impressive website demos. Here is Manus building an excellent personal website with almost no prompting. Here is Manus creating a detailed personal itinerary for a trip. Manus creating animations and a lesson plan for a middle school science class. Manus is invite-only (and while I submitted a request for the tool, it hasn’t been granted), so it’s hard to tell from the outside how representative these highly selected examples are. After a few days of Manus fervor, though, the bubble popped a little and some more moderate reviews started coming out. Manus, the growing consensus holds, is worse than OpenAI’s DeepResearch at research tasks; but better than Operator or Computer Use at personal assistant tasks. It’s a step forward toward something important — AIs that can take action beyond the chatbot window — but it’s not a shocking out-of-nowhere advance. Perhaps most importantly, Manus’s usefulness for you will be sharply limited if you don’t trust a Chinese company you’ve never heard of with your payment information so it can book things on your behalf. And you probably shouldn’t. The agents are arriving When I first wrote about the risks of powerful AI systems displacing or destroying humanity, one very reasonable question was this: How could an AI act against humanity, when they really don’t act at all? This reasoning is right, as far as current technology goes. Claude or ChatGPT, which just respond to user prompts and don’t act independently in the world, can’t execute on a long-term plan; everything they do is in response to a prompt, and almost all that action takes place within the chat window. But AI was never going to remain as a purely responsive tool simply because there is so much potential for profit in agents. People have been trying for years to create AIs that are built out of language models, but which make decisions independently, so that people can relate to them more like an employee or an assistant than like a chatbot. Generally, this works by creating a small internal hierarchy of language models, like a little AI company. One of the models is carefully prompted and in some cases fine-tuned to do large-scale planning. It comes up with a long-term plan, which it delegates to other language models. Various sub-agents check their results and change approaches when one sub-agent fails or reports problems. The concept is simple, and Manus is far from the first to try it. You may remember that last year we had Devin, which was marketed as a junior software engineering employee. It was an AI agent that you interacted with via Slack to give tasks, and which it would then work on achieving without further human input except, ideally, of the kind a human employee might occasionally need. The economic incentives to build something like Manus or Devin are overwhelming. Tech companies pay junior software engineers as much as $100,000 a year or more. An AI that could actually provide that value would be stunningly profitable. Travel agents, curriculum developers, personal assistants — these are all fairly well-paid jobs, and an AI agent could in principle be able to do the work at a fraction of the cost, without needing breaks, benefits or vacations. But Devin turned out to be overhyped, and didn’t work well enough for the market it was aiming at. It’s too soon to say whether Manus represents enough of an advance to have real commercial staying power, or whether, like Devin, its reach will exceed its grasp. I’ll say that it appears Manus works better than anything that has come before. But just working better isn’t enough — to trust an AI to spend your money or plan your vacation, you’ll need extremely high reliability. As long as Manus remains tightly limited in availability, it’s hard to say if it will be able to offer that. My best guess is that AI agents that seamlessly work are still a year or two away — but only a year or two. The China angle Manus isn’t just the latest and greatest attempt at an AI agent. It is also the product of a Chinese company, and much of the coverage has dwelled on the Chinese angle. Manus is clearly proof that Chinese companies aren’t just imitating what’s being built here in America, as they’ve often been accused of doing, but improving on it. That conclusion shouldn’t be shocking to anyone who is aware of China’s intense interest in AI. It also raises questions about whether we will be thoughtful about exporting all of our personal and financial data to Chinese companies that are not meaningfully accountable to US regulators or US law. Installing Manus on your computer gives it a lot of access to your computer — it’s hard for me to figure out the exact limits on its access or the security of its sandbox when I can’t install it myself. One thing we’ve learned in digital privacy debates is that a lot of people will do this without thinking about the implications if they feel Manus offers them enough convenience. And as the TikTok fight made clear, once millions of Americans love an app, the government will face a steep uphill battle in trying to restrict it or oblige it to follow data privacy rules. But there are also clear reasons Manus came out of a Chinese company and not out of, say, Meta — and they’re the very reasons we might prefer to use AI agents from Meta. Meta is subject to US liability law. If its agent makes a mistake and spends all your money on website hosting, or if it steals your Bitcoin or uploads your private photos, Meta will probably be liable. For all of these reasons, Meta (and its US competitors) are being cautious in this realm. I think caution is appropriate, even as it may be insufficient. Building agents that act independently on the internet is a big deal, one that poses major safety questions, and I’d like us to have a robust legal framework about what they can do and who is ultimately accountable. But the worst of all possible worlds is a state of uncertainty that punishes caution and encourages everyone to run agents that have no accountability at all. We have a year or two to figure out how to do better. Let’s hope Manus prompts us to get to work on not just building those agents, but building the legal framework that will keep them safe. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
Few individual animals have ever been more important to their species than 2323M — a red wolf, dubbed Airplane Ears by advocates for his prominent extremities, who spent his brief but fruitful life on North Carolina’s Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge. Red wolves, smaller, rust-tinged cousins to gray wolves, are among the world’s rarest mammals, pushed to the brink of extinction by threats such as habitat loss, indiscriminate killing, and road collisions. By 2019 fewer than 15 were known to survive in the wild. Against that grim backdrop, 2323M offered hope. Born at a federal site in Florida, he was released in 2021 onto the Alligator River refuge, a swath of coastal plain on North Carolina’s eastern shore. Over the next two years, he and a female known as 2225F raised 11 pups. Alas, in September 2023, Airplane Ears was killed by a car on US 64, the highway that runs through the refuge. One of the world’s rarest species had lost its most prolific member. Airplane Ears was an extraordinary animal who suffered a common fate. Around one-fifth of red wolves meet their end on a bumper, many on US 64, a primary route that vacationers take to the Outer Banks, the picturesque chain of barrier islands that line North Carolina’s seaboard. Black bears and white-tailed deer, and even alligators fall victim to collisions that kill animals and result in “significant harm to humans and vehicles,” according to the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Even the occasional alligator blunders onto the highway. While US 64’s roadkill rates are exceptional, it’s far from the only perilous highway in the United States, where animal crashes annually cost society more than $10 billion in hospital bills, vehicle repairs, and other expenses. For species from Florida panthers to California tiger salamanders to North Carolina’s red wolves, collisions pose an extinction-level threat. After 2323M perished, a coalition of conservation groups began pushing the North Carolina Department of Transportation to retrofit the highway with fences and underpasses — essentially spacious tunnels that would allow red wolves and other animals to slink safely beneath US 64. “We knew that something had to be done, quick,” says Ron Sutherland, chief scientist at the Wildlands Network, a conservation group that focuses on habitat connectivity throughout North America. Otherwise, wild red wolves could be lost. Drumming up millions of dollars for wildlife crossings has always been a tall order. In December, however, North Carolina received $25 million from the US Department of Transportation to build underpasses on Highway 64. Combined with $4 million that Wildlands Network and the Center for Biological Diversity raised in donations, as well as state funds, it was enough to make a stretch of Highway 64 safe for wolves. “It felt really good to know that something had gone right for the red wolf, for once,” Sutherland says. That the transportation department invested in animal underpasses may come as a surprise — its primary mission, after all, is to facilitate human movements, not the peregrinations of wolves and deer. The 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law (BIL), however, contained an initiative called the Wildlife Crossings Pilot Program, which allotted $350 million in competitive grants for animal passage, the largest pot of federal funding ever earmarked for the cause. In addition to North Carolina’s red-wolf crossings, the program has awarded grants for nearly three dozen projects — some of which will aid imperiled species such as ocelots and desert tortoises, many more that will seek to avert dangerous crashes with large mammals like deer, elk, and moose. “This is not ornamental,” Pete Buttigieg, Joe Biden’s transportation secretary, told Vox of the wildlife crossings program in an interview earlier this year. “This is something that ties into the very core of our mission, which is to secure the safety of the American traveling public.” Unfortunately for the red wolf and many other species, President Donald Trump’s administration may not agree. The future of the wildlife crossings program, and many similar initiatives that the BIL supports, is uncertain. Shortly after taking office, Trump suspended the disbursement of BIL funds, leaving hundreds of Biden-era initiatives twisting in the political wind. Will animal passages, traditionally an overwhelmingly nonpartisan solution, endure? Or will the Trump administration stymie crossings, and a plethora of other BIL projects, before they ever truly get off the ground — perhaps dooming red wolves, and many other animals, in the process? A tenuous renaissance for wildlife-friendly infrastructure The Pueblo of Santa Ana is an approximately 79,000-acre shard of New Mexican desert that’s criss-crossed by roads. Highway 550 plows below the southwestern edge of the Pueblo, known to its Native inhabitants as Tamaya; to the east and south, I-25 barrels along from Albuquerque to Santa Fe, impeding the movements of elk, pronghorn antelope, mountain lions, and other species. As in North Carolina, constructing wildlife crossings and fences along these highways, says Myron Armijo, the Pueblo’s governor, will save the lives of both drivers and wild creatures. “These animals are part of our culture and tradition, and we have very high respect for them,” he said. It’s thus only fitting that the Pueblo is where Buttigieg chose to launch the wildlife crossings program. On a windy day in April 2023, Buttigieg spoke with tribal leaders, made a brief speech backdropped by one of the Southwest’s busiest interstates, I-25, and toured a concrete underpass, its walls scrawled with graffiti, through which animals already cross the interstate. “You couldn’t help but be struck by the deep connection that these tribal communities have with wildlife and the natural environment,” Buttigieg said. “And at the same time, this is not just a spiritual concern, because they’ve also tallied up the car crashes that are caused by these wildlife-vehicle collisions that we can prevent with better roadway design.” Over two rounds of grants since, the wildlife crossings program has awarded an eclectic array of crossings. Western states, where animals often move along clearly defined migration routes, have historically built more passages than Eastern ones, and the wildlife crossings program has duly channeled money to states like Colorado, for a major overpass on I-25 south of Denver, and Utah, for underpasses on Highway 89. But the program has also funneled money eastward. Maryland, New York, and Georgia are among the states that received relatively modest planning grants in December, and Maine earned $9.3 million to build a passage for moose and deer. “If you look at a map that overlays the projects from the first two rounds of funding, you will see coast-to-coast diversity,” said Renee Callahan, executive director of ARC Solutions, a group that studies and supports animal passages. In today’s politics, wildlife crossings may seem like a flight of fancy, but in reality, they’re critical safety infrastructure. Deer collisions alone kill an average of 440 drivers annually, making white-tailed deer deadlier than bears, alligators, and sharks combined. One study found that underpasses in Wyoming prevented so many perilous, expensive crashes that the state was on pace to recoup their costs in just five years. If the program has a shortcoming, it’s that it doesn’t go far enough. In 2024 alone, applicants requested $585 million in federal funding, nearly five times more than the transportation department made available that round. That left lots of worthy crossings unbuilt, like passages on Highway 191 south of Bozeman, Montana, that would have spared elk, deer, and grizzly bears. Callahan, like many conservationists, hopes that the pilot program will eventually be made permanent, ideally at a minimum of $1 billion over five years. “There are thousands of projects where today, based on a flat-out cost-benefit analysis, we’re going to save money in the long term by investing in this infrastructure,” Callahan said. In Callahan’s view, the pilot program has another flaw: The states and other entities that apply are required to bring up to 20 percent of their project’s costs to the table, a serious obstacle to Native tribes, which, in Callahan’s view, shouldn’t be subject to the matching-funds obligation. That didn’t dissuade the Santa Ana Pueblo, who drummed up their share through a separate state grant. In December, the Pueblo learned that it had received close to $6.4 million to design passages on the highways bordering their lands. “I was totally elated,” Armijo said. No longer would the Pueblo be an ecological island in an ocean of asphalt. What will Trump mean for infrastructure? As John Oliver once observed, rarely is infrastructure sexy — and neither is retrofitting it for nature. Consider the National Culvert Removal, Replacement, and Restoration Grant Program, which allocated $1 billion over five years to fix decrepit culverts, the unglamorous pipes that funnel water beneath roadways. Derelict culverts both threaten the integrity of roads and block fish migrations; on one stream in western Washington, for example, a series of too-narrow, impassable culverts prevent salmon from reaching their spawning grounds, violating the fishing rights of the Jamestown S’Klallam Tribe. When the first round of culvert funding was announced in August 2023, the Jamestown S’Klallam received $4.2 million to replace a pair of outdated culverts and thus restore nearly four miles of salmon habitat. “It doubles as two things — it opens up blocked fish passage, and we’re repairing road infrastructure,” said LaTrisha Suggs, the Jamestown S’Klallam’s restoration planner. Now, however, such initiatives are in jeopardy. In his first month in office, Trump has proposed slashing budgets, environmental protections, and the federal workforce alike. Among his first acts was to sign an executive order, titled “Unleashing American Energy,” that instructed agencies to “immediately pause the disbursement of funds” authorized by the Inflation Reduction Act and the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, pending review within 90 days. How Trump’s policies imperil wildlife Though Trump has only been in office for a few months, already his executive actions are putting more vulnerable animals and ecosystems at risk. Read these recent Vox stories to learn more: This animal is on the edge of extinction. Trump just fired the people trying to save it. The tiny lizard that will test Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda Scoop: Leaked emails show the nation’s leading wildlife agency has halted critical funding for conservation A “wholesale decimation of expertise” threatens the natural resources we all rely on According to a January 29 memo from new Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, that executive order has led the agency to evaluate and potentially revoke many of its existing funding agreements, including any that mention climate change or environmental justice. The order could violate the 1974 Impoundment Control Act, which prevents presidents from withholding congressionally authorized funds. On February 13, Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro sued the Trump administration, arguing that its funding freeze broke the federal government’s contract “to provide billions of dollars in congressionally approved funding,” and in late February the administration restored more than $2 billion to the state. The wildlife crossings program is among the many confronting uncertainty. According to Erin Sito, US public policy director for the Wildlands Network, a number of states have been told by the Federal Highway Administration (FAA) that their grants are “on hold,” without any clear next steps. (The agency did not respond to a request for comment.) “It’s definitely caught up with all the transportation projects that are not getting funded or administered at the moment,” Sito said. The Santa Ana Pueblo is among the affected recipients: Glenn Harper, the Pueblo’s wildlife biologist, said that the FAA informed the tribe that its grant was “on pause,” though Harper remains optimistic that the Santa Ana’s crossings will eventually move forward. Delays notwithstanding, conservationists still have ample reason to hope that the program will ultimately endure. As Deb Kmon Davidson, chief strategy officer for the nonprofit Center for Large Landscape Conservation, puts it, wildlife crossings tend to be “super bipartisan.“The preservation of migration routes enjoys broad support in red-swinging Nevada and in blue Oregon, and in conservative states like Wyoming, hunters are among the issue’s staunchest champions. Sen. John Barrasso (R-WY) included a forerunner to the wildlife crossings program in a 2019 highway bill, and US Rep. Ryan Zinke of Montana, who served as interior secretary during Trump’s first term, implemented a secretarial order directing Western states to protect big-game habitat and migration pathways. With Reps. Don Beyer (D-VA) and Alex Padilla (D-CA), Zinke is also cosponsor of the Wildlife Movement Through Partnerships Act, a bill that would help states, tribes, and federal agencies study and protect animal corridors, which was reintroduced to Congress in January. Animal passages may be that most endangered of Washington species: a relatively nonpartisan issue. “Frankly, when we launched this program, I was ready for folks from the other side of the aisle to pounce and say, ‘Oh, you’re building highways for bunny rabbits,’ … when actually some of the strongest and most enthusiastic responses we got were from Republican legislators from states that have confronted wildlife-vehicle collisions on a daily basis,” Buttigieg told Vox. “My hope is that this will be a proverbial bridge-building exercise that enjoys support, whoever’s in charge.” In the meantime, many states are just hoping they receive the funding they’re due. In North Carolina, the state’s transportation department is still figuring out precisely what its red-wolf crossings will look like and how many to build. (Although its grant application included a conceptual map with potential passage locations, a spokesperson from the agency said that “no additional analysis” has since been conducted.) But that planning and implementation can’t take place until the federal government releases money to the state. “NCDOT has yet to receive any guidance on the status of the Wildlife Crossing Pilot Program,” the spokesperson told Vox in an email. The fate of that funding could mean the difference between life and death, both for red wolves and the many other species that call the Alligator River refuge home. In August 2024, Wildlands Network launched daily roadkill surveys along US 64, cruising the highway and counting dead deer, bears, snakes, turtles, otters, bobcats, and other critters. In February the researchers counted their 3,000th animal — and though the survey hasn’t yet documented a dead red wolf, it seems only a matter of time. In an email, Sutherland said that federal turmoil was likely to “induce some delays” in building crossings, “which is sad for the wolves and other wildlife.” Delays are the one thing red wolves can’t afford.
Canadanian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks, flanked by Minister of Foreign Affairs Melanie Joly (left) and Minister of Finance and Intergovernmental Affairs Dominic LeBlanc, during a news conference February 1, 2025, on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, Canada. | Dave Chan/AFP/Getty Images The US and Canada are meant to be the best of friends, but they’re in the midst of a pretty ugly fight. It began with President Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House, when he began referring to his outgoing Canadian counterpart as “Governor Justin Trudeau of the Great State of Canada.” Things escalated from there, with heated meetings and calls leading to the US enacting (then retracting, then enacting, then retracting) tariffs on its northern neighbor, and Canada responding in kind. Province leaders got in on the action as well, perhaps most notably Ontario Premier Doug Ford: “If they want to try to annihilate Ontario,” he said early on in the tariff saber-rattling, “I will do everything — including cut off their energy with a smile on my face.” This week, he took steps to make good on that threat, announcing a 25 percent tax on electricity exports to New York, Minnesota, and Michigan. The US responded by promising to increase tariffs on Canadian steel and aluminum to 50 percent. That led to both sides reversing course, and a fresh round of ongoing talks. (Though Trump maintained on Thursday that “Canada only works as a state.) I wanted a firsthand account of how all this is affecting normal Canadians and Canadian politics. So I dialed up Vox’s Zack Beauchamp, who lives in Canada, to get the scoop. Zack told me that “Canadians are angry — just out-of-this-world angry about what the United States is doing to them.” Here’s what else he had to say. (Our conversation was edited for length and clarity). What’s going on in Canada right now? Well, for over a century, the US-Canadian border has been one of, if not the, most peaceful borders in the entire world. There have been extremely strong relations between the two countries and extremely tight economic ties between them. For a long time, it’s been extremely easy to travel back and forth between the United States and Canada. Even before NAFTA, there was open trade for some goods. There’s a way in which the economies are so intertwined that it’s not crazy to think about Canada and the US as having a broadly integrated economic system, even if it’s totally wrong to call Canada the 51st state. I’ll give you an example. The US is a big farm country. Canada is too. Farming requires fertilizer, and the US imports 80 percent of its potash — an important fertilizer — from Canada. Then it sells some of the products that it grows back to Canada. When I go to the grocery store, I often find “Product of the USA” and “Product of Canada” in the produce aisle. By putting tariffs on agricultural products on both sides, you’re making things more expensive in multiple ways. The potash becomes more expensive to import, which also means that farmers have to pay more. It also means consumers in the United States have to pay more, and so do Canadians, because Canada’s putting reciprocal tariffs on the United States. So not only are goods more expensive to begin with, but Canadian tariffs on American imports would make my groceries more expensive. By going after this very tight economic integration, Trump is likely to wreak havoc on both economies, but especially the Canadians. The tariffs on various goods threaten one of the foundations of the Canadian economy, which is trade with its much larger southern neighbor. Now, it’s not like Canada will collapse all of a sudden, but the country will experience pretty significant pain if it’s having trouble exporting or importing from the US. With the caveat that there’s a lot of back-and-forth on this, can you tell us a bit more about what’s going on with the tariffs? I can, but I don’t know how much good it will do by the time this gets published! But right now [as of late Thursday, March 13], we’re at a pause because of both sides backing down. Earlier this week, the premier of Ontario — the Canadian equivalent of a governor — threatened to put significant export taxes on electricity sent to the United States, which would basically jack up electrical prices for Americans. Trump threatened some significant tariffs and retaliation. He got really mad. They both sort of backed down. Lots of other tariff-related negotiations are going on. And though all this changes constantly, meaning, again, this unfortunately may not be the case when people read this, but the next big date is April 2, which is when the next round of American tariffs on Canadian-related goods will go into effect. Canada doesn’t want to be the aggressor. What Canadians say, and that includes all sorts of different politicians, is that they want the Americans to stop doing this, because economic warfare isn’t helping anybody. Essentially, “We want our things to go back to the way they were, but you keep threatening us, and so we have no choice but to fight back.” The Canadian position is this is a defensive form of economic warfare, and they’re right to be clear. Trump started this for no reason. And I mean no reason. There was no justification given that makes any sense. Our own Eric Levitz wrote a piece looking at Trump’s various different justifications, and they contradict each other. Let’s explore that a bit. It’s a mystery what Trump wants from all this? I truly don’t know what Trump wants, and I’m not sure Trump knows. After the election, Trump made some comments about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau being Governor Trudeau. And at first they seemed like jokes, like, “Hahaha, Canada, right? It’s small America,” just the sort of thing Canadians hate, but Americans engage in sometimes. It was insulting but ultimately harmless. But it seems somewhere along the way, inside Trump’s head, this went from being a joke that he made to insult and bully somebody into a serious thing that he actually wanted, to the point where he began to link it explicitly to harmful policies. And now you have Trudeau saying — and this is the official line of the Canadian government as well — that Trump is trying to bully us into becoming part of the US. I just didn’t believe Trump would do that at first, because it’s so stupid. It doesn’t make any sense. The United States, for all of its power, does not have the capacity to force Canada to become part of America through economic coercion. That would require an invasion or require war, and that’s not happening, right? Trump is not going to invade Canada. (Though if he does, and I eat my words, I will be next speaking to you from the front lines of the Battle of Windsor, Detroit.) The only way it makes sense to me is to think of Trump as a mad king. Like the archetype from fantasy literature, who just starts ordering his subjects to do all sorts of crazy things that don’t make any sense in real life. I think Trump somehow got it in his head that it would be really cool if Canada was part of the US. It would be great. It would make him look awesome. I can’t make any sense out of it otherwise. The relationship between the US and Canada prior to Trump, was as good as any two countries that live next to each other could hope to be right, nearly open trade, no threat of war. There’s literally a bridge that you drive over from Buffalo called the Peace Bridge. And all of a sudden, Trump has antagonized the Canadians for no discernible purpose, and disrupted what was the most peaceful and mutually beneficial border on Earth. Of course, there’s the explanation that this is all a negotiating stance, and that Trump wants to seem crazy. I find that ridiculous at this point, because it’s not clear what negotiating benefits we’re supposed to be attaining. What can Canada give the US? I don’t know, and from what I understand, the US hasn’t articulated anything privately, other than, “You can make it stop when you become the 51st state.” Tell me more about how that 51st state rhetoric is playing in Canada. Everything Trump has said and done has led to a level of rage and defiance that I think very few Americans fully appreciate. People hear that 51st state stuff, and say, “America is literally attempting to annex us. They’re trying to coerce us into becoming Americans. And we hate that.” Yesterday, I was walking around my neighborhood, and there were three shops in a row on the main drag in my neighborhood, and every single one of them listed the Canadian-made goods that they were selling. There’s a widespread boycott of American-related goods here in Ontario, which is not only Canada’s largest province, but where state-run liquor stores have a semi-monopoly on alcohol sales. And they have taken all American-made products out of those stores. That’s a government initiative, not a citizen boycott. There’s both: Consumers don’t want to buy American goods, and the government is limiting access to certain American goods. Ontario is currently governed by a conservative government, one that you would think would have more ideological affinities with the Trumpers. The fact that they’ve been so aggressive is demonstrative of where public opinion is in Canada. Canadians are so insulted, so infuriated because they have their own real sense of nationhood. One of the pillars of Canadian national identity is being not American, is that Canada is different from the other country near them. To say “You should just become part of the US” is to assail one of the foundations of what makes Canada Canada. Being so infuriated has led to a backlash against the United States and against the Trump administration, unlike anything in recent memory, dwarfing even the anti-Americanism you saw in Canada during the Bush administration around the Iraq War. So all this is making Canadians very angry. What’s it doing to Canadian politics? It’s transforming Canadian politics. I’ve never seen anything like this. So to back up, Justin Trudeau, the outgoing prime minister, and his Liberal Party have been in power for a really long time. On Friday, he’s stepping aside in favor of Mark Carney, his successor at the top of the Liberal Party. It was widely thought that the Liberals were done, that Trudeau would resign, there would be a new Liberal prime minister for a little bit until Canada has elections, and then the Conservative Party, which is their main rival, would end up winning the elections and be in charge because Trudeau was very, very unpopular — as leaders tend to be after 10 years in power. All of a sudden, though, the polling dramatically reversed. What had been a consistent Conservative lead for years became almost a dead heat, and has stayed that way for the past few months. Trudeau stepping down is part of that. But it really is about America for two reasons. First, people like the way that the Liberals have handled the United States. Trudeau and the rest of the Liberal Party have been defiant, aggressive, willing to push back, not giving any ground, calling on Canadians to stand together and stand up for their country in the face of American bullying. And that’s been hugely popular. Trudeau’s approval rating is still negative, but it’s gone up by 10 points, which is striking, Second, the Conservative Party made a choice to elevate a guy named Pierre Poilievre to leadership. Poilievre is about as close to a Trump-style conservative, as you can get in Canada. He’s not a danger to Canadian democracy in the same way that Trump’s a danger to American democracy, and he’s less right-wing on a lot of issues, including some big cultural war ones. But he has a penchant for a kind of aggressive policy rhetoric and conspiracy theorizing to the point where he’s developed a bit of a fan club among American conservatives, who praise him. That may have seemed like an asset for Poilievre at one time, certainly in his primary race. But now being close to the US or American-style in any way is like a death sentence in Canadian politics. The US government is the one who’s literally trying to destroy your country. It’s not helpful if you’re seen as somebody who can’t stand up to the Americans. It’s not that Poilievre hasn’t been trying. He’s been making statements about how he’s willing to push back on the US. But the Liberals are seen as the much more naturally antagonistic party against a Republican-led United States. Now what was once a shoo-in election for the Conservatives is now a toss-up. And if trends continue, it may even turn into a Liberal favorite election, but that will take some time. Are we seeing something of a long-term reorientation in US-Canada relations here? There are two ways to think about it, both of which could be equally valid. The first one is one that I’ve heard from European diplomats and the people who talk to them: One Trump term can be dismissed as a fluke, but two Trump terms suggest that the United States might be like this in the future. That is, every four years you have the possibility of facing an antagonistic, aggressive right-wing, nationalist government that wants to bully you and undermine the foundations of your shared diplomatic relationship. If you take that view — that Trump is just what the Republican Party is, and we need to readjust our politics around the fact that America might often be like this — that would lead to a long-term strategic reevaluation of the relationship and a transformation of what the nature of the US-Canadian border is going to look like, what trade is going to look like, what economic ties between the two countries are going to look like. The second school of thought is that that’s all really costly. The relationship takes a lot of work to change, and there’d be a lot of short- and long-term pain. The US-Canada relationship developed as it did for a reason. Geographic proximity makes it easy to trade, and it makes sense that these big markets with different climates that can grow different crops and easily support different industries would cooperate. It is a naturally congenial economic and political relationship. It would be to everyone’s detriment if the politics were more hostile. So it might be that you start seeing a policy that acknowledges the long-term risks and takes some steps to ameliorate them, while attempting to leave the door open for a return to the pre-Trump status quo. Those schools of thought aren’t mutually exclusive, and you can see elements of both in a Canadian strategy. What I can say for sure is the odds that there will be some kind of political or economic rupture between the US and Canada that lasts decades into the future have gone up substantially just over the course of the past few months.
Donald Trump and Elon Musk promoting Teslas at the White House on March 11, 2025. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images In the past week, Donald Trump announced that he would buy a Tesla and advertised the company’s vehicles at an event that turned the White House lawn into a showroom benefitting his ally, Tesla CEO Elon Musk. He also said that vandalizing Tesla cars — as some demonstrators have done to protest Musk — will be labeled an act of “domestic terrorism.” It’s the latest and perhaps most egregious example of the conflicts of interest that have ensnared both Trump and Musk, who is leading the so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), a role that has given the world’s richest man the ability to target and gut any government agency that draws his ire. This isn’t anything new. Trump’s first term was riddled with unprecedented conflicts of interest. Yet this time around, Trump came into office with even more business entanglements and ways to use the presidency to enrich himself. His social media company, Truth Social, is now a publicly traded company, giving anyone the ability to become a shareholder in the president’s business. He and his family members have launched crypto coins. And Trump also has a new set of merchandise licensing deals. But when it comes to just how unprecedented the conflicts of interest are in this administration, the Tesla incident shows that Musk is the new elephant in the room. The businessman, who became one of the president’s closest advisers after spending hundreds of millions of dollars to help Trump win, is now directly influencing agencies tasked with regulating his own companies. And of course other Trump appointees and nominees — from Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to Dr. Mehmet Oz, Trump’s pick to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services — are not free from conflicts of interest either. At this point, the public seems resigned to the fact that people in power also have massive incentives to enrich themselves. But in truth, there are people and processes that are supposed to protect us from this kind of abuse. What are they, how have they broken down, and how can we get them to work? How the government polices itself A conflict of interest arises when an official’s personal interests can cloud their judgement when making decisions on behalf of the public. When foreign officials, for example, spend money at Trump’s businesses, they create a conflict of interest for the president because he materially benefits from his relationship with them. And while some conflicts of interest are inevitable and not inherently corrupt, they do increase the risk of corruption, where officials intentionally advance their own personal interests instead of national ones. Every branch of government has ethics standards and conflict of interest rules. Though as the ethics scandals with Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas have shown, they’re not always enforced. In the executive branch, conflicts of interest are determined by statutes that apply to all federal employees — like the law prohibiting someone from working on matters where they have a financial interest — and ethics rules that are set up by the White House. One major limitation, though, is that these conflict of interest laws do not apply to the president or vice president, which is why Trump is allowed to maintain all of his businesses while serving in the White House. As for Musk, there’s a reason he hasn’t been subject to the same ethics standards as most other government employees. “The administration has taken pretty significant steps to insulate Mr. Musk from accountability,” said Donald Sherman, the executive director and chief counsel at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). “So they made him a special government employee instead of a permanent employee, so he’s working for the federal government while also maintaining his day job.” The administration has pointed to that special status — usually given to short-term advisers who sit on temporary advisory committees or task forces — as a reason why Musk doesn’t have to make his financial disclosure form public, limiting scrutiny into his businesses’ entanglements. (Past administrations have also dubiously granted people special government employee status, as was the case when Huma Abedin worked as an aide to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton while maintaining an outside consulting job.) So who is responsible for actually enforcing existing conflict of interest rules where they can be applied? “Primarily that has been — within the executive branch — the Office of Government Ethics,” said Eric Petry, who serves as counsel in the Brennan Center’s Elections and Government Program. “There’s also a robust system of inspectors general, who are supposed to expose fraud and waste and conflicts.” The Office of Government Ethics (OGE) was formed after the Watergate scandal. Before then, conflict of interest cases were mostly handled through criminal investigations and proceedings, but OGE was established to help prevent conflicts of interest from arising in the first place. Tasked with scrutinizing the president’s political appointees, the office reviews their financial disclosures, identifies areas where conflicts of interest might arise, and proposes ethics agreements to address those conflicts, including by requiring appointees to sell assets. OGE also maintains a database of officials’ disclosures, which are generally available to the public. Inspectors general also play an important role. They are an independent watchdog within a given agency and conduct audits and investigations to ensure that the agency and its employees are complying with the law and to prevent fraud and abuse. While their investigations usually come in the form of a public report, inspectors general can also make referrals to the Department of Justice, where criminal violations can be prosecuted. “But,” as Petry notes, “you’ve seen the Trump administration has really been putting those systems under stress or just outright ignoring them.” Indeed, Trump has engaged in a full-on assault on these watchdogs, firing the director of OGE as well as at least 17 inspectors general across various federal agencies. Trump’s moves also underscore the potential conflicts of interest at play. At least one of the inspectors general he fired was overseeing an investigation into one of Musk’s companies. To put it mildly, these firings — which are potentially unlawful — are a major setback for the executive branch’s ability to police itself. Obviously, that’s by design. From day one, Trump has shown little interest in promoting ethical conduct. One of his first executive orders, for example, rescinded Biden-era ethics rules that prohibited employees from accepting gifts from lobbyists. To be sure, while other administrations haven’t exactly been squeaky clean, the way the Trump administration has handled ethics concerns is a departure from its predecessors. “Unfortunately within the executive branch, some of the tools that we typically look to to police conflicts are not going to be effective,” Petry said. “So that means we look to the other branches of government.” Congress and the courts need to step up This administration’s flagrant disregard for ethics rules underscores that the regulations we already have are clearly not enough. “It’s a real problem that federal conflicts-of-interest laws don’t apply to the president and vice president,” Petry said. “That’s something that Congress can and should change. There are problems here that are sort of systemic that require reform.” After Trump left office in 2021, there were some efforts to bolster ethics standards and oversight, and ensure that the president and vice president are no longer exempt from conflict of interest rules. But those efforts largely failed. Still, the different branches of government have to make an active effort to hold each other accountable. Since Trump has undermined the ability of the executive branch to hold itself accountable, the Congress and the courts have to be more vigilant. It might seem like it’s expecting too much of a Republican-controlled Congress to investigate potential conflicts of interests, but that’s the legislative branch’s job. It’s also not unheard of. During Trump’s first term, Republican lawmakers oversaw inquiries into the president’s appointees. Former US Rep. Jason Chaffetz, of Utah, for example, called out Michael Flynn, Trump’s former national security adviser, for potentially violating the law for not properly disclosing payments from foreign governments. (Flynn pleaded guilty for lying to law enforcement, but the Department of Justice eventually dropped its case against him and Trump granted him a pardon in 2020.) Where Congress falls short, the courts can step in. Trump’s firing of the inspectors general, for example, is improper because he neither gave Congress a 30-day notice, as required by law, nor provided a substantive reason for the inspectors general dismissals. So some of those inspectors general have filed a lawsuit against Trump, saying their firing was “contrary to the rule of law.” “Unfortunately this moment of chaos could be really painful for a lot of people, but hopefully it will generate the backlash and public momentum for changing the system that we saw following the Gilded Age, following Watergate, following other periods of crisis and constitutional uncertainty,” Petry said. That’s why the last line of defense against the conflicts of interest plaguing the Trump administration is important. And that is the role of the press and government watchdog groups. Trump has been able to evade accountability in part because he is more immune to public shaming than other public officials. His corruption has always been brazen and often out in the open. As a result, many people seem desensitized to this kind of abuse of presidential power. But while public shaming might not work as effectively on Trump, it can pressure other officials and institutions to take action. Even when there aren’t specific remedies to Trump’s or Musk’s conflicts of interest, shedding light on them for the public to see is an important accountability mechanism because people can demand more of their representatives in government and put pressure on the administration. So the public shouldn’t be resigned to the idea that ethics rules are somehow moot under Trump. After all, that’s who lawmakers will have to answer to come election time. And it’s likely that voters will have some questions about who this administration is really serving. “You don’t need to be an ethics expert,” Sherman, of CREW, said, “to have significant questions about how this administration is operating and whether or not conduct rises to the level of a violation of federal or criminal law.”
A coal-fired power plant in West Virginia. | Visions of America/Joseph Sohm/Universal Images Group via Getty Images This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to the Logoff: Today I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s effort to dismantle a slew of environmental regulations, a development only relevant to people who breathe air or are concerned about humanity’s future. What’s the latest? The Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday evening that it was starting the process of unwinding 31 regulations aimed at protecting air quality, water quality, and the climate. This includes rules on pollution (mercury, soot, carbon dioxide, and other greenhouse gases) from many sources, including power plants, automobiles, and oil and gas refineries. What about climate rules? Perhaps the most significant regulation on the chopping block is the EPA’s 2009 conclusion that greenhouse gases threaten public health and must be regulated. It’s the underpinning of the most important climate regulations, including rules aimed at dramatically lowering greenhouse gas emissions from the energy and transportation sectors. Can the administration do this? This is the start of a lengthy process of rewriting federal rules. Environmental groups are also planning to sue, which will tie up these rule changes in court for months or even years, my colleague Umair Irfan explains. Why is the administration doing this? EPA administrator Lee Zeldin framed the changes around “unleashing American energy” (in this case, he’s primarily talking about coal, oil, and natural gas) and “lowering the cost of living.” The EPA’s mandate, the New York Times notes, is to protect the environment and public health. What’s the big picture? These regulations — alongside financial support for clean energy development — are the backbone of federal efforts to address climate change, an undeniably real environmental problem that’s on track to deeply degrade the planet’s capacity to host human life. Federal policy is not the sole driver of our efforts to address climate change, as technological breakthroughs, market forces, and state rules all play a role. But if the EPA is successful in finalizing the rule changes it’s proposing, the administration will have succeeded in severely undercutting the nation’s ability to hit its climate goals. And with that, time to log off: I got a lot of great emails about the Good Robot podcast on artificial intelligence that I shared yesterday, so if you missed it, it’s available here on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’re looking for something a touch more outdoorsy, I had a lot of fun with this National Park Service tool that tells you about the parks nearest you. It’s good inspiration for a future trip — or maybe even a weekend hike. Thanks, as always, for reading.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, a Democrat from New York, speaks during a news conference following the weekly Senate Democrat policy luncheon at the US Capitol on March 11, 2025. | Al Drago/Bloomberg via Getty Images Once again, the country is on the brink of a government shutdown. Unless the Republican-controlled Senate passes a spending bill, the government will shut down on Friday at midnight, when last year’s appropriations run out. The House has already passed a bill to fund the government through September on a nearly complete party-line vote. The bill keeps most spending stable, but it includes boosts to defense spending and cuts to domestic projects, one-time grants, and programs like a federal rural broadband initiative. It also restricts the District of Columbia’s locally funded budget. It faced critics on both sides of the aisle: Conservative Republicans argued the bill didn’t do enough to cut spending, and disliked the legislative method used to fund the government, while Democrats balked at the cuts. But eventually, all but one House Republican supported the party’s legislation, while all but one House Democrat opposed it. To pass the bill in the Senate, Republicans stand to need the help of eight Senate Democrats to clear the 60-vote filibuster hurdle. The GOP holds a 53-seat majority, and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has already said he will not support the plan. So far, one Senate Democrat has come out in favor: John Fetterman of Pennsylvania, who said he refuses “to burn the village down in order to save it.” The stakes are high for a few reasons. This “continuing resolution” (as it’s called in Congress) is Democrats’ first high-profile chance at a stand-off with Republicans in Donald Trump’s second term — their chance to try to negotiate for some oversight and accountability over the White House, Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency,” and their cuts across the government. And the Democratic base is furious at its leaders; to help Republicans keep the government open would send yet another message to Democrats that their party isn’t confronting Trump the way they want them to. But shutdowns are never popular — and the risks of forcing one are real: Designating a score of government employees as nonessential could facilitate the work of Musk and DOGE, while giving Trump a foil as his own approval ratings fall. There’s no easy answer here. There are legitimate reasons to oppose and support the stopgap effort — and time is running out to make a choice. The case for letting the government shut down Democrats have plenty of reasons to oppose the Republican spending plan. And there’s a whole assortment of folks pushing them to do so, including most House Democrats, some safe-seat Senate Democrats, progressive activists, both liberal and moderate Democratic strategists, and your average resistance liberal. Democrats preferred a 30-day stopgap spending bill so that they could have longer negotiations over cuts to government spending. But they were largely ignored as House Republicans led the effort for a six-month-long extension. Going along with a plan they were left out of, some Democrats say, could incentivize Republicans to keep governing without the opposition party’s input in the future — which isn’t usual for government spending bills like this. Some also see the opportunity to force Republicans to make concessions in order to keep the government open at a time when they control both chambers of Congress and the White House. Democrats wanted a spending bill that included safeguards for how government funding would be spent and administered: Namely, they wanted guarantees that the White House would spend the money Congress had appropriated, protecting the legislative branch’s constitutionally mandated power of the purse. Those concerns grew after a report from the news outlet NOTUS that Vice President JD Vance told House members to vote for the bill and suggested that Trump would refuse to spend allocations that the White House thought were harmful. Safeguards against such spending blocks are not included in the House bill. Nor are more oversight of and limits on DOGE and Elon Musk, another Democratic priority. Other Democrats point out that Trump is already effectively shutting down parts of the government through DOGE’s major cuts to federal agencies: Delaware Sen. Chris Coons, for example, pointed to the mass firings at the Department of Education this week as evidence that Trump and Musk “have been shutting down our government piecemeal, illegally shuttering programs, agencies, and now attempting to close entire departments.” So the case for allowing a shutdown is also that Democrats would be taking a stand against a presidency that has already challenged legal and constitutional norms, dismantled parts of the federal government and its workforce, and, they say, poses a threat to democracy. That’s at least the case that anti-CR Democrats, like House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, have made: “The bill that was strongly opposed by House Democrats is a power grab that further unleashes and entrenches Elon Musk’s efforts,” Jeffries said yesterday. He and other House Democratic leaders have been urging Senate Democrats to “stand” with them and oppose the CR. Even those wary of a shutdown are making the same case about the separation of powers: “The problem I have with the bill is that I think it advances this project that we’re seeing come from the executive branch, this power grab that does not respect that the power of the purse is with the Congress,” Sen. Raphael Warnock of Georgia told reporters on Wednesday. In that way, they’d not only be ideologically consistent with the case they’ve been making against Trump, Musk, and DOGE for the last two months, but also be feeding the burning appetite for obstruction and resistance that their base has been craving since Trump took office. Shoring up Democratic support, unifying the party, and beating back the “do-nothing” Democratic brand that has taken root are all clear political benefits. And though it’s unclear now who the public would primarily blame for a shutdown, this faction argues that there’s enough time for public sentiment to recover if it ends up primarily hurting Democrats. The case against a shutdown More moderate and swing-state elected officials, like Fetterman, centrist commentators, and strategists are pushing against a shutdown — and Senate Democrats have been receptive to their case. They seem to be particularly wary about the economic effects on their states should the government close for an extended period. Aside from it being a basic congressional duty, there are concerns that those worried about the work DOGE is doing to downsize the federal government cut staff would be boosted by the sudden designation of federal workers into “essential” and “nonessential” categories. Wired, for example, has explained one theory: that Musk and DOGE would welcome a shutdown since it not only makes it easier to pick which workers to fire, but could make it easier for DOGE to identify programs and agencies that can be completely folded. After 30 days of a government shutdown, the executive branch also gets larger legal abilities over how the government can operate and whether to pay back workers at all if they return from furlough. There is also a whole mess of political risks in play if Democrats are cast as the facilitators of a government shutdown. At the moment, Trump, Republicans, and Musk are the primary villains and main characters of the political ecosystem. Trump’s favorability and approval ratings are declining, his handling of the economy and the confusion over tariffs are the major story of the day, and the risk of a recession is all over the media. To have Democrats trigger a shutdown would functionally be a major distraction — an own goal — in the face of Republicans’ self-engineered spiral. Should economic conditions deteriorate quickly, and the shutdown last long, Trump could also end up spinning fallout on Democrats; the executive branch has some leeway in implementing a shutdown, so there would be plenty more opportunities to create bad news cycles for the Democrats. It’s partially why shutdowns get blamed not on the party in power, but on the party that causes them to happen; up until now, that’s been the Republicans. That was one of the fears Sen. John Hickenlooper of Colorado, who seemed to be waffling on opposing the bill, laid out to CNN yesterday: “It does seem the lesser of two very serious evils to go along with the CR. Shutting down the government it’s always a last resort; in this case, it’s even more than that,” he said. “Who knows how long it stays shut down? Who knows how long the president decides that he likes making all the decisions for the government? You can imagine him saying, ‘Congress has failed, Congress can’t help you. It’s up to me to save everyone.’”
EPA administrator Lee Zeldin says the agency is “driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion.” The Environmental Protection Agency announced this week that it’s starting the process of undoing 31 environmental regulations, including a ruling that’s foundational to US climate policy. But undoing any regulation is a cumbersome process, and with the climate rule in particular, the EPA may end up painting itself into a corner. The big target here is the 2009 endangerment finding, in which the EPA concluded that greenhouse gases threaten public health and welfare, therefore the agency must limit them. The finding is the foundation for regulations that ensued, like requiring power plants and vehicles to cut their emissions of gases that are heating up the planet. Without the endangerment finding, these regulations could be rescinded. The rollbacks are yet another manifestation of the Trump administration’s longstanding antipathy toward all things related to climate change. “By overhauling massive rules on the endangerment finding, the social cost of carbon and similar issues, we are driving a dagger through the heart of climate-change religion and ushering in America’s Golden Age,” EPA administrator Lee Zeldin wrote in the Wall Street Journal. But it will take more than press releases and editorials to get rid of greenhouse gas rules. The endangerment finding stems from a 2007 Supreme Court ruling in Massachusetts v. EPA that says greenhouse gases are covered under the Clean Air Act and the EPA has to figure out whether these gases could endanger public health or welfare. Endangerment endangered Based on science alone, the endangerment finding is on solid ground. The evidence is overwhelming that rising temperatures are worsening problems like heat stress and facilitating the spread of diseases carried by insects, which poses a threat to public health. And on welfare, the text of the Clean Air Act specifically says it includes “effects on soils, water, crops, vegetation, manmade materials, animals, wildlife, weather, visibility, and climate.” So to undo the endangerment finding, the EPA would have to establish a factual record that climate change isn’t happening due to burning fossil fuels, and that even if it is, it doesn’t hurt anything. Trump administration officials have hinted that they are indeed making the case that efforts to limit climate change are worse than its harms and that warming might benefit humanity on balance. “This is truly ridiculous,” said David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project and one of the attorneys who litigated Massachusetts v. EPA. “I could go into the DC Circuit and argue against this in pig latin and win it.” It’s likely that states led by Democrats, particularly California, as well as environmental groups, will sue to stop the EPA’s efforts to repeal the endangerment finding, but a lot has to happen before it even gets to that point. The EPA has to make another factual determination, write a proposed rule, provide a justification, and invite public comments, all before they issue a final rule. “Nothing they’ve done so far on the endangerment finding counts as a final agency action that can be challenged in court, so there’s really nothing to sue on yet,” said Shaun Goho, legal director for the Clean Air Task Force. The Trump administration may also face an unexpected complication in its efforts, thanks to a Supreme Court decision that many conservatives cheered. In the 2024 Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo decision, the Court overturned “Chevron deference,” a legal doctrine that lets federal agencies figure out the particulars of implementing complicated laws like the Clean Air Act when the wording is vague. The Loper Bright decision gave courts much more authority to second-guess an agency’s decision by claiming that the agency’s action is not consistent with a federal statute. But Bookbinder argued that this actually works against the Trump administration’s climate rollbacks. Since the EPA can’t easily make its own determinations anymore about whether climate change is a threat, it has to stick to the letter of the law, and the law unambiguously says that “climate” is included in the obligation to protect welfare under the Clean Air Act. “Now we’re in a better position legally with the end of Chevron,” Bookbinder said. The other hurdle for the EPA is that with so many layoffs and job cuts across the agency, it will be much harder to find the staffing power to put together all the paperwork and argue the legal case for reversing the endangerment finding. The litigation around the endangerment finding may wend its way back to the Supreme Court, where Republicans have a 6-3 majority, but historically courts have backed it and the case may not be the layup that the Trump administration may be anticipating. “The endangerment finding has been implemented by multiple administrations and both parties,” Goho said. “It’s been upheld in the courts repeatedly. The science and then the law are really clear. It would be very misguided for the EPA to try to move forward with repealing it.”
Traders watch as then-President-elect Donald Trump walks onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on December 12, 2024, in New York City. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Candidate Donald Trump promised an economic renaissance. President Donald Trump is delivering economic turmoil. The US stock market, once the only measure of economic performance that the president cared about, has seen a significant selloff amid fears of an impending recession — and the US is underperforming relative to its global peers. Other indicators look brighter, but there are troubling signs on the horizon. February’s jobs report said the labor market was holding steady, but the report did not yet capture the full extent of Trump’s mass layoffs of federal workers. Inflation came down slightly in February, but price stability is in trouble as Trump’s tariffs touch off a global trade war. Meanwhile, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said the administration is focused on the “real economy,” tracking Treasury yields as an indicator of its health. Declining Treasury yields could help bring down borrowing costs across the economy, spurring investment and leading to economic growth. But amid the chaos created by Trump’s policies, it’s not clear that strategy will work. The future looks rocky enough that Trump last weekend refused to rule out a recession. Trump’s defenders say the pain is temporary and that good times are ahead: “I’d kind of suggest people keep their powder dry and pay attention to a well-thought-out economic plan that will indeed make America great again,” Larry Kudlow, a Fox Business pundit and former Trump adviser, said Monday. But the American public remains skeptical: A March Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 57 percent of Americans think Trump’s economic policy has been too erratic. Other recent polls similarly show his approval ratings on his handling of the economy tanking. Here’s what the economy looks like right now, in four charts. US stocks are underperforming Investors might have hoped that Trump’s second term would be a boon for the stock market. Trump certainly gave the markets a lot of attention during his first term, when he frequently touted the record highs the stock market reached under his tenure, appearing to view it as a direct reflection of the strength of his economic policies. In his second term, the markets have instead been roiled by his tariff policies, which threaten to raise prices for Americans and have set off a trade war, Meanwhile, he has dismissed concerns about a potential recession. “I don’t see it at all,” Trump told reporters on Tuesday when asked if he thinks there will be a recession. Major US stock indices closed higher on Wednesday following the inflation report. But they are still posting losses this year to date. That has put them behind global stock indices. Some of those that exclude US stocks have even posted gains so far in 2025. Job growth is steady but precarious Though hiring has remained strong, there are some signs that the labor market is cooling down. The US added 151,000 jobs in February, but the unemployment rate increased to 4.1 percent from 4 percent. That uptick might be a sign of a slowdown to come. In February, US employers announced job cuts on par with what was seen during the last two US recessions. The February jobs numbers also do not fully reflect the impact of cuts underway at the federal government. On Wednesday alone, the Trump administration slashed more than 1,300 jobs at the Education Department, practically halving its size. Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency has also claimed to have made over $100 billion in spending cuts, but his team has been unreliable in their accounting. Those cuts could also affect jobs at businesses that contract with the federal government. Trump is eyeing Treasury yields Trump officials have signaled that they’re closely monitoring a benchmark known as the 10-year Treasury bond yield. That yield is the interest rate that the federal government pays to Treasury bondholders each year on loans that mature after 10 years. It affects borrowing costs for everything from the $12.6 trillion mortgage market to $5.8 trillion in bank lending. The current yield is about 4.2 percent. That rate isn’t determined by the government but rather set by market forces. If financial institutions are feeling good about the US’s financial outlook, their bids at these bond auctions may be lower. If they’re predicting economic turbulence, as is currently the case, those bids may be higher. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s reelection, the 10-year Treasury rate rose sharply. It’s come down since peaking in January, but rose again amid the uncertainty and fear created by Trump’s tariffs. Bessent has said that lowering the Treasury yield could bring financial relief to struggling Americans, and Trump heralded a “big, beautiful drop” in Treasury yields during his recent address to Congress. However, there are some snags in his plans: For one, Germany has triggered a global bond selloff with its recent announcement of major infrastructure and defense spending, causing US Treasury yields to rise. And Trump’s tariffs may actually lead to more inflation, making it difficult for borrowing costs to come down. Inflation is expected to creep up again New data from the federal government published Wednesday shows that inflation cooled to 2.6 percent in February, exceeding some analysts’ expectations. But it might be premature to celebrate. That’s because Trump’s tariffs may have not yet been fully priced into consumer goods. Trump imposed 25 percent tariffs on all aluminum and steel goods on Wednesday, and the European Union and Canada have responded with retaliatory tariffs on a host of US products ranging from bourbon to motorcycles. Trump has also imposed a 20 percent tariff on Chinese goods and 25 percent tariffs on imports from Canada and New Mexico, though has exempted broad categories of goods including goods imported by US automakers. If inflation ticks back up again, the concern is that the Federal Reserve might not be able to use the lever of interest rates to respond to a potential recession. The Fed has come closer to its target rate of 2 percent inflation, but might not be willing to introduce further interest rate cuts if that number starts rising again.
President Donald Trump delivers remarks on the jobs report from the Oval Office on March 7, 2025. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images It is a political truism that it’s bad to be the president in charge when the economy turns sour. It may be especially bad for President Donald Trump — because, through endless controversies during his decade in politics, voters’ belief in his economic savvy has been his most consistent polling bright spot, Now that bright spot may be gone. CNN has had the polling company SSRS ask voters whether they approve of Trump’s handling of the economy since the beginning of his first term. They did so again last week — and Trump got positively grim results. Forty-four percent of respondents said they approved, and 56 percent disapproved. That makes for a net disapproval of 12 percent, which is easily his worst ever in this particular poll, as the below chart shows: Trump’s (former?) reputation on the economy is an underrated reason for his political strength There have been endless explanations and theories offered for Trump’s rise and persistence in politics. Some of these are stylistic (his willingness to stoke racism or say offensive things, his tweets), others are ideological (his challenge to the previous GOP elite consensus on immigration, free trade, and foreign policy). But another key reason for his rise and return is the belief among many voters that Trump is a savvy businessman and would therefore handle the economy well. Trump did, after all, play such a character for many years on his reality television program, The Apprentice, making rapid-fire assessments of contestants’ business prowess and firing those that didn’t make the cut. His name had long been used in hip-hop music to symbolize wealth and flashy success. He published a book called The Art of the Deal. For voters who aren’t dug into a particular ideological camp, the belief that a seemingly rich, successful businessman would be better at managing the economy than a typical politician seemed logical. And indeed, though Hillary Clinton led Trump in polls for most of the 2016 campaign, the electorate consistently thought he’d handle the economy better than she would. Trump’s record during the first three years of his first term seemed to vindicate this belief, as growth remained strong and markets soared ever higher while unemployment, inflation, and interest rates all remained low. The Covid-19 pandemic threw that for a loop in 2020, but even then, voters didn’t fully turn against Trump on the economy. The Biden presidency subsequently featured the highest inflation in decades, followed by huge hikes in interest rates by the Federal Reserve to try and conquer that inflation. Voters absolutely hated this, and Joe Biden’s popularity tanked. All this seemed to fit with the idea that Democrats are terrible at economic management and that, if Trump was back in power, he’d bring back the good old days of 2017–2019. Accordingly, Trump solidly outpolled Kamala Harris on the economy. Since beginning his second term, though, Trump has been acting quite differently than he did in his first. He’s been much more aggressive on pushing his tariff and trade war agenda, in a way that’s been highly visible. The results have also been highly visible, as markets have plunged in the past few weeks. In general, the second Trump term has been aimed toward pleasing the MAGA base. But if Trump cares about retaining his popularity among the less hardcore general election swing voters who helped him win in 2016 and 2024, this is an ominous sign. Of course, he may not care — he doesn’t have to face another election. Republican candidates around the country will be the ones in electoral peril.
Enjoy the laptop lifestyle while it lasts, folks. | Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images My entire job takes place on my laptop. I write stories like this in Google Docs on my laptop. I coordinate with my editor in Slack on my laptop. I reach out to sources with Gmail and then interview them over Zoom, on my laptop. This isn’t true of all journalists — some go to war zones — but it’s true of many of us, and for accountants, tax preparers, software engineers, and many more workers, maybe over one in 10, besides. Laptop jobs have many charms: the lack of a commute or dress code, the location flexibility, the absence of real physical strain. But if you’re a laptop worker and not worried about what’s coming in the next decade, you haven’t been paying attention. There is no segment of the labor market more at risk from rapid improvements in AI than us. The newest “reasoning models” from top AI companies are already essentially human-level, if not superhuman, at many programming tasks, which in turn has already led new tech startups to hire fewer workers. Generative AIs like Dall-E, Sora, or Midjourney are actively competing with human visual artists; they’ve already noticeably reduced demand for freelance graphic design. Services like OpenAI’s Deep Research are very good at internet-based research projects like, say, digging up background information for a Vox piece. “Agentic” AIs like Operator are able to coordinate and sequence these kinds of tasks the way a good manager might. And the rapid pace of progress in the field means that laptop warriors can’t even take comfort in the fact that current versions of these programs and models may be janky and buggy. They will only get better from here, while we humans will stay mostly the same. As AIs have improved at laptop job tasks, progress on more physical work has been slower. Humanoid robots capable of tasks like folding laundry have been a longtime dream, but the state-of-the-art falls wildly short of human level. Self-driving cars have seen considerable progress, but the dream has proven harder to achieve than boosters thought. While AI has been improving rapidly, robotics — the ability of AI to work in the physical world — has been improving much more slowly. At this point, a robot plumber or maid is far harder to imagine than a robot accountant or lawyer. Let me offer, then, a thought experiment. Imagine we get to a point — maybe in the next couple years, maybe in 10, maybe in 20 — when AI models can fully substitute for any remote worker. They can write this article better than me, make YouTube videos more popular than Mr. Beast’s, do the work of an army of accountants, and review millions of discovery documents for a multibillion-dollar lawsuit, all in a matter of minutes. We would have, to borrow a phrase from AI writer and investor Leopold Aschenbrenner, “drop-in remote workers.” How does that reshape the US, and world, economy? Right now this is a hypothetical. But it’s a hypothetical worth taking seriously — seriously enough that I may or may not be visiting the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers’ apprenticeship application most days, just in case I need work that requires a human body. Fast AI progress, slow robotics progress If you’ve heard of OpenAI, you’ve heard of its language models: GPTs 1, 2, 3, 3.5, 4, and most recently 4.5. You might have heard of their image generation model DALL-E or video generation model Sora. But you probably haven’t heard of their Rubik’s cube solving robot. That’s because the team that built it was disbanded in 2021, about a year before the release of ChatGPT and the company’s explosion into public consciousness. OpenAI engineer Wojciech Zaremba explained on a podcast that year that the company had determined there was not enough real-world data of how to move in the real world to keep making progress on the robot. Two years of work, between 2017 and 2019, was enough to get the robot hand to a point where it could unscramble Rubik’s Cubes successfully 20 to 60 percent of the time, depending on how well-scrambled the Cube was. That’s … not especially great, particularly when held up next to OpenAI’s language models, which even in earlier versions seemed capable of competing with humans on certain tasks. It’s a small story that encapsulates a truism in the AI world: the physical is lagging the cognitive. Or, more simply, the chatbots are beating the robots. This is not a new observation: It’s called Moravec’s paradox, after the futurist Hans Moravec, who famously observed that computers tend to do poorly at tasks that are easy for humans and do well at tasks that are often hard for humans. Why? Here we’re less sure. As the machine learning researcher Nathan Lambert once noted, Moravec’s paradox is “based on observation, not theory. We have a lot of work to do to figure out why.” But we have some hypotheses. Perhaps human-like motions are harder for robots because we gained them relatively early in evolutionary time, far earlier than our capacity for reasoning. Running on two or even four legs is a very old ability that many animals share; it’s instinctual for us, which both makes it harder for machines without that evolutionary history to learn, and harder for us to articulate to those machines. Harder still is the fact that a robot has to learn to run on two legs by actually running on two legs in real life. This point is key: If OpenAI had its servers pronouncing every sentence that ChatGPT generates, out loud, one at a time, as part of its training process, it probably would’ve taken millennia to get to today’s abilities. Instead, it was able to train the GPT models using millions of CPU cores operating in parallel to analyze vast reams of data, processing trillions of individual words a second. Each new model only requires months or a few years of training because the process happens much, much faster than real time. Historically roboticists’ way around this limitation was to make simulated worlds, sort of purpose-built video game environments, in which to train robots much faster. But when you take the bot out of the virtual playground and into the real world, it has a tendency to fail. Roboticists call this the “sim2real” (simulation to reality) gap, and many a noble robot has fallen into it (and over it, and on it) over the years. The optimistic theory of the case is that, given enough real-world data about movement, the same techniques that have made language models so successful can be used to make robots work well. The most bullish takes on robotics I’ve seen, like this from Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark last year, are based on the idea that if you throw enough data (from stuff like YouTube videos of people walking around, or from actual humans operating the robot with a controller) into well-enough designed and fine-tuned transformer models (using the same learning structure as ChatGPT or Claude etc.), the end result will be a model good enough to govern a robot in the real world. Maybe! So far we mostly have academic demonstrations rather than the real-world, commercialized products that large language models are today. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) I don’t know the trajectory of cognitive AI and robotics over the next decade. Maybe, as OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has predicted, this year will “see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies” (referring, presumably, to software workers rather than robots). Maybe, as critics argue, the cost of training these models will prove too immense and the companies developing them, which are burning through billions in VC funding, will fail. Maybe robotics will continue to lag, or maybe people will have Rosie from The Jetsons dusting their furniture next year. I have my guesses, but I know enough to know I shouldn’t be too confident. My median guess, though, is the world outlined above: language, audiovisual, and otherwise non-physical models continue to make very rapid progress, perhaps becoming capable of doing any fully remote job currently done by humans within the next decade; robotics continues to lag, being very useful in advanced manufacturing but unable to garden or change your sheets or empty your dishwasher. Taken to an extreme, this could look like, in the words of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, a “country of geniuses in a datacenter.” What does that world look like? The work left for the rest of us One of the more useful pieces examining this idea came out in January from Epoch AI, a small research group that’s quickly become the most reliable source of data on cutting-edge AI models. The author, Matthew Barnett, uses a commercially available AI model (GPT-4o) to go through a US Department of Labor-sponsored database of over 19,000 job tasks and categorize each of them as doable remotely (writing code, sending emails) or not doable remotely (firefighting, bowling). A task, notably, is not the same as a job or occupation. The occupation “journalist” includes specific subtasks like writing emails, composing articles, making phone calls, appearing on panels, reading academic papers, and so on. And an occupation as a whole cannot be automated unless all tasks, or at least all absolutely necessary tasks, can themselves be automated. An AI might be able to do some of the mental labor a surgeon has to perform, for instance, but until it can actually cut and suture a human, the surgeon’s job remains safe. Barnett finds that 34 percent of tasks can be performed remotely, but only 13 percent of occupations have, as their top five most important subtasks, things that can all be done remotely. Thirteen percent can then serve as an (admittedly very rough) estimate of the share of jobs that could, in principle, be fully automated by a sufficiently advanced cognitive AI. Obviously, a world in which 13 percent of jobs are rapidly automated away is one with pretty massive social disruption. But at first glance, it doesn’t seem too different from what’s been happening in many industries over the past couple of centuries. In 1870, about half of United States workers worked in agriculture. By 1900, a third did. Last year, only 1.4 percent did. The consequence of this is not that Americans starve, but that a vastly more productive, heavily automated farming sector feeds us and lets the other 98.6 percent of the workforce do other work we like more. Similarly, manufacturing has become so automated that it now appears global manufacturing employment has peaked — it’s not just that factories use fewer workers in the US compared to poorer countries, but that they use fewer workers everywhere, period. “There’s an upper bound of how much can be remote, and I think we’re kind of at it now.” Nicholas Bloom, Stanford University economist and leading expert on remote work Agriculture and manufacturing are also becoming less important as a share of global economic output over time, not just as shares of employment. So this is one possible future: AI rapidly increases productivity in remote-friendly jobs like software engineering, accounting, and writing for Vox.com, leading to sharp reductions in employment in those sectors. People displaced by this shift gradually shift to harder to automate jobs, becoming masseuses, electricians, nurses, and so forth. Barnett notes that if this happens, the effect on global economic growth could be massive (maybe a doubling of economic output). It would obviously be inconvenient for me, personally, and I would be sad. But it’s basically “the world now, but moreso” — more economic growth and more labor displacement — rather than a brave new world. That said Barnett thinks this is probably underselling what might happen. Yes, automation in agriculture and manufacturing has meant that those sectors gradually decline in importance. That doesn’t have to happen, though. Barnett gives the example of the UK after the invention of spinning jenny and flying shuttle. Those and subsequent cotton-processing technologies massively improved productivity in the textiles industry relative to other sectors of the British economy. Was the result that textiles became less important? Quite the opposite: The sector exploded, and became vastly more important to the British economy. British exports of textiles increased over sevenfold between the 1740s (when those inventions were just being developed and deployed) and the 1750s, and kept growing exponentially from there. The difference between these scenarios is a number that Barnett calls the “elasticity of substitution” — in this case, between remote and in-person work, but in principle between any two kinds of work. For some kinds of work, this number is below 1, meaning that if that work gets much cheaper, it will shrink relative to other kinds of work. The two types of work don’t substitute well for each other, so the elasticity of substitution is low. But if the elasticity is above 1, then the work getting cheaper will become more common and more important. One way to think about this, Barnett told me, whether your demand for something can be saturated. “There’s a sense in which your utility from food saturates, because the amount of utility you get from just getting 2,000 calories per day is not half the amount of utility you get from 4,000.” he told me. “Assuming you can live comfortably on 2,000 calories per day, then it’s going to be almost exactly the same amount of utility, because you’re probably gonna throw away a whole bunch of food.” It makes sense, then, that agriculture shrank in importance once humanity developed the ability to grow more calories than people needed (the world’s farms currently produce about 3,000 calories per person per day, more than enough to feed every human on the planet by sheer quantity). Manufacturing, too, makes some sense in these terms. Most people hit a limit on how much large manufactured stuff they actually are able to use. My first washing machine helped a lot; getting a third or even a second would be pointless. By contrast, the world’s demand for textiles in the 18th century was nowhere near a saturation point. You can, in principle, own a limitless supply of clothes, and especially in the time of hand production, there was lots of pent-up demand, in countries around the world, for fabrics that had previously been prohibitively expensive. That meant that Britain could pour more and more resources into that sector of its economy without having returns diminish too much. What if remote work is more like that? This supposition might seem fanciful, but let’s fantasize. If you had an on-call computer programmer who could make your computer work exactly the way you wanted, wouldn’t you have a lot to ask it? If you had a personal animator who could make on-demand episodes of your favorite type of TV show with your favorite music in the background, wouldn’t you call on her a lot? I have a million deeply weird questions I’m too busy and/or lazy to answer — who invented the “You Can’t Hurry Love” bassline? Why were the witness reports in the Dag Hammarskjold plane crash ignored? — that I wish something smarter than OpenAI Deep Research could give me an answer in seconds. Maybe you would too? If that’s the situation, then things look very different. If the elasticity of substitution between remote and non-remote work is 10, Barnett finds, then you see US GDP grow tenfold over a decade, an average growth rate of 25 percent. That is completely unheard of in human history. But it would also be incredibly weird growth, showing up in increased consumption of AI-generated products, rather than, say, easier access to child care or cheaper housing. Nicholas Bloom, the Stanford University economist and leading expert on remote work, is taking the under on this bet. It’s better, he reasons, to think of remote and non-remote work as complements than substitutes, which makes a scenario with high substitution, like Barnett’s fast growth situation, hard to believe. “There’s an upper bound of how much can be remote, and I think we’re kind of at it now,” Bloom says. That said, part of Bloom’s skepticism about full-remote work comes from his belief in the importance of mentoring, which is much harder to do in a remote work setup. With AI, presumably the need to mentor in-person becomes moot. What are the most remote-friendly jobs? One can of course reason through which jobs are easy to do remotely (graphic design, telemarketing) and which are impossible (surgery, construction). But is it possible to be more systematic? Several researchers have tried to categorize major occupations as remote-able or not, but I like Matthew Barnett’s approach of simply asking a large language model if certain tasks can be done remotely. Here are some examples of jobs where every single task can be done remotely, per the OpenAI model that Barnett asked (GPT-4o): Bioinformatics scientists Bioinformatics technicians Business continuity planners Business intelligence analysts Clinical data managers Credit analysts Credit counselors Customer service representatives Data warehousing specialists Database administrators Database architects Editors Environmental economists Financial quantitative analysts Geographic information systems technologists and technicians Information security analysts Information technology project managers Insurance underwriters Mathematicians Preventive medicine physicians Proofreaders and copy markers Search marketing strategists Securities, commodities, and financial services sales agents Telemarketers Travel agents Video game designers Web administrators Web developers Writers and authors How doomed are remote workers? Before getting too carried away, it’s worth remembering — we’re not here, yet. At the very least, an AI remote worker will have to use a computer fluently, and perhaps surprisingly, the best benchmarks we have, like OSWorld, do not show AI models doing that. “The fact is right now that models really suck at navigating browsers,” Jaime Sevilla, who runs the Epoch forecasting group, told me. “They’re not at the level of my grandmother currently.” Sevilla suggested that the pace of investment and progress he’s seeing suggests that we might get grandma-level Chrome usage within a year or two. But it’ll be some time from there to actually using Chrome in an economically useful way, or managing a developer team in Slack, or any number of other specific tasks we expect remote workers to do. We’ll also probably learn a great deal about the character of the jobs we’re automating. Tamay Besiroglu, also at Epoch, notes that AI became superhuman at playing chess in 1997, when IBM’s Deep Blue defeated world champion Garry Kasparov. Today the top chess engine, Stockfish, is wildly, wildly better than the top-ranked human player, Magnus Carlsen. But chess is arguably more popular than it’s ever been. Carlsen is a global celebrity with more than 1.4 million subscribers on his YouTube channel, where he streams matches and analyzes games from shows like The Queen’s Gambit. His job has been automated to hell, and he’s a millionaire. “We discovered that, actually, the thing that people pay chess players for isn’t their ability to produce very good chess moves,” Besiroglu concludes. “That’s one thing, but not the entire thing. Things like being entertaining, having charisma, being a good streamer — those things are very important. And we don’t have good benchmarks for how entertaining or charismatic an AI system is.” To be fair, Besiroglu expects AI to gain those capabilities in the next five to 10 years. But even if it does, I think it’s plausible that people will still be willing to pay for a connection to a specific human, a connection that AI, by its very nature, cannot fully replace. Magnes Carlsen the chess player can be, and has been automated; it’s less obvious to me that Magnes Carlsen, the influencer, can be automated as well. So I’m not hanging up my laptop and giving up just yet. Maybe people will still value human-grown hot takes, the way they value Magnus Carlsen’s human-developed chess style. Or maybe not, in which case, electrician school might start looking better. But I keep thinking back to Barnett’s conclusion that human-level cognitive AI could maybe do 13 percent of work out of the box. A world where those are the only jobs that get automated is not a situation where the singularity happens (that is, where AI becomes so good that it is capable of recursively improving itself without human intervention and eventually becomes superhuman in all tasks). But it’s one where society is transformed radically all the same. When I talk to people working in AI, they treat that transformation as nearly inevitable, perhaps a lowball for the changes that might actually be on their way. When I talk to everyone else, I get the sense they have no idea what’s coming.
A special education teacher works with a kindergarten student. This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions. Over the last few weeks, I’ve been doing a lot of reporting on the Trump administration’s efforts to dismantle the Department of Education. The news on that front has been chaotic — a draft executive order to close the department was leaked, then walked back by the Trump administration, and newly minted Education Secretary Linda McMahon has pledged to guide the department through its “final mission” without providing specifics on what that mission is or how it is final. Then, on Tuesday, the department announced the firing of more than 1,300 workers, bringing the department staff to about half the size it was before Trump took office. Amid the upheaval, one thing is clear: Any plan to shut down the Education Department — and, indeed, the cuts and layoffs that have already happened — will disproportionately hurt students with disabilities. That includes kids who receive special education, but also those in general education classrooms who get supports or accommodations to learn, from speech therapy to sign language interpreters to counseling. Any kid who has an Individualized Education Program (IEP) or 504 plan through their school could be affected by what’s going on at the Education Department. That’s a huge group of kids. As of 2022–2023, 7.5 million students — 15 percent of all those enrolled in public school — received special education or related services (like speech therapy) under the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act. The most common reasons were specific learning disabilities like dyslexia. I know a lot of students and families are concerned about what the Trump administration’s actions could mean for education. So to dig more specifically into some of these issues, I reached out to Sara Nović, whose work has helped me make sense of the administration’s impact on students and on disability rights more generally. Nović is an author and translator, and she’s also the co-founder of Disability Rights Watch, a site that shares news about disability advocacy in the current moment. “As a deaf person and the mom of a deaf kid, I’ve always had a vested interest in disability rights and education,” she told me in an email. But her “villain origin story for broader organizing” happened in 2023, when she organized against an ACLU-Delaware complaint that could have harmed deaf children. “This was an example of an ill-informed group trying to ‘help,’ but being co-opted by special interests and not listening to actual deaf/disabled people and experts in the field,” she said. The experience taught Nović a lot about organizing, lessons she’s now putting into practice on a nationwide scale as changes in the federal government potentially threaten access to learning for millions of kids. Today, Nović is a go-to source for what’s going on with the Trump administration’s education policy right now (a topic that’s often murky), and how it will affect kids’ lives. Our conversation — which I’ve condensed and amended with a few links — looks at how the Education Department enforces disability rights, what cuts there could mean, and how everyone can support students with disabilities right now. Why is the Education Department’s work especially important for students with disabilities? How does the department help enforce their right to an education? The Department of Education enforces a law called Individuals With Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), which gives disabled children a legal right to a “free and appropriate public education,” and oversees the creation of those students’ Individualized Education Programs (IEPs). A student’s right to specialized instruction, services like speech or physical therapy, or an out-of-district placement in programs like schools for the deaf or blind, are under the purview of IDEA. The department also gives grants to school districts specifically for IDEA-related costs (not enough, but some), and disburses funds for a variety of special ed programming like early intervention programs, teacher training, the Special Olympics, the Helen Keller National Center for the DeafBlind, Gallaudet University, and National Technical Institute for the Deaf, and many more. The Education Department has already seen layoffs and canceled contracts, as well as the stopping (and maybe restarting?) of the processing of disability rights cases through the Office of Civil Rights. Have these cuts, delays, and uncertainties already affected students with disabilities? How? If a school violates IDEA, it’s not as if the police come and throw them in IDEA jail. Filing a complaint with the Office of Civil Rights is one of the main mechanisms for enforcement. (Same for the Americans With Disabilities Act enforcement.) These wait times are already very long, and obviously if a child loses years of education waiting in line for OCR to get around to investigating, it is a loss no matter what the outcome. One grant program we recently saw destroyed was for disabled students graduating high school and transitioning to the workforce. Due to the sudden nature of the cut, we’re likely to lose those programs. And almost all of the Education Department’s research contracts were also canceled in February, including one that provides IDEA-related data analysis. IDEA grants are given out via a complex formula grant calculation, so without that data, districts’ funds could be delayed or never arrive in the coming year. Trump has vowed to dismantle the Education Department, and while it’s not clear exactly what form that will take, it seems like the administration intends more layoffs and cuts at a minimum. What are your concerns about education for students with disabilities under this administration, and about the impacts of “dismantling” the department, whatever that looks like? We stand to lose so much educational and advocacy expertise for disabled kids if the department goes down, whether that means full abolishment (which would require an act of congress) or an executive order and Secretary McMahon just taking an axe to the workforce and programming internally. Disability is intersectional, so disabled students of color and other marginalized backgrounds are going to be disparately impacted by these cuts on top of all the other anti-DEI initiatives being pushed onto the department. Funding is obviously a huge concern. Funding for national programs, research, teacher trainings, as well as grant funding sent out to local districts are all at risk. Title I schools who rely on the federal government for general and special ed funding will drown. Even if there are districts out there who want to do right by their disabled students, if they are no longer receiving funding from the federal government eventually they will have to make decisions between providing individual services and keeping the lights on. This concern is compounded as the Right pushes voucher programs, because it will suck even more funding out of public schools, and private schools aren’t even required to accept disabled students, never mind accommodate them. There are currently three active bills in congress that could dismantle the department. Right now, any of them getting the votes is unlikely, but they are worth looking at because you can see different potential trajectories for programs without the Education Department. One of the bills is a single sentence, with no mention of whether and how IDEA law would continue to be enforced. Another moves IDEA oversight to the Department of Health and Human Services, which is honestly to me more frightening, given the disdain RFK Jr. has for disabled and autistic folks, his love of eugenics, and recent spitballing over “wellness farms.” Can you talk a little bit about what school might look like for kids without the supports they’re entitled to under IDEA? What happens to their learning? It’s hard to generalize the impact of losing IDEA protections, because by their nature every kid’s IEP plan is designed especially for their needs. But as an example, a hard-of-hearing kid like mine has the legal right to things like visits from an educational audiologist who makes sure his hearing aids are working and has access to an FM system that connects to those, an ASL-fluent speech therapist who on English concepts and vocabulary, a teacher of the deaf who has specialized training and teaches a regular academic curriculum via ASL, and specialized instruction via a reading curriculum that’s designed especially for deaf and hard-of-hearing kids to bypass phonics. Things like visual schedules, movement breaks, preferential seating, closed captions, extra time on tests and quizzes, or other accommodations are also in an IEP. IDEA law was created in part as a backlash to the previous practice of institutionalizing disabled kids in horrid conditions, like at Willowbrook. Without IDEA, while we won’t immediately swing back to that place of mass institutionalization (though honestly, with the amount of eugenic rhetoric floating around in this administration, it can’t be ruled out), many of the effects will be the same — the student may be in the classroom, but they aren’t learning. There’s another recent development a lot of disability rights advocates are concerned about: Texas v. Becerra, the lawsuit around Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act. What could happen to education for students with disabilities if that suit is successful? Section 504 is part of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 that says any entity that receives federal funding may not discriminate on the basis of disability. The statute had a broad impact on disability rights, because it allows disabled people to enter and be accommodated in hospitals, public buildings, federal jobs, and public schools. A disabled kid even being able to enter the public school was not a given before 504. Within a school context, folks might be familiar with “504 Plans,” which are legal protections for accommodations, including closed captions, sign language interpreters, FM systems, wheelchair accessibility, braille or audio texts, certain medical supports, as for students with diabetes or asthma, and anything that provides a disabled person access to regular school instruction. Texas vs. Becerra is a lawsuit that has two parts — one asks the judge to dismantle Final Rule, a series of guidelines established by HHS in 2024 to bolster Section 504 protections. The other part asks the judge to fully declare Section 504 unconstitutional, and provide “relief” from enforcement. A lot of attorneys general have been saying they only want the first part, not the second part, but the request to declare 504 unconstitutional remains in the filing, right there in black and white. Honestly, even if it were true that they only want to remove Final Rule, its something worth fighting for — those rules add pandemic-age protections for disabled people (e.g., you’re not allowed to deny someone a ventilator because they’re disabled) and update technological stipulations into the 21st century regarding telehealth and website accessibility. They also emphasize disabled people’s right to live in-community rather than be institutionalized; this section seems to be what causes the greatest angst among involved states. There has been a lot of confusion about to what degree this is a suit about “gender dysphoria,” but this is simply an attempt by prosecutors to use transphobic rhetoric to cultivate buy-in for their ableism. However, even if it were, trans rights are disability rights, and I for one will not be throwing anyone’s basic protections under the bus in an attempt to delay the theft of my own. Our liberation is intertwined. What should students with disabilities and their families know about their rights during this time? Are there resources you’d point to if folks are concerned, or just want more information? It’s a truly scary time for families of disabled kids, because even if laws are not repealed, there is a question of to what degree they’re going to be enforced. There are also a lot of state-level, comply-in-advance attacks that seek to dismantle these protections locally that families need to be vigilant about. Besides Disability Rights Watch, I’d recommend these two educational policy trackers: Department of Education Tracker, and Fighting for My Voice’s Policy Change Tracker. What can schools, educators, and communities do to support students with disabilities right now? Share this information. Call representatives and ask them to protect the Department of Education, and sign on to Rep. Hayes’ Department of Education Protection Act. Call attorneys general and ask them to drop out of the lawsuit Texas v. Becerra. Advocate for codifying special education funds at the state and local levels. Make fliers and spread the word offline. Tell disabled kids you see them as full human people worthy of education and a good quality of life with access to their communities. So often these days the harm brought on disabled people has been framed by the media as collateral damage in an attempt to get to the “real rights” of others. We are human. Stand with us, too. What I’m reading Kids in Los Angeles are experiencing sleep problems and anxiety after the region’s devastating wildfires. The Trump administration has resumed detaining migrant families with children in ICE custody, a practice ended under Biden that advocates say is dangerous and inhumane. Five years after the Covid-19 pandemic began, Scientific American has a roundup of what we know about the effects on kids — and cautions readers not to think of kids who missed out on experiences during the lockdowns as a “lost generation.” My older kid went to the Scholastic Book Fair this week, and very sweetly got his little brother a Bluey book, Queens, in which Bluey and Bingo eventually crown their mother queen, but not before she scrapes a bunch of bird poop off the porch. I am not sure I support the message of this book. From my inbox After I wrote about what childhood was like before the widespread availability of vaccines, reader Douglas McNeill responded with some of his own family history. “When I was about 20 years old,” McNeill wrote, “my father shared one fact: He and mother decided to have four children so ‘two might live.’ The 19th century childhood deaths you describe still echoed in hardscrabble West Virginia where he was raised in the 1930s.” McNeill wrote that his sister was exposed to rubella when his mother contracted the disease while pregnant: “She lived with lifelong hearing loss because of that and was the second person in the US who had open heart surgery, the best available treatment in 1945.” “When vaccines become available,” McNeill said, “I am first in line.” And now a question for a future newsletter: Do the kids in your life have imaginary friends? What are they like, how do they play, and what function do you think they serve? Let me know at anna.north@vox.com.
Traders monitor fluctuating stock prices. Donald Trump has a gift for inheriting valuable things. And the economy of January 2025 was no exception. When the president took office, stock values were hitting record highs, unemployment was hovering near historic lows, and consumer confidence was stable. Wall Street expected that business conditions would only improve. Among investors, conventional wisdom held that Trump was serious about corporate tax cuts — but not about launching an unprovoked trade war against America’s closest allies (a proposition too pointless and self-destructive to be sincere). Times have changed. Contrary to corporate America’s wishful thinking, Trump has made good on his promise for large tariffs on Chinese goods, steel and aluminum from all countries, and many Mexican and Canadian imports, triggering retaliatory tariffs from America’s trade partners. Largely as a result of these developments, US stock markets forfeited six months of gains in three weeks, while consumer confidence fell precipitously. All this has led countless Americans to ask whether their economy is headed for a recession (Google searches for that word have skyrocketed since the beginning of March). There is no certain answer to that question. Economic forecasters generally believe that the risk of a US downturn in 2025 has risen sharply over the past month, but still remains unlikely. What’s left of Wall Street’s optimism rests on a simple truth: Trump (almost certainly) has the power to stabilize the economy whenever he pleases by merely abandoning his most arbitrary and haphazard trade policies. But betting on the president’s prudence seems only a little safer than investing in his memecoin. Why Wall Street is increasingly worried about the risk of a recession The probability of a US recession has risen in recent weeks, according to major US banks. JPMorgan Chase now pegs the risk of a 2025 economic downturn at 40 percent, up from 30 percent at the start of the year. Goldman Sachs raised its own recession probability from 15 percent to 20 percent last week. Even if the US does not enter a proper recession — which is defined as six months of declining economic activity — the outlook for economic growth has soured, according to the Atlanta Federal Reserve, Morgan Stanley, and other analysts. Trump’s trade policies are the primary cause of such darkening forecasts. Large and perpetually shifting tariffs hurt the economy in multiple ways. Tariffs are a tax on foreign-made goods paid by importers — such as retailers or manufacturers — who tend to pass their heightened costs onto consumers. This effectively reduces Americans’ purchasing power. According to one estimate from the Peterson Institute, if Trump’s tariffs on China, Mexico, and Canada were to be fully implemented, and left in place, they would cost the typical US household $1,200 a year. When Americans make less money, they tend to reduce their spending on goods and services. And when consumer demand declines, businesses often lay off workers, who must then reduce their own spending — a dynamic that can yield a self-reinforcing, recessionary cycle. Trump has mitigated his tariffs’ impact on consumers by repeatedly pausing them, or adding temporary exemptions for certain goods. Yet the fact that the president’s trade policy is constantly changing creates its own problems. Economic uncertainty is bad for investment. As harmful as Trump’s tariffs are, if businesses knew they would be permanent, then some might invest in new US factories or mines that wouldn’t have been financially viable under conditions of free trade. By contrast, if no one can be sure that Trump won’t roll back those tariffs tomorrow then investing in such factories would be perilous. Uncertainty therefore leads many investors and companies to delay investment until long-term economic conditions become clear. And a pullback in investment reduces demand in the economy, thereby increasing the risk of recession. These factors lay the groundwork for a stock market selloff. But that sell-off was accelerated by the president’s nonchalant attitude toward falling equity values. For months, financial analysts had assumed that the stock market boasted a veto over Trump’s most ill-advised economic policies: Given the president’s past enthusiasm for bragging about record stock prices, many believed that Trump would roll back his tariffs in response to any sustained drop. But over the past week, the president and his advisers have signaled the opposite: That they are comfortable with inducing economic pain in the immediate term, for the sake of realizing their broader ideological goals. Asked about whether he expected a recession this year, Trump told Fox News last Sunday that he didn’t like to “predict things like that” but “there is a period of transition because what we’re doing is very big. … And there are always periods of, it takes a little time.” Although Trump has been the primary driver of declining investor sentiment, he is not the sole cause of economic concern. The economy of January 2025 was broadly considered strong. But it had some vulnerabilities. Years of inflation had eroded Americans’ savings, causing some to fall behind on their loans. Credit card delinquencies and late payments on auto loans both rose in the final quarter of last year. And the labor market has shown some signs of slackening, with the percentage of Americans who say they can only find part-time work rising and the typical number of weekly hours worked falling to its lowest point since June 2010. The Trump-induced stock market collapse risks exacerbating these sources of economic strain, since affluent households often pare back spending when the value of their stock portfolios declines. The risk of a downturn is rising, but the odds are still low All this said, there’s reason to think fears of an imminent recession have been overhyped. One source of such anxieties is the Atlanta Fed’s GDP forecast, which turned negative in recent weeks. But the Fed’s model is highly volatile, and its current projections are largely informed by data from early this year, particularly a 0.2 percent decline in consumer spending during January. But there’s reason to think that this dip reflected fleeting headwinds. After all, much of the country experienced major winter storms in January, while southern California was devastated by wildfires. These natural disasters surely kept many Americans away from retailers, restaurants, and other businesses. It is true that consumer sentiment has fallen precipitously in recent months, in response to the public’s anxieties over Trump’s tariffs. But such surveys have not been very predictive of consumers’ actual spending habits in recent years. Meanwhile, the US economy continued adding jobs in February and unemployment remains low by historical standards. One of the government’s gauges of inflation also came in unexpectedly low Wednesday, showing that consumer prices were only 2.8 percent higher in February 2025 than they were one year earlier. If inflation continues to decline, then the Federal Reserve may feel comfortable cutting interest rates, which would make it easier for consumers to spend and businesses to invest. Trump could stabilize the economy if he wanted to While the US economy isn’t devoid of complicated challenges, Trump could all but eliminate the threat of a recession anytime he wishes. All he needs to do is rescind his unpopular and arbitrary tariffs. Doing so would not undermine any of the president’s more respectable economic goals. Putting 25 percent tariffs on industrial inputs made in Canada and Mexico is not beneficial for American manufacturing, but harmful to it. And alienating core US allies does not bolster our nation’s national security but jeopardizes it. Goldman Sachs’s belief that the risk of a recession is only 20 percent hinges on Trump’s responsiveness to deteriorating economic conditions: The fact that “the White House has the option to pull back if the downside risks begin to look more serious” tempers the bank’s anxiety. Perhaps, if stocks remain depressed — while unemployment climbs — the president will decide to prioritize Americans’ economic well-being over his own ideological hobby horses. But I’m not sure that I’d put money on it. And a growing number of investors seem to feel the same.
President Donald Trump and Elon Musk show off a Tesla Model S on the South Lawn of the White House on March 11, 2025. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images The next phase of Elon Musk’s plan to entangle his companies with the workings of the federal government is well underway. That entails not only President Donald Trump’s photo op with a Tesla in front of the White House but also, surprisingly, the future of your internet connection. More specifically, Musk is making moves that could change the way millions of Americans access the internet by boosting Starlink, the satellite-based internet company operated by his company, SpaceX, of which he is the founder, CEO, and major shareholder. Starlink and other space-based internet projects work by beaming internet service from satellites in orbit down to Earth’s surface, as opposed to wired broadband internet, which typically relies on fiber-optic cable. Satellite internet’s major advantage is that, with a few exceptions, it can work almost anywhere on the planet. Its drawbacks — including slow speeds, high latency, and spotty reliability — mean that fiber internet is better for the vast majority of people right now. In the last week or so, the Commerce Department said it plans to rewrite the rules of a $42 billion high-speed internet initiative in a way that would benefit Starlink. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) meanwhile granted Starlink a waiver that will make its new service, which lets phones connect to satellites, more powerful, as satellite competitors urged the agency to rein in Musk’s company, which they say is “anticompetitive.” Musk affiliates have also reportedly instructed government agencies to start using Starlink, and the General Services Administration is already doing it, apparently without oversight. SpaceX confirmed that it’s leasing Starlink kits to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), amid reports that the agency might cancel a $2.4 billion contract with Verizon and award it to Starlink instead. The company denied that it was trying to take over the contract. There are billions of dollars at stake here, but this isn’t just about the money. (Musk doesn’t really need it.) Some people are worried that these developments represent the early steps of a power shift in the telecom industry, one that could result in the world’s richest man deciding how the nation’s communications network works. “We have never before had a situation where the owner of a major communications company is inside the government. This is a very unusual situation.” In addition to hacking away at the federal government in his unelected position as the head of DOGE, Musk could also become the single individual who is “the dominant force in telecom policy,” according to Blair Levin, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute and former chief of staff at the FCC. What’s more, the US telecommunications system is key to national security, and Musk’s business interests might not always line up with Washington’s. “We have never before had a situation where the owner of a major communications company is inside the government. This is a very unusual situation,” Levin said. “It’s very troubling.” Some of this must sound hyperbolic. It’s also hypothetical — for now. I’ve been writing about Starlink since before it launched its first batch of satellites in 2019, and from bringing remote parts of the world online to connecting Ukrainian soldiers at war, there’s no doubt that the technology is incredible. But if recent events are any indication, the Trump administration plans to advantage Starlink in ways that benefit Musk more than the people who need better internet service. It also opens the door for Musk to become a much bigger power broker in the telecom world — and have more of a say in how you get online. Elon’s space internet is not better than Earth internet yet It’s tempting to think Starlink is the future of internet service. It’s very easy to set up, which is a huge deal to anyone who lacks broadband access — soldiers in Ukraine, for example, or farmers in rural America. But Starlink is not the same as the fiber-based broadband that’s become the gold standard for internet access. For a number of reasons, space internet isn’t as fast, as reliable, or as cheap as terrestrial broadband. That’s why Congress prioritized companies that lay fiber-optic cable with the Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program, which provides federal funding to bring high-speed internet access to as many as 8 million Americans who have never had it, as part of the 2021 infrastructure bill. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick now wants to make the program “technology neutral,” a change that would increase Starlink’s chances of getting grants. Whereas Musk’s company was on track to receive a little over $4 billion under the old rules, Starlink could now get between $10 billion and $20 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal. If the Commerce Department goes through with the proposed changes to the BEAD program, its implementation would be delayed — more than one expert told me it would be by at least a year. Which is ironic given that Republicans made delays in BEAD’s rollout a talking point during the 2024 election. This process involves digging miles of trenches for tubes of cables that connect far-flung parts of the country. It takes time and costs money, but this infrastructure would last for decades. “It is truly a historic opportunity to get fiber to a lot of these places,” Drew Garner, director of policy engagement at the Benton Institute for Broadband & Society, told me. “We’ll probably never have another opportunity like this.” Some argue that Starlink and other satellite-based internet companies could get people online more quickly and without the expense of laying fiber. Starlink already has more than 7,000 satellites in orbit and is trying to add more. But it’s unclear how quickly Starlink could actually add more users, since the company already has a waiting list for people to sign up because its network is at capacity. That’s not to mention the fact that, for now, Starlink is neither faster nor cheaper than terrestrial broadband. Starlink delivers download speeds of 50 to 100 Mbps, while the FCC defines broadband as 100 Mbps. The average download speed in the US is about 275 Mbps. Starlink also currently charges customers $80 a month for its “Residential Lite” service, while the average US internet bill is $78 a month. This is what makes the Trump administration’s apparent preferential treatment of Musk’s company so frustrating. It’s a poorer solution that takes longer and doesn’t result in savings for most Americans. Musk posts Starlink into the FAA We don’t yet know how things will shake out with BEAD. The Commerce Department could change its mind, and the broadband infrastructure expansion could break ground in a few states this spring. However, the Trump administration is already starting to use Starlink in unusual ways. The FAA, like many federal government agencies, is dealing with massive staff cuts at the behest of Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. Just days after 67 people died in a midair collision near Washington’s Reagan Airport, Musk’s staff urged FAA staffers to accept buyout offers, which more than 1,300 of them did, according to the Atlantic. DOGE also ended up firing about 400 FAA employees. When Musk’s team tried to lay off air traffic controllers, Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy finally intervened. At the same time — and operating on orders from Musk himself — a SpaceX engineer started to deploy Starlink technology on FAA systems. Musk posted on X that “the Verizon communication system to air traffic control is breaking down very rapidly,” that “the situation is extremely dire,” and that he would send Starlink dishes to the rescue. The FAA has since confirmed that it’s reviewing the $2.4 billion Verizon contract and testing Starlink equipment at several locations, including in Alaska, New Jersey, and Oklahoma. Musk’s posting-fueled intervention at the FAA is a scary one. Almost single-handedly, the billionaire threw cold water on a contract with Verizon, one that will affect the safety and security of Americans. Although it’s not clear if Starlink will indeed take over this particular contract, we have a glimpse at what it looks like for a singular bureaucrat — one that sells satellite dishes that don’t always work — to call the shots. “If you’re downloading stuff to your house in a rural area, and your speed drops because the system is oversubscribed, that’s annoying,” said Harold Feld, senior vice president of Public Knowledge. “If you’re the FAA, and your speed drops because the capacity is oversubscribed, that’s deadly.” Project 2025’s surprising role in all this Elon Musk and DOGE, which is run by employees of Musk’s companies, certainly appear to be operating within the federal government to promote the best interests of those companies. The “why” of it all will take some time to figure out. Less than two months into Trump’s second presidency, we’re too busy keeping track of what’s even happening, especially where Musk is involved. As for Starlink and Elon Musk’s apparent ambitions to dominate the US telecom industry, the FCC’s cooperation is essential. And Brendan Carr, the agency’s new chair, happens to be a big Elon Musk fan. Carr first made contact with Musk on X, where the two exchanged complaints about Democrats denying Starlink broadband subsidies and blamed Kamala Harris for rolling BEAD out too slowly. Carr was also the author of the chapter on the FCC for the big report published by the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025. In it, he argues against terrestrial broadband expansion and in favor of accelerating the development of satellite technology, like Starlink. One of Project 2025’s main goals is to “dismantle the administrative state,” and in Musk, the right found a key ally. Musk has also found an opportunity: When the bureaucrats are all fired, someone still has to make decisions, and it’s easier to move quickly without any oversight. Across the world, people are setting Tesla dealerships on fire to protest Musk’s gutting of the federal workforce and hoping to tank its stock. But what’s happening more quietly with Starlink, the Commerce Department, and the FCC shows that the multibillionaire isn’t just interested in making money. He’s consolidating power in Washington and helping determine what the future will look like. Selling cars is one thing, but taking control over America’s telecommunications network is another. Musk is not there yet, but we have already seen Musk use Starlink specifically to intervene in military operations abroad — he prevented Ukraine from launching a surprise attack against Russia in 2022. That sets a scary precedent for what the future holds. “Elon Musk has been pretty cavalier about his ability to turn on or turn off Starlink to influence policy decisions,” Garner, from the Benton Institute, told me, referring to a series of recent posts on X from Musk about cutting off Starlink access in Ukraine. It’s not just scary that Musk is becoming more powerful in the telecom industry. It is uniquely terrifying that he alone could decide to bring networks down. And that might be an even more important development to keep our eyes on than the Tesla ad he produced in front of the White House. A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff. Today I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s move to cut the Department of Education’s staff by half. Before we dive in, a request: If you’re enjoying The Logoff, please consider forwarding it to a friend (or text them this sign-up link: https://voxdotcom.visitlink.me/MFBxDE.) I really appreciate it. What’s the latest? The administration Tuesday night laid off 1,315 Education Department workers. The cuts, combined with previous staff reductions, mean the agency will be about half the size it was when Donald Trump took office seven weeks ago. What does the Education Department do? Among many tasks, the department is responsible for: Distributing billions of dollars of federal funding to schools and school districts Investigating violations of students’ civil rights Managing the $1.5 trillion student loan portfolio Collecting crucial research data about students and schools to inform policymaking Will it keep doing all of that? The administration defended the cuts by saying they’d improve efficiency and keep the organization focused on its core missions. Critics say that’s simply not possible at the new staff level: some or all of its functions will suffer. What’s (possibly) next? Multiple outlets have reported that Trump was planning to try to close the department by executive order. It’s not clear if these cuts replaced that move, or if there’s more to come. But Trump would need Congress to eliminate the department entirely, and he doesn’t have the 60 Senate votes he’d need to do it. What’s the big picture? Conservatives have long had a vendetta against the Education Department. Gutting it won’t affect what schools teach — that’s controlled at the state and local level — but, through understaffing, Trump can make it difficult for the department to enforce laws and help schools, districts, and anyone with a student loan. The consequences may be quiet, but they could be enormous. And with that, it’s time to log off… A confession: I know that I really need to learn more about artificial intelligence, but I sometimes feel like I’m so far behind in the conversation that I avoid it entirely. That’s why I’m so excited about Vox’s new podcast series, Good Robot, which both provides a great introduction to the topic and dives into the big questions that surround it (starting with: “Is AI going to mean humanity’s end?”). The first episode came out today (available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and elsewhere), and I hope you’ll get to enjoy it. Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.
A sign warns drivers outside the U.S. Department of Education’s headquarters on March 6, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images Conservative activists have been dreaming of dismantling the Department of Education for decades. They’re halfway there. On Tuesday, the Department of Education announced mass firings of its workforce, which would cut the department staff down to about half of what it was when Joe Biden left office — from about 4,000 to about 2,000. President Donald Trump had promised to abolish the department on the campaign trail, but since it was established by Congress and many of its functions are legally required, he can’t make it go away with a stroke of a pen. Instead, his team is slashing its personnel and will likely try to cut back its spending to the greatest extent they think they can get away with. Now, it’s very unclear how big the policy impact of these layoffs will actually be. The biggest things the Education Department does in practice are sending money to public schools that have many low-income students, sending money to help educate students with disabilities, and running the federal student loan program. Education Secretary Linda McMahon said Tuesday that the department would keep doing all these things — though staff cutbacks seem likely to make such services more dysfunctional. But even firing half the department staff is an important symbolic victory for ideological conservative activists. Because, ever since the Education Department was created as a standalone agency in 1979, they’ve wanted it gone. These activists generally argue that education should be a local matter without federal “interference.” Many of them also disdain the public school system and support bolstering private alternatives (or home schooling). For 45 years, they kept on failing to get their way, even when Republican presidents were in power. For much of that period, the GOP was split on education: Anti-government conservatives wanted the federal government to stay away, but other Republicans saw a federal role in improving public schools. Plus, it was widely believed that abolishing the department would lead to political backlash and was likely impossible without congressional approval — so why bother trying? But the past decade, and especially the past few years, have seen major shifts in the politics of public education and inside the conservative coalition — shifts that have finally made the time right for a full assault on the department. Why conservative activists are finally getting (half of) their way now The first shift was a bipartisan disillusionment with the federal efforts to boost learning in public schools that were embodied in the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002. NCLB was championed by Republican George W. Bush, but was ultimately criticized by both the left (too much focus on testing) and the right (too much government interference). Once NCLB was repealed in 2015, Republicans essentially abandoned the idea that the federal government should try to improve public schools, which removed one rationale for keeping the Education Department around. (Back in 2018, Trump announced a plan to merge the Department of Education with the Department of Labor, but it went nowhere.) The second, more recent shift is backlash among rank-and-file Republicans against public schools, due to anger over their handling of the Covid-19 pandemic and culture war issues in the past few years. The right frames this as parents recoiling against the incompetence or ideological extremism of educators, administrators, and unions; the left frames this as conservatives targeting public schools with an exaggerated campaign of vilification. But the result was that typical Republican voters became more open to shaking up the status quo on public education. That can be seen in the flurry of “universal school choice laws,” which allot families public funds to pay for private school tuition, that have passed in red states in the 2020s. So abolishing the Education Department became a frequent applause line for Trump during his 2024 campaign — his newfound focus on this was no secret. Eliminating the department was the main theme of Project 2025’s education chapter, too — though this was no surprise, as the think tank behind the project, the Heritage Foundation, has been calling for that for decades. Still, even after Trump won another term, there was widespread skepticism that he could actually do it, given the belief that congressional approval would be necessary, and that Democrats would never agree. That’s where the third change comes in: the entry of Elon Musk and DOGE to the conservative coalition. They have modeled a new approach to dismantling the agencies they dislike, something that has never really been tried at this scale. And now it’s the Department of Education’s turn in the barrel.
Then-President-elect Donald Trump rings the opening bell on the trading floor of the New York Stock Exchange on December 12, 2024. | Spencer Platt/Getty Images Is Donald Trump tanking the economy? The stock market has taken a beating, giving up six months of gains. Several economic indicators — consumer confidence, GDP estimates — have gotten gloomier. All signs point to the main culprit being Trump and his trade war obsession. The markets have spoken loud and clear that they hate Trump’s tariffs. Even more than the tariff levels themselves, it may be the uncertainty over what Trump will do that is driving fear among investors, since this makes it very difficult to do business planning. Still, while it seems clear Trump is making the economy worse, it’s not yet clear just how much worse he’s making it. There is more to life — and the US economy — than Trump and the stock market, and several major indicators continue to suggest things are in decent shape. The economy Trump inherited from Joe Biden was in generally good shape but it had some lingering problems and potential trouble signs: There were fears about inflation returning (which spurred the Fed to keep interest rates high), GDP growth slowing, stocks and particularly tech and AI stocks being overvalued, and a continuing housing market slump. The good times kept rolling for about Trump’s first month in office, when it remained unclear how serious he’d be about his absurd-sounding tariff proposals. But as it gradually sunk in that the whole country was now strapped in to Mr. Trump’s Wild Tariff Ride, the vibes shifted. Consumer confidence took a steep decline in surveys released in late February, in large part due to tariff fears. The markets took an even more dramatic turn. On February 21, stocks began falling, and they have continued falling ever since. In the past 18 days, the major stock indexes — Dow Jones Industrial Average, the S&P 500, the NASDAQ — erased the past six months of gains. Obviously, if this trend continues, that would not be good. Broader economic indicators, though, tell a story of some weakening — but not yet a disaster. That can be seen in jobs numbers for February, which still looked fine. It can be seen in GDP growth estimates for the current quarter. This week Goldman Sachs downgraded their estimate from 2.4 percent to 1.7 percent, which is some weakening, but not yet the negative number that would foretell a recession. And the CPI (consumer price index) data for February suggested inflation isn’t yet roaring back despite some fears. (The important caveat there is that Trump’s tariffs, which will push many prices higher, largely hadn’t been imposed yet.) In other words, the economy seems so far to mostly be holding up despite Trump’s messiness. But will this continue to be the case? In theory, Trump could be acting to reassure the markets, but in practice he’s been doing the opposite. In an interview last weekend, he sounded unperturbed by the possibility of a recession, saying there would be a “period of transition” as he imposed his economic agenda. He has a new and even more sweeping round of tariffs planned for April 2. Where will his wild ride take us next?
People participate in a “Tesla Takedown” protest against Elon Musk outside a Tesla dealership in Pasadena, California, March 8, 2025. Donald Trump turning the White House into a Tesla showroom aside, things are looking pretty grim for the electric car company right now. The stock has dropped tremendously. There have been reports of Tesla chargers being burned, people vandalizing cars, people flipping Tesla drivers off, breaking glass at Tesla showrooms. There have also been very spirited peaceful demonstrations all across the US in front of Tesla dealerships, with protesters voicing their dislike of Elon Musk, Donald Trump, and his policies, and the government cuts being enacted by Musk’s DOGE group. And people are selling their Teslas back, often for significant losses. The vibes are bad in Europe, too — largely thanks to Musk boosting Germany’s far-right party and making what looked like a Nazi salute. There are widespread protests and a movement for people to buy other types of electric cars. Public opinion is starting to crystalize against Tesla because Musk is the face of the company, and many people aren’t happy with what he’s doing politically. The problem for Tesla (and Musk) is when public opinion has catalyzed against something, it can be very hard to reverse course. And so then the question becomes: Does Elon Musk care about that? Faiz Siddiqui, a Washington Post reporter who has written a book on Musk, told me that Tesla’s stock is Musk’s engine. When Musk acquires Twitter or wants to gobble up an AI company, he’s not paying cash. He’s using Tesla stock, based on the understanding that that’s an incredibly profitable, growing asset. And Musk is going to continue to need a lot of money. Faiz mentioned that the next big thing for Musk seems to be pivoting Tesla to be a robotics and AI company. Those are expensive goals, and if Tesla stock drops too much, that could limit future ambitions. Maybe Musk cares about that. However, maybe he sees that as a price worth paying for being the second most powerful man in the world — and some might argue, given his influence on Trump, that he is the most powerful man in the world. Sure, things are rocky for Tesla at the moment, but Musk now has an unprecedented level of access to the American government and power. And he has a giant portfolio — SpaceX, Tesla, Neuralink, Starlink, xAI — that is very affected by government contracts and regulations. So maybe it doesn’t matter if Tesla incurs great losses if Musk is able to use his position to convince the Federal Aviation Administration to move a $2.4 billion government contract from Verizon to Starlink, which is something the FAA is reportedly at least considering. Perhaps DOGE (the “Department of Government Efficiency”) can make his life easier on the regulation front or allow him to learn valuable information about competitors. It’s hard to say what Musk’s end game is, and how secure his position is; there have been some reports of him clashing with other administration officials. But one thing the recent Tesla drama has shown is that things seem inevitable until they don’t. Tesla seemed to be on this inevitable glide path to remain one of the most profitable car makers in the world. Now, maybe not. And the same is true with Elon Musk and his political power: Things can rise and fall faster than you might think. This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.
Earlier this week, we learned that a senior State Department official called Secretary of State Marco Rubio stupid. The insult was delivered using peculiar phrasing — “low IQ” — that’s actually quite telling about the nature and ideas of the American right today. The official in question, Darren Beattie, is the acting under secretary of state for public diplomacy — a fairly important job. He is also a creature of the internet fever swamps with a history of offensive behavior: He was fired from his speechwriting job in the first Trump administration for giving a talk at a white nationalist conference. On Monday, CNN’s KFile went through some deleted tweets from Beattie’s X account. Among many inflammatory statements the reporters uncovered, one stood out as especially embarrassing — a 2021 post where he insulted his now-boss in a number of vivid and explicit ways. On the list: a claim that the current secretary of state was “low IQ.” For a normal person whose brain has not been poisoned by the internet, “low IQ” just sounds like an overly complicated way of calling someone stupid. But for those of us familiar with the online world from which Beattie hails, it rang a very specific bell. In those spaces, there is an obsession with the concept of IQ — not just intelligence in general, but this particular means of measuring it. This preoccupation, is at its heart, about race: the idea that genetic racial inequalities in everything from income to incarceration are best explained by Black and Latino people having lower IQs than white and Asian people. This racism, recently repackaged as “race realism” or “human biodiversity,” was once mostly a province of the fringe right — so controversial that Jason Richwine, a researcher at the Heritage Foundation, was forced to resign in 2013 after his history of race-IQ theorizing came to light. But in the Trump era, this kind of thinking has become more mainstream — so commonly accepted, in fact, that insults like “low IQ” are part of the lingua franca of the online right. This is why Trump appointed Richwine to a government post in 2020, and why race-IQ theorists believe they’re winning the war of ideas in Trump’s second term. “It is an open secret that [the tech right] is aware of race differences. Elon Musk frequently promotes HBD (human-biodiversity) X accounts,” writes Nathan Cofnas, a Cambridge philosopher who was sanctioned by his college for his openly racist beliefs last year. “Among young (most millennial, virtually all zoomer) intellectuals on the right, race realism isn’t controversial.” The right’s renewed IQ obsession, explained Scientific racism is hardly a new thing, long predating even the infamous eugenics movement of the late 19th and early 20th century. In a 1787 essay, Thomas Jefferson bizarrely argued that Blacks were a “distinct race” because they “secrete less by the kidneys, and more by the glands of the skin.” These arguments seek to naturalize social inequality: to point to a social arrangement, be it slavery or the racial wealth gap, and argue that it reflects deep and unchangeable truths about humanity rather than the contingent choices of social actors who create a hierarchy within humanity for their own (nefarious) purposes. A central conceit of the modern race-and-IQ revival is that a right-wing position on race is intellectually indefensible without an appeal to biology. Mainstream conservative arguments blaming racial gaps on welfare or minority culture simply can’t survive serious scrutiny; the only intellectually serious right, they argue, is a racist right. “All non-racism-based cultural explanations for race differences have fatal problems that most intelligent people immediately recognize,” Cofnas writes. “If it were true that the races were on average psychologically equal, the best explanation for disparities would be the continued existence, or the legacy, of white racism.” To be clear: IQ is a legitimate scientific concept. There is a large body of psychological evidence showing that IQ tests do measure aspects of intelligence, and that people with high IQs are more likely to have higher incomes and succeed in cognitively demanding fields like academia or the law. However, there is no real evidence for a genetically rooted IQ difference between racial groups — let alone a genetic gap large enough to explain persistent social inequalities. Whatever IQ gaps do exist between these groups are most likely products of inequality rather than causes of it. We have been having this debate in public for decades now, since at least the publication of Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein’s The Bell Curve in 1994, and the evidence has increasingly pointed away from biological explanations. Yet in the Trump era, this reality hardly serves as a constraint. The modern reject rejects the academic consensus on everything from the science of vaccines to the benefits of free trade. The same arguments about “woke academia” and “liberal bias” used to effectively dismiss established medical and economic research are now deployed against the biological and psychological evidence for human equality. The Trump era has also demolished the moral constraints limiting the spread of these ideas. What was once career-ending at even a conservative institution like Heritage — Richwine’s dissertation alleging that Hispanic immigration should be restricted because they were a low-IQ group — is now reasonably similar to the rhetoric you hear from the president of the United States. Just last year, for example, Trump argued that immigrants coming across the southern border were likely to become murderers because they had “bad genes.” The decline of the right’s moral guardrails against racism did not just encourage anonymous racist trolling, but also helped acceptance of gussied-up racist thinking among its elite. “I’d say that maybe half of the smartest conservative and libertarian writers at least suspect that there are genetic racial differences in IQ, or even take it for granted,” writes Richard Hanania, an influential tech-right pundit who used to post anonymously on white nationalist websites (a past for which he has apologized). This is not the kind of sentiment you’ll see in columns by conservatives at the New York Times or the Washington Post. But behind the scenes, in right-wing group chats and salons, a race science renaissance is underway on the right. The use of “low IQ” as a common insult is merely the visible tip of the iceberg.
US and Ukraine officials sit together at peace talks hosted in Saudi Arabia. This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff. Today I’m focusing on negotiations between the US and Ukraine, where new developments have immediate ramifications for the war in Europe — and for our understanding of President Donald Trump’s broader foreign policy. What’s the latest? The US will resume military aid and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, lifting freezes the administration put in place earlier this month. Ukraine also endorsed a US proposal for a ceasefire, though Russia, critically, has not. What’s next? After a meeting between the US and Ukraine, Secretary of State Marco Rubio pushed Russia to agree to the ceasefire, and Trump said he would talk this week with Russian President Vladimir Putin ahead of upcoming peace talks. What’s the big picture for the Ukraine-Russia war? Today’s agreement signals a rapprochement between the US and Ukraine after their relationship imploded following a contentious White House meeting in February. But Russia still hasn’t agreed to the ceasefire — and a “ceasefire” only one party has endorsed is more aptly described as “a war.” The big question for Ukraine remains a security guarantee. A real end to the war is a good development: It would save many thousands of lives and reduce mass civilian suffering. But without a plan in place to guarantee Ukraine’s post-war safety, it’s unclear that this would be an end to the war so much as a pause. What did we learn about Trump? This was another example of Trump’s transactional approach to foreign relationships: first cutting off Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy for being insufficiently committed to Trump’s peace process, then restoring ties after he acquiesced. This may yield short-term compliance, but it comes at the expense of the nation’s reputation as a trustworthy ally — and encourages the US’s partners to look elsewhere for strategic cooperation. And with that, it’s time to log off… If you’re in Washington, DC — or anywhere else that’s getting a blast of spring weather — there’s nothing I can recommend online that’s going to be as great as watching the sunset in the new warmth. So please do yourself a favor and enjoy that if you can. If it’s not as nice where you are, or if outside isn’t available, I really enjoyed this short video about a bird sanctuary in India. Have a great night either way, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.
Protesters gather to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil on March 10, 2025, in New York City. | David Dee Delgado/Getty Images Civil rights advocates are accusing the Trump administration of trampling the First Amendment following the arrest of an immigrant who was involved with pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University. US Immigration and Customs Enforcement reportedly showed up at Mahmoud Khalil’s university-owned apartment in Manhattan on Saturday and arrested him without telling him or his pregnant US citizen wife why. They later informed his attorney that they were revoking his green card, claiming that Khalil had “led activities aligned to Hamas” but not charging him with a crime. On Monday, a federal judge in New York temporarily blocked Khalil’s deportation amid a legal battle over his future. The case may test First Amendment protections, especially for noncitizen legal residents. But it could also have broad implications for every American. Unless the government has evidence that Khalil committed a crime that it has not yet disclosed, this appears an attempt at punitive action on the basis of political expression, a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. The Free Press reported Monday that, according to an unnamed White House official, the administration sees Khalil as a national security threat but “the allegation here is not that he was breaking the law.” “If the government has got anything other than just somebody who is saying things they don’t like, they need to show it now, because otherwise, the harm to First Amendment freedoms will be serious,” said Will Creeley, legal director for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression. What rights does Mahmoud Khalil have? Khalil’s arrest raises legal questions about whether the Trump administration can revoke his green card based on his role in the protests at Columbia. Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X on Sunday that the administration “will be revoking the visas and/or green cards of Hamas supporters in America so they can be deported.” The government has not offered evidence to back Rubio’s accusation that Khalil is a Hamas supporter. However, the government’s authority to do so is limited, and civil rights attorneys think that the Trump administration has overstepped in Khalil’s case. “This arrest is unprecedented, illegal, and un-American,” Ben Wizner, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project, said in a statement. Immigrants living in the US, including those on visas and green cards, have the same right to free expression as any American under the First Amendment. However, the government can still detain and deport them if they are found to be “inadmissible” on grounds of associating with or offering material support to terrorism, according to Muzaffar Chishti, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute and director of the think tank’s office at New York University School of Law. (The United States designates Hamas — the Palestinian militant group behind the October 7, 2023, attack on Israel — as a terrorist organization.) Under federal immigration law, the bar for engaging in “terrorist activity” is high: It can involve hijacking transportation vehicles, assassination, kidnapping and threatening physical harm to those held hostage if the government does not comply with their demands, or threats or conspiracy to commit those acts. Notably, the first Trump administration believed that rhetoric alone was not enough to meet that bar. In a 2018 internal memo, Justice Department lawyers wrote that “lawful permanent residents very likely could not be excluded or removed for expressing mere philosophical support for terrorism or for endorsing the activities of groups whose activities do not implicate the foreign policy interests of the United States.” In Khalil’s case, it’s not clear if the government is detaining him on the basis of just his speech supporting Palestinians. The Department of Homeland Security did not respond to a request for comment on the specific grounds for taking Khalil into custody. He was one of the lead negotiators with the Columbia administration on behalf of pro-Palestine protesters at the university’s Gaza solidarity encampment in spring 2024. He was not involved in the occupation of a university building where protesters were ultimately removed by police. What is obvious is that the Trump administration is making an example of Khalil. The White House posted on X on Monday calling him “Radical” and promising that his arrest is the first of “many to come.” Khalil’s arrest came just after the Trump administration cut $400 million in federal grants and contracts to Columbia because of what it described as the university’s failure to respond to antisemitism on its campus, despite the fact the university cracked down harshly on protesters last spring. A chilling effect on free speech The fallout at Columbia from Khalil’s arrest has been swift. Students and faculty fear that they, too, could be targeted by the Trump administration — and that the university, concerned about further funding cuts, won’t even come to their defense. “Many of our faculty are, like Mr. Khalil, permanent residents of the United States, and many of them have said things in the course of their scholarship that the Trump administration finds noxious,” said Michael Thaddeus, a mathematics professor at Columbia and executive committee member of Columbia’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors. “The attack on Mahmoud Khalil is intended to make them quake in their boots and to make all of us quake in our boots.” But the implications of the arrest stretch far beyond the university’s campus. Expressing opposition to the war in Gaza is protected by the First Amendment so long as it does not involve criminal conduct. And even if the speaker is accused of criminal conduct, they have the right to a fair hearing and due process. “You can’t be snatched off the street and arrested without knowing what you’re being arrested for,” Creeley said. So far, Khalil does not appear to have been afforded those legal protections. And if he is being punished for merely expressing support for Palestinians alone, then there is no telling where the Trump administration will draw the line in targeting political dissent — especially among immigrants, but also among American citizens. “It just seems like we’re entering a dangerous new stage where the government is interpreting its power extremely expansively in ways that sure look like they extend past the limits of the Bill of Rights,” Creeley said.
If I ever need a reminder that I’m not a natural extrovert, I need only to look at the journal I kept during the early days of my improv classes. “I am having incredible dread about improv tomorrow,” I wrote one day. “I would literally pay any amount to get out of this class,” I moaned on another. “You can’t be bad at improv, but I feel like I am bad at improv,” I wrote after a class during which I gave up in the middle of a game called Big Booty and said simply, “I can’t take this anymore.” I had enrolled in improv because I was trying to become more extroverted, as part of a sweeping personality-change project that I document in my new book, Me, But Better. Extroversion is one of the “big five” personality traits that scientists say make up a person’s disposition, along with openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Extroversion is associated with socializing and cheerfulness, and as a hardened introvert, I knew I needed a mechanism to force me out of my house and into gregariousness. Improv seemed like the full-immersion extrovert experience. These perks of extroversion would only reveal themselves to me in time, after many, many hours of playing Zip Zap Zop against my will. But it wasn’t going well, and at times, I thought about dropping the class or giving up altogether. Even after I got better at improv, I still felt nervous before every class. And the other activities I was doing to boost my extroversion — like going on long hikes with strangers — were only mildly pleasant, at best. I had this notion that, since I was an introvert, I should avoid difficult social situations like, well, improv class. I’m glad I didn’t give up, though. It turns out that behaving in an extroverted way can have surprising benefits, even if you’re an introvert. And these perks of extroversion would only reveal themselves to me in time, after many, many hours of playing Zip Zap Zop against my will. What spurts of extroversion can do for introverts Compared to introverts, extroverts are happier, research unfortunately shows. An exhaustingly chirpy series of studies has found that social connection is one of the strongest predictors of well-being, and extroverts are more socially connected. In lab experiments, extroverts tend to interpret ambiguous stimuli more positively, hearing the word “won” rather than “one,” for example, or writing more uplifting short stories based on generic prompts. People who are extroverted as teenagers remain happier even when they’re 60. I understand that introverts might not be thrilled to hear this — I wasn’t, either. But Sonja Lyubomirsky, a psychologist who has studied this phenomenon, says it’s worth focusing less on the “extrovert” part of this and more on the fact that these individuals are more enmeshed in community. “Connection is really the key to happiness,” Lyubomirsky told me. And there are ways to square your natural introversion with the universal human need for connection. You don’t have to mingle with everyone at the office party, for instance. You can just call a trusted friend for a one-on-one conversation. Even hanging out with others and listening more than you talk can be a form of “extroversion,” Lyubomirsky says. One surprising thing Introverts may believe that behaving like extroverts means going against their nature — but this doesn’t bother us as much as we might think. In one study, introverts even reported feeling truer to themselves when they were behaving like extroverts. While it’s true that extroverts enjoy talking, people, and attention, they also enjoy activity, period. Therefore, to boost your own levels of extroversion, you can just sign up for an activity — in addition to improv, I tried sailing — and commit to going, even if you don’t plan to talk much. Though there’s nothing wrong with being an introvert, several studies have shown that when introverts occasionally behave in extroverted ways, they experience more “positive affect” — science-speak for good feelings. “I started doing these studies because I didn’t believe them,” says John Zelenski, a psychology professor at Carleton University who has replicated this finding, and who himself is introverted. But “it absolutely seems correct that if you get people to act extroverted — and usually, that means socializing for a few minutes — there’s a big mood boost there.” The reason for this twist is that behaving against our natures doesn’t bother us as much as we fear it might. In one study, introverts even reported feeling truer to themselves when they were behaving like extroverts. That’s because, much as we might prize authenticity, we have other desires, too. We want to handle difficult situations appropriately, feel embraced by others, and accomplish our goals — and most of us also want to feel happier and more connected. Sometimes, achieving those things means going against our “natural” personality traits. “Lots of things that we may not initially like doing actually really benefit us,” says Lyubomirsky, who, as an example, offered that she now loves running but took a while to get into it. “A lot of things in life don’t feel natural at first. … Just because it doesn’t feel comfortable and natural doesn’t mean it’s not authentic.” Authenticity can come from familiarity, and the only way to build familiarity is through experience. A desire to remain “authentic” is one reason people may balk at the idea of changing themselves — either through personality change or otherwise. But living authentically can also mean acting in ways that feel, at first, uncomfortable, as long as those actions draw you closer to your values and goals. Many of us, if we followed the North Star of “authenticity,” would quit our jobs, neglect our families, and watch Love Is Blind all day. But what is instinctive is not always best. This doesn’t mean behaving like an extrovert constantly, just occasionally. I told Zelenski about a time I had to collect “man on the street” interviews as a reporter — a horrible task that involves approaching random strangers and lobbing questions at them in an attempt to find a pattern of responses for your story. One freezing cold night in New Jersey, I didn’t conceal my misery well enough. As I mangled my words and rubbed my hands together, one woman looked at me with pity and said, “Don’t worry, you’re almost done.” “After a while, it does get old,” Zelenski acknowledged. How to coax out your inner extrovert To figure out how to get better at these forays into extroversion, I called up Gillian Sandstrom, a senior lecturer in psychology at the University of Sussex in the UK. More importantly for my purposes, she talks to strangers — on the street, on vacation, even in the sacred space of the London Tube. She researches the power of “weak ties,” casual acquaintances with whom we interact, but usually only briefly. People who have lots of weak ties, who make eye contact and idle chitchat with baristas and neighbors, feel happier than those who don’t, her studies find. Initially, her research felt alien to me. I had stopped working in an office when the pandemic started, and I didn’t miss it at all. I live in the suburbs, so I don’t interact with many people unless I make a point to — and I usually don’t. Sandstrom told me she’s the same way: She’s an introvert and tends to avoid demanding social situations. But she uses talking to strangers as a coping mechanism of sorts. If she’s in a big, crowded room, she finds someone who’s off by themselves and starts a one-on-one conversation. One way to open such a conversation is by making a statement, rather than asking a question. For instance, when Sandstrom is on public transportation, she’ll test the waters by complimenting the person sitting next to her. (She recommends remarking on something other than their looks.) Or, she’ll comment on something in the environment — if they have a suitcase, she’ll ask where they’re going. One time, she was walking in a park and noticed a man smiling at some ducks. “Aren’t they cute?” Sandstrom said. She and the man ended up chatting for half an hour, since they were walking in the same direction. At the end of her conversations, Sandstrom just says something like, “Thank you, it’s been nice talking to you,” and walks off. Just like a mediocre movie wouldn’t make you swear off cinema forever, one bad conversation shouldn’t keep you from trying again. I told Sandstrom that I don’t miss my weak ties much, and I’m not really one for small talk. We either have to get to the bottom of your childhood trauma, or we’re not talking at all. The thing is, she pointed out, most weak ties probably aren’t going to become long-term relationships. I needed to set the stakes way lower. Her conversations tend to last just a few minutes, and sometimes, they’re nothing special. But just like a mediocre movie wouldn’t make you swear off cinema forever, one bad conversation shouldn’t keep you from trying again. Over time, these weak ties do benefit us, even if we don’t especially notice them. They make us feel woven into the social fabric, Sandstrom says, like we’re part of something bigger. “When I do talk to people, I feel better,” she told me. “It’s almost always at least an average experience.” And when a conversation is unusually engaging, “it feels awesome, because I wouldn’t expect there to be anything coming from it.” As I sped home from my first improv class, I detected something that, honestly, floored me. I was smiling. Even though I would continue to dread it for months, something about the whole exercise was just so fun. I’m rarely immersed in something that’s meant to be light and exuberant, as opposed to correct or exacting. Because it was the middle of the pandemic, it had been months since I’d socialized with a group of people. The electricity of improv had invigorated me, in spite of myself. I found myself living out Lyubomirsky’s adage, that sometimes things that don’t seem natural end up feeling pretty good. The pioneering psychologist Jerome Bruner said that “you more likely act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action,” and I had literally acted myself into feeling happy. Sometimes, it seems, introverts should agree to do activities before we feel like doing them. Occasionally, you have to commit to socializing. If you wait until you’re in the mood, you’ll never go.
The mRNA were hailed as a miracle. Why did Americans turn against them? | Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images Exactly five years ago today, after more than 118,000 cases and more than 4,200 deaths across 114 countries had been recorded, the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus a pandemic. With the virus spreading rapidly around the world, the need for a vaccine was desperate — but the prior record for the fastest development of a new vaccine to a new virus was four years Yet vaccines using the new technology of mRNA were developed by Moderna and Pfizer/BioNTech in a matter of months, and were already being put into arms by the first anniversary of the pandemic. Rather than containing a weakened or dead virus, as most vaccines do, the shots contained mRNA — or messenger RNA, a kind of genetic script — that prompted cells to produce special proteins that would allow the body to develop an immunity to the novel coronavirus. While new Covid variants would later pose challenges in the pandemic, scholars at the Commonwealth Fund, a health policy research group, estimated that the Covid vaccines prevented more than 3 million deaths in the United States alone and 18 million hospitalizations from December 2020 to November 2022. Scientists, who are usually not prone to crediting divine intervention, called the mRNA vaccines a miracle. Four in five Americans received at least one dose; when we remember less than half of Americans get their flu shot each year, the high uptake of mRNA shots, at least initially, signaled a willingness from the US public to trust this novel technology. After most Americans received their shots, more people returned to work, more kids went back to school, and the economy began to rebound. And there was optimism that mRNA technology could be used to make better vaccines for other diseases. But even as the vaccines were actively pulling the US out of the pandemic, skepticism about mRNA technology was rising. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., still a private citizen at the time and one of the country’s most vocal vaccine skeptics, urged the first Trump administration to pull the shots. Now the nation’s top health official, Kennedy is reevaluating the US Health and Human Services’s contract with Moderna, which is developing flu vaccines targeting strains with high pandemic potential including the H5N1 bird flu that is currently driving fears of another pandemic. With Kennedy at the helm of HHS, scientists and public health experts worry that a major breakthrough in medicine development may now backslide. mRNA technology has shown the potential to deliver new cancer treatments and a universal flu vaccine, and could lead scientists to uncover even more applications. But now, mRNA vaccine development is in peril — just a few years after proving its value. Why so many Americans turned against a vaccine miracle Scientists had been trying since the 1990s to crack mRNA vaccines, but progress was slow, in part because it was difficult to secure funding. But when the Covid-19 pandemic hit, Operation Warp Speed funded rapid clinical trials, expanded manufacturing capabilities, and offered huge purchase guarantees for companies that delivered an effective vaccine. mRNA vaccine development proved almost too good to be true during a real-life emergency. During the new Covid vaccines’ early clinical trials, they showed a 90 percent efficacy in preventing any symptoms at all. In the real world, the efficacy of early vaccines didn’t quite live up to that hype. The Moderna and Pfizer shots were still very effective in preventing severe disease, but some vaccinated people did get infected. Many people reported experiencing unpleasant side effects like fatigue or body aches after their shot; some of them felt ill enough to miss work. And as more variants of the disease emerged and as protection that many people got from the vaccines faded over time, shots became less and less effective. For such purely biological reasons, there were some important caveats to the “miracle” that public health experts were touting. But those side effects fed into existing anti-vaccine sentiment, and many people — activated by influencers and politicians who portrayed business closures and mask requirements as authoritarian measures of control — began to turn against the Covid vaccines. By autumn 2021, less than a year after the vaccines’ debut, anti-vaccine communities were thriving, constructing an alternative narrative of the pandemic in which the disease itself was not actually that serious but the vaccine could alter your DNA or plant a chip in your body. Public embrace for the vaccine shattered and never recovered. Data from the CDC speaks for itself: Uptake for the booster shots that succeeded the original mRNA shots has plummeted; in November 2023, only 15 percent of Americans received the latest version of the vaccines. The low rates for Covid-19 boosters underscored growing misinformation: Four in 10 Republicans said in a January 2025 KFF poll that it was “probably” or “definitely” true that more people had died from the Covid-19 vaccines than from Covid-19 itself, which represented a 15-point increase from a July 2023 survey. Shifts in the national political mood have only entrenched this skepticism further. In December 2021, Kennedy said the Covid shots were “the deadliest vaccine ever made.” (Scientists have documented at most a few dozen deaths attributable to the vaccines worldwide after billions of doses were administered, and population-level analyses have detected no meaningful increase in mortality after the vaccines were introduced.) By February 2025, Vice President JD Vance was echoing some of those claims. “I took the vax, and, you know, I haven’t been boosted or anything,” Vance told podcaster Joe Rogan. “But the moment where I really started to get red-pilled on the whole vax thing was when the sickest that I have been in the last 15 years by far was when I took the vaccine.” Elon Musk, meanwhile, has emerged as something of a double agent, simultaneously embracing skepticism of the Covid-19 vaccine development while underscoring the risk of discrediting mRNA technology entirely. Musk claimed on his own platform X that he “almost went to hospital” after a Covid booster, before adding: “That said, synthetic mRNA has a lot of potential to cure cancer and other diseases. Research should continue.” He’s right. As Covid-19 has upended our politics and culture so thoroughly in the past five years, we are at risk of losing out on important medical innovations. That cure for cancer may never materialize if governments stop offering financial support or ban mRNA use, or if people simply don’t trust it and won’t take it because they’ve become convinced by these conspiracies. But all of those things are unfolding at once. The US health department’s recent decision to reevaluate a $600 million contract with Moderna to develop a shot that targets flu strains with particularly high pandemic potential has terrified public health experts. With H5N1 already percolating as a pandemic threat, former federal health officials have warned the decision could hamper our ability to quickly produce a new vaccine whenever the next influenza pandemic strikes — be it bird flu or something else. At the state level, Republican leaders, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, have called for a ban on any vaccine mandates involving mRNA shots. Some state lawmakers want to press further, banning all mRNA vaccines for the people they represent. No such ban has yet become law but in the last year alone, legislation has been introduced in Idaho, Iowa, and Montana. “I believe all the gene therapy products that are being used for immunization should be put on hold until we can determine their safety and efficacy,” said Idaho Republican Sen. Brandon Shippy. (The mRNA vaccines do not alter your genes, as gene therapies made specifically for genetic disorders like sickle cell disease are designed to do.) Many Republican voters not only believe the Covid-19 vaccines killed more people than Covid did, but they’re souring on other parts of the public health consensus, including long-held recommendations for childhood vaccines. In a November 2024 paper, researchers looked at worldwide attitudes toward mRNA technology and discovered “widespread negative sentiment and a global lack of confidence in the safety, effectiveness, and trustworthiness of mRNA vaccines and therapeutics.” For now, mRNA development in the US and around the world continues. Scientists are working on a universal flu shot and respiratory virus vaccines. They are showing promising results with cancer vaccines, including for diseases such as pancreatic cancer that have resisted older treatments. Major pharmaceutical firms believe that mRNA could be harnessed to treat rare genetic disorders, too. Covid showed that the science behind mRNA technology works. The opportunity for major medical breakthroughs still exists. The question now after our collective experiences of the past five years, is whether we still want them.
President Donald Trump, accompanied by Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, takes a question from a reporter in the Roosevelt Room of the White House on March 3, 2025 in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images The beginning of Donald Trump’s second presidential term has most certainly been full of sound and fury. What has it signified? As in the first Trump administration, it’s been challenging to distinguish between the controversies of the day that will soon be forgotten, and the concrete changes that truly matter and will last. On many important issues — trade wars, the economy, the future of NATO, US-China relations, mass deportation, DOGE’s efforts to overhaul the federal workforce, potential prosecution of Trump’s political opponents, and the handling of future election results — it’s simply too early to say how things will turn out. Ultimately, it depends on what exactly Trump ends up deciding to do, how effective his team is, and how much pushback he gets. But other Trump changes already stand out as likely to last — or at least to result in significant consequences. The sandbagging of Ukraine will clearly have global ramifications. The dismantling of USAID will be very difficult to undo. Many of Trump’s attacks on DEI and affirmative action policies will likely stick, given a sympathetic Supreme Court. And his wholesale cooptation of the Justice Department and use of the pardon power to protect political allies sends an unmistakable message. 1) Trump’s harsh treatment of Ukraine will have global consequences Trump’s public humiliation of Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, and his subsequent cutoff of aid to and intelligence sharing with Ukraine, was an incredibly important change in American foreign policy with consequences that are already rippling outward far beyond Ukraine itself. Indeed, the upshot for Ukraine itself and its war with Russia remains unclear. We don’t yet know whether the Trump administration will eventually reach an accommodation with the Ukrainian government, and how efforts to bring the war to a close will play out. But already, Trump’s behavior, his willingness to close the door on a decade’s worth of US support for Ukraine, and his questioning of NATO commitments, have sent shock waves across Europe. European nations, now believing US support can’t be counted on, are reevaluating their defense policies. We can’t know where all this will lead. But one potential consequence is more nuclear proliferation — the prime minister of Poland said last week that, because of Trump’s actions, his country might have to “reach for opportunities related to nuclear weapons.” 2) USAID has been torn down in a way that will be difficult to reverse In Elon Musk’s rampage through the federal government, he’s engineered a bunch of firings and canceled a bunch of contracts. But he wreaked particular havoc on the six-decade-old United States Agency for International Development, which, he bragged, he fed “into the wood chipper.” Indeed, Trump’s appointees simply declared that they were ending USAID as an independent agency, and moving a much-reduced version of it to the State Department. Most of USAID’s staff was fired or placed on leave, while programs to send life-saving food or medicine abroad were put in limbo. On Monday, Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on X that the “review” of USAID programs was complete, and that 83 percent of its programs would be canceled while the remainder would be restarted. The administration has not yet announced which programs fall into which category. Hopefully much of the most important life-saving aid, like the PEPFAR HIV treatment program, will return to operation. But Trump is, at the very least, significantly downsizing the US’s commitment to foreign aid while gutting both the government workforce that worked on it, and dealing devastating blows to many nonprofits that provided it with USAID grant money. Even if Democrats return to power in 2029, it will be very difficult to simply turn back the clock and restore everything to where it was — once a sector is this broken, it’s hard to put it back together. 3) Trump is using the federal government to fight the culture war One of the most striking features of Trump’s new administration is how aggressively his appointees have used federal power to fight the culture war. Trump has not only rolled back federal affirmative action policies, he’s demanded investigations into universities, nonprofits, and companies that have purportedly “illegal” diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) practices. He’s threatening funding for institutions that support gender-affirming care for adolescents and young adults. He’s cutting funding to universities that he claims let anti-Semitism flourish on campus (by tolerating protests of Israel’s war in Gaza). But together, they’ve sent a very clear message that if you go too left, the Trump administration will try to punish you — by withholding federal funds if you get them, or investigating you if you don’t, or deporting you if you’re a non-citizen. The chilling effect is the point — fear has spread in universities, among researchers, and elsewhere, as people now have to watch what they say. The anti-“wokeness” crusaders now in power may well overreach and provoke a backlash, and many of Trump’s policies here may not survive court scrutiny. But with his appointees committed to waging culture war against the left, they’ll have four years in power to figure out new ways to do it — and will likely do a lot of damage. 4) Trump has politicized the rule of law Since the Watergate scandal, there’s been a norm that Justice Department decisions about criminal prosecutions should be made independently of White House interference, and that the Department of Justice needed to uphold its reputation as an impartial administrator of justice. So, under President Joe Biden, federal prosecutors indicted Donald Trump. But the Biden DOJ also prosecuted Democratic megadonor Sam Bankman-Fried, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), and New York City Mayor Eric Adams (D) — as well as, ultimately, the president’s son, Hunter Biden. Trump, in contrast, began his administration with a broader pardon of January 6 rioters (including violent ones). He then appointed loyalists atop the DOJ and the FBI, who have gone on to purge many of those institutions’ existing leaders. Cases against certain connected Republicans quickly went away. The DOJ tried to drop the case against Adams, apparently in hopes of coercing him into cooperating with deportations, in what became a public fiasco. The acting US attorney for the District of Columbia threatened Democratic members of Congress with transparently baseless investigations. Trump has long wanted his political enemies prosecuted, but making a phony case stick is easier said than done. In each instance, his team would have to convince DOJ prosecutors, a grand jury, and ultimately a judge and jury that the charges are legitimate. However, it’s actually much easier to just have a standard where the DOJ avoids prosecuting the president’s allies. Past Justice Departments could be pressured, based on leaks to the press or complaints from Congress, into launching investigations into their “own team” — think special counsel Robert Mueller’s appointment in Trump’s first term, or the Hunter Biden special counsel under President Biden. But if Trump’s Justice Department thinks they can get away with ignoring those complaints, they will. They don’t seem to care much about maintaining the DOJ’s reputation for independence — they’d rather use it as a weapon. How effective they’ll be at attacking their enemies remains to be seen, but it’s a safe bet that friends of Donald Trump won’t see themselves in much legal trouble from the federal government in the next four years.
Columbia University student Mahmoud Khalil talks to the press during the press briefing organized by pro-Palestinian protesters who set up a new encampment at Columbia University’s Morningside Heights campus on Friday evening, in New York City, on June 1, 2024. | Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here. Welcome to The Logoff. Today I’m focusing on the Trump administration’s arrest of a pro-Palestinian activist, a chilling development for defenders of free speech and the First Amendment. What’s the latest? Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents on Saturday arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a recent Columbia University graduate student who was born in the Palestinian territories. Khalil is a legal permanent resident of the US. His arrest comes after he played a prominent role in anti-Israel protests on campus. Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested yesterday that Khalil’s green card would be revoked and that the administration planned to deport him. But a judge this afternoon blocked the administration from deporting Khalil while legal proceedings over his case go forward. Why was Mahmoud Khalil arrested? Khalil has not been charged with a crime, the Associated Press reports. The administration said the arrest was in accordance with Donald Trump’s order “prohibiting anti-Semitism.” Rubio’s post made clear the arrest was due to Khalil’s involvement with Columbia’s pro-Palestine protests, calling the former student a “supporter of Hamas.” (The government has not produced any evidence that Khalil was coordinating with Hamas or providing material support.) What’s the big picture? Not everyone will agree with Khalil’s position on Palestine and Israel, but that’s beside the point. The Trump administration is explicitly taking punitive action against Khalil on the basis of his political expression, effectively criminalizing an act of political speech in a troubling sign for all of our civil liberties. Trump in a White House statement today said: “This is the first arrest of many to come.” And with that, it’s time to log off… A quick reminder that doomscrolling doesn’t help anyone. Instead, might I suggest today’s episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast? It’s about the value of silence, and I found it really helpful to hear about the benefits of quiet in a world where it’s hard to find. The podcast is available for free on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and elsewhere, and I hope you get to enjoy it. Have a good night, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.
The past few years have violated many of my assumptions about human progress. Twenty-year-olds are going MAGA. More and more Americans say that women should return to their “traditional” roles in society. For some reason, we have decided to gamble with bringing back once-eradicated deadly diseases. And now, add to the list: Cow’s milk is back. Sort of. Last year, US dairy producers sold about 0.8 percent more milk than in 2023, according to US Department of Agriculture (USDA) statistics, the first year-over-year increase since 2009, when milk prices were historically low. That may not sound like much, but it’s a big deal for the dairy industry, which has seen a sustained drop in both per capita and total US milk consumption over the last few decades. Raw milk, which has not been pasteurized to kill pathogens, has seen double-digit growth, a concerning trend given its potential to spread life-threatening infections, though it still makes up a very small share of overall milk sales. Meanwhile, non-dairy milks — the kind made from soybeans, oats, almonds, and other plants — have stumbled, declining by about 5 percent in both dollar and unit sales over approximately the last year, according to data shared with Vox by NielsenIQ and data reported elsewhere from the market research firm Circana. A small uptick in cow’s milk intake is, obviously, not tantamount to the calamities that have been unleashed over the last six weeks in American politics. But it does likely sprout, at least in part, from the same vibe shift that’s given us butter-churning, homestead-tending tradwives, an unscientific turn against plant-based foods, and a movement to destroy public trust in vaccines. After achieving ubiquity in the 2010s and early 2020s, plant-based milks may have lost their cool, nonconformist quality — much like how, after more than a decade of liberal cultural supremacy, embracing authoritarian revanchism now feels like countercultural rebellion. The problem is that cow’s milk is not, unfortunately, just a harmless dietary preference — it’s land-intensive, water-intensive, climate-warming, and incredibly cruel to cows. Dairy cows contribute more than 10 percent of US methane emissions, a super-potent greenhouse gas, and their land use, while not nearly as great as that of beef farming, is still high, occupying land that could otherwise be freed up for carbon-sequestering ecosystems. To mitigate climate change, our dairy consumption needs to go down, not up. It’s too early to tell whether the growth in milk sales is a temporary blip or a genuine turning point; Dotsie Bausch, executive director of Switch4Good, a group that advocates for moving away from dairy consumption, told me she’s optimistic it’s the former. And all this comes amid another important shift: America’s top coffee chains, including Starbucks, Dunkin’, Dutch Bros, Tim Hortons, and Scooter’s — very large buyers of milk — have all in recent months dropped their extra charges for adding plant-based milks to drinks, a change that animal rights groups, led by Switch4Good, had demanded for years. That change makes it anywhere from 50 cents to $2 less expensive to choose plant milks over cow’s milk, and will likely nudge some customers to choose more planet-friendly plant-based options. Still, while economic incentives do matter for milk consumption, as we’re increasingly seeing, they’re not the whole story. Why dairy milk is becoming more popular If you really think about it, it’s weird that we drink dairy milk — the milk that cows, like all mammals, make for their babies. There’s no compelling reason to think humans need to drink milk after infancy, much less the milk of another species. Nevertheless, thanks to many years of “pseudo-scientific theories that exalted drinking-milk to permanent and unquestioned superfood status,” as culinary historian Anne Mendelson put it in her book Spoiled: The Myth of Milk as Superfood, cow’s milk consumption became practically compulsory in the US, peaking in 1945 at 45 gallons per person, or about two cups per day. And that’s only counting straight cow’s milk, not other dairy products made from it like cheese, butter, or ice cream, which added a lot more — ice cream consumption peaked in 1946, at 23 pounds per person. After World War II, fluid milk intake plummeted, falling to less than half a cup per person per day on average in 2019. It’s important to keep these trends in perspective, however: More than 90 percent of US households still buy cow’s milk, while less than half buy plant-based milk; plant milk sales are still way lower than sales of cow’s milk. And even as cow’s milk in fluid form became less popular, overall dairy intake in the US has only increased since the 1970s, driven by growing consumption of cheese, butter, and yogurt. So why might drinking cow’s milk be coming back? The most persuasive hypotheses boil down to three things: price, perception, and protein. The first one is pretty obvious: Consumers are angry about inflation, struggling with high grocery bills, and switching to lower-cost options. Conventional dairy milk — the kind that makes up more than 90 percent of the cow’s milk market and comes in clear, hard-plastic jugs with brightly colored caps — is generally cheaper than any plant-based milk you can get. The cheap soy milk I buy is still more than twice the cost by volume of the cheapest cow’s milk at my grocery store. If you know anything about how resource-intensive cow’s milk is to produce, its low cost might seem counterintuitive. Part of that is because the costs are externalized elsewhere: Cows have been bred to produce immense volumes of milk over the last century, which has brought down the cost while taking a heavy toll on their welfare. Most milk today comes from mega dairies, which benefit from economies of scale by confining thousands or even tens of thousands of cows in one place, but these operations are known for spreading pollution and foul odors to nearby communities. Dairy is also much higher in greenhouse emissions than plant-based foods with comparable nutrition, and much more water-intensive, contributing to water scarcity in arid Western states like California, the nation’s top dairy producer. But the dairy industry, as well as those that grow crops to feed cows, gets to use all that water at low cost, a classic “tragedy of the commons,” UC Davis agricultural economist Richard Sexton told me. Soy milk, while far less resource-intensive than dairy, has higher manufacturing costs, and hasn’t benefited from the decades of US government-subsidized R&D that have lowered the cost of cow’s milk, nor from the dairy industry’s scale efficiencies. The cost of the soy used to make soy milk is also shaped by competition with other, much larger, uses of soybeans, Sexton said. Most soy grown in the US is fed to farmed animals, while another chunk is used to make subsidized biofuels. Why soy milk rules Soy milk, which has been consumed in East Asia for centuries, is almost too good to be true — but at just 1 percent of the US milk market, it doesn’t get enough credit. It’s packed with protein and (assuming you get a fortified variety) essential nutrients, low in saturated fat, and much lower in sugar than milk. The federal government’s Dietary Guidelines for Americans recognize fortified soy milk as an appropriate substitute for cow’s milk. I think it’s an even better choice, kinder to both the planet and to cows. If you haven’t had it before, soy milk might taste different from what you’re used to, but it has a satisfying, full-bodied texture and nutty flavor. And don’t worry about whatever you may have heard about the supposed dangers of soy — it’s been debunked. It’s literally a bean, and we can all use more of that in our diets. But look closer at the data, and the price explanation for dairy milk’s rebound becomes a lot more complicated. Organic milk sales grew by 7 percent by volume from 2023 to 2024 — about 19 times faster than conventional milk did over the same period. And organic cow’s milk is significantly pricier than conventional; often, it’s more expensive than plant-based milks. Lactose-free milk, which is also costlier than regular milk, saw huge gains, too, with many new buyers switching from less-expensive plant-based milks. One factor might simply be taste and feel, Chris Costagli, vice president for food insights at NielsenIQ, told me. Consumers seem to be trying to incorporate more fats in their diets: Rich, full-bodied whole milk, which has been rising in popularity as low-fat milks decline, may be gaining appeal compared to almond milk, the most popular plant milk, which is runny and low in calories. And then there’s the hazier but crucial element of consumer perceptions — in other words, vibes. Americans are increasingly skeptical of so-called ultra-processed foods, an ill-defined, unrigorous concept that I covered back in December. Most plant-based milks fall into that category, putting them on the wrong side of today’s culture war, which has swung toward the regressive and anti-modern. Consumers find the ingredient lists of cow’s milk — which is often just “milk” and added vitamins — simpler and easier to understand than those of plant milks, Costagli said, and they also might feel that they’re getting a better value. “The first ingredient on dairy milk is milk. The first ingredient on plant-based is water,” he said. That’s true — but cow’s milk is also overwhelmingly comprised of water. A more detailed ingredient list might look like this: Water, milk fat, casein, whey, lactose, vitamins, minerals, enzymes, estrogen, progesterone, Insulin-like Growth Factor 1. Novel foods suffer from the perception of being “unnatural” and mechanized regardless of their actual health impacts. I’m reminded of what 20th-century philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote in his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” arguing that in an era of mass production, objects lose their “aura,” or uniqueness and authenticity. Cow’s milk, particularly the kind that’s marketed as unadulterated and close to the source, like organic, appeals to a sense of lost aura by promising to reconnect consumers with something ancient and primal — a living, breathing animal, the very opposite of a machine. But this fatally misunderstands the nature of modern dairy farming, which one could reasonably define as the process of turning an animal into a milk-making machine. Organic dairy does have some standards that are better for animal welfare, including a requirement for cows to have access to pasture for at least 120 days per year, although organic dairy has been gamed and industrialized to such an extent that it often resembles conventional mega dairies. More fundamentally, though, there’s no guarantee that organic dairy cows are treated humanely because both organic farms and conventional mega dairies rely on the same business model: Putting cows through repeated, taxing cycles of insemination, pregnancy, and lactation, separating them from their calves so that humans can take their milk, and then sending them to slaughter at a young age when their health and productivity decline. Organic dairy is not meaningfully better for the environment, either. Got soy milk? There’s one more factor we need to consider to understand what’s happening in the cow’s milk market: America’s obsession with protein. Most types of plant milk, including oat, almond, and coconut, are significantly lower in protein than cow’s milk. That might explain why sales of soy milk — which is higher in protein as a share of calories than either whole, reduced fat, or low-fat cow’s milk — have remained stable, while low-protein almond milk has seen the steepest declines. Some companies have even introduced “ultra-filtered” cow’s milk that’s higher in protein than regular milk. The Coca-Cola-owned milk brand Fairlife, which has seen massive growth in recent years thanks to the popularity of its high-protein products, was recently the subject of an undercover investigation by the animal advocacy group Animal Rescue Mission. The group found appalling animal abuse at two Fairlife supplier farms in Arizona, including cows and calves being beaten, dragged, chained, and shot. A 2019 investigation found similar abuse at another Fairlife supplier, and Coca-Cola in 2022 settled lawsuits alleging that it falsely advertised Fairlife milk as coming from humanely raised cows. “The mistreatment of animals depicted in the recent videos is unacceptable. Effective immediately, our supplier, United Dairymen of Arizona (UDA), has suspended delivery of milk from these facilities to all UDA customers,” Fairlife told Vox in a statement. “We have zero tolerance for animal abuse. Although we operate as milk processors and do not own farms or cows, we mandate that all our milk suppliers adhere to stringent animal welfare standards, and we expect nothing less.” So what kind of milk should people drink if they care about nutrition and animal welfare? The perfect milk for most people is made of soybeans. Soy milk is not just high-protein, but also lower in saturated fat than any type of cow’s milk except skim, much lower in sugar (make sure you get an unsweetened variety), and even has fiber, which, unlike protein, Americans are actually deficient in. If you get a fortified variety, like the leading soy milk brand Silk, you also get calcium, vitamin D, and other essential nutrients. If you’re accustomed to cow’s milk, soy might just taste different. Myths about adverse health effects from soy have been debunked; unless you have an allergy, there’s no reason to be afraid of it. To the contrary, soy is simply a bean, and one of the best sources of protein out there. Soy milk is also unequivocally better for the environment than dairy, isn’t made with animal abuse, and as a plus, won’t help start the next pandemic. The US federal dietary guidelines recognize fortified soy milk as an appropriate substitute for cow’s milk. Despite this, it is, strangely, the official policy of the US government to promote cow’s milk consumption and protect it from changing consumer preferences — an outdated vestige of 20th-century agricultural policy that punishes plant-based foods at a time when we most need them. Seen in this light, the perceived resurgence of cow’s milk may really just be one more example of the re-entrenchment of the status quo. Although it’s seeing a bit of a renaissance, cow’s milk has never not been mainstream. The truest form of cultural rebellion has always been to simply avoid it. And please, whatever you do, don’t drink raw milk. This story originally appeared in the Processing Meat newsletter. Sign up here!
Gov. Tim Walz speaks onstage durning SXSW in Austin, Texas. | Tibrina Hobson/Getty Images I sat down with Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz on Saturday at SXSW in Austin, Texas. Remember Tim Walz? His running mate, former Vice President Kamala Harris, has been keeping a relatively low profile since leaving elected office earlier this year, but Walz is still out there talking — to Rachel Maddow, to Molly Jong-Fast, to David Remnick, and now to me — about what the Democrats could, should, and need to do to oppose Donald Trump and MAGA. I asked him what he’s running from — and if there’s anything he’s running for. Below you’ll find an excerpt of our conversation for Today, Explained that’s been edited for clarity. You can also listen to the interview below or wherever you listen to podcasts. Do you think these guys are still weird? Oh, hell yes. Look, obsessing with choices people are making about their own lives that has absolutely zero to do with you. That is weird. That might be too soft. That is really unnecessary. Did you watch the joint session this week? Yeah, parts of it. I did. I felt like the messaging from the Democrats was muddled at that joint session. Some didn’t show up at all. Some left early, some wore pink and held up these feeble signs that said, “False!” or “This is not normal.” We all saw Representative Al Green protest. But there wasn’t a unified message. Did you want to see something more unified from your party? Yes. Other than bidding on an antique tea set or whatever was happening? Yes, I wanted something more than that. I’m hearing it from my constituents in Minnesota, and I’m hearing it across the country. There’s a primal scream of “Do something! Do something!” Now I have the advantage — as a governor, I can do something. We can put up firewalls against them. You’re not going to demonize our people. We’re going to continue to make sure our children are fed. I called the premiers of Ontario and Manitoba and said, “Look, the official policy is theirs. But we like you. We like Canadians. We like what we trade together.” When I get asked, “What should we be doing?” I’m probably the last guy. I didn’t get it done. And we needed to win. And that’s where we’re in this pickle because we didn’t win. But I’m being reflective of what I could have done better, what I should have done better. I don’t have a big solution. But what I think for all of us, which is encouraging to me, these town halls — the kind of organic folks bringing up — there’s not going to be a charismatic leader right in and come up with this just perfectly delivered message. It’s going to get us out of this. It’s going to be a whole bunch of people who don’t want to see kids go hungry, who don’t want to see health care ripped apart, who don’t want to throw Ukraine under the bus on the side of Russia. Those folks are going to stand up and make a difference. So yes, in answer to your question [on Democrats’ response to Trump’s speech]: Yes, it’s frustrating, but it’s hard. I served for 12 years in Congress and someone said, “Would you like to go back?” I said, “I would rather eat glass than go back to Congress.” James Carville said in a New York Times op-ed that the Democrats [should] sort of roll over and play dead, let the Republicans have their way with the government, anger voters to the point that they’re repulsed by their policies, and then go for a shot in the jugular. What do you think of that strategy? Well, I don’t agree with it, and I don’t agree with this idea that people need to feel the pain. I’m going to do all that I can as governor. I said to my team that we protect the most vulnerable. We protect our gains. That’s what we’re going to do. This isn’t simple disagreement on tax rates, simple disagreement on how much we should do on defense spending versus domestic or whatever. This is an all-out assault around Article I of the Constitution. Again, I don’t want to overreact, but I said this last week and I stand by this: The road to authoritarianism is littered with people saying, “You’re overreacting.” And I think that piece of it, of speaking out, matters. Have [Trump’s team] done anything you liked? They’ve done a lot. Two things. I’ll mention this especially today, tonight. I think I come down on Trump’s side on Daylight Savings Time. So we started talking about that. I’ll give you that, I’ll give you that one. And believe it or not, this is bizarre, I heard Donald Trump talk about this and I’m with him: I think we should get rid of the penny. I think it’s outlived its thing. So yeah, the world’s melting down around us. But Donald and I are solving the penny crisis. So let’s talk about 2024 for a minute here. Not because I want to dwell on the past, but you brought it up that you guys didn’t win. I want to better understand why not. You guys didn’t swing a single swing state in your direction. A lot of people were stunned by that. Were you stunned? Yeah. In this business, you’ve got to be steely eyed and coldhearted about where things are at. I spent my time in about seven swing states, and felt like I was getting down to where folks were at. Obviously not. And I think the soul searching that comes with that is: Why did our message about focusing on the middle class, expanded health care, Medicare, help for home health care work, environmental issues — why did that not work? Because it felt like to me that it was resonating and it did not. And I think the team around me said this: We’ll either win all seven or we’ll lose all seven on this. I think that they thought because — these things are so nationalized now that it didn’t matter that I’m in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, talking to folks or up in Erie. Or you’re in Waukesha in Wisconsin. The national narrative over the top of that was going to drive it, and it felt like we were there. And I [was], you know, drinking my own Kool-Aid or whatever. And that’s on me. I said I own that. You’ve been doing soul searching. If there’s one thing you can take back or do over, what do you think it would be? Yeah, I think I would have taken back getting myself sucked into the conversation around what was happening in Springfield, Ohio. It so struck me, like, reprehensible that they were saying this about people that I was in like a three- or four-day debate, making my case that this is not happening in Springfield, Ohio. And every time I was saying that we were talking about Springfield, Ohio, and immigration — we weren’t talking about other things that mattered to people. And I went down that line trying to do, I think morally the right thing. It turns out, how much have you heard about Springfield, Ohio, by the way, since that election? What Donald Trump has mastered is he floods the zone to the point where you don’t get to make your point. And it doesn’t matter if it was eating dogs and cats, because it was immigration and people were uncomfortable with immigration. And so I would, I would do that differently. I don’t think Vice President Harris has been asked this, but I bet one thing she wished she could take back was that moment in that interview with The View, where she said she wouldn’t change a single thing the Biden administration was doing. I’m sure the right loved that, and I think a lot of people on the left were stunned by that. Had that question been posed to you, what were the things that the Biden administration could have been doing better for the American people? Yeah, he should have been out there telling us that inflation was real. And this hurt. In retrospect, I think there should have been talk about sending, especially in the summer of ’23, potentially sending stimulus checks to folks to try and counter some of that and making it clear that we were fighting for them. Look, I think you were always going against this idea of change. It was a change election. It’s happened globally. We needed to be the change. And what that statement, more than anything, was — a lot of great work was done by the administration. We do have the best economy, but that doesn’t matter on a micro scale to someone if they can’t afford the rent payment. But in fairness to the vice president, had it been me in that moment, I might have [said] that same thing. And I think that we as Democrats better do some soul searching about that. Why would we do that? It’s not like we’re blindly loyal, like, you know, the Trump folks are. But it’s okay to criticize people you like. In fact, that’s what you need. You watch the RNC, you don’t see the Bushes on stage. You certainly don’t see the Chaneys, but you watch the DNC and you still see the Obamas and the Clintons. Do you think it’s time the Democratic Party refresh a little bit, put some fresh faces on there? Because here we are, and there’s still — no one has any idea who’s coming next. Well, I will say this: The DNC was a good party. I thought it would do something better than them. But yes, let’s have our 2028 candidate have hair. So the Trump campaign seems to mostly run on the economy, immigration, but they get to office and it feels like they’re mostly focused on draining the so-called swamp and, and “wokeness.” Now the wokeness they seem to be campaigning against, some of it started in your state with the murder of George Floyd. And it seems like they are betting that the majority of the American people, or at least their base, thinks that there was an overcorrection after the death of George Floyd — whatever happened with BLM and DEI. What do you think about that? I think we have not done a good job of explaining it. I think we need to name [racism] when it happens. But we also need to tell the average person — who I do not believe is racist, but [who] doesn’t understand what we’re saying. And they have been conditioned by the other side that we are somehow passing over well-qualified white males to put these people in there. I think we as Democrats have a great example to rebut that: Just look at this current cabinet. If that’s the best and brightest coming from the other side, we should make that case about accountability. There’s some cognitive dissonance in this country right now, because some people can’t believe that we’re canceling aid to African children, that we’re deporting migrants the way we’re doing it, that we’re treating trans people the way we’re treating them. And then it seems like half the country’s pleased as punch about it all, which is confusing. It feels like we’re losing a sense of ourselves. But you just spent months crisscrossing the country, shaking every hand in sight, and you seem like a glass-half-full kind of guy. What would you say to people who are losing faith in their American identity right now? Because it feels like you’ve still got faith. It’s tough. I don’t want to whistle past the graveyard, but it’s not a cliche: Every generation has to renew the democracy. And again, I will admit it. I would like to live in precedented times. I’m sick of living in unprecedented time. I want normalcy, I don’t want to see these people. But there’s also an opportunity and a privilege for us to, to reimagine. I think we’re still exorcizing ghosts that haven’t been exorcised since the beginning of this country. I think they’re just coming back out. I think they’re raising their head up again, and we’re going to have to deal with them. So I think it’s our responsibility, I think the privilege of being in that battle. I got asked the other day, “Who’s the leader of the Democratic Party?” I’m like, “Hell if I know. I think it’s the people who are out there. I think it’s the working class.” Because we are not cultish. It’s pretty clear if you ask a Republican who’s the leader of the Republican Party? Because they can’t say it fast enough, put on their red hat and dance to the tune. We’re not going to dance to that tune. But we have a set of shared values. And so I am optimistic. I do believe that arc in the moral universe bends, but I don’t think it bends by itself. I think you got to reach up and pull it some to get there. You’re talking to us right now at SXSW. I saw you on Maddow. I saw you talking to Molly Jong-Fast, David Remnick. Are you running for somethin’ right now? I am not. I have the potential, if I would be given the privilege, to run for a third term of governor of Minnesota. We just need to make sure that we have a winning candidate for ’28 — not because they’re [a Democrat], but because they care about people and they adhere to our values.
Transgender rights supporters and opponent rally outside of the Supreme Court as the high court hears arguments in a case on transgender health rights on December 4, 2024 in Washington, DC. | Kevin Dietsch/Getty Images The Supreme Court announced on Monday that it will hear Chiles v. Salazar, a challenge to a Colorado law preventing most mental health professionals from offering “conversion therapy” — a discredited method of counseling that attempts to turn LGBTQ patients cisgender and heterosexual (or at least make patients act that way) — to people under age 18. The Colorado law at issue in Chiles prohibits licensed therapists from engaging in “any practice or treatment … that attempts or purports to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity,” and it includes an exemption for counselors “engaged in the practice of religious ministry.” According to a 2023 dissent by Justice Samuel Alito, 20 states plus the District of Columbia have laws restricting conversion therapy. As a federal appeals court that upheld Washington State’s law targeting this practice explained, “every major medical, psychiatric, psychological, and professional mental health organization opposes the use of conversion therapy.” The American Psychological Association, for example, says that conversion therapy “‘puts individuals at a significant risk of harm’ and is not effective in changing a person’s gender identity or sexual orientation.” The Chiles case raises difficult questions under the First Amendment (if you want to read a deeper dive into these questions, I explore them here). In short, however, the central question is whether a restriction on what people can talk about with their therapist violates constitutional free speech protections. The First Amendment, as many states with conversion therapy laws have argued, historically has not been understood to protect malpractice or similar misconduct by licensed professionals, even if that misconduct only involves speech. A lawyer cannot tell their client “nothing will happen to you if you go rob a bank” without risking professional sanction. Nor can a physician cite the First Amendment to avoid a murder trial if they tell a patient to “go drink a jug of arsenic.” Much of the case will likely rest on the Court’s decision in NIFLA v. Becerra (2018), which provides ammunition to both sides of the Chiles case. NIFLA held that “speech is not unprotected merely because it is uttered by ‘professionals,’” so that’s certainly helpful language for proponents of conversion therapy. But NIFLA also said that “[s]tates may regulate professional conduct, even though that conduct incidentally involves speech,” and it added that regulations of professional malpractice “fall within the traditional purview of state regulation of professional conduct.” It’s always a little dangerous to predict how the Supreme Court may decide a particular case, but this Supreme Court has a 6-3 Republican majority, and it has not been a strong defender of LGBTQ youth. Last December, the Court heard oral arguments in a case asking if states may ban many medical treatments for transgender people under the age of 18, and the Court’s Republicans appeared eager to uphold these bans. Should the Court strike down Colorado’s law, it will need to wrestle with how to do so without eviscerating every state’s ability to sanction malpractice. If a state cannot prevent licensed therapists from engaging in controversial practices that are rejected by all of the relevant professional organizations, why can it sanction doctors who promote quack treatments for Covid-19? Or who spread false information about vaccines to their patients? Colorado’s best shot at defending its law, in other words, is likely to point to the intolerable consequences of stripping states of their ability to sanction malpractice, at least when that malpractice results from a conversation between a patient and a client. But it is far from clear whether this Supreme Court will care about those consequences.
Mel Robbins on the Today show on January 6, 2025. | Nathan Congleton/NBC via Getty Images Sometimes the best advice is the most straightforward. This assumption seems to summarize the appeal of TikTok’s favorite armchair psychologist at the moment, Mel Robbins. Her extremely basic tips for tackling life and “getting anything you want” have made her the go-to self-help queen in our increasingly stressful times. The motivational speaker, author, and podcast host has become an A-lister in the virtual advice landscape thanks to her practical approach to productivity and relationships. Even if you haven’t listened to The Mel Robbins Podcast, or bought one of Robbins’s books, you’ve probably been exposed to her work online. She’s the person getting women on social media to make their beds every morning and high-five themselves in the mirror. Most popular is her viral two-word phrase, “let them.” The advice is as simple as it sounds: Your teenager wants to dye their hair? Let them. Your spouse is wearing a shirt you don’t like? Let them. You think your co-workers are gossiping about you? Let them. “Let them” theory has quickly become Robbins’s calling card. It’s the premise of her latest book — The Let Them Theory: A Life-Changing Tool That Millions of People Can’t Stop Talking About, released this past December— and frequently invoked and (sometimes parodied) by her fans on social media. This catchphrase has won the attention of Oprah, TikTok influencers, and regular people posting about their relationship to the concept online. Not everyone is buying what she’s selling, however. To some critics, an empire built on obvious and overly generic advice, from a woman without a social work or psychology degree, reads as another self-help scam, and the mantra like a gimmick. While Robbins has largely managed to evade the cynicism and scandals that emerge when a new self-styled expert blows up online, it’s hard not to notice that her guidance falls into a familiar self-help trap. A burnt-out lawyer with a knack for public speaking Like many self-designated experts on life, Robbins has performed a plethora of impressive jobs and leadership roles outside the realm of psychology. After graduating from Boston College Law School in 1994, she worked as a criminal defense attorney for the Legal Aid Society in New York City, and at a large firm in Boston. She’s led life-coaching programs at big corporations. She’s launched (and sold) her own businesses and hosted a call-in radio show. In 2013, she was a legal analyst for CNN during the George Zimmerman trial. But back in 2009, at the age of 41, Robbins felt she had “failed at life,” as she tells it in The Let Them Theory. In the midst of a recession, she and her husband were unemployed and operating a failing business, respectively. She was drowning in debt — $800,000, she claims — and facing house liens, while avoiding her problems with alcohol. As Robbins would repeat again and again when recounting her come-up story, she was so anxious and overwhelmed that she couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. It was during this time, watching a NASA launch on TV, that Robbins came up with her “five-second rule,” which would later become the premise and title of her 2017 book. The mental exercise is as rudimentary as it sounds: count down from 5 — as if you’re a rocket — to launch yourself into whatever action you need to complete, whether that’s paying your bills, going to the gym, or, in Robbins’s case, simply getting out of bed. “Using 5-4-3-2-1, I pushed through the excuses, the anxiety, the overwhelm, and the fear,” she writes in The Let Them Theory. “Step by step, day by day, week by week, I slowly took the actions that put my life and career back on track.” In 2010, Robbins published her first book, Stop Saying You’re Fine: The No-BS Guide to Getting What You Want. The next year, the non-profit TED invited her to give a lecture at one of their first-ever TEDx conferences in San Francisco. The talk, titled “How To Stop Screwing Yourself Over,” became an early hit for the platform, and currently has 33 million views. In the video, she uses ideas from her book to help audience members overcome complacency. She spreads her notably uncomplicated concepts over 20 minutes, filling the time with hypothetical scenarios, funny anecdotes about her family, and a dose of scientific research. More than any piece of advice, Robbins’s public speaking skills and affable, Midwestern persona stand out. She’s magnetic and motivating, rallying her audience out of feeling stuck, able to balance a sense of comfort with tough love. For Robbins, this down-home practicality is the point. “There is an obsession with being smart, I think, in the thought leadership space,” Robbins told the New York Times last year. “And I would rather be useful.” So is the playbook for Robbins’s career. While she has a knack for sharing relatable, amusing anecdotes about her own life, she’s largely a messenger of other people’s well-tested ideas and wisdom. In Time, she describes herself more like an advice curator: “I am on a mission to find as many stories and pieces of science and research and tools that a person can use to make their life a little better.” That’s her methodology on The Mel Robbins Podcast, launched three years ago, where she talks to a wide range of experts and people who inspire her about how to tackle life’s hurdles and reach their goals. It’s also where she debuted her now signature theory for handling other people. Per a 2022 episode, “let them” was originally uttered to Robbins by her daughter after Robbins tried to micro-manage her son’s prom experience. Now, Robbins instructs her followers to stop wasting time trying to control other people by repeating the pithy saying. Controversially, the phrase has been met with plagiarism allegations. In an interview in the Substack newsletter Sage Words, writer Cassie Phillips accused Robbins of cribbing and capitalizing off of her viral 2022 “Let Them” poem, which preaches the same idea of radical acceptance. An illusion of freedom and simplicity for stressed-out women In the self-help guru space, it’s hard to be entirely new. There are only so many ways to empower people. Robbins’s patchwork philosophy feels like a cross between the more emotion-based work of professor Brené Brown and Tony Robbins’s more spiritually macho leadership advice. What this gives her, though, is a platform designed for women who know that they can’t have it all — but are still willing to try. Robbins’s target audience is markedly goal-oriented, career-minded women, including mothers, trying to optimize every part of their lives. There’s an assumption that her listeners have the time and privilege to keep adding self-improvement rituals, like running a marathon or adopting a perfect sleep schedule, to their plate. She often assures her followers that it’s okay if they occasionally fail at their goals. But the message is that they should constantly be wanting more for themselves, whether it’s more friends, more money, or a fitter body. Author Virginia Sole-Smith compared Robbins’s teachings to diet culture on a recent episode of her Burnt Toast podcast. She says that, like most diet plans, Robbins doesn’t seem to anticipate her followers ever reaching a slow-down stage where they aren’t working as hard. “There’s no profit in [Robbins’s] followers achieving stasis,” says Sole-Smith. “That’s what it comes down to, in diet culture, in perfection culture. Mel Robbins is never going to give you permission to reach stasis because then why would you buy her next book?” Rae Jones, a therapist at New York-based The Expansive Group, says that the self-help industry as a whole relies on consumers constantly feeling inadequate in order to make a profit. “The industry profits off of people feeling poorly about themselves and believing they need to change or fix themselves in some way, and therefore will absolutely encourage the very type of thinking that keeps the self-help industry in business and making millions,” they said. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Mel Robbins (@melrobbins) Still, Robbins’s advice thrives under the guise of simplicity and accessibility. It makes sense that Robbins’s nuggets have penetrated short-video platforms, like Instagram and TikTok, where she has 8.4 million and 3.9 million followers, respectively. TikTok is overflowing with so-called “hacks” that all too often make whatever you’re trying to do even more stressful and complicated. Compared to the grueling workout challenges and elaborate morning routines that can easily flood one’s feed, Robbins telling women to high-five their bathroom mirror and make their beds every morning may feel like some sort of reprieve. But she hardly seems to be advocating a stress-free, content life. While “let them” has become her trademark, achieving radical nonchalance certainly isn’t the core of her ideology. Scroll through her Instagram, and you’re inundated with an onslaught of tips and life hacks on bettering oneself — often presented in small numbers (“3 Simple Ways to Get The Love You Want”; “4 Nighttime Habits To Feel Energized”) to give the impression that they’re not as overwhelming. She encourages people to control, regiment, and perfect virtually every aspect of their own lives. As Robbins’s profile has grown, so has the range of topics she’s eager to discuss. In addition to her usual motivational fodder, she has podcast episodes dedicated to boosting your metabolism, decreasing alcohol consumption, and intermittent fasting. “As an upper-middle class, suburban, white mom, I understand why she’s speaking to my people,” says Sole-Smith. “We’ve been trained that the way we uphold all of that privilege is to keep going, going, going, achieve, achieve, achieve — and not actually look around and question the systems that are forcing us into all of these toxic standards.” To keep Robbins’s utility at the top of viewers’ minds and feeds, she has to find more hypothetical problems to fix and areas of her followers’ lives to address. This quickly becomes repetitive, especially on her podcast, where she’ll platform numerous experts and approaches on the same issues. This might be the conflicting mindset of an over-achiever whose hard work didn’t prevent them from collecting tons of debt and having to rebuild their life. While she preaches indifference regarding other people, she can’t help but perpetuate the core principles of hustle culture. Overall, Robbins’s advice seems best suited for the sort of corporate-bred, high-achieving women she represents. You can let them do what they want, but never let yourself go.
Dating is tough. And for many single straight young men, it can feel downright hopeless. As a man in his mid-30s, I can attest to this. When I was younger, meeting a potential partner felt so accessible. In school, it’s easy to meet women your age who have similar interests and hobbies because you’re in the same classes and extracurriculars. Then, in my mid-20s, right around the time I was embarking on my new career away from home, dating apps hit the scene, making it easier than ever to swipe, meet people, and go on dates. But in the years since, dating apps have become “enshittified”. You’ve got to pay Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge for higher profile visibility, and to see your potential matches. On top of that, we had a global pandemic that allowed folks like me to work remotely but also removed a lot of the daily social interactions that could eventually lead to a relationship. So when a 20-something Vox reader and podcast listener told me over the phone that he too was struggling to date, I got to digging to find out why — and what could be done about it. It eventually led me to Charlie McKeever, who calls himself the “Happy Man Coach.” McKeever works with men one-on-one in Austin, Texas, in addition to organizing retreats and weekly meet-ups, to troubleshoot men’s dating and relationship troubles and their broader vulnerability issues. He invited me to one such gathering at a bar called The Water Tank, where I met some of McKeever’s clients. I was blown away by how self-aware and enlightened they were. “You can call me a dating coach, but I would call myself a confidence coach,” McKeever explained. “That’s important for dating, it’s important for relationships, and it’s important for life. So I help men own themselves, to get to know who they are to reclaim themselves in their life.” The guys in McKeever’s group were realistic about how men like themselves can struggle to pursue relationships. Steve, a man who dated aimlessly for years, but recently found a partner, told me about a recent conversation with his friend. “My friend was talking about, ‘I wanna manifest a relationship.’ And that basically meant to them, ‘I wanna wish for this to happen.’ And they thought that that was going to actually work,” said Steve, whose last name is being withheld so he can speak freely about his relationships. “And I was like, well, that’s not gonna work … You have to be like, ‘I want this and I am going to take action by doing that.’ And go do it. It’s like an action-oriented thing.” McKeever shared some of his insights with the host of Vox’s Explain It to Me podcast, Jonquilyn Hill. Read an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below. And listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545. What kinds of men do you coach? And what are some of the general issues they’re having with dating and romantic relationships? In general, men are very feeling. We’re also very mission oriented; very singularly focused; and we like to succeed. We don’t want to fail. I’m a big fan of Alison Armstrong‘s research, and in it, she says that a man doesn’t want to do something that he doesn’t think has a high probability of success. So he’s going to only do the things that he thinks are worth it, right? At some point he has to learn that he needs to be himself and be who he enjoys being in his life and then do things from that place, right? Doing it as a happy, whole, contented person. And then he’ll see things from a perspective of abundance and not from a place of scarcity and lack, which is where we come from when we think that we need somebody. We need a person’s approval. We need their acceptance in order to be okay. And if we can only be okay if [we have it] then we’re really in a very precarious place. Loving yourself is all well and good. But what do you say to a man who’s doing the work? They love themselves. But they’re still looking for “their person.” That’s totally legit. And there would have been a time that I would have eye-rolled at all of this, too. But this work doesn’t come down to magic. There’s no secret. It’s really very logical that when I’m dependent on something outside of me, then I’m going to feel very powerless. I’m going to feel very choiceless. I’m going to feel very victimized by the other person. And that’s just not a great place to be. It’s not a great place to live. One thing I hear from men quite frequently is the word intimacy. They talk about intimacy. They talk about connection. The thing that we don’t know, that we don’t realize, is that intimacy is not just sex. At the end of the day, what we really want — and this is the part that [men] are kind of confused about — is that we really want to be seen. We really want to be heard. We really want to be understood. And the interesting thing about intimacy and being seen and being heard, being understood, is that if we’re in this place where we’re protecting ourselves, where we’re trying to get something from somebody, the thing that we think that we don’t have, then we actually subvert that connection. If we just blame the external, then what happens is we feel powerless. We feel dependent, we feel choiceless, and we don’t recognize how much we’re influencing our own situation. How would you advise a young man who is not comfortable with approaching a woman in real life? Maybe because they worry they will come off as creepy or cringe? If we believe that it’s not okay to be ourselves, that it’s not okay to bother somebody, not okay to approach somebody — that it’s cringe, that it’s weird, that it’s whatever — then we’re going to disengage. We’re going to disconnect. We’re going to avoid. Because if the idea of walking up to somebody and talking to them is painful, then we’re going to avoid it. We’re not going to want to engage in that. This is where men’s work comes in. If I’m living my life from the outside in, not the inside out, then I’m going to say to myself, “It’s not okay for me to go up and talk to that person, because I can only be this and I can’t be that.” But what we’re really wanting — what we’re walking around hungry for, desperate for — is acceptance. But if we don’t accept ourselves first, if we don’t say it’s okay to be me, then we’re never going to believe that it’s going to be okay to go up and talk to somebody and share ourself with somebody.
My job, like many of yours, demands more from my brain than it is biologically capable of. For all its complexity, the human brain is frustratingly slow, running at about 10 bits per second — less bandwidth than a 1960s dial-up modem. That’s not enough to keep up with the constant firehose of information we’re exposed to every day. “Raw-dogging” cognition while competing in today’s economy is like bodybuilding without steroids: a noble pursuit, but not a way to win. Inside this story: The philosophical argument that phones, the internet, and AI tools are extensions of our minds Why humans love to outsource thinking How relying on devices changes our brains What happens when technological tools both enhance and undermine our ability to think for ourselves Humans have never relied on sheer brainpower alone, of course. We are tool-using creatures with a long history of offloading mental labor. Cave paintings, for example, allowed our prehistoric relatives to share and preserve stories that would otherwise be trapped in their heads. But paleolithic humans didn’t carry tiny, all-knowing supercomputers in their loincloths. Using tools — from hand-written texts to sophisticated navigation apps — allows humans to punch above our biological weight. Even basic applications like spellcheck and autofill help me write better and faster than my monastic ancestors could only dream of. Today’s generative AI models were trained on a volume of text at least five times greater than the sum of all books that existed on Earth 500 years ago. A recent paper by researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University found that higher dependence on AI tools at work was linked to reduced critical thinking skills. In their words, outsourcing thoughts to AI leaves people’s minds “atrophied and unprepared,” which can “result in the deterioration of cognitive faculties that ought to be preserved.” The mind is so deeply attached to the self that it can be unsettling to consider how much thinking we don’t do ourselves. Reports like this may trigger a sense of human defensiveness, a fear that the human brain — you, really — is becoming obsolete. It makes me want to practice mental math, read a book, and throw my phone into the ocean. But the question isn’t whether we should avoid outsourcing cognition altogether — we can’t, nor should we. Rather, we need to decide what cognitive skills are too precious to give up. The extended mind, explained In 1998, philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers published their theory of the extended mind, positing that the mind extends beyond the “boundaries of skin and skull,” such that the biological brain couples with the technology, spaces, and people it interacts with. Following this logic, by outsourcing my cognitive faculties to my phone, it becomes part of my mind. I call my friends without knowing their phone numbers, write articles without memorizing source texts, and set calendar reminders to juggle more tasks than I could remember myself. The intimate coupling between my brain and my devices is both self-evident and extremely normal. In fact, Clark and Chalmers point out that the brain develops with the assumption that we will use tools and interact with our surroundings. Written language is a prime example. Reading isn’t hard-coded into our genome, like the capacity for speech is, and until recently, only a small minority of humans were literate. But as children learn to read and write, neural pathways that process visual information from the eyes reorganize themselves, creating a specialized visual word form area — which responds to written words more than other images — about an inch above the left ear. The process physically reshapes the brain. And as the tools we use evolve, for better or for worse, the mind appears to follow. Over the last 40 years, the percentage of 13-year-olds who reported reading for fun almost every day dropped from 35 percent to 14 percent. At the same time, they are doing worse on tests measuring critical thinking skills and the ability to recognize reliable sources. Some cognitive neuroscience research even suggests that shifting from deep reading to shallower forms of media consumption, like short-form videos, can disrupt the development of reading-related brain circuits. While evidence is still limited, several studies have found that short-form video consumption negatively impacts attention, an effect sometimes called “TikTok Brain.” Ned Block, Chalmers’ colleague at New York University, says that the extended mind thesis was false when it was introduced in the ’90s, but has since become true. For the brain to be truly coupled with an outside resource, the authors argue, the device needs to be as reliably accessible as the brain itself. To critics, the examples Clark and Chalmers came up with at the time (e.g., a Filofax filled with notes and reminders) felt like a bit of a stretch. But today, my phone is the first thing I touch when I wake up, and the last thing I touch before going to bed. It’s rarely out of arm’s reach, whether I’m at work, a bar, or the beach. A year after the first iPhone was released, a study coined the term “nomophobia,” short for “no-mobile-phone-phobia”: the powerful feeling of anxiety one gets when they’re separated from their devices. In their paper, Clark and Chalmers introduced a thought experiment: Imagine two people, Inga and Otto, both traveling to the same familiar place. While Inga relies on her memory, Otto — who has Alzheimer’s disease — consults his notebook, which he carries everywhere. (Today, we could imagine Otto consulting his smartphone.) “In the really deep, essential respects, Otto’s case is just like Inga’s,” they write. “The information is reliably there, easily and automatically accessible, and it plays a central role in guiding Otto’s thought and action.” That, they argue, is enough. Of course, if it doesn’t matter whether my cognitive faculties live in my skull or my smartphone, why bother using my brain at all? I could simply outsource the work, keep up appearances in society, and let my brain rot in peace. The potential side effects of the extended mind are difficult to study. Our reliance on digital tools is relatively new, and the tools neuroscientists have to observe human brain activity are imprecise and confined to labs. But emerging research points to a reality as uncomfortable as it is self-evident: Allowing digital prosthetics to think for us may compromise our ability to think on our own. Why we outsource our mental labor Humans generally don’t like thinking too hard. One recent analysis of over 170 studies spanning 29 countries and 358 different tasks — from learning how to use new technology to practicing golf swings — found that in all cases, people felt greater frustration and stress when they had to use more brainpower. When given the option, lab rats and humans alike usually choose the path of least resistance. Human study participants have even opted to squeeze a ball really hard or get poked by a burning hot stick to avoid mental labor. Still, people choose to do challenging things — for fun, even! — all the time. Working harder tends to lead to better outcomes, like earning a promotion or resolving a time-sensitive problem. And when cognitive effort is rewarded, people learn to value mental labor itself, even in the absence of an obvious short-term payoff. But the world gives us plenty of reasons to work smarter, not harder. When external pressures, like tight deadlines or intense competition, raise the stakes, we’re forced to triage our cognitive resources. The demands of always-on capitalism compel the mind to rely on cloud storage, calendar reminders, and chatbots. Julia Soares, an assistant professor of cognitive science at Mississippi State University, said this tendency aligns with the decades-old social science concept of the cognitive miser. “People get a little bit cheap with their cognitive resources,” she said, especially “when they get stuck on using digital devices.” That’s why rather than constantly juggle an overwhelming to-do list in my mind, for example, I choose to set reminders, alerts, and events for everything short of brushing my teeth. There’s a word for this habit: “intention offloading,” or the act of using external tools to help us remember to do things in the future. These tools can be low-tech, like leaving a package by the door so you remember to return it. They can also be digital and relatively hands-off, like recurring Google Calendar events or Slack reminders at work. Either way, “we can notice the information disappearing from people’s brains after they know that it’s also stored outside,” said Sam Gilbert, a cognitive neuroscientist at University College London. A decade ago, his research group ran an experiment where people had to remember a to-do item while lying in an fMRI scanner. In different conditions, they either tried to remember it on their own or were instructed to set an external reminder. Gilbert observed that brain activity in the part of the prefrontal cortex that normally reflects future plans was strongly reduced when an external reminder was used. “That sounds scary, but I think that’s exactly as it should be,” Gilbert told me. “Once you know that information is duplicated outside the brain, you can use your brain for something else.” Something similar seems to happen when people follow turn-by-turn directions instead of navigating on their own. Networks of cells in the posterior hippocampus — part of a seahorse-shaped brain region best known for its role in memory and navigation — form our mental map of the world. This map literally grows with practice. London taxi drivers, who have to memorize all possible routes across tens of thousands of roads to earn their license, have a larger and more developed posterior hippocampus relative to London bus drivers, who simply follow pre-set routes. Growing up zillennial, I remember watching my parents print out and memorize MapQuest directions before heading off on a long drive. By the time I could get behind the wheel, I had a smartphone equipped with GPS. As a new driver, I let my phone handle directions while I handled singing along to Arctic Monkeys songs. It may be no coincidence that my sense of direction today is awful. I can’t remember a parking spot to save my life, and one tiny detour or a dead phone can have me accidentally taking the road less traveled. My posterior hippocampus probably isn’t withering away — the “navigation” it’s involved in extends to more abstract scenarios, like navigating social media networks — so the cognitive liberation provided by GPS feels worth the cost. Navigation doesn’t feel central to my identity. I’m willing to outsource it. But as newer technologies take over more of our intimate thought processes, it’s worth carefully weighing the consequences of relinquishing control, lest we lose things we truly value. Do our devices actually make us less smart? Back in 2004, Google co-founder Sergey Brin told Newsweek, “Certainly if you had all the world’s information directly attached to your brain, or an artificial brain that was smarter than your brain, you’d be better off.” We essentially live in that world today, but it’s not clear that we’re better off. As I write this, I have the power to answer nearly any question imaginable using one of the two incredibly powerful computers in front of me. The internet provides instant access to a sea of information, and AI search can save me the trouble of having to wade through it. All of the knowledge we need lives in data centers, which increasingly makes storing any of it in my brain feel like an unnecessary luxury. As Nicholas Carr wrote for The Atlantic nearly 17 years ago, when early Google was our main cognitive partner: “My mind expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” A couple of years later, the leading academic journal Science published a study declaring that Google does indeed make us less intelligent. Researchers found that when people expect to have future access to information — as one does when the entire internet lives in their pocket — their memory retention and independent problem-solving skills decline. This sparked broader conversations about what some experts call “digital dementia,” essentially the academic term for “brain rot”: the theory that overusing digital devices breaks down cognitive abilities. One group of Canadian researchers even published a paper predicting that excessive screen time will cause rates of Alzheimer’s disease and related dementias to skyrocket by 2060. However, long-term studies tracking older adults over time show that seniors who use their phones to help them remember things are actually less likely to develop dementia. Technology that automates recurring, mundane tasks — the stuff our brains struggle with anyway — isn’t the problem. What should concern us is surrendering our intellectual autonomy by letting devices think for us, rather than with us. And that’s precisely what appears to be happening with AI. Ten years ago, a series of experiments led by Matthew Fisher, now a marketing professor at Southern Methodist University’s Cox School of Business, found that people who searched the internet for information felt smarter than they actually are. Fisher suspects that this is because old-school internet searching, following hyperlinks and stumbling across information, feels like following your own native train of thought. But it’s important to know what you don’t know. The conversational nature of AI chatbots draws a clear psychological boundary that traditional web searches don’t. While the internet feels like an extension of the mind, “When I’m talking to ChatGPT, it doesn’t feel like it’s a part of me. If anything, I feel kind of dumb talking to it,” Fisher told me. “It highlights my own ignorance.” Recognizing AI as separate from ourselves could theoretically inspire us to question its responses. But if interacting with AI as if it’s an oracle — like many do — risks blindly accepting its outputs. As soon as ChatGPT was released, students began submitting AI-written essays filled with hallucinated references. AI-powered hiring tools regularly review AI-generated job applications, and some doctors use ChatGPT in their practice, despite its not always reliable ability to cite its sources. This tension between preserving our cognitive integrity and embracing technological assistance permeates the workplace, where today, the brain alone is rarely enough. What’s the real trade-off? There’s something in economics called the Jevons paradox: the idea that increased efficiency leads to increased consumption. When applied to AI, it suggests that as digital tools make workers more efficient, it increases demand for their labor. Given the opportunity to expand our minds with automated workflows and generative AI, we’ll take it. And as technology advances, expectations expand to match, leaving us with higher baseline demands. To keep up with the requirements of a knowledge sector job in 2025, you need more than your own mind. The standard for productivity has shifted dramatically in recent years. Under-resourced newsrooms, for example, require journalists to not only report and write, but also fact-check, monitor trends, and maintain a personal brand across multiple platforms. Software engineers face ever-tightening sprint deadlines while creating the very tools upending their jobs. Across fields, the processing limits of the human brain can’t compete with expectations of constant availability, instant information recall, and perpetual content creation. How to fight brain rot: Immerse yourself in reading. If not a book, try sitting with a magazine feature. It’s one of the best ways to improve focus, imagination, and overall brain health. Multitask less. Our brains are horrible at it. Ron Swanson was right when he said, “Never half-ass two things. Whole-ass one thing.” Think before handing AI the wheel. Ask yourself: “Would solving this problem myself be a total waste of time? Or will it help me understand something more deeply?” If the answer leans more towards the latter, take a stab at it yourself before passing the question off to a chatbot. Try a digital detox (yes, really). Taking intentional time away from social media, your phone, or screens altogether can help reset your relationship with your devices. Insisting on avoiding the tools in front of you can mean failing to meet increasingly high expectations. “If I’m going to see my doctor,” said Fisher, “I don’t want them to only give me information they’ve memorized. I want them to have as many resources at their disposal as possible to find the correct answer.” In high-stakes situations, prioritizing accuracy over cognitive self-reliance seems obvious. The challenge becomes knowing where to draw the line. Some tasks, like memorizing phone numbers and drafting insurance appeal letters, we’ve happily surrendered without much consideration. The patience and focus required to solve hard problems, however, seems worth holding onto. As a kid, I could sit and read a book for hours without even thinking about getting up. Now, I can barely read a single 800-word news article without feeling a physical compulsion to check Instagram. It’s increasingly difficult to convince myself that solving a hard problem is actually worth solving when easier alternatives are just a click away. Why bother taking the time to write a LinkedIn post promoting my work, when AI can do it faster (and likely better)? Everyone else is doing it. But taking the time to wrestle with challenging ideas on your own “can give you surprising insights or perspectives that wouldn’t have been otherwise available to you,” said Fisher. For example, Soares told me that putting pen to paper, while a kind of analog offloading itself, “exponentially increases my ability to think by creating a change in the world — the writing on the page in front of me.” The connections we make between seemingly unrelated concepts often come when we’re showering or taking a walk, alone with our wandering thoughts. This can’t happen when the information lives elsewhere. Soares cautioned that we should be mindful about allowing tech to “steal something away from us that we would not have otherwise” — like mind wandering. When used with intention and discernment, you can reap the benefits of AI without compromising your cognitive integrity. It’s similar to today’s food environment: in theory, we have unprecedented access to healthy options, but only if you’re informed, deliberate, and in many cases, wealthy. But the food environment, like the digital tool environment, is built to push you toward options that are highly palatable and cheap to produce — often, not what’s actually good for you. The ability to use AI selectively, without losing your mind, might be an elite privilege. While wealthier households generally have more digital devices, poor teens spend more time on their devices than those from rich families. It seems that as people’s access to technology increases, so does their ability to restrict that access. The same may be true for AI: while people with higher incomes and education levels are more aware of examples of AI use in daily life, a study published earlier this year found that less educated people are more likely to blindly trust AI. The more people trust AI, the more likely they are to hand over their mental workload, without bothering to evaluate the outcome. They write, “This trust creates a dependence on AI for routine cognitive tasks, thus reducing the necessity for individuals to engage deeply with the information they process.” We won’t know for many years exactly what our devices are doing to our brains; we don’t have the neurological tools, and there hasn’t been enough time for longitudinal studies to track the full impact. But we have an intuitive sense of what our devices are doing to our psyche, and it’s not great. The scattered attention, the weakened ability to focus, the constant urge to check for updates — these are tangible changes to how we experience the world. Even more worrying than brain rot is the fact that a handful of very rich people are developing AI at breakneck speed, without asking society for permission. As my colleague Sigal Samuel has written, Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, literally said his company’s goal is to create “magic intelligence in the sky” — without attempting to seek buy-in from the public. The question isn’t just how these tools reshape our individual cognition, but how they will irrevocably change society. “Plagiarism, misinformation, and power imbalances worry me 100 times more than I worry that we might be losing our cognitive abilities by overusing technology,” Gilbert said. The real risk may not be that we outsource too much thinking, but that we surrender our agency to decide which thoughts are worth thinking at all.
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the Oval Office of the White House on March 6, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Alex Wong/Getty Images President Donald Trump is going after a pair of major law firms — and attacking the First Amendment in the process. Trump issued an executive order on Thursday that took aim at Perkins Coie, a law firm that represented Hillary Clinton when she ran against Trump in 2016. Notably, Perkins Coie hired a research firm that produced the infamous “Steele dossier,” which alleged the president colluded with Russia to steal the election. Trump’s order aims to strip the firm’s attorneys of their security clearances and asks the government to review all contracts with the firm with the intention of terminating any they can. Trump issued a similar memorandum last month, going after some attorneys at the law firm of Covington & Burling. The firm is home to former special counsel Jack Smith, who led the prosecution of Trump in cases related to the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol and the president’s alleged mishandling of classified documents. (Both cases were dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election.) The memorandum aims to strip security clearances from Peter Koski, a partner at the firm based in Washington, DC, and any other individuals who helped Smith while he served as special counsel. Canceled contracts promise to cost the firms revenue while stripping security clearances hurts them by putting certain areas of federal business off-limits. But the issue is far bigger than harm to a pair of well-off law firms. Legal experts say that Trump’s executive actions challenge the First Amendment right to free expression — and aim to send a signal to would-be opponents from well beyond just the legal profession. (The White House did not respond to a request for comment.) “No one is going to cry for a big law firm,” said Katie Fallow, deputy director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “But the idea of the government punishing a private entity based on the political positions it’s taken, or the speech it’s engaged in, or who it’s associated with, is terrible from a free speech and association standpoint.” What the executive orders say Thursday’s executive order accuses Perkins Coie of trying to “judicially overturn popular, necessary, and democratically enacted election laws, including those requiring voter identification,” as well as discriminating against applicants and staff by promoting diversity, equity, and inclusion policies. In addition to demanding that firm attorneys be stripped of their security clearances on that basis, it also orders government contractors to end their business relationships with the firm to the extent permitted by law and blocks the government from hiring firm employees. The earlier memorandum concerning Covington & Burling similarly accused anyone at the firm who assisted Smith of “weaponization of the judicial process,” ordering the termination of their security clearances and government contracts with the firm. Trump’s executive actions are not normal: Under President George W. Bush, a senior Pentagon official encouraged clients to cut their ties with law firms representing prisoners held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. But a month after his remarks, the official resigned and publicly apologized, asserting that he believed “that a foundational principle of our legal system is that the system works best when both sides are represented by competent legal counsel.” Legal experts were not aware, however, of any incident in which a sitting president had done something similar via executive action. Even for Trump, who has already sought retribution against his perceived enemies in the media and in the federal government, “this is just jaw-dropping,” said Laurence Tribe, a constitutional scholar at Harvard Law School. “This represents sort of a great escalation of a trend that was already evident.” Why Trump’s targeting of law firms raise key constitutional concerns Legal scholars say that Trump’s targeting of law firms likely violates the First Amendment and other constitutional protections. The executive order seems to be taking aim at specific positions that Perkins Coie has taken on behalf of its clients, its views about employee management policies (including DEI programs), and its association with Democrats. That language “absolutely suggests viewpoint discrimination,” which is prohibited by the First Amendment, said Catherine Ross, a professor at George Washington University Law School. Fallows and Tribe said they agreed. Beyond that, Tribe also raised a concern that the executive order could violate the Sixth Amendment right to the effective assistance of counsel. That right, he said, is “gravely endangered if the executive branch can brand and ostracize a particular group of lawyers and strip them of the security clearances, without which they could not represent a number of the people that the administration either has gone after or has indicated an intention to go after.” It’s not entirely clear, however, that the orders will be struck down in court, the analysts say. Judges have historically deferred to the president on matters of national security, and that might provide some legal cover to Trump if the issue reaches the Supreme Court, Tribe said. But Ross also pointed out that Thursday’s executive order lacks specific details on any potential national security concerns. Instead, she said, it “appears to be aimed at preventing the firm from acquiring or maintaining clients.” Trump’s attacks on the First Amendment should worry Trump’s perceived political opponents no matter what field they are in. “This is the way dictatorships get going,” Tribe said. “People get afraid to say their piece — if they are lawyers, to represent a client who might be in the crosshairs of those in power. When that kind of fear casts a chill across the land, the ability of ordinary people to live their lives as they see fit gets undermined.”
Shells at the workshop of the Forges de Tarbes producing 155mm shells, the munition for French Caesar artillery guns in use by the Ukrainian armed forces, in Tarbes, southwestern France, on April 4, 2023. It’s possible that three years of fighting between Russia and Ukraine could end — at least temporarily— in a matter of weeks. It’s more likely it could continue for months or even years. US and allied intelligence agencies have concluded Russia is probably not serious about making peace, which means the war would continue. If that happens, who will supply Ukraine with weapons? Possibly the United States. But after the events of the past few weeks, Ukraine and its European allies certainly can’t assume American aid will continue. Inside this story What the US provides Ukraine that Europe can’t One major challenge to getting Ukraine help A potential conflict of interest for European countries The US announced a pause in military aid for Ukraine earlier this week a few days after a disastrous Oval Office meeting between Presidents Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelenskyy, then suspended intelligence sharing with Ukraine as well. It’s still possible the rift might be repaired. During his address to Congress this week, Trump said he had received a letter from Zelenskyy in which the Ukrainian leader said he was ready for peace. Ukraine has also expressed a willingness to sign a deal that imploded last week, which would allow the US to profit from some of the country’s natural resources, though there are also reports that the US may try to link a deal to Ukraine agreeing to a quick ceasefire. In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, during which he confirmed the pause in intelligence-sharing, CIA Director John Ratcliffe suggested the aid pause would be temporary, and was merely a means to push Ukraine to the negotiating table. In what seems to be a shift in tone at least, Trump threatened new sanctions and tariffs against Russia on Friday unless Moscow agrees to a ceasefire. (The US already has wide-ranging sanctions in place against Russia, and there isn’t much trade between the two countries. It’s not quite clear what new measures Trump has in mind.) Meanwhile, French President Emmanuel Macron has been developing a plan for a one-month ceasefire to be applied “in the air, at sea, and on energy infrastructure,” but not along the front lines, in order to test Russia’s seriousness about agreeing to a more comprehensive peace deal. In a primetime address on Wednesday, Macron told the French public, “I want to believe that the US will stand by our side, but we have to be ready for that not to be the case.” On Thursday, European leaders convened for a summit in which they discussed plans to increase their own defense spending by as much as $800 billion, including a plan to provide as much as $150 billion in loans to allow countries to purchase crucial systems like air defense and drones. The countries also pledged to provide “regular and predictable financial support” and increase the amount of military support currently being provided. But if a peace deal doesn’t come, will that be enough? Can Europe step in? On paper, the challenge of keeping Ukraine in the fight without US support looks difficult but not impossible. It’s true that the US has provided more military aid to Ukraine than any other country, though far less than the figures Trump keeps repeating. Only about 20 percent of the military hardware in Ukraine comes from the United States, with 55 percent produced by Ukraine itself and 25 percent coming from Europe, according to estimates from the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), a British defense think tank. However, this is more than just a numbers game. The aid provided by the United States includes some systems with no European equivalent. The main example, several experts suggested, is the Patriot missiles used by Ukraine for air defense. The Ukrainians have a variety of systems they use to intercept the missiles, drones, and rockets regularly fired at their cities and critical infrastructure — so many, and from so many different sources, that the air defense system as a whole has been nicknamed the “petting zoo.” But the Ukrainians consider the Patriot, with its advanced radar and long-range, vital for shooting down the largest and most advanced Russian missiles, and no other country makes an equivalent system. This could leave Ukraine’s cities and energy infrastructure increasingly vulnerable to attack. During a press conference last month, Zelenskyy lamented that Ukraine is already running low. “At 3, 4, and 5 am, the commander calls me and says: ‘We are near this city, and we have no missiles for the Patriot systems — we’ve exhausted them… There are eight [Russian] missiles incoming, but we have nothing left to intercept them.’” The ongoing need for missile defense was only further highlighted by a massive barrage of missiles and drones targeting Ukraine’s critical infrastructure on Thursday night. Oleksandra Ustinova, a Ukrainian member of parliament who chairs the committee overseeing weapons deliveries, pointed out that in contrast to most recent Russian strikes, which used drones, the recent barrages have increasingly involved cruise missiles, which are in more limited supply. “I think they’re trying to exhaust our air defense,” she said. “I see the capacity, and trust me, it’s not a lot.” The US decision to suspend intelligence sharing with Ukraine could also hamper the country’s ability to intercept attacks like these as well as launch long-range strikes of its own into Russia. “A lot of your weapons are dependent on the intelligence that is coming from the US,” said Ustinova, pointing to the F-16 fighter jets that have been delivered to the Ukrainians, but rely on US-provided radar and targeting data. Other weapons systems, even some of those produced in Europe, rely on US-provided parts, the delivery of which has now been frozen. How fast can help move? Ukraine had actually been receiving more aid than normal for the first few weeks of Trump’s presidency, largely because the Biden administration rushed aid that had already been allocated by Congress out the door between the election and Inauguration Day. Experts believe there is likely enough to last until this summer, when the situation will start to become more strained. Some of the aid comes in the form of funding, loans, or grants that Kyiv can use to purchase weapons from US defense contractors. This type of aid seems like the most likely to be restarted, given that it involves contracts already signed with American companies, but for now there’s uncertainty in Kyiv about whether these contracts will be honored. In theory, Europe could make up for this funding, especially if EU countries agree to a plan currently being discussed to seize frozen Russian assets in Western banks and transfer them to Ukraine. But there’s also uncertainty about whether the administration will allow US defense firms to send weapons to Ukraine, even if they are purchased by other countries. “The Europeans can all buy it, but if you decide not to sell it, we’re done,” said Ustinova. With the exception of Patriot missiles, European firms make equivalent products to many of the systems Ukraine has been buying from the US. But the problem is time. Ukraine is only now receiving some of the weapons it ordered in the early months following the Russian invasion. “Any country that puts in an order today, you know that they won’t get the first one for at least two years,” said Mark Cancian, a retired Marine Corps colonel and expert on defense logistics at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “It might be another year after that for the last one to arrive, and that might be even a touch optimistic.” The US also provided weapons to Ukraine using what’s called “drawdown,” essentially sending weapons directly from the US military’s own stocks and then allocating money for the Pentagon to purchase replacements. The Trump administration has about $4 billion in funding for drawdown left, but seems unlikely to use it. This is an area where Europe will have a hard time making up for the US. After years of post-war declines, European countries simply don’t have the military stockpiles that would allow them to send significant amounts of material to Ukraine. Countries generally don’t publicize the extent of their military stockpiles, but, the “general understanding is that European countries do not hold nearly enough stocks,” said Nick Reynolds, research fellow for land warfare at RUSI, the British think tank. The CEO of Rheinmetall, Germany’s largest defense contractor, put it bluntly in a recent interview with the Financial Times: “The Europeans and the Ukrainians have nothing in their depots.” European countries have dramatically increased defense spending in recent years. Twenty-three of NATO’s 32 members now meet the alliance’s 2 percent of GDP target, up from just three (including the United States) a decade ago. But in the last three years, much of the new equipment and weaponry has already been going to Ukraine. Despite the German government declaring a zeitenwende, or “turning point,” in its attitude toward national defense after the Ukraine war broke out, the country now has fewer battle-ready brigades than it did when the war broke out, because so much of its equipment has been sent to Ukraine. “The Europeans have indeed made progress on munitions,” said Katherine Dahlstrand, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “The question will how quickly they can actually deliver on them, and how quickly Ukraine might need them.” The problem is particularly acute when it comes to artillery ammunition. For all the attention given to high-tech systems, from AI-enabled drones to fighter jets over the course of this war, the humble 155-millimeter artillery shell has been arguably the key military system throughout this conflict. Simply put, Ukraine and Russia have been firing them at a rate not seen in any war in decades. Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan once referred to the challenge of supplying Ukraine with these shells as the war’s central “math problem.” For Ukraine, there’s a sad irony to the fact that the US has finally ramped up to the once far-fetched seeming goal of producing 100,000 of these shells per month — from fewer than 14,000 before the war began — just in time for the US to cut off aid. How much is Europe willing to give? The issues of European countries building up military capabilities for their own defense, and providing for Ukraine’s defense, are separate issues, even though they’re often discussed together. And in some cases, the two goals may be in conflict. Every rocket launcher, air defense system, or artillery round kept in a warehouse or on a base in Europe is one that could be used on the battlefield in Ukraine. And as the Europeans build up their own capabilities — a process likely to accelerate as Trump casts further doubt on US commitment to the NATO alliance — these countries may at times even be competing with Ukraine for defense contracts. Denmark made headlines last year when its prime minister announced the country was sending its entire stock of artillery ammunition to Ukraine. Other countries, particularly those closer to the Russian border themselves or those with significant overseas troop deployments, might be reluctant to do something like that. In the long term, there may be enough money and enough firepower to go around. But in the short term, in providing for Ukraine’s defense, European countries may have to decide what level of risk they’re willing to take when it comes to their own. The increasing importance of drones on the battlefield might seem like some good news for Ukraine: unlike artillery systems, Ukraine produces many of its drones domestically. But, says Reynolds, there’s simply no way to innovate away the need for old-fashioned artillery. “Artillery has the advantage over drones of being able to put down a very high volume of destructive fire across a large area quite quickly,” Reynolds said. Ukraine learned this vividly in early 2024, when due to a long delay in Congress approving a new aid package, the Ukrainians were forced to conserve artillery ammunition, at one point giving the Russians as much as a 10-1 advantage in artillery fire. “Due to a lack of ammunition, we lost [the city of] Avdiivka and a number of small settlements, and also suffered significant human losses … All this could have been avoided if help had been provided on time,” Yehor Cherniev, a Ukrainian member of parliament, told Vox last April. It’s still possible that weapons shipments and sales could resume, perhaps in tandem with Ukraine and Russia sitting down to ceasefire talks after highly anticipated US-Ukraine talks in Saudi Arabia this week. But even if that happens, the close partnership between the US and Ukraine has probably been irrevocably damaged, even after Trump leaves office. “I think this trust will take years to rebuild,” Ustinova, just returned from a trip to visit troops on the front lines, told Vox. “Now we understand that in one day, you can just turn your back.”
In the 1970s, acid rain was one of the most serious environmental threats in North America and Europe. The air was so laden with pollution from coal power plants and cars at the time that it turned the rain toxic. Downpours killed fish, destroyed forests, eroded statues, and damaged buildings, sparking public outcry. “Acid rain is a particularly alarming demonstration of the simple adage that what goes up must come down,” former Colorado Senator Gary Hart said in 1979. “With acid rain,” he said, “what comes down is much worse than what went up — worse in its potential damage to trees and crops, worse in its potential damage to fresh‐water lakes and fish and tourism.” A few decades later, acid rain had largely disappeared. Beginning around 1990, the US and Europe passed legislation that limited the amount of acid-forming pollutants — such as sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxides — that power plants could emit. Laws requiring car manufacturers to put catalytic converters into new vehicles, which reduced harmful emissions, were also taking effect. That brings us to today: While precipitation in some regions is still unnaturally acidic, on the whole, acid rain is largely a problem of the past and a major environmental success story. Now, however, there’s another problem with our rain — and it’s even more alarming. While precipitation has become less acidic, a growing body of evidence suggests that it’s now full of many other pollutants that pose a risk to public health, including microplastics. And unlike the compounds that cause acid rain, these pollutants are almost impossible to get rid of. The new pollutants in our rain As government regulators focused on reigning in air pollution, companies were busy generating new sources of pollution, including plastics and PFAS, the so-called forever chemicals. PFAS, which stands for perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, are a large group of compounds used, among other things, to make fabric stain-resistant and pans nonstick. Over time, these modern-era substances — which famously take decades to millennia to degrade — have leached into the environment, reaching every corner of the planet, no matter how tall or deep. Microplastics, PFAS, and some other compounds, such as pesticides, are now so widespread that they’ve essentially become part of our biome, not unlike bacteria or fungi. They’re so common, in fact, that they’re even found in the rain. A number of studies, for example, have documented microplastics in rain falling all over the world — even in remote, unpopulated regions. For one 2020 analysis in the journal Science, researchers documented microplastics in rainwater that fell on several national parks and wilderness areas in the Western US. Most of the plastic bits were microfibers, such as those shed from polyester sweaters or carpeting on the floor of a car. The researchers estimated that more than 1,000 metric tons of plastic from the atmosphere fall on parks in the West each year, including both as rainfall and as dry dust. That’s equivalent to roughly 120 to 300 million plastic water bottles, according to the study. The largest source of those microplastics was highways, said Janice Brahney, a biogeochemist at Utah State University who led the Science study. Roads are often littered with plastic waste that gets broken down by cars and kicked up into the air. Those particles are typically lighter than soil, so once they become airborne, they can easily move around in the atmosphere and get grabbed by rain as it falls. Another important source of plastic rain is the ocean, Brahney said. Several million tons of plastic enter the ocean each year, much of which breaks down into microplastics. When waves crash on the beach or bubbles burst on the sea surface, it sends microscopic plastic particles into the air. Plastic rain is an environmental threat that’s harder to fix than the last one. “It’s much worse than the acid rain problem,” Brahney said. “With acid rain, we could stop emitting acid precursors and then acid rain would stop falling. But we can’t stop the microplastic cycle anymore. It’s there and it’s not going away.” The story of PFAS is similarly bleak: Researchers have detected these chemicals in rain across the planet from the US and Sweden to China and even Antarctica, often at levels above drinking water guidelines. For a study published in 2024 — titled “It’s raining PFAS in South Florida” — researchers analyzed rainwater that fell around Miami and found more than 20 PFAS compounds, including PFOS and PFOA. Although these two PFAS were phased out in the US years ago due to public health concerns, the researchers still found them at concentrations beyond government health advisory levels for drinking water, underscoring the remarkable persistence of forever chemicals. For another article, published in 2022, scientists reviewed studies of PFAS in rainwater and similarly found concentrations of these chemicals at levels above what US and Danish regulators say is safe for drinking water. The authors concluded that, based on health advisories, no untreated rainwater would be considered safe to drink. “For us to get rid of PFAS, we probably have to go back in time,” said Natalia Soares Quinete, a chemist at Florida International University who was involved in the 2024 study. Even though the government is increasingly regulating PFAS, she said, “I don’t see us completely getting rid of those chemicals.” Is the rain dangerous? The good news is that most people — especially in wealthy countries like the US — don’t rely on untreated rainwater. What is concerning is that rain ends up in groundwater, rivers, and reservoirs that feed into municipal water systems. Treatment plants help a lot, typically removing upwards of 70 percent of microplastics in water, but some still pass through. A study published earlier this year, for example, found a small amount of microplastics in bottled water and tap water in France. Similarly, typical filtration plants for municipal water remove some but not all PFAS. Authors of a 2023 study by the US Geological Survey, a federal agency, estimate that at least 45 percent of the country’s tap water has at least one type of PFAS present. Treatment facilities don’t have the technology to treat all of the microplastic compounds, let alone the technology to measure them, Brahney said. “There are tens of thousands of chemicals involved, and we only understand a fraction of them,” she said. Whether or not you’re at risk from microplastics, PFAS, and other chemicals is all about exposure — how much of those substances you’re breathing in or consuming. There’s not much of them in a single glass of tap or a bottle of water. The problem is that there are many other pathways that these pollutants can take to enter your body, such as through food. And over time they add up. How to protect yourself from polluted rain Avoid drinking untreated rainwater and eating snow, no matter how pristine it looks! If you can afford to filter your water, you should. Standard filters like reverse osmosis — which runs water through a semi-permeable membrane — typically remove a large portion of microplastics and PFAS. Some countertop pitcher filters also remove at least some PFAS (e.g., Zero Water) and microplastics (e.g., LifeStraw), though they vary a lot. Consumer Reports also has a great guide to getting PFAS out of your water. Opt for tap over bottled water to avoid ingesting microplastics. Tap water is also way better for the planet. A recent study found that the human brains contain as much as a typical plastic spoon’s worth of microplastic, by weight. Scientists still don’t understand what impact that might have on human health, but they suspect that microplastics could be linked to cancer, heart and kidney disease, and Alzheimer’s. Meanwhile, nearly all Americans have a measurable amount of PFAS in their blood, according to US health officials, though concentrations of some of them — including PFOA and PFOS — are declining. On the whole, forever chemicals are associated with a range of ailments including increased cholesterol, decreases in birth weight, and kidney cancer. All of these contaminants can also be harmful to wildlife, which unlike most of us, do rely on untreated water. One study, for example, linked exposure to PFAS to impaired immune systems in alligators. “If we have these contaminants in our rainwater they’re getting into our groundwater,” Brahney said. “They’re infiltrating our soils. Every organism is interacting with rainwater.” Ultimately, what all of this research reveals is that the planet is dirty, even if the filth can be hard to see. These chemicals are in the rain because they’re abundant in the environment — and they’re in the environment because they’re in the rain. And while there’s ongoing research, we don’t yet fully understand how those pollutants impact our bodies and our ecosystems. We just know they’ll be around for a very, very long time. “To be honest, I cry, because there’s no walking this back,” Brahney said of microplastic pollution. “These particles don’t break down at a time scale that would be relevant. So yeah, we’re not escaping that.”
Belinda, just pretend you don’t know this man! | Courtesy of Fabio Lovino/HBO In a show full of unlikable people, it takes a special character to be the absolute, no-contest worst of the bunch. On White Lotus’s season three, it’s without a doubt Greg (Jon Gries) a.k.a. Gary a.k.a. the not-so-grieving widower of season one and two’s Tanya McQuoid (Jennifer Coolidge). In a bit of a twist, Greg is the only character to appear on all three seasons of White Lotus, as he was reintroduced to viewers in the first episode of season three. Technically, he’s not a guest at the resort. Having inherited Tanya’s giant fortune, Greg now owns a luxurious house steps away from the White Lotus in Thailand. He’s also dating a model named Chloe (Charlotte Le Bon) who slightly resents him, and is dating him for his wealth — not unlike his own relationship to Tanya. He’s also going by the alias Gary, presumably because law enforcement is looking at Greg as a suspicious person in Tanya’s death. White Lotus is an anthology series, following a different group of appalling rich people around a different lavish resort each season for a vacation that inevitably ends in someone’s death. Although the show has seen some characters return — namely Tanya and Belinda (Natasha Rothwell), the saintly White Lotus Hawaii staffer who Tanya plied with promises of her own spa in season one — it hasn’t seemed to have (or been billed as having) a throughline narrative, until now. The problem for “Gary” is that Belinda just so happens to be at the Thai resort as part of an exchange program. She finally recognized Greg in episode three, but while she knew that he distracted their mutual patron from funding Belinda’s dream of owning her own business, she didn’t yet know about Tanya’s untimely demise — or Greg’s role in it. (Quick refresh: Greg employed a coterie of scamming homosexuals to have his wife killed, but ultimately she smacked her own head on the side of a boat while trying to jump to safety.) He denied they’d ever met (he’s Gary after all), but in the season’s fourth episode, Belinda is up to speed thanks to a quick Google, and terrified. So is Greg. If Belinda exchanges enough information with authorities, she could shatter everything he worked to hide! Episode four picks up after Greg and Belinda’s face-to-face. He has a boat party to begrudgingly host, and she’s preparing for her son’s arrival. But they can’t stop thinking of each other (negatively) and seem to be on a collision course. Now it seems more and more likely that the man who appeared to be nothing more than a side character/love interest in season one has, this whole time, been taking White Lotus fans on the familiar arc of a true crime romance scammer: seduction, violence, and the desperate struggle to not get caught. The customary White Lotus boat trip As certain that the sun will rise tomorrow, the characters on White Lotus will get on a boat and have an awful time. In season one, Tanya scattered her mother’s ashes in the Pacific Ocean (or attempted to) with newlyweds Rachel (Alexandra D’Addario) and Shane (Jake Lacy) along for the ride. In season two, Tanya again found herself on a ship in the Mediterranean where she accidentally died after killing the rich gay guys who were trying to murder her. And, in season three, episode four, the White Lotus Thailand’s guests are at sea once more. With (presumably) Tanya’s money, Greg has procured a yacht, and at Chloe’s behest invited the Ratliff family — parents, children, and lorazepam stash — as well as Chelsea (Aimee Lou Wood) and Rick (Walton Goggins) all spend a day aboard. Technically they’re all Greg’s guests. But most everyone, including Greg, seems a bit miserable. The ship is full of older men and their much younger female company. As Chloe says, these old bald guys are all the same. Even on open water with champagne flowing, tension — missing pills, inappropriate flirting, wrong-headed revenge plots, and some previous antipathy between the Ratliffs and the incredibly nervy Rick — is unavoidable. It all goes back to the idea that no matter how rich you are and how many things you buy to throw at your problems, you can still absolutely hate the life you have. At the bar, Tim Ratliff (Jason Isaacs), the rapidly unspooling South Carolina businessman loaded on his wife’s lorazepam and many, many midday drinks, wants to know about Greg’s life in Thailand. When Tim asks if he likes it, Greg tells him, “I never want to leave.” That could be true, but with the police on the lookout, he also never can. “Just heard someone say that anyone who moves to Thailand is either looking for something or hiding for something,” Tim slurs. “Neither,” Greg tells him, “I just got sick of the rat race.” Greg is in a race of his own now, though. Finding him sitting alone on the upper deck, Chloe asks if she can take the boat to a different island to celebrate an upcoming full moon party. The man she calls Gary tells her she can take the boat without him, and she doesn’t seem to care when he tells her, “There’s something I gotta deal with at home.” The “something” is Belinda. Back on land, Belinda spots Greg talking to the hotel’s grinning manager. From the look in his eye, she can’t help but assume it’s her. She and Greg make brief eye contact. Later, in the sleek home Tanya’s fortune bought, Greg looks at Belinda’s Instagram, examining pictures of her and her son. Given what we know about Greg’s history of grifting and Tanya’s eventual demise, it certainly can’t be good for Belinda to be in his crosshairs. Is Greg going to kill Belinda? With Belinda knowing who Greg is and Greg knowing that Belinda knows about him and Tanya, it raises a very obvious question: Is Greg going to kill Belinda? And further, is Belinda the mystery person who dies in episode one? Many signs point to yes. Belinda seems to be the only person in Thailand who knows that Greg isn’t Gary. Even if Belinda is intent on keeping quiet, Greg doesn’t know that. It would seem like this man, who has no qualms about grifting and murder-for-hire, wouldn’t think twice about finding a way to silence Belinda for good. That’s as clear a motive as we see on the show. But there’s one absolutely huge reason why he’s not the killer stalking the resort in the season opener — shooting and killing Belinda wouldn’t be his MO or beneficial to his endgame. The murder that we get a glimpse of in the beginning of the season is just too blatant for Greg to be the killer. The man is wanted in Italy, and the last thing he wants to do is draw even more attention himself. You know what draws attention? Repeatedly and wildly firing a gun at a luxury resort full of the richest people on earth. There’s a higher chance of Belinda using the gun in some kind of self-defense than Greg shooting her. Greg has also proven himself to be the type of guy who would not do the murdering himself. Back in season two when he went to Italy with Tanya, Greg actually left Tanya and let the “evil gays” (one of whom Greg had a previous relationship with) toy around with her. If Greg is going to off Belinda, he’s going to figure out a way to do it without being directly involved. No doubt, the tension between Belinda and Greg is going to drive the rest of the season. She’s going to be cautious around him. He’s going to want to keep her close, close enough to sniff out how much she knows and whether or not she’ll snitch. What’s fascinating here is what a turn this is for the show, which usually tells contained stories. White Lotus has always been a work made up of closely observed character study (please see this season’s three quietly warring white women who have been friends since childhood). Since his first appearance in season one, though, Greg has been more than a bit of a cipher. He’s taciturn, he’s reserved. Yes, he’s angry, as he proved in season two when Tanya brought her assistant Portia (Haley Lu Richardson) along on vacation, but he’s fairly unknowable. We think he likes fly-fishing, and we’re pretty sure he worked at the Bureau of Land Management. What exactly was his relationship with Quentin (Tom Hollander)? Did he ever really have cancer, as he claimed when he met Tanya in Maui? Greg also doesn’t neatly fit into the show’s class criticism. So many characters on the show are cartoonish, exaggerated versions of the one percent. They get away with spoiled entitlement, and impose themselves on places where common people are shut out. Greg’s grift feels slightly different, but maybe more egregious — here’s a thief who is worse than the rich he’s stealing from. Arranging Tanya’s death and getting away with her fortune feels unjust. White Lotus is a show about personal unravelings, what these affluent people really look like when their money can’t buy what they really need. But Greg is wound tight. He may be more desperate than ever, but there is no true sense of who this man is. It’s only slowly and methodically, over years, that this show can let us into a character like Greg: a man who doesn’t go on vacation to let go, who isn’t there to relax or make friends, who is moving like a shark toward some longer-term, darker goal. Unlike the rest of our travelers, he doesn’t indulge in self-exploration. Greg knows who he is. It’s his job to make sure that no one else does.
Amazon workers and union members picket outside a distribution center in New York. | Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images A Vox reader asks: What is wealth inequality and class warfare and why is it extra bad at this point in time? “Wealth” is someone’s net worth — that is, their assets (like savings, stock portfolios, and the value of their property) minus their debts (like student loans). “Wealth inequality” is measured by looking at how total wealth is spread out across the population. The more wealth there is at the top, the more inequality there is because there’s less to go around for everyone else. Today, there’s a huge gap in incomes between rich and poor. Even though incomes across the board rose at relatively similar rates in the decades after World War Two, incomes at the very top started to grow much faster after the 1970s — a trend that’s driven, at least in part, by shrinking union membership. For instance, CEOs’ compensation has grown by 1,085 percent since 1978 while the average worker’s salary has only grown by 24 percent. And though wages at the bottom have grown at a faster clip than those at the top in recent years, that change has not been enough to reverse the overall trend. Since 1979, the top 1 percent of earners saw their wages grow by 182 percent; the bottom 90 percent saw their wages grow by 44 percent. As a result, the concentration of money at the top of the income ladder is at the highest it’s been in nearly 100 years. But that’s income inequality, which just looks at the distribution of people’s wages. What’s more extreme is the gap in wealth between rich and poor households. According to the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, the bottom half of households have an average net worth of $51,000. Collectively, they own just 2.5 percent of household wealth in the country. By contrast, the top 10 percent of households had an average net worth of nearly $7 million and own more than two-thirds of household wealth — a share that has only been growing over the last three decades. There are other worrying aspects of the wealth gap, including racial inequality. On average, for every $1 that white families owned, Black families and Latino families owned 23 cents and 19 cents, respectively. Class warfare, or class conflict, happens when the tension between social classes comes to a boil. That happens when the interests of different classes diverge, building resentment between them. Oftentimes, this comes in the form of protest or revolt and is generally viewed as a struggle between workers and the ruling class or elites in society. Sometimes this gets violent, as was the case in the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, when workers in multiple states went on strike after railroad workers saw their wages get repeatedly cut. Eventually the rebellion was squashed by the National Guard and private militias, and about 100 people were killed. Why does this matter? Part of the reason you might be hearing phrases like “wealth inequality” or “class warfare” more often these days is because the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few has been on full display. In January, for example, Donald Trump, a billionaire, was sworn in as president while being surrounded by other billionaires. (There were many, many millionaires in the audience as well.) So as most Americans who watched Trump’s inaugural address saw it on their screens, a handful of the world’s richest men had a front-row seat. In fact, the combined wealth of everyone at the Capitol that day topped $1.2 trillion. At its very core, the reason this level of inequality is bad is because it’s deeply unfair. But it’s not just a matter of fairness. It’s also dangerous. The fact that so few people own so much wealth is a threat to democracy. In his farewell address, former President Joe Biden warned the nation that the United States was becoming an oligarchy — a system of government in which power is only shared by a small group of elites. It’s a warning that politicians like Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders have been talking about for years, especially after the 2010 Supreme Court decision Citizens United allowed corporations to spend unlimited amounts of money on elections. The hoarding of wealth is already having an impact on our government. Since Trump returned to the White House, he’s handed over a lot of power to Elon Musk, who, with a net worth of hundreds of billions of dollars, stands to be the world’s richest man. And while Musk is charged with gutting the federal workforce, he’s not required to adhere to certain government standards. Why is it that Musk has been able to evade the ethics rules that typically apply to other government personnel? And why is it, anyway, that Musk — now an unelected bureaucrat — has so much influence over policymaking? The answer is that Musk likely gained access to so much power because he spent hundreds of millions of dollars on the election last year in an attempt to help Republicans win, and his investment seems to have paid off. He operates by different rules than everyone else because he can simply buy his way to the White House. The concentration of wealth has also degraded some of the country’s institutions outside of government. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, for example, who owns the Washington Post, directed the newspaper’s opinion pages to avoid publishing views that are in conflict with his own, focusing their coverage on “personal liberties and free markets.” Bezos also killed the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris last fall. It’s not necessarily the case, though, that America is on the brink of a class war, despite the fact that there’s so much inequality that billionaires are taking joyrides to space while millions of Americans are struggling to make ends meet. In fact, the last election cycle showed that people in different income brackets are becoming less politically divided, with Trump making gains among poorer voters, who historically have overwhelmingly voted for Democrats. But if history is any guide, this level of inequality is unsustainable, and the economy might course-correct. Between 1800 and 1920, for example, inequality in the US grew very quickly. But in the 60 years that followed, the gap between rich and poor shrank significantly. During that period, the wealth of the average family grew 40 times its size while the wealthiest Americans saw their fortunes double. It’s hard to say how the situation will improve this time. But chances are, at some point, that the rich will push their luck and the rest will say enough.
The plant-based egg product Just Egg. A global economic meltdown seems to be the only event that can cause people to cut back on meat. In the years that followed the 2007 Great Recession, the average American’s annual meat consumption fell by almost 9 percent. Milk purchases fell too. But through it all, egg consumption remained relatively stable and kept climbing, reaching around 280 eggs per person on average in 2022. That number could fall this year, not because people have soured on eggs, but because there aren’t enough to meet demand. Just in the last two months, 27 million egg-laying hens — 9 percent of the nation’s egg-laying hen flock — have been (brutally) killed to slow the spread of H5N1, a highly pathogenic strain of bird flu. Shortages have doubled the cost of eggs, and inspired at least two egg heists. Despite grand promises from Donald Trump’s presidential campaign to bring down the price of eggs, his own agriculture department now says their cost will continue to surge this year. This has some shoppers — maybe you — turning to egg alternatives. While most grocery stores now offer a wide variety of plant-based milk and meat products, there are fewer egg alternatives on the market. But there’s still plenty you can do with the plant-based egg alternatives likely available at your local grocery store, and even with more traditional kitchen ingredients, when you have fewer eggs than usual, or none. 1. Just Egg Just Egg, a plant-based liquid egg launched by San Francisco-based startup Eat Just in 2018, is made from an ingredient that’s foreign to most Americans — mung beans — but it scrambles and functions like the real thing. The taste may not fool you, as it’s not quite as eggy (as in, stinky) and is less fatty than chicken eggs. But eggs usually aren’t eaten alone — cooking Just Egg with olive oil, garlic, onion, tomato, and a vegetable or two of your choice makes for a tasty breakfast that comes close to an egg scramble. And it has a similar amount of protein as liquid eggs from chickens per serving. I’ve also had delicious quiches and frittatas made with Just Egg, and it can even be used to replace eggs in baking (more on this later). The company also sells pre-cooked frozen egg patties for breakfast sandwiches, and breakfast burritos. However, Just Egg costs around $7.50 for a 16-ounce bottle, which is much more than liquid chicken eggs in part because, as I’ve written about, animal agriculture has benefited — and continues to benefit — from decades of government support that helps keep prices low. Just Egg is by far the most popular plant-based egg: Eat Just’s CEO, Josh Tetrick, told me that in the first two months of 2025, sales grew five times faster than in the same period last year. It’s available in nearly 50,000 grocery stores and restaurants in North America — use the company’s store locator here to check availability near you. 2. Simply Eggless At first glance, Simply Eggless appears practically identical to Just Egg, in that it’s a plant-based product that comes in both liquid and patty form and is made with a bean (lupin beans instead of Just Egg’s mung beans). But I’m sad to report that that’s where their similarities end. I was excited to find the product at Trader Joe’s last year, but I was quickly disappointed when I cooked with it. For one, it doesn’t scramble as well as Just Egg or regular eggs — it just gets clumpy. Second, it tastes bad. As one BuzzFeed writer put it, “These were, unfortunately, nasty. There’s no way to beat around the bush here. I actually spit them out.” I didn’t go as far to spit it out — I soldiered on and finished my meal — but I haven’t bought it again. 3. AcreMade’s egg substitute powder AcreMade, a company partially owned by livestock giant Cargill, makes a plant-based egg product made from pea protein that is…okay. It comes in powder form, which when mixed with water can be scrambled. It has a good texture and is functionally similar to Just Egg, but doesn’t taste quite as good. It’s only available online and costs $15 for a 5.6-ounce bag, which contains 24 servings — equivalent to 24 eggs — and is also available for purchase on its website. The company also has a similar product to replace eggs in baking. 4. Yo Egg Yo Egg is a newer company that has recently expanded the number of grocery stores and restaurants that sell its products, which include a plant-based poached egg, a patty, and a hard-boiled egg substitute. I recently tried the poached product — made with soy and chickpea protein — at a restaurant and liked it. The flavor was good, but I was even more impressed with the company’s technical ability to create an egg white pouch filled with a thick, yolky liquid. Find their products at a grocery store or restaurant near you. 5. WunderEggs I never liked hard-boiled or deviled eggs, so WunderEggs — launched in 2023 by Texas-based startup Crafty Counter — aren’t for me, but I have friends who like them. WunderEggs’s main ingredients are simple — water, almonds, coconut milk, and cashews — and they look remarkably similar to eggs. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Crafty Counter (@mycraftycounter) Last year, the company won an innovation award from grocery giant Albertsons, and it’s now available in 1,600 of its stores (Albertsons, Safeway, Shaw’s, and Vons), as well as all Whole Foods locations. A tray of six costs around $8 and contains 8 grams of protein. 6. Tofu Tofu is the perfect food: it’s cheap, high in protein, iron, and calcium, available just about everywhere, and can be used in a variety of dishes and cuisines, including as a substitute for an egg scramble. On its own, it doesn’t taste like eggs, but medium-firm tofu, when mashed and sauteed, can have a similar texture. Like chicken meat, tofu doesn’t have an inherently strong flavor and can absorb whatever spices and sauces you throw at it. Why you should consider making tofu a dietary staple Tofu, made from soybeans, isn’t as glamorous as all the new plant-based meat startups, but it should be. It was invented in China around 2,000 years ago and remains a dietary staple around the world for good reason. At $2-3 per pound, it’s cheaper than meat — except, sometimes, chicken— and is widely available in grocery stores and most Asian restaurants. It’s low in saturated fat and high in protein, calcium, and iron, and you can get it in soft (silken), medium-firm, firm, or extra-firm varieties. It’s versatile in the kitchen, taking well to frying, grilling, baking, or even in desserts. And as a bonus, it’s incredibly environmentally friendly, using less land and water, and emitting far fewer greenhouse gas emissions, than animal-based protein. If you’re skeptical, try first ordering a tofu dish at an Asian restaurant to experience how truly delicious it can be. Tofu scramble — a classic plant-based staple — is typically made with oil, garlic, onions, vegetables, and (plant-based) cheese. It’s filling, affordable, healthy, and if made well, tasty in its own right even if it doesn’t directly replicate the flavor of eggs. A pinch of kala namak, or black salt, will give it an eggy taste and smell. Here are a few popular, fool-proof recipes to get started: The best tofu scramble (Nora Cooks) Seriously the best tofu scramble (Rainbow Plant Life) Scrambled tofu revisited (Isa Chandra Moskowitz) 7. Hodo All-Day Egg Scramble A decent tofu scramble should take you 30 minutes or less to make, but if you want it even faster, try the all-day egg scramble from tofu maker Hodo. It’s a spiced and mashed block of tofu rich with flavor, made with onion powder, garlic, cumin, turmeric, smoked paprika, and more. It’s a bit salty, but cooking it with a few vegetables and cheese can cut some of that. 8. Baking without eggs I’m more of a baker than a cook, and I’ve been vegan for almost 20 years, so I’ve mastered the art of baking without eggs, and I can tell you it’s quite simple — because a lot of baked good staples don’t need eggs in the first place. I can’t tell you how many times a non-vegan bit into something that I or a friend made, had no idea it didn’t have eggs (or dairy), and were none the wiser. View this post on Instagram A post shared by Isa Chandra Moskowitz (@isachandra) You can use products like Just Egg, AcreMade’s egg replacer, or this one from Bob’s Red Mill, to replace eggs in baking. But to save money, you can simply use, depending on what you’re making, bananas, ground flax seeds with water, apple sauce, silken tofu, or even the water from a can of chickpeas (called aquafaba). Those ingredients may strike you as odd egg replacers, but eggs don’t add too much to the flavor of a baked good. Rather, they’re more of a functional ingredient, working to bind other ingredients together, improve texture, and give certain desserts some fluff. Depending on the recipe, these other ingredients can do the trick. This guide from popular vegan recipe developer Nisha Vora covers how to use these ingredients as egg replacers and which are best for which baked goods. To be safe, I recommend using recipes that are already egg-free so you know it’s been tested as such, rather than trying to reformulate a classic recipe, especially when you’re just getting started. Aside from what I’ve mentioned here, there are a few other plant-based egg products that either aren’t easy to find at grocery stores or aren’t available at all in the US: Beleaf plant-based egg, Crack’d, Neggst, and Zero Egg. (I’ve had the Beleaf egg and enjoyed it but haven’t seen it in stores.) Why aren’t there more plant-based egg options? If the US were facing shortages of chicken, beef, or cow’s milk, consumers would have a wide array of alternative choices. But for some reason, despite the enduring popularity of the egg, the plant-based food sector has put little effort into making tasty and affordable animal-free options. That’s a shame, because egg farming is particularly cruel to animals. Most egg-laying hens are packed into tiny cages, unable to even flap their wings, where they languish for one-and-a-half to two years before they’re slaughtered for pet food. Cage-free farming is an improvement, but still much more inhumane than you might think. I asked Tetrick of Eat Just why there’s such a lack of competition (Just Egg, he said, makes up 99 percent of the plant-based egg market). He told me it’s a highly technical challenge compared to making, say, a plant-based burger, and it’s required the company to raise a lot of capital, and take on a lot of risk. “We almost didn’t accomplish it,” he added. I’m glad they did, because it means we have at least one great plant-based egg product that’s also widely available. But for the sake of the hens, and food security threats like the bird flu, I hope they get a lot more competitors.
An artist rendering of the NASA Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) space probe approaching the asteroid Didymos and its minor-planet-moon Dimorphos. | Illustration by Nicholas Forder/Future Publishing via Getty Images In 2012, astronaut Ron Garan did an AMA on Reddit. In between questions about aliens (he didn’t see any in space) and where his coffee came from (recycled urine), he responded to a question about why we should accept the risks of a future mission to Mars. Garan quoted a colleague: “If the dinosaurs had a space program, they’d still be here.” Putting aside the unlikelihood of giant reptiles with brains the size of walnuts developing their version of Apollo 11, the point here is that the dinosaurs were almost certainly wiped out by a nearly 6-mile-wide asteroid that struck the Earth with the destructive power of billions of Hiroshima-scale nuclear bombs, causing an “impact winter” that cut off sunlight and led to drastic cooling far beyond what most dinosaurs could survive. The dinosaurs, of course, could do nothing about the killer asteroid, other than presumably waving their tiny arms at the oncoming doom. But if they did have a space program — and yes, now I’m imagining a T. rex in a space suit, swaggering to a rocket like John Glenn in The Right Stuff — they might have been able to detect that incoming asteroid decades in advance, and done something to avert their doom. Humans, though, are in a better place — as shown by the recent news over an asteroid called 2024 YR4 that briefly appeared to be threatening the Earth. Killer asteroids, briefly explained The Chicxulub asteroid that likely wiped out the dinosaurs wasn’t the first time a massive asteroid collided with the Earth. An asteroid 12 to 16 miles wide hit the planet more than 2 billion years ago, in what is now Vredefort, South Africa, while another 6 to 10 miles wide hit what is now Sudbury, Ontario 1.85 billion years ago. More recently, a 130-foot-wide space rock exploded 6 miles above Siberia in 1908, creating a blast strong enough to knock over 80 million trees. The Earth exists in a cosmic shooting gallery, and while truly civilization-threatening strikes of the kind seen in movies like Deep Impact are incredibly rare, they do happen. And given enough time, they will happen again. Until very recently, were a Chicxulub-sized asteroid to find itself on a collision course with Earth, we wouldn’t have been able to do much more than the dinosaurs did. The result would be global firestorms, massive earthquakes, and potentially megatsunamis, followed by an impact winter that would wipe out the global food supply. Very bad stuff. But we’re not helpless anymore. Project Icarus Like a lot of cool things, the field of asteroid defense began with a bunch of kids at MIT with brainpower to spare. In 1967, MIT professor Paul Sandorff asked his class to imagine that a real-life asteroid called Icarus, which astronomers had already identified, would hit the Earth in the near-future — and it was their job to devise a way to save the world. (In real life, the asteroid came within 4 million miles of the Earth — 15 times the distance between our planet and moon, but a close shave by cosmic standards.) So was born “Project Icarus.” The students created a plan to launch six Saturn V rockets, each carrying a 100-megaton nuclear warhead, at the asteroid. The warheads would detonate near the asteroid and create enough force to alter its trajectory and miss the Earth. For all its careful engineering, “Project Icarus” was largely science fiction; among other inconveniences, the largest nuclear bomb ever made only had a force of 50 megatons. Our space science was so rudimentary at the time that we had no way to reliably identify potentially dangerous asteroids very far in advance, and no real way to deflect them. But Project Icarus put the idea of asteroid defense out into the public. The discovery of the actual Chicxulub crater in 1990, confirming the likely cause of dinosaurs’ demise, and the sight of the Shoemaker-Levy 9 comet walloping Jupiter in 1994, convinced Congress to take the threat of killer asteroids seriously. In 1998, Congress directed NASA to detect and catalog within 10 years at least 90 percent of what are called near-Earth objects (NEOs) that were more than a kilometer wide. NASA and its partners hit that goal with time to spare, and so in 2005, Congress directed the agency to identify at least 90 percent of all NEOs 140 meters or wider — not big enough to end the world, but big enough to destroy a city. Though over 18,000 NEOs have been identified, about 40 every week, there may be a million or more out there. That mission continues. Do look up The recent scare over the asteroid known as 2024 YR4 made this search for killer asteroids so we can knock them off course a bit less academic. (When NEOs are discovered, they are initially given a name that reflects the year of identification, followed by letters and numbers that indicate the order it was identified that year, starting with AA. But the discoverer does get to propose a formal name for it, provided it’s less than 16 characters and meets the approval of the International Astronomical Union, which is cool.) 2024 YR4 was discovered on December 27 of last year by the Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS) — a NASA-funded asteroid detection program with telescopes around the world — at its station in Chile. With an estimated diameter of 130 to 300 feet, it wouldn’t be a world-ender, but it could cause severe local damage if it were to collide with the Earth. Which was worrying, because early calculations suggested it had as much as a 3.1 percent chance of striking our planet on December 22, 2032. 3.1 percent may not seem like much of a risk — it’s about the same chance as flipping a coin five times and getting all heads or all tails — but it was three times higher than that of any other large known asteroid. For skywatchers this was a big deal. So they swung into action, pulling in data from observatories run by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. Asteroids do offer us the opportunity to stave off at least one kind of planetary disaster because, like all objects in space, they follow a clear and largely predictable orbit. An asteroid impact happens when the orbits of the object and the Earth intersect, like two cars trying to merge onto the highway. Get enough data, do some math, and scientists can figure out with astounding precision whether the Earth will suffer a cosmic fender bender decades into the future. Once the new measurements were taken and the math was done, the probability of YR4 hitting the Earth began to decline, eventually falling to just 0.004 percent. Crisis, such as it was, averted. But while YR4 won’t be obliterating any cities, it did provide an invaluable test for planetary defense science — one we passed. Planetary defense Now, what would happen if a big asteroid was confirmed to be on a collision course impact path with Earth? While our asteroid detection systems are way ahead of our asteroid defense systems, there are some options, at least theoretically. Project Icarus had already figured it out back in the 1960s: You don’t need to destroy an asteroid to protect the Earth — you just need to give it a slight nudge. Treat it like the eight ball on a pool table, and knock it away. The cue ball in this analogy would be something known as a “kinetic impactor” — a spacecraft that crashes into the asteroid with enough force to alter its orbit. We know this can work. On September 26, 2022, NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) collided with the tiny asteroid Dimorphos, more than 7 million miles from Earth. DART was a success, shortening Dimorphos’s orbit by 32 minutes. DART wasn’t perfect. The collision also unleashed a swarm of boulders, demonstrating some of the unintended consequences of smashing something into a space rock at roughly 14,760 mph. As the science writer Robin Andrews pointed out on X, DART was proof of principle at best, and not yet something we could use on an asteroid like YR4 if we needed. Of course, a much bigger asteroid that would actually threaten the whole planet would require far, far more force to deflect, and technology we don’t yet have. (No, we cannot yet send up oil drillers with a nuclear bomb, like Bruce Willis in Armageddon.) But still. Thanks to brilliant space scientists, international collaboration, and yes, even an act of Congress, our species is closer to being able to permanently protect itself from a natural existential risk that has obliterated the dominant species in our planet’s past. If that’s not good news, I don’t know what is. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Demonstrators, some of them former PEPFAR and USAID employees, protest to demand that Congress stand up to President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s “Department of Government Efficiency” and reinstate lifesaving programs in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill on February 26, 2025, in Washington, DC. A lot has happened in the last six weeks, to put it mildly, and it can be hard to see through the dust and tell what’s actually ongoing. The government threatened tariffs, backed off, then did the tariffs, and then started carving out tariff exceptions for connected-enough constituencies. We did showy military deportation flights then stopped because they’re incredibly expensive. Trump’s flurry of executive orders tried to end birthright citizenship (a judge put that on hold), and froze the issuing of passports to transgender Americans (this is being slowly resolved as people individually appeal to their representatives or the media for help). Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, team slashed the federal workforce, then sent emails hiring many people back. One result has been that it is very hard to communicate as a journalist — or to learn as an interested member of the public — which of the harmful things that the government is doing are actually ongoing and actually worth pushing back on. But here is an enormously high-stakes problem that is clear and still ongoing: the cancellation of our best-performing overseas programs to treat infectious disease. My colleague Dylan Matthews has written for a decade about PEPFAR, the underrated star of George W. Bush’s otherwise ignominious presidency. PEPFAR helps partner countries offer HIV testing and lifesaving treatment at an extraordinary scale: More than 20 million people were receiving lifesaving antiretrovirals from PEPFAR when the administration took office. No one in Rubio’s State Department or in DOGE has said they want to cancel PEPFAR — Rubio has in fact repeatedly spoken out in favor of it in the past — but it was hit by a stop-work order. And even after many PEPFAR programs were issued waivers, funding wasn’t unfrozen, contacts at USAID had been fired or placed on leave, and work in most cases wasn’t able to resume. Some PEPFAR programs were then sent termination notices. The Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation, which treats HIV+ pregnant women to prevent their babies from contracting HIV in the US and overseas, got a cancellation notice for programs serving more than 350,000 people. The PEPFAR report For people like myself who have long taken pride in PEPFAR, it’s been painful and horrifying to watch this lifesaving work grind to a halt without a justification or even acknowledgment that it’s happening. It’s gutting to know that people are dying for no reason, and maddening to hear Musk assure everyone that every legitimate program has been restored while contacts on the front lines of the fight against HIV tell us that isn’t so. So in response to the PEPFAR confusion, some economists, technologists, and policy experts I know got together for a weekend hackathon last month online. We aimed to do a couple of things: get some independent confirmation of the eye-popping numbers being thrown around about the lives saved by PEPFAR, understand the current status of the programs, and make some updatable public resource explaining all this, because it was (perhaps intentionally) extremely unclear. (The State Department, which oversees PEPFAR, hasn’t been returning my requests for comment.) This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week. That weekend the hackathon team produced an independent estimate: that PEPFAR saves around a million lives a year, and an independent site explaining what we concluded and why, including long technical appendices with a ton of details on the studies the team looked at. (You can read the report here.) I had already assumed that PEPFAR was a good program because of Dylan Matthews’s reporting, but looking into the numbers, I was taken aback by how strong the case for it is. PEPFAR’s funding in real dollars peaked in 2009; every year since then it’s been increasing the number of patients treated with less funding (if you adjust for inflation), thanks to falling drug prices. In many countries, PEPFAR has successfully handed over responsibilities to local governments — in South Africa, for example, the program provides only 25 percent of the medications, with the rest funded and provided by the South African government. But the effectiveness and importance of PEPFAR underscore the devastation that is unfolding as it is withdrawn — even just 25 percent of patients being thrown out of clinics overnight still causes mass chaos and mass deaths, as heartbreaking coverage of the effects of the sudden PEPFAR closures has made clear. And South Africa is relatively fortunate — in some other countries, like Nigeria, where PEPFAR is 90 percent of HIV funding, there’s no viable way for most people to get antiretrovirals once PEPFAR shuts down. Some of the 20 million people we threw off their lifesaving medication will find other sources, but many won’t. And every day, 1,400 babies will be born with HIV who would otherwise be HIV-free if we hadn’t frozen the programs meant to help their mothers. Here’s what our 44-page report boils down to: about a million additional people will die terrible deaths every single year for the foreseeable future if PEPFAR doesn’t get reversed. Does activism do anything? In the first Trump administration, there were a lot of large-scale protests. This time around, I’ve seen less energy, though there are still plenty of protests. I think this is partially due to a perception that those first-term protests didn’t really work; after all, Trump eventually got reelected with more support than before. But I think “do protests work” is too complicated to have a “yes” or “no” answer. Protests can draw attention to an issue; whether that attention is good or bad depends on whether the public and policymakers are on your side or not. Protests are therefore at their most useful when they’re about something that’s being done half by accident or out of carelessness. Musk has claimed that the USAID freeze didn’t kill anyone, and that they’re reauthorizing all programs that are legitimate. But PEPFAR clinics are still closed. Sen. Lindsey Graham has reportedly pressed the government on the PEPFAR closures. Unlike much else Trump and Musk are doing, slashing PEPFAR really doesn’t even appear to be a partisan act, and it’s not even clear it’s intentional. For that reason, many of the PEPFAR report authors, along with pro-life groups, Effective Altruism DC, and lots of concerned citizens protested Friday at Foggy Bottom Metro station, trying to raise awareness of the PEPFAR program freezes. I didn’t participate (it’s Vox policy not to do so, plus I’m on the wrong coast), but I want to make the intellectual case for what they’re doing. Protesting the Trump administration works best when you’re able to cut through the noise and tell people about something indefensible that they didn’t know happened, didn’t know was ongoing, or didn’t know was unpopular. The administration hasn’t defended the PEPFAR cuts, and indeed has mostly insisted that PEPFAR is still operating and got waivers. That makes it an unusually good target for public pressure. When considering a protest, like considering any other way to improve the world, I use the framework “Is it important? Is it tractable? Is it neglected?” When you find something that’s all three — a million unnecessary deaths a year, as a product of a policy that most people aren’t aware of and that no one in government has endorsed and that Republicans along with Democrats are opposed to — it’s worth making some noise, even amid the terrible roar of noise which is the defining feature of this moment. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
For a “golden age” of America, that’s a lot of red. | Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images Welcome to The Logoff. Today I’m focusing on Donald Trump’s effect on the economy, because we’re seeing some early indications of how the president’s policies are affecting the rest of us — and because the markets may influence his behavior going forward. What’s the latest? We got two early signs of how Trump’s economy is doing today. The government reported that the US added a net 151,000 jobs in February — slightly less than the average growth for the past 12 months (168,000). And the financial markets closed their worst week since early September. Is this mediocre economy Trump’s fault? During the period of inflation under Joe Biden, his defenders were quick to point out that the economy is influenced by factors outside the president’s control. The same is true for the current president. But Trump is far from blameless. The job growth estimate reflects some, but not all, of the administration’s mass layoffs of federal workers. And on the markets, analysts say the uncertainty of Trump’s implementation — and then partial walkback — of tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and China drove the slide. What’s the big picture? Trump’s promises of an instant economic boom were always nonsensical. The US economy is a behemoth that takes time to change course, even under the most pro-growth policies. And very few — if any — economists think mass federal layoffs and hefty tariffs are a recipe for growth. Perhaps more interesting is how (and whether) the market slides will affect Trump going forward. As observers weigh whether Trump will go through with the massive tariffs he’s continually threatening, skeptics have said that bad market reactions could restrain the administration. But it’s just too soon to know: Trump on Thursday said his walkback of tariffs this week had “nothing to do with the market.” And with that, it’s time to log off… It’s choose-your-own-adventure Friday. If you’re in the reading mood, Vox’s resident book critic, Constance Grady, has this illuminating piece on the history of The Great Gatsby. The book turns 100 this year, and its backstory is fascinating. If you’re in the mood for lighter fare, I absolutely loved this three-minute BBC Earth video about mudskippers — a fish (yes, I checked) that can walk on land and skip across the water. I hope you have a great and restorative weekend. I’ll see you back here on Monday.
Ashley Flowers and Brit Prawat accept their award at the 2024 iHeartPodcast Awards presented by the Hartford Live at SXSW at Fairmont Palm Park, Fairmont Hotel on March 11, 2024, in Austin, Texas. | Rick Kern/Getty Images for iHeartRadio By 2017, the true crime podcasting space might have already seemed crowded — but perhaps what it was missing was full body chills. That was the year Ashley Flowers and her pal Brit Prawat launched their true crime podcast Crime Junkie into an arena that already included pioneers like Serial (2014), Generation Why (2012), and My Favorite Murder (2016). The casual way Flowers narrated crimes to her friend, who responded with dramatic gasps and her trademark exclamation (“Full. Body. Chills.”), resonated and their breezy takes on everything from local Indiana cold cases to high-profile murders (they think Scott Peterson’s innocent) drew in legions of listeners — so many, in fact, that Flowers was able to quickly quit her day job and turn her attention to podcasting, full time. Over the years, that dedication has paid endless dividends. Crime Junkie rapidly shot to the top of the podcast charts and never left; last year it was Apple’s second most-popular podcast — beating out Joe Rogan. Its success enabled Flowers to launch her own expanded podcast network, Audiochuck, publish a bestselling thriller novel, and rake in a staggering $45 million a year. Bloomberg recently reported Flowers’s revenue, along with news of an investment of $40 million from the Chernin Group, a venture capital firm that’s funded cultural cornerstones like Tumblr and entertainment projects like Reese Witherspoon’s production company. That likely means the sky’s the limit for Flowers and Audiochuck, which according to Bloomberg was valued at $250 million. But with great opportunity comes great scrutiny — and scrutiny hasn’t always done Crime Junkie many favors. There’s no question that Crime Junkie is a juggernaut. But because it’s a juggernaut, it inevitably plays an outsized role in the broader conversation around true crime itself. So far, it sits uneasily within larger debates about responsible content creation, fan engagement, the rights of victims’ families, and the ultimate question of whether true crime is journalism or entertainment. Ashley Flowers’s route to podcasting was unconventional — but, wow, has it paid off Before 2016, Ashley Flowers wasn’t an investigator — her only interaction with the world of criminal justice was as a volunteer with her local Crime Stoppers branch, where she served on the board of directors. But that year, Flowers, then a 27-year-old startup worker, proposed a true crime radio segment to air on a local Indianapolis station in order to promote the Crime Stoppers organization. After about a year of doing the local segment, Flowers’s lifelong bestie Prawat suggested she listen to Serial. Soon, Flowers had decided to expand her radio gig to a true crime podcast. “It really started as a way to get the Crime Stoppers name out there, and it has grown into so much more and allowed for the platform to bring attention to a lot of really amazing nonprofits,” Flowers said in a 2019 radio interview. That’s a slightly different narrative than the one she gave the New York Times in 2022. In that version, she said, “I never saw this as a hobby.” A telltale sign that she meant business: Instead of signing with an established podcast network, as most true crime podcasters do, Flowers launched Crime Junkie under her own studio, named Audiochuck after her dog. (Every Audiochuck podcast ends with a callout to Chuck, followed by an approving doggie yowl, presumably from the pup himself.) If Flowers was always gunning for success and independence through Crime Junkie, she found it fast. Crime Junkie’s growth from the outset was phenomenal; its listeners had an incredible zeal for the show. For fans of talky “comedy” true crime podcasts like My Favorite Murder, Crime Junkie offered a slightly more serious mode of delivery: Ashley got right down to narrating the story, with Brit chiming in to ask leading questions the way a listener might. Was it highly scripted and occasionally awkward? Sure. Did audiences care? Not a whit. 2022 seemed to be a breakout year. Flowers gained new mass media attention when the New York Times covered the launch of her show The Deck, which she hosts. (The show focuses on the cold cases so far gone that law enforcement puts them on the backs of playing card decks that they distribute to prisons, hoping to find answers among inmates). That year, per the Times, the Crime Junkie fan club had “tens of thousands” of subscribers; that same year, Crime Junkie entered the No. 2 spot among top-ranked podcasts, behind Joe Rogan and ahead of The Daily, and has stayed there ever since, refusing to be dislodged. The show’s massive popularity with women undoubtedly has a hand in its staying power; Edison Research has reported ever since 2022 that Crime Junkie reaches more women than any other podcast. While total listenership is hard to quantify, the stats are staggering: as of this year, Crime Junkie has racked up 500 million streams on Spotify alone, while the Audiochuck network boasts jaw-dropping stats of over 2.6 billion total downloads. Along the way, Flowers has launched multiple additional podcast series, most notably The Deck. She’s also brought multiple series to the network, including three series from journalist Delia D’Ambra and Anatomy of Murder, co-hosted by former prosecutor and Investigation Discovery host Anna-Sigga Nicolazzi. In addition to Flowers writing her debut novel, All Good People Here — a second novel arrives in May — she and Prawat regularly tour the country, performing the show for sold-out audiences. The pair will soon play Radio City. On top of all this, Audiochuck recently announced that it would be moving into film and TV, which gives it the potential to expand an already massive platform even further. But whether that expansion is a net good for true crime itself depends on who you ask. The answer lies in whether Audiochuck is ultimately about serving journalism, entertainment, or an unholy mix of both. For Crime Junkie, accolades and controversies go hand in hand In 2019, journalist Adam Wren put together a longform profile of Flowers for Indianapolis Monthly dubbed “The Problem with Crime Junkie.” In it, he wrote scathingly about a live show performance in which Flowers and Prawat heavily implied the guilt of the victim’s father, even though he was provably innocent. The man who was indicted by a grand jury on 22 felony counts, including the murder of another child, is not the little girl’s father. Any armchair detective could tell you that straight away. But these two don’t. Indeed, charges of irresponsible and unethical handling of cases have dogged Crime Junkie ever since its inception. Case in point — the show’s treatment of the Scott Peterson case, which was its second episode (a multi-parter) and among its most popular. “It seems like the sole source for that Crime Junkie episode was them watching the A&E documentary series about the Peterson case, which was heavily biased and left out a lot of incriminating information pointing to his guilt,” Robin Warder, host of long-running podcast The Trail Went Cold, told me. “And they probably did not do any additional research.” Warder also points to the show’s conspiratorial take on the Kendrick Johnson case, a death he explains is generally understood to be a tragic accident. “This can definitely be an issue when your show has a larger audience than anyone.” Still, Warder is quick to acknowledge that many of these concerns are much, much larger than Crime Junkie itself. The true crime podcasting community has long struggled with ethical considerations and questions about how to pay respect to victims and their families while balancing the need for scrutiny of the criminal justice system. Then there’s the fact that, well, this is entertainment. Flowers and Prawat have never identified as journalists, though they have hired and worked with journalists in the past. That lack of journalism training became a major source of controversy for the show fairly early in its run. As Wren reported, Cathy Frye, a journalist formerly of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, inadvertently ran across a Crime Junkie episode in which she claimed Flowers had thoroughly plagiarized her reporting on a 2002 murder. In a since-deleted Facebook comment, Frye alleged that not only did Flowers replicate details, story structure, and fail to give attribution, the podcast cheapened her award-winning reporting, turning it into entertainment. After Frye’s post, multiple podcasters, including Warder, went on to allege that Flowers was routinely stealing their content, without giving them credit nor directing any of her massive listenership toward their shows. This 2019 dust-up wound up not only catching the attention of mainstream media, but prompted a community-wide conversation about plagiarism, both in true crime and podcasting writ large. “The plagiarism scandal was beneficial at helping change the industry and making people recognize the issue,” Warder acknowledged. In the end, Flowers made a habit that continues to this day of extensively listing her sources — though Warder claimed that she never actually apologized to him or other podcasters who accused her of theft. Another major criticism of Flowers involves her podcast, Red Ball, which was meant to be a deep dive into the notorious unsolved Burger Chef murders. Instead, as Wren profiled, a lead investigator on the case wound up being reprimanded for giving Flowers and Crime Junkie unauthorized access to the case files — a move that ultimately led to Red Ball being truncated. Other podcasters have since claimed that the debacle left the Indiana State Police unwilling to work with other media outlets, to the detriment of solving cases. (Audiochuck was unavailable for comment.) Last year, Charlene Shunick, whose sister Mickey was murdered in 2012, blasted Crime Junkie for releasing a paywalled episode about the crime. While Flowers did remove the episode, Shunick told me she wasn’t happy with the response she received from the company. In an email exchange provided to Vox, Shunick reached out to thank the podcast for removing the episode and encourage Crime Junkie producers to undergo ethics training. She also wanted to know why her family’s pleas for privacy in a closed case hadn’t been respected. After a note assuring her that Audiochuck was “taking [her] message to heart,” her next question — about what the company would do differently in the future — received no response. Shunick told me that other victims’ family members had shared similar stories with her about their own interactions with the show. “I don’t think it’s absurd to expect to be asked for permission to tell our life stories,” she said. “In my opinion, it doesn’t really seem like Crime Junkie cares about the family members of the people whose stories they profit off of.” Still, while these criticisms arise, other families have nothing but praise for Flowers and her dedication to advocacy and using her platform to promote actual crime-solving. Crime Junkie has also focused more heavily on unsolved cold cases and missing persons cases as it’s grown more popular, sometimes despite complaints from fans. Flowers herself has donated money to criminal justice groups, DNA testing funds, and other investigative non-profits. She also founded her own cold-case fund, Season of Justice, which has proven to be remarkably effective at creating movement and even solving cases. The organization claims to have generated 20 “SOJ Solves” since its inception. Warder himself is quick to note what a difference Crime Junkie’s massive platform has made in solving cases — both because it’s enabled Flowers’s financial philanthropy and because it’s gotten listeners involved. “Years ago,” he said, “I covered this murder case on The Trail Went Cold, and it wound up being solved and an innocent man was exonerated because the right listener just happened to be listening to a Crime Junkie episode about it and took action.” Warder speculated that Crime Junkie listeners may not explore the community outside of the realm of Audiochuck. While there are ample examples of Crime Junkie listeners asking for and receiving recs for other podcasts, it is true that Crime Junkie, and the Audiochuck network, can seem like its own isolated archipelago in the true crime ocean. Perhaps the bigger question is: Does that matter? If you’re on an island of true crime, who cares if that island is your version of a five-star resort? If all of this is ultimately about entertainment, then by any standard, Crime Junkie is a roaring success. But if true crime strives to enlighten as well as entertain, then Crime Junkie may still have lots of room to grow.
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development Scott Turner, accompanied by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, President Donald Trump, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, leads a prayer during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on February 26, 2025 in Washington, DC. Since returning to office, the Trump administration has moved to upend America’s long-standing approach to tackling homelessness. The “housing-first” model — which has enjoyed bipartisan support for decades — prioritizes getting people into stable accommodations before addressing other issues like mental health or substance abuse. This evidence-backed approach first gained prominence during George W. Bush’s presidency, with Salt Lake City becoming an early success story in 2005. It was supported by the Trump administration during the president’s first term, and former Housing and Urban Development Secretary Ben Carson publicly praised the model several times. But as homelessness has worsened due to the nation’s housing affordability crisis, conservative think tanks and GOP lawmakers have increasingly pointed to “housing-first,” and the network of nonprofits and service providers that support it, as the culprit. Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page policy blueprint, explicitly calls to “end housing-first policies.” Trump’s appointment of Scott Turner — a pastor and former Texas state lawmaker — to lead the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) signals a deeper shift. Federal policy is poised to turn away from the individuals and institutions that have backed housing-first and toward a new approach that embraces mandatory treatment and even faith-based models. During his time as a legislator, Turner voted against multiple bills to expand affordable housing and protect low-income tenants, while blaming government welfare for harming American families. In his confirmation hearing, Turner emphasized an interest in leaning more heavily on local organizations, including religious groups, to solve the homelessness crisis. Now as secretary, he’s created a “DOGE”-style task force aimed at slashing agency spending, including money directed to housing-first organizations. Recent leaks suggest HUD is planning massive staffing cuts, particularly to the Office of Community Planning and Development — the division responsible for homelessness programs, affordable housing, and disaster relief. The New York Times reported in February that this office could see an 84 percent reduction, from 936 employees to just 150. When Vox asked HUD to explain its homelessness strategy and position on housing-first, spokesperson Kasey Lovett repeatedly declined to address homelessness, only confirming that the agency’s disaster relief efforts “will not be impacted.” A rapid policy reversal The administration didn’t wait long to act. By January 27, the Office of Management and Budget had imposed an across-the-board grant freeze affecting $3.6 billion in previously approved homelessness funding. Though a federal judge ordered this freeze lifted, many homeless service providers still haven’t received the money. Earlier this week more than 50 Democrats sent a letter urging HUD to release these congressionally appropriated funds. The consequences are already visible. In Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, a region outside Philadelphia, officials recently held a press conference to highlight the $5 million in homeless funds they’ve been promised but haven’t received. “Losing this funding could mean that we see a doubling in the number of people that are sleeping on the streets and in our un-housed population,” one commissioner warned. “This is extremely serious. It affects children — 120 children and 400 people as a whole.” The freeze, even if it ultimately ends, reflects years of growing skepticism among conservatives about the federal government’s approach to tackling homelessness and selecting grantees. By 2019, Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers was questioning the effectiveness of housing-first, and Trump’s appointment of longtime housing-first critic Robert Marbut to lead the US Interagency Council on Homelessness underscored the shift. Under Marbut’s leadership, the Council published a report encouraging leaders to consider requiring sobriety and other treatments in exchange for housing assistance — a report that 12 national homelessness organizations condemned as “ineffective and dishonest.” Leaders for the most part did not take up the recommendations. The Biden administration then pivoted back to unequivocal support for housing-first, even expanding it by authorizing federal Medicaid dollars for rental assistance — effectively embracing the idea that housing is a form of health care. Yet, during this time, the attacks on housing-first started to pick up momentum in several GOP-led states, which began diverting resources away from the model with backing from conservative groups like the Cicero Institute, an Austin-based think tank founded in 2016, the Manhattan Institute, and the Heritage Foundation. Missouri, Florida, Georgia, and Utah now redirect tens of millions from permanent housing solutions toward transitional and short-term options, in explicit rebuke of the housing-first approach. What’s the best way to help? At the heart of the debate is a fundamental disagreement about what constitutes success in addressing homelessness. For housing-first advocates, stable housing is both the primary goal and the foundation for addressing other issues. Critics, however, argue that simply being housed without improvements in health or substance use doesn’t represent real progress. This philosophical divide shapes how both sides interpret research on housing-first’s effectiveness. Critics like Judge Glock, an alumnus of the Cicero Institute who now directs research at the Manhattan Institute, point to studies from the National Academies of Science and The Lancet that found limited evidence of improved health outcomes among housing-first participants. Proponents like Margot Kushel from the University of California San Francisco’s Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative see the debate differently. “Housing-first is not and has never been ‘housing only,’” she told Vox. “Rather, it describes a strategy that best pairs housing with services in the most efficient way possible.” She argues that the voluntary nature of housing-first makes it successful by helping preserve client dignity and autonomy while increasing the odds that people actually embrace and stick with treatment. Veterans’ homelessness provides perhaps the clearest example of the model’s potential. In 2008, a housing-first program began combining HUD-provided housing vouchers for veterans with case management and clinical services provided by the VA. As a result, while overall homelessness has increased nationwide in the last decade, veteran homelessness has decreased by more than half. But most housing-first programs are not as well supported (financially or politically) as the efforts to end veteran homelessness. “The problem with the housing-first policy is that Congress has not funded it to scale,” Dennis Culhane from the University of Pennsylvania told Vox. “Only about 15 percent of people who experience homelessness get into a housing-first program in a given year.” And although regular check-ins by case managers remain a core component of housing-first programs, many programs do not live up to these standards. As critics note, this leaves some vulnerable individuals effectively abandoned, albeit indoors, with limited improvement in other outcomes. Despite these shortcomings, most experts see the shift away from housing-first as deeply concerning. Culhane found, for an upcoming paper, that the model was associated with a 15 percent decline in homelessness nationwide from 2010 to 2018. HUD’s housing-first investments have added more than 100,000 units of permanent supportive housing, and another 144,000 subsidized beds of other types. Culhane added that past experience has shown that models like transitional housing or “treatment first,” which were the predominant approach from the late 1980s to the mid-2000s, are expensive and unsuccessful. “Funding was entirely tied up in the high costs of administering the beds and services, and there was no funding dedicated to the endgame of getting people into housing,” he said. Glock, the critic, conceded that the evidence for his preferred alternatives that carry more strings attached isn’t great either. “We have to wrestle with the fact that the turnover rates in those [transitional] units are wild and substantial, that people who go into a very structured environment that often requires sobriety or regular mental health checkups are often going to leave those units quickly because they don’t want the structure,” he said. Still, Glock believes having zero mandates on people is a mistake. “That doesn’t have to be complete sobriety,” he added. “But right now you aren’t even forced to, like, get a checkup.” He expects the Trump administration to abandon what he calls its “one-size-fits-all” approach. “The problem is that the federal government made housing-first the uniform and universal standard for homeless housing, and that was inappropriate,” he added. Trump’s tight-lipped pivot on housing-first comes at a time when over 650,000 people in America experience homelessness on any given night, and roughly 40 percent of those individuals are sleeping outside on the streets, in cars, parks, train stations, and other places not designed primarily for people. In Congress, it’s unclear whether lawmakers even plan to adequately fund the federal housing voucher program — one of the key policy tools used to prevent ending up unsheltered in the US. Even if it is funded, though, gutting the federal agency that administers the vouchers could lead to further problems in fighting homelessness.
Last year, a specific archetype for an ideal boyfriend gained traction online: a Man in Finance. Trust fund. Six-foot-5. Blue eyes. What began as a playful TikTok song from creator Megan Boni became a viral sensation — endlessly memed and remixed until even David Guetta hopped on the track. Aside from its earworm status, “Man in Finance” winked at a wider trend in dating: the standards for what women desire in a romantic partner have reached new heights. Boni later said she was inspired by the complaints of women, herself included, who lament singledom “but then have this laundry list of impossible needs.” It’s not just heterosexual women who are accused of having impossible standards for their male partners. Certain men seem to harbor a very specific fantasy of how their female partners should look and behave too: look no further than the popularity of the “tradwife” or the fact that late last year, actor Sydney Sweeney was labeled “mid” by a bevy of online male commenters. If Sweeney isn’t good-looking enough, one might wonder, then what woman is? It should go without saying that maintaining some sort of inventory of qualities you’re looking for is mostly beneficial when choosing a partner. These ideals provide a loose sketch of the type of person you want to date and how you’d like to be treated. There was a time, in the not-too-distant past, where the standard most appropriate for women to have was, “Can he provide enough to ensure we won’t be destitute?” Now, with more freedom, daters want to ensure they align with their partners on values and worldviews. If not, they’re empowered to walk away. The issue, experts say, is that people who, in theory, want romantic partnership may be delaying commitment until they find a potential partner who checks all of their boxes — even about the most minute things. As online dating entered the mainstream, licensed marriage and family therapist Elizabeth Earnshaw observed more clients feeling “disposable” to other singles, all the while becoming just as dismissive of those they were dating. “They might have been thrown away,” she says, “but their behavior is often very much throw-away behavior. They won’t see it that way. They’ll see it as their standards are really high.” However, singles might end up disappointed when no one measures up. According to a 2019 Pew Research Center survey, among both straight and queer Americans who reported difficulty dating, 43 percent said it was because they failed to find someone who meets their expectations. “I don’t think that people are realistic at all,” says Daphney Poyser, the CEO, matchmaker, and head dating coach at LGBTQ matchmaking service Fern Connections. “People just think that I’m gonna meet my Prince Charming … and we’re gonna live happily ever after. And it just doesn’t work that way.” What men — and women — want Prior to the 20th century, marriage was largely an economic decision and whether or not a prospective spouse could provide, either financially or through unpaid labor, was perhaps the most important romantic standard. Though society — and laws — have changed to allow women to earn an education, own property, hold jobs, and live independently, pairing off with a “provider” remains attractive to women. Over the last 30 years, women have consistently said they value male partners who have good financial prospects, socioeconomic status, ambition, and intelligence. Why I reported this Many of the straight single women I know have expressed a similar sentiment: “All the guys I’m dating kind of suck.” These are smart, beautiful, successful women who feel like the dating pool is full of duds who can’t answer a text or initiate an actual date. Meanwhile, TikTok is full of talk about red flags and not settling for the “bare minimum.” I wondered: Is it that important to you that he opens the door or pays for the date? So I decided to talk to some singles to find out what’s happening with men’s and women’s dating standards. Men, on the other hand, consistently aspire to date someone hot. Across the same studies spanning decades, results show men prefer physically attractive mates with “good genes” and “reproductive capacity.” “As a matchmaker,” Poyser says, “I hear a lot of ‘I need someone who’s petite. I want someone who’s younger,’ when it comes to men.” Raymond Truong, a 27-year-old accountant in Portland, is looking for a woman who is fit, interesting, ambitious, conventionally attractive, and who shares his values. While he’s gone out with a number of women primarily from dating apps — he likes the information he gets up front — only a handful have progressed to second dates. Truong has been told his standards are too high, but he doesn’t see the point in lowering them. “In the beginning of my dating I did do that,” he says, “and it felt like a waste of time.” He also wonders if the women he’s seeing have better options than him. These good-on-paper ideals, however, do not represent the world in which we live. Although men outnumber and generally outearn women in the workforce, millions of American men of working age are not working nor looking for employment. Compared to men, more young women are enrolled in and graduate from college. More women occupy the C-suite than a decade ago. And in some metro areas, like New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles, young women make more than their male counterparts. This has implications for dating: If women want a man with high earning potential, the pool of potential matches is dwindling. “Women don’t want to be stay-at-home wives, but they still want to feel like they dated well and they married up,” says Arielle Kuperberg, associate professor of sociology at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. Meanwhile, female breadwinners tend to inspire stress among their male partners. When wives outearn their husbands, men are increasingly anxious, research shows. “A lot of these men who are not going on to college are often having trouble finding jobs and then resenting women,” says Campbell Leaper, a distinguished professor of psychology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Traditional gender roles still dominate dating One reason for the current state of affairs in dating may be that despite society’s shift toward more egalitarian partnerships, young people still support traditional gender roles. In a 2016 study, both male and female college students said men should be the ones to initiate a date, hold the door open, pay for the date, and propose marriage, while women should take the man’s last name. A 2020 study found that gender stereotypes in first dates, where men are proactive and women are reactive, persist and may create unrealistic expectations. Among the LGBTQ people Ellen Lamont, an associate sociology professor at Appalachian State University, spoke to for her book The Mating Game: How Gender Still Shapes How We Date, these gendered expectations are a non-issue. When someone wants to make a move, they do so. “In fact, for certain people I interviewed who had been in heterosexual relationships before coming to identify as LGBTQ,” Lamont says, “they discussed having to unlearn those expectations, and they came to see those expectations as very toxic.” As for heterosexual singles, even if they say they want an equal relationship, social scripts can be deeply rooted and internalized. Throughout her life, Morgan Moore, 33, observed her parents dote on each other, and watched as her father cheered on her mother when she became the breadwinner. Moore, who works in ad sales in the DC area, yearns for a relationship like her parents — one where values are aligned, and where her future partner “emotionally, physically, financially” takes care of her. “You should be coming up to me. You are now, as a man, in your feminine energy and putting me in my masculine energy.” Still, she struggles to find a man who lives up to these standards. “I can’t remember the last time a guy bought me a drink at the bar in my adulthood,” Moore says. While she has no issue approaching men and making the first move, she assumes these prospective partners aren’t serious about a relationship. “The sperm chases the egg,” she says. “You should be coming up to me. You are now, as a man, in your feminine energy and putting me in my masculine energy.” This kind of talk about masculine and feminine energies, it should be noted, is all over social media. Earnshaw, the therapist, says the examples of love and romance people observe — whether in culture or in their lives — can shape daters’ beliefs around what they should want or how courtship should look. Many men Earnshaw speaks with, she says, were socialized to approach women first, but they realize that’s no longer the expectation or preference. “You’ve got a generation of people,” Earnshaw says, “who feel very stuck in ‘What the hell is my role supposed to be? Society is telling me I want a more modern way of dealing with this, but my heart and my mind and my socialization are telling me that that’s icky, and so I don’t know what I’m supposed to do here.’” Standards as protection So it’s fair to ask: are we all just being too picky? Exceedingly high expectations have given way to “red flags” — habits and quirks that are instant dealbreakers. It’s impossible to know whether your date’s penchant for cutting you off mid-sentence may portend deeper issues, but the impulse to self-protect could lead you to write them off anyway. You may be well-meaning in wanting to avoid an unhealthy relationship, but “it’s very hard to build relationships with people if you’re trying to control everything and if you aren’t able to settle into allowing some things to not be perfect,” Earnshaw says. Dating apps, which lay bare plenty of characteristics, from height to dietary preferences, make it easier to choose — or discount — others based on these qualities under the auspices of having standards. Ironically, the normalization of prioritizing mental health led to greater acceptance of our own flaws and imperfections, Earnshaw says, but less willingness to tolerate that same messiness in others. As a result, minor foibles are filed under red flags and the person possessing them is dubbed as failing to meet your standards. “We’ve made everything toxic when it comes to relationships except ourselves — we’re not toxic,” she says. “We’re wonderful, authentic, should be able to be our full selves. But if somebody isn’t good at texting back, that’s a toxic person.” On the other hand, standards provide an effective framework for what behavior is and isn’t acceptable to you in a romantic partner. Without them, you may find yourself in an unfulfilling relationship with someone who’s so misaligned or whose actions make you feel disrespected, unheard, or worse, unsafe. In an effort to pair off with someone who shares their values, singles may decide that dating someone of another political party is off limits, which data suggests they are. To say nothing of meeting high standards, evidence points to men failing at the basics. In her research, Lamont has found that men are struggling to fulfill women’s baseline expectations: someone who isn’t controlling, someone who believes in reciprocity, someone who will commit. When men fail to clear these hurdles, some women may raise the bar to weed out those who don’t meet the bare minimum. In her research, Lamont has found that men are struggling to fulfill women’s baseline expectations. Kay, a 22-year-old psychology major living in Pensacola, Florida, whose last name is being withheld so she can speak freely about her relationships, feels this lack of effort from some of the men she’s dated. “A lot of men my age seem uninterested in moving forward in life and it’s frustrating because many of them try to hold women back who are focused on advancing their education or career,” she says in an email. “It’s hard to find someone who’s not intimidated by ambition and who is willing to grow alongside me.” While she says financial stability is important in a relationship, she cares more about a potential partner’s values and their willingness to grow together. Compromise is possible So what hope do singles with high standards have if they feel the dating pool is full of duds? First, you need to home in on what qualities in a partner really matter and which are non-essential, Poyser, the matchmaker, says. Sure, dating someone with a six-figure salary would be nice, but do they share your values? After ending a six-and-a-half-year relationship, Gia Aldisert, a 22-year-old content creator based in Los Angeles, reevaluated what she wanted out of a partner. While she admits her past relationship wasn’t unhealthy, there were some boxes her ex left unchecked, some areas where she felt she was settling. Her current list of standards for a boyfriend includes someone ambitious, who embraces romantic gestures, who makes time for her friends and family, and who wants to show her off. “I feel like a major way that dating as a whole for women [changed] is that they understand their value now and they don’t just settle for the first guy that treats them with the bare minimum,” Aldisert says. Standards are only as good as your ability to reciprocate, Poyser says. If you hope to date someone who prioritizes their career, you should be able to say the same about yourself. “If I’m going to say I want someone who is kind and thoughtful,” Poyser says, “then I need to be kind and thoughtful too.” You may also want to interrogate the source of your expectations, especially ones rooted in established gender roles. Singles shouldn’t be ashamed to admit to themselves if they do yearn for more stereotypical dating scripts, such as a man pursuing a woman, Earnshaw says. But you might also come to the realization that you were socialized to believe you desired these traditional dating roles. In reality, many relationships will have some combination of “traditional” and modern: a woman may not care that she outearns the men she dates, but she would like a long-term partner who cares for the lawn and the car. “Just lean into it,” Earnshaw says. “You want traditional? Fine. You’ll find somebody out there that’s like that, but then you have to be willing to lean into that. If you want to be the one to talk to this guy in the bar … then you got to do it.” “I usually recommend people do three dates in three totally different places,” he says. “Actually give people chances and try to do fun things that you would do anyway.” Standards can help guide your romantic choices, but they’re best utilized once you have a fair assessment of the person you’re dating. Paul Eastwick, a psychology professor at the University of California, Davis, says we generally don’t have a good read on someone until the third date — so don’t immediately write them off if you’re not instantly physically attracted or felt their jokes were lacking. “I usually recommend people do three dates in three totally different places,” he says. “Actually give people chances and try to do fun things that you would do anyway.” But maybe it’s time to unburden yourself from the tyranny of rigid standards anyway. In one of his studies, Eastwick and his collaborators found that while participants tended to be romantically attracted to people who had the qualities they were looking for in an ideal partner, they were equally as attracted to people who had qualities other study participants listed as ideal. In other words, what we think we want in a romantic partner doesn’t matter so much. So keep your standards as a north star, a path from which you don’t want to stray too far. But as a checklist for the perfect partner? Unfortunately, the 6-foot-5, blue-eyed trust fund man in finance — who’s also kind and doting and funny — probably doesn’t exist.
The Great Gatsby turns 100 years old this year. The Great Gatsby is 100 years old this year, which feels right in a way. After all those years as a perennial mainstay of the American high school English curriculum, all those Gatsby-themed flapper parties, all those valiant but ham-fisted attempts to adapt it, we know the beats of it well: the parties, the glamour, the green lights, and the beautiful clothes. It might as well be a hundred. On the other hand, there are parts of Gatsby that feel so fresh and modern that they could have been written yesterday. In our own moment, as the world’s richest man takes a hatchet to the federal government for sport, one of Gatsby’s most celebrated lines about the very wealthy feels resoundingly true: “They were careless people … They smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.” There’s something reassuring about knowing that Gatsby is the book we’ve chosen to put in classrooms and movie theaters, to make it one of those culture touchstones that everyone more or less knows at least a little. But Gatsby did not become an immediate institution in American life, and we don’t know it as well as we think we do. Gatsby is a much more complicated book than its pop culture footprint suggests. It’s big enough to survive all those turgid high school essays about color symbolism and the American dream, all those drinking parties with girls in backwards headbands, all those mediocre movies and bad plays. Here’s the story of how The Great Gatsby has endured — and why we keep misreading it. How F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote a masterpiece and became a legend As laid out by Matthew J. Bruccoli in the definitive Fitzgerald biography, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, F. Scott Fitzgerald set out to fulfill his promise as one of the most promising novelists of his generation with The Great Gatsby in 1925. His second book, 1922’s The Beautiful and Damned, had been considered a letdown. Readers agreed it was beautifully written, but felt nonetheless that it didn’t quite live up to the standard set in his acclaimed debut, This Side of Paradise. Critics began to wonder if Fitzgerald wasn’t a man “with a gift for expression without very many ideas to express.” To write The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald drew upon his own experience as the rejected poor suitor to multiple rich girls. He was from a middle-class family, but the fancy boarding school education that led him to Princeton had him rubbing elbows with the wealthy. In college Fitzgerald dated a society debutante, whose father warned him that “poor boys shouldn’t think of marrying rich girls.” When he courted his eventual wife Zelda, also a debutante from money, he was an unemployed and unpublished writer. Zelda refused to marry him until he had a source of income, and Fitzgerald responded by building his own legend as a handsome, romantic, hard-living celebrity novelist, gallivanting from party to party across New York City. These events provide the loose skeleton of the plot of The Great Gatsby: Poor young James Gatz falls in love with the glamorous socialite Daisy, but doesn’t have enough money to marry her. Gatz spends the next five years pursuing various illicit money-making schemes until he is as wealthy as an emperor, transforming himself into the mythical figure of Jay Gatsby, a man he hopes will be rich and polished enough to win Daisy’s hand. What Gatsby doesn’t understand is that Daisy’s old-money breeding demands more than just vulgar, splashy wealth. That last element of the story comes from Fitzgerald’s own ambivalence about wealth and what it did to people, and what he really thought about the old-money families he lived so closely beside. “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works.” “I have never been able to forgive the rich for being rich, and it has colored my entire life and works,” Fitzgerald observed in 1938. He himself ran through his money as fast as he possibly could; he was well-paid for his work, but his debts piled higher and higher, and he kept having to write commercial short stories he thought were bad in order to maintain his extravagant lifestyle. Bruccoli reads Fitzgerald’s inability to manage his finances as an expression of his contempt for both money and those who had it: “If he could waste it,” Bruccoli writes, “then it didn’t own him.” If that was Fitzgerald’s thought, the idea didn’t exactly work out. “The inevitable result,” Bruccoli concludes, “was that he was in bondage to it after all because he had to earn the money he was squandering.” Gatsby’s attitudes toward wealth are similarly ambivalent. Money is what generates Gatsby’s famous glitz and glamour, the parties full of jazz and cocktails and fireworks that sound so fun that people keep trying to replicate them a hundred years later. It is what makes Daisy, Gatsby’s lost love, so alluring: that her voice is “full of money.” Yet money is also what corrupts Daisy, what makes it possible for her to accidentally kill a poor woman and drive away from the accident without stopping. Money, in this novel, makes people careless. Gatsby is a fraught, vexed book, all the more lovely because it is so ambivalent. When it came out in 1925, it was considered a masterpiece. T.S. Eliot called Gatsby “the first step American fiction has taken since Henry James.” It made Fitzgerald’s reputation. It also arguably ruined his life. He spent the next nine years working to write a book that could be its equal, descending ever more inexorably into alcoholism as he did. He would publish two more novels — 1934’s Tender Is the Night and the posthumous The Love of the Last Tycoon in 1940 — but neither of them would be as celebrated as The Great Gatsby. As the Depression continued, Fitzgerald came to be dismissed as a relic of the boom time, a chronicler of the rich whose moment was long gone and whose continued alcoholism was all too apt a fate. As Fitzgerald’s star faded, so too did Gatsby’s reputation. In the last month of his life, before he died in 1940 at the age of 44, Fitzgerald sold only seven copies of the book and made $13.13 in royalties. Gatsby comes to the classroom Like many great artists, Fitzgerald enjoyed a critical reappraisal almost as soon as he was dead. His publishers packaged the incomplete Love of the Last Tycoon with a reprint of The Great Gatsby, a canny move that reminded the literary world just how great Fitzgerald was at his best and primed the larger public to remember his name. It took World War II for Gatsby to become an institution, when the US government began shipping small paperback editions of popular novels out to the troops for morale. Gatsby was one of the books chosen for the program, with 155,000 copies distributed across the armed services. Now, the book was not just well-regarded but also inescapable. It would take decades more, however, before Gatsby reached the place where most people meet it today: the classroom. For a long time, American high school English classes didn’t teach much American literature. All the great stuff was by Europeans, the thinking went, and American literature was so simple and straightforward that it simply wasn’t worth teaching. The increased patriotism of World War II got more American novels into the classroom, but even then, they tended to be the authors of the so-called American Renaissance of the early 19th century: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau. Over the course of the midcentury, however, American schools became invested in “new criticism,” a form of literary analysis that focuses on analyzing prose at the level of the sentence and the symbol rather than focusing on the social context in which a book was written. Schools also became more interested in giving their students books that felt newer and more relatable; perhaps even books written in the 20th century. The Great Gatsby presented itself as a solution to a number of these problems. Gatsby is short and its sentences are straightforward and easy to read, making it less intimidating for teen readers than a brick like Moby-Dick. Its central theme is the inaccessibility of the American dream, which makes it nicely relevant to an American literature unit. And it is riddled with the kind of color symbolism that high school teachers love to point out: the green light that represents both lost love and money; the white dresses that suggest Daisy’s apparent purity; the looming blue eyes of Dr. T.J. Eckleburg, watching over everything like God in an advertisement. It is in many ways a perfect pedagogical text. By 1993, The Great Gatsby was one of the top 10 most assigned books in high school English classes across the US, and it remains a mainstay of the high school curriculum. Yet as time accumulates between us and Fitzgerald, his prose becomes harder for students to read, and some of the pure pleasures of Gatsby can disappear. It’s hard to graduate high school without having encountered Gatsby in some form or other, but if your sole focus as a student reader is on tracking every time the words red, white, and blue appear in the text, you might have less time to focus on the idea that wealth and class corrupt their owners. What students know most of all about The Great Gatsby now is that it certainly says something about the impossibility of the American dream, without necessarily knowing how scathing Fitzgerald’s treatment of that dream is — an ironic problem in our own era of broligarchs who love to move fast and break our things. Seeing beyond Gatsby’s glitz If many of us are missing the point of Gatsby when we sit in our English classrooms, most attempts to adapt the canonical book for the stage and screen also falter. Most Gatsby adaptations — and in fact, much of our culture — is most interested in the part of the novel about partying in a flapper outfit: the glamour of the soirees, the kick of the cocktails, the silhouette of Gatsby in his tailored suits and Daisy dancing the Charleston with marceled curls. We tend to ignore what happens to Daisy and Gatsby after the glamour has been torn away from them, when they become shabby. Since Gatsby entered the public domain in 2021, New York has hosted multiple theatrical adaptations. Both The Great Gatsby, a glitzy musical, and The Gatsby Experience, a Sleep-No-More-style immersive experience, played all of the love stories with a schmaltzy sentimentality that asks the audience to break its heart for not only Gatsby and Daisy but also for cynical, dubiously heterosexual Nick and Jordan. Then there’s Baz Luhrmann’s 2013 film, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which stages Gatsby as a hectic and hedonistic swirl of parties and violence. Jack Clayton’s 1974 adaptation, starring Robert Redford and Mia Farrow, comes closest to finding the balance, pitting dingy ’70s grays and a naturalistic camera against Redford at his most shiningly charismatic as Gatsby. Even Clayton, though, is defeated by the story’s sensational and highly symbolic ending, which defeats all attempts to shoot it straightforwardly. The Gatsby adaptation that has moved me most, the one that is the best argument of Gatsby’s relevance, is the Elevator Repair Service Company’s Gatz, which played its final New York performance at the Public Theater last fall. Only Gatz seems to understand why we’ve kept reading Gatsby for so long, or at the very least, the best reason we have for continuing to read Gatsby for so long: because it is simply a very beautiful book. Gatz strips away all of Gatsby’s spectacle. It takes place in an anonymous ’90s office with cigarette stains on the faux-wood paneling and cardboard bankers boxes littering the floor. One worker, unable to get his computer to boot up, happens upon an old copy of Gatsby stuffed in the back of a desk and begins to read. It is more beautiful than pink linen suits, more beautiful than Lana Del Rey singing a sad song, more beautiful than a stage full of chorus girls in sequins and beads. Over the course of the next eight hours, Gatz’s Nick reads the whole of Great Gatsby out loud, as his office brings the story to life around him. The desks get pushed together and pulled apart to become cars, tea tables, dance floors. Drunken revelers strew old paperwork around the place when they get rowdy. And Gatsby — well, Gatsby is as unglamorous as James Gatz was before he ever put on a white linen suit: a middle-aged middle manager with a bald spot in bad khakis. Across this unprepossessing set, from these unassuming figures, Fitzgerald’s language rolls out in great golden tides, so beautiful as to overwhelm you. It is more beautiful than pink linen suits, more beautiful than Lana Del Rey singing a sad song, more beautiful than a stage full of chorus girls in sequins and beads. The gift Gatz gives you is simply to force you to sit still long enough for them to show you how beautiful The Great Gatsby is. Gatsby has survived this long because of a series of accidents: because a paperback edition fit well into the pockets of soldiers during WWII, because it meshes nicely with the educational goals of the standard 11th-grade English syllabus, because it’s fun to film and stage all those Jazz Age party sequences. But Gatsby makes the best argument for its own continued relevance when we strip those circumstances and accidents away and allow the text, shining as bright as the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock, to show us all what it can do.
President Donald Trump speaks during an executive order signing ceremony in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on March 6, 2025. | Al Drago/Bloomberg/Getty Images President Donald Trump’s tariffs have had a chaotic week. First, they were on, then they were great, then they were maybe off, then definitely off (but just for now). After the Trump administration enacted its 25 percent tariffs on most Mexican and Canadian goods on Tuesday, stocks immediately fell. As of Thursday, the S&P 500 had fallen almost four percent since the beginning of the week. For now, those tariffs appear to be on hold. After creating a temporary carve-out for goods imported by US car manufacturers on Wednesday, Trump announced on Thursday that he would pause tariffs on many, but not all Mexican and Canadian goods for another month. Canada’s retaliatory tariffs are expected to remain in effect, at least for now. It’s unclear whether Mexico will proceed with its planned tariffs on US goods, which were expected to be announced Sunday. The turnabout was surprising: Trump initially claimed that he would not consider any exceptions to the tariffs, and praised them at length during his speech to Congress Tuesday. The White House hasn’t said what made Trump change his mind. But it is possible that the shock his tariffs caused to the stock market entered into his decision-making. Trump certainly gave the markets a lot of attention during his first term, when he frequently touted the record highs the stock market reached under his tenure, appearing to view it as a direct reflection of the strength of his economic policies. It’s worth mentioning that presidents don’t have much control over the economy, and Trump arrived in office when the economy was already pretty strong. However, his decision-making often appeared to be influenced by the stock market. In 2018, he publicly criticized Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell for raising interest rates, claiming that it was driving down the stock market: “The only problem our economy has is the Fed. They don’t have a feel for the Market,” he posted on social media. And in early 2019, when the markets dipped in response to Trump’s tariffs on China, he walked back or delayed some of the tariffs. His 2017 corporate tax cuts, which reduced the maximum tax rate from 39 percent to 21 percent, also seemed designed to be market-friendly, and investors are hoping that he’ll extend those cuts this year. One other economic indicator that may have influenced Trump’s tariff policy is one that the president seems to have developed a new focus on during his second term: a benchmark known as the 10-year Treasury bond yield. That yield is the interest rate that the federal government pays to Treasury bondholders each year on loans that mature after 10 years. The 10-year Treasury yield is considered a key indicator of the strength of the US economy and affects borrowing costs for everything from the $12.6 trillion mortgage market to $5.8 trillion in bank lending. The current yield is about 4.2 percent. That rate isn’t set by the government but rather determined by Wall Street through an auction process. If financial institutions are feeling good about the US’s financial outlook, their bids at these bond auctions may be lower. If they’re predicting economic turbulence and staring down a national debt crisis, as is currently the case, those bids may be higher. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s reelection, the 10-year Treasury rate rose sharply. It’s come down since peaking in January, but rose again amid the uncertainty and fear created by Trump’s tariffs. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said that lowering the Treasury yield could bring financial relief to struggling Americans, and Trump heralded a “big, beautiful drop” in Treasury yields during his address to Congress on Tuesday. It’s difficult to say what’s driving Trump’s tariff policymaking for certain. But based on past behavior, the stocks and bond markets seem like important factors to watch. This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.
A viral surveillance video posted of alleged armed members of the Tren de Aragua gang in Aurora, Colorado, in 2024. | RJ Sangosti/MediaNewsGroup/The Denver Post via Getty Images President Donald Trump made a very specific reference on Tuesday night to one criminal organization: the “Tren de Aragua,” a Venezuela-based gang he frequently mentioned when talking about immigration and crime on the campaign trail. The group sprang out of the South American country in the 2010s and has been accused of setting up and running human trafficking and extortion rings in neighboring Colombia, Chile, and Peru. As border crossings, asylum claims, and migration from Latin America in general picked up since the pandemic, the group has been of particular interest for Trump and immigration hawks. As Trump and his allies have tried to portray undocumented immigration as a threat to public safety, they’ve repeatedly highlighted the Tren de Aragua (or TdA)’s criminal activity in the US and abroad. That emphasis has coincided with TdA’s post-pandemic expansion in the US, though it’s deeply unclear how many TdA members are here — and how powerful the gang actually is. Still, a few high-profile incidents — in which the perpetrators were accused of being TdA members — have caught Trump’s attention, and they’ve been a consistent focus of conservative media, immigration critics, and local law enforcement agencies. Those include a high-profile forced entry in an apartment complex in Aurora, Colorado, that Trump seized upon last summer and highlighted during his debate against former Vice President Kamala Harris. But not much is actually known about the group, how it operates, or the extent of its reach within the United States. Still, that hasn’t stopped officials, politicians, and commentators from using real instances of crime and violence to paint a picture of a dangerous migrant “invasion.” Trump himself did that on Tuesday night, referencing the murder of a 12-year-old Texan girl in the Houston area. Two undocumented Venezuelan men were eventually charged with her murder, and both are accused of being members of the gang — which Trump called the “toughest gang, they say, in the world, known as Tren de Aragua.” Whether the Tren de Aragua is the toughest in the world is debatable. But back in Venezuela and along the routes that migrants follow to get to the US, it has contributed to insecurity, instability, and violence. What is the Tren de Aragua? While we don’t know a lot about the state of the organization in the United States right now, a lot is known about the group’s origins. The Tren de Aragua has its roots in a trade union that was formed to build a railroad in 2005, during Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez’s tenure. According to researchers who have studied the group’s rise and local journalists, it morphed from being a railway workers’ group into an organization that embezzled funds and extorted contractors during that construction process. The project ended up falling apart in 2011, but by then the group had morphed itself into a larger criminal organization, being led out of the infamous Tocoron prison, a detention center in the state of Aragua, Venezuela, that had been overtaken by inmates. It was there that the groups’ current leader joined the group, and eventually led the Tren de Aragua to expand its extortion, local drug dealing, and human trafficking into other Venezuelan states, and eventually into Colombia, Chile, and Peru. It’s no coincidence that the TdA’s rise happened around the start of Venezuela’s economic crisis in 2014 and in 2017. Rising poverty, collapsing social safety nets, and political repression created opportunities for both recruitment and targets of extortion, human trafficking, and sexual exploitation among the very migrants and refugees fleeing instability back home. After establishing itself in those neighboring countries since 2018 — and with the rise in Venezuelan refugees and other South American migrants in the United States since the pandemic, reports of people with alleged ties to the group have steadily increased in the US. Scores of news and government reports have tied supposed gang members to murders, sex trafficking and exploitation cases, and petty crime. Immigration officials, meanwhile, frequently label undocumented immigrants who have been arrested and are in the process of being deported as alleged TdA members. But it’s hard to prove these associations, Charles Larratt-Smith, an assistant professor of security studies and researcher on transnational migration at the University of Texas at El Paso, told me. Unlike in the cases of other transnational criminal groups — like Mexico’s drug cartels or MS-13, the Salvadoran gang born in Los Angeles that ended up wreaking havoc in El Salvador after its members were deported or removed from the US — there’s no evidence or intelligence sharing between the US and Venezuela that can help identify members, and no straightforward hierarchy or line of command within this network. Essentially anyone can claim or be accused of being a member of the group, since there’s no reliable way to cross-reference membership, or for the group itself to hold its members accountable. Even the tattoos and other symbols used to try to identify group members can be inconsistent. And the group’s original base of operations, the Tocoron prison, has since been retaken by the Venezuelan government, and its leader has disappeared. In other words, the group’s influence, reach, and actual power may have been exaggerated over the years. “If you’re comparing those organizations to the Tren de Aragua, the comparison is farcical,” Larratt-Smith said. The shadowy group just doesn’t have the same means, resources, organization, or power to compete with the groups various American government and Homeland Security officials have compared it to. And yet both Trump’s and Biden’s administrations have argued they pose enough of a threat to warrant federal responses, Just last year, the Biden administration levied sanctions against the group and designated it as a transnational criminal organization. And in January, the Trump White House went one step further, reclassifying it as a foreign terrorist organization. So while there are places where the group’s presence is better established, like in New York City, the shadowy description of the group also serves other political purposes. For Larratt-Smith, the fear the Tren de Aragua, and its presence in the US, inspires in people serves to both justify the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration in general, and helps to muddy the differences between those actual TdA gang members in the US and any Venezuelan immigrants who commit crimes in the US or may have criminal records back home. “It’s a useful signifier for Venezuelan criminality — and that does exist, you would have to be naïve or delusional to say otherwise — but it’s disproportionately publicized compared to acts of criminality committed by American citizens, because it fits this broader [anti-immigrant] narrative,” he told me.
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