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Rapper Drake at “Lil Baby & Friends Birthday Celebration Concert” at State Farm Arena on December 9, 2022, in Atlanta. | Prince Williams/WireImage To borrow a phrase from our foremost cultural observer, Azealia Banks, the boys are fighting. For almost a year now, Drake and Kendrick Lamar have been embroiled in one of rap’s most public and memorable beefs. It all started back in March of 2024 when Future and Metro Boomin’ dropped the joint album, We Don’t Trust You, practically dedicated to sneak-dissing Drake. The most notable diss on the record, though, came from Lamar who’s featured on the song “Like That.” His “f— the big 3” line, referring to Drake and J.Cole, ignited a weeks-long back-and-forth between Drake, Lamar, and eventually a handful of other rappers. Most of the drama remained between Drake and Lamar, as they released several explosive songs accusing one another of some pretty heinous crimes, including Lamar calling Drake a “pedophile.” It was Lamar, who ultimately came out on top thanks to the Mustard-produced “Not Like Us.” The track became 2024’s song of the summer and a certified West Coast anthem. It also won five Grammys last month, including Record and Song of the Year. Lamar’s success also seemingly earned him the coveted gig of headlining the Super Bowl Halftime Show last month, making him the first solo rap act to do so. Almost a year since the release of “Like That,“ Drake and Lamar aren’t really at war. Drake, at least, has ostensibly waved the white flag, directing his ire at his and Lamar’s record label instead. On January 15, Drake filed a lawsuit against Universal Music Group for defamation regarding the lyrics in “Not Like Us.” (He originally filed a petition last November accusing UMG and Spotify of “artificially inflating” the popularity of the diss track and participating in a pay-for-play scheme with iHeartRadio, before withdrawing it.) The current defamation suit claims that the allegations in “Not Like Us” specifically, the “certified pedophile” lyric, endangered Drake and his family. The suit references a shooting outside of Drake’s Toronto mansion a few days after the song’s release and two other break-in attempts at Drake’s home over the following two days. On March 17, UMG filed a motion to dismiss, stating that their signee “lost a rap battle that he provoked” and calling the suit “a misguided attempt to salve his wounds.” After nearly 15 tumultuous years in the game, Drake is hardly a stranger to mess and beefing with other rappers. At first, it seemed like this latest feud was exactly what rap’s sensitive king needed in a rather uninspired era in his career, defined by dull musical output and gross jabs at women. However, following Lamar’s verbal lashings and his heavily mocked decision to pursue legal action as a response, it’s hard to see how Drake’s career completely overcomes this moment. Who’s beefing with who? On March 22, Future and Metro essentially released a breakup album from their frequent collaborator and former comrade, Drake. (Drake and Future have nearly 30 collaborations combined, and Metro executive-produced their 2015 mixtape What A Time to Be Alive.) We Don’t Trust You is packed with subliminal messages seemingly directed at Drake, regarding his shady maneuvers. However, it was Kendrick’s relatively gentle prodding on the track “Like That” that was ultimately the most incendiary. On the track — which has sat at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for three weeks in a row now — he raps “Motherfuck the big three, it’s just big me,” renouncing his informal association with rap peers Drake and Cole. On the recent Drake song “First Person Shooter,” off his latest album For All the Dogs, Cole claimed on his guest verse that he, Drake, and Lamar are the “Big 3” of the current era of hip-hop. Nevertheless, Lamar’s ire on “Like That” is mostly pointed at his noted frenemy Drake, brushing off his purportedly unstoppable commercial success. “Your best work is a light pack,” he asserts. “N—, Prince outlived Mike Jack.” Cole responded first on April 5 with the track “7-Minute Drill,” featured on his aptly titled mixtape Might Delete Later. Cole throws shots at Lamar’s Pulitzer Prize-winning discography, calling his latest album Mr. Morale and The Big Steppers “tragic” and claiming his Grammy-winning sophomore album Good Kid, Maad City “put [listeners] to sleep.” He also promises to “humble” Lamar if “push comes to shove.” However, by April 10, Cole had rescinded his warning shot, including removing “7-Minute Drill” from streaming platforms. At his annual Dreamville Festival, he issued a heavily mocked quasi-apology to Lamar. “I tried to jab [Lamar] back, and I try to keep it friendly,” he told the crowd in North Carolina. “But at the end of the day when I listen to it, and when it comes out and I see the talk, that don’t sit right with my spirit.” Before Drake could unleash his own diss, Future and Metro released the follow-up, We Still Don’t Trust You, on April 12. This time, A$AP Rocky got some punches in. On the song “Show of Hands,” he rapped “N—s in they feelings over women. What, you hurt or something? I smash before you birthed, son. Flacko hit it first, son.” This is presumably a response to Drake apparently dissing A$AP and his partner Rihanna, whom Drake previously dated, on his song “Fear of Heights.” (Fans have also speculated that A$AP means he previously slept with the mother of Drake’s son.) Another one of Drake’s most famous industry mates, The Weeknd, appears on both Future and Metro albums. However, on We Still Don’t Trust You’s eighth track, “All to Myself,” he sings, “I thank God that I never signed my life away.” Fans interpreted that as a jab about Drake’s label OVO Sound, which, despite his heavy association with the label, The Weeknd ultimately never signed to. Who is Drake dissing on “Push Ups”? On Saturday, April 13, Drake’s long-awaited response titled “Push Ups (Drop & Give Me Fifty)” mysteriously made its way to the internet. The seemingly unmixed demo made many social media users speculate whether the song was AI-generated before noted hip-hop commentator DJ Akademiks eventually played it — noticeably with some tweaks, like the omission of a line about P. Diddy and a different beat — on his livestream. Hip-hop radio station Power 105 also streamed a high-quality version of the song. Given Drake’s comments on Instagram over the weekend, including a photo of Uma Thurman single-handedly taking on a group of fighters in the 2003 film Kill Bill, all signs point to the track being legitimate. That said, “Push Ups” is a hefty (and expectedly humorous) diss record, taking aim at Drake’s aforementioned opps while pulling some other parties into the crossfire. One of them is the Weeknd’s manager, CashXO, who he accuses of “blowing Abel’s bread trickin.” He also takes shots at Memphis Grizzlies player Ja Morant, who fans are speculating he was previously in a love triangle with. In probably the silliest development of this multi-pronged feud, he throws some digs at rapper Rick Ross, another frequent collaborator of his. “This n— turning 50,” Drake raps. “Every song that made it on the chart he got it from Drizzy.” Ross swiftly followed up with his own diss called “Champagne Moments,” which quickly went viral. Among other insults and accusations, he calls Drake, who’s mixed, “white boy” and claims he got a nose job. As for Lamar, Drake offers a pretty comprehensive rebuttal, poking fun at Lamar for apparently wearing a “size 7 shoe” and his collaborations with pop acts like Maroon 5 and Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood.” (Lest we forget, Drake has also linked up with Swift for a check.) He also names some artists who he feels have surpassed Lamar’s stardom, including SZA, who’s signed to Lamar’s own Top Dawg Entertainment label. (She apparently doesn’t want to be involved.) There’s also a bar that many listeners, including DJ Akademiks, interpreted as an audacious mention of Lamar’s fiancé, Whitney Alford (“I be with some bodyguards like Whitney”). However, this could also be a misreading of a more obvious reference to the Whitney Houston film, The Bodyguard. Drake’s latest round with Kendrick took a particularly dark turn Ahead of Lamar dropping his response, “Euphoria,” Drake released another diss track for Lamar on April 19 called “Taylor Made Freestyle” using AI-generated vocals from 2Pac and Snoop Dogg to “spit” on his behalf. Drake’s weaponization of artificial intelligence, specifically regarding the deceased Tupac Shakur, generated mixed responses online. Some fans were amused by his “innovation,” while others, including Snoop, seemed downright confused. However, after his and Lamar’s most recent round of disses, these criticisms would be the least of his concerns. On April 30, Lamar finally dropped his rebuttal titled “Euphoria” on streaming platforms. He spends most of the 6-minute track poking holes in Drake’s public persona. Among other digs, he questions the Canadian rapper’s proximity to Black American culture and his relationships with women. A few days later, Lamar followed up with “6:16 in LA,” claiming that Drake has a “leak” in his camp. Presumably, Drake wanted to get ahead of any dirt Lamar could possibly expose by dropping the track “Family Matters” this past Friday, along with a music video. In addition to Lamar, Drake has some more words for Ross, The Weeknd, and even Pharrell Williams. However, it’s Lamar’s fiancée, Whitney Alford, who’s the primary target of Drake’s claims. First, he suggests that one of Lamar’s children is actually fathered by his general manager, Dave Free, who’s also the former president of Lamar’s former label, Top Dawg Entertainment. Then he makes the more troubling allegation that Lamar “puts his hands on” Alford. “They hired a crisis management team to clean up the fact that you beat on your queen,” he says at the end of the track. Seemingly tipped off by a mole, Lamar followed up just a few minutes later with “Meet the Grahams,” with cover art featuring a box of the weight-loss drug Ozempic supposedly prescribed to Drake. In that song, Lamar addresses his verses to Drake’s son, Adonis, and Drake’s parents. “Dear Adonis, I’m sorry that man is your father,” he bluntly opens the track. He also dedicated a verse to Drake’s alleged 11-year-old daughter, who would be the second child the rapper has kept hidden from the public. Drake, however, was quick to jump on Instagram and shut down the claim that he had a secret daughter. More strikingly, though, Lamar refers to Drake as a “predator” and even likens him to Harvey Weinstein. Later that evening, Lamar dropped yet another track — this time, produced by DJ Mustard, who seemingly also has beef with Drake — “Not Like Us,” where he outright calls Drake a “pedophile.” In particular, social media lost it over the triple entendre, “tryna strike a chord, and it’s probably A-minor.” On May 5, it seemed like Drake was ready to bow out after releasing the track “The Heart Part 6.” In addition to the curious claim that he purposely planted false information for Lamar to use, he spends most of the song denying that he sleeps with underage girls. He even addresses a controversial incident from 2018, when Stranger Things actor Millie Bobby Brown, who was then 14 years old, stated in an interview that she texted the rapper about boys. In a haphazard move, Drake attempts to connect these claims to Lamar’s own trauma, referencing the “one record where [Lamar] said [he] got molested” titled “Mother I Sober” — only Lamar doesn’t state that he was sexually abused on the song. In rapping about his cousin who was accused of sexual assault, he claims twice on the track that his cousin didn’t touch him, despite his family not believing him. Drake ends the song with a rambling spoken outro, similar to Nicki Minaj’s Megan Thee Stallion diss “Big Foot” earlier this year. “I’m not going to lie,” he says. “This shit was some good exercise.” In a noticeably exhausted tone, he says “it is what it is,” seemingly waving a white flag. Still, that hasn’t stopped Lamar from publicly reveling in the chart success of “Not Like Us” and the support of his industry allies. On June 19, otherwise known as Juneteenth, Lamar held “The Pop Out: Ken & Friends” at the Kia Forum to celebrate Los Angeles rap and, once again, broadcast his hatred for Drake. At the concert, which was streamed on Amazon and Twitch, Lamar performed “Not Like Us” six times. With each replay, a growing number of musicians, athletes, and other big West Coast names — including YG, Steve Lacy, Russell Westbrook, Black Hippy, and Mustard — joined him onstage, in what looked like an Avengers ensemble of Drake haters. Drake has previously thrived in beefs — but can he win when the whole industry is against him? For the most part, Drake has handled his public gang-up with an expected sense of humor and irreverence. However, with the latest releases, he seems to be fighting a battle he can’t win, using wishy-washy bars to attempt to toss off some serious allegations. It’s worth noting that Drake’s domestic abuse claims against Lamar are just as serious. Nevertheless, rap fans on social media seem more invested in the seedy gossip that’s surrounded Drake’s mostly private romantic life, including these unsettling accusations about underage girls. Plus, after years of dominating the rap scene and making enemies out of several rappers, it seems social media users are ready to see the rapper taken down a few pegs. @xeviuniverse Everyone has their own reasons to dislike him but are aware of everyone elses reasons, makes him unlikable#greenscreen ♬ original sound – Xevi As anyone who’s even slightly followed rap over the past decade and a half can attest, this isn’t Drake’s first time engaging in warfare with his peers. Most famously, his career has seen headline-generating battles with Meek Mill, Pusha T, Joe Budden, and Kanye West. Arguably, his most infamous tiff was the culmination of a long-brewing beef with Pusha T in 2018, where the Virginia rapper exposed Drake’s formerly hidden son, Adonis, to the world. Despite the brief moment of humiliation, Drake ultimately emerged the victor — that is, if you’re using chart numbers and general popularity as a determining metric. After his moderately received victory lap of an album, Views, he was given a more gripping narrative to fuel his blockbuster 2018 album Scorpion. At the same time, he was once again proving his mass appeal outside of the rap audiences with party bangers like “God’s Plan,” “Nice For What,” and “In My Feelings,” all of which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100. More recently, however, Drake has been involved in several seemingly one-sided beefs with famous women. On his 2023 song with 21 Savage, “Circo Loco,” he threw out a not-so-subtle diss at rapper Megan Thee Stallion (“This bitch lie ’bout getting shots but she still a stallion”), joining a chorus of famous men disputing her now-proven claims that singer Tory Lanez shot her in the foot in 2020. During the rollout of For All the Dogs, he vexed actor Halle Berry, who claimed he used a photo of her for the artwork for his single “Slime You Out” without her permission. Additionally, he’s attempted to reignite drama with his former fling Rihanna. Aside from his digs on “Fear of Heights,” he played their collaboration “Work” at one of his concerts just to claim that he “doesn’t sing [the] song anymore.” Drake’s songwriting is often propelled by a sweeping sense of grievance and an obsession with the past and his haters (he’s not that different from Taylor Swift after all!). However, his constant feelings of victimhood within his relationships with women — and the subsequent, more blatant misogyny that’s grown out of that — has begun to wear on critics and parts of his female fanbase. It’s an observation that Lamar has sharply utilized in his diss tracks over the weekend. While this latest beef originally seemed like an ultimately invigorating experience for Drake in a snoozy part of his career, Lamar’s accusations of Drake being a “pedophile” and other predatory behavior have left a strong stench on Drake’s public image. It’ll be fascinating to see whether the seemingly invincible rapper can rebuild fans’ respect after such dark claims. However, history has proven that male rappers can still thrive despite the most sordid allegations. Update, March 17, 5:30 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 17, 2024, and has been updated multiple times, most recently to UMG’s motion to dismiss Drake’s lawsuit.
We’re one step closer to a full-blown Constitutional crisis. | Win McNamee/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 showdown with the courts over deportations, a standoff with major implications for immigration policy and even larger ones for the rule of law. What’s the latest? Donald Trump signed an executive order Friday invoking the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a wartime power that gives the president authority to deport certain foreign nationals without a hearing. By Saturday, the administration had used that power to deport hundreds of immigrants to El Salvador, including alleged members of the Venezuelan gang “Tren de Aragua.” A federal judge ordered the deportations paused amid lawsuits from civil liberties groups, but the migrants arrived in El Salvador — and remain there — despite the judge’s order. Did the administration violate a court order? The judge ruled the deportations should be paused. The administration claims the judge lacked the authority to halt the deportations, in part because his order wasn’t issued until some deportation flights were over international waters. Critics say the administration is pettifogging the issue to obscure the fact that it overran a federal judge. What’s the big picture for immigration? Due process was always going to pose legal and logistical hurdles to Trump’s plan for the largest mass deportation campaign in history. In the Alien Enemies Act, the administration has found a partial workaround — at the expense of civil liberties. What’s the big picture for democracy? Amid congressional Republicans’ supine posture, the judicial branch has been the main check on Trump’s power. The big question has been: “What happens if Trump ignores the courts?” The administration has now shown at least a willingness to flout the spirit of a court ruling — even if they’re not explicitly saying they’re defying the court’s order. That puts us a step closer to a full-blown Constitutional crisis. And with that, it’s time to log off… I’ve struggled to face what’s unfolding in places that depended on USAID before the administration gutted the agency, which is why I was so grateful for my colleague Sigal Samuel’s Vox piece on how we can help. She writes: “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. … You are not powerless here.” Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.
Stephen Miller, deputy White House chief of staff for policy, speaks with President Donald Trump looking on. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images A legal showdown this past weekend shows that the Trump administration is continuing to test the limits of how far they can get away with ignoring or defying court orders. On Saturday, Trump officials attempted to rapidly deport a bunch of people they said were Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador — based on a new and initially secret legal rationale — before progressive activists could sue and judges could stop them. However, the activists did sue and, while deportation flights were either in the air or about to leave, a judge did issue an order to stop them. But the administration ignored the judge’s order and refused to turn around or halt the flights, which handed over a reported 261 immigrants into Salvadoran custody. Trump officials cited a few reasons for letting the deportations proceed. One is that, because two of the flights had already departed US territory, the judge’s order (they claim) no longer bound them. They’ve also asserted that the new legal authority Trump invoked — an obscure, rarely-used law known as the Alien Enemies Act — is un-reviewable by federal courts. Notably, Trump officials seem hesitant to say they were flat-out defying a court order. After an Axios story making that claim was published, it was updated with an anonymous official’s statement: “Very important that people understand we are not actively defying court orders.” But the story makes clear they had the court order in hand and chose to ignore it. Indeed, the way the Trump administration’s challenge to judicial authority has played out is not through open defiance — there’s no bold “I am defying the courts” announcement. Rather, it’s through sneakily trying to get away with things, pushing the limits, looking for edge cases, and finding whatever legal justification they think seems even remotely defensible. For instance: They thought they could get away with those in-progress deportations on Saturday. But there hasn’t been news of further Alien Enemies Act deportations since then — and, if they have stopped for now, they are at least putting on a show of belatedly obeying the judge’s order, while appealing it and hoping for the Supreme Court’s eventual blessing. The tangled series of events involving Saturday’s deportations and a judge’s attempt to stop them On Friday, Trump secretly signed an order saying he’d assert authority under the Alien Enemies Act — a 1798 law only invoked three times before — to rapidly deport members of the Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang. Trump officials were trying to send them to El Salvador (where President Nayib Bukele has agreed to accept US deportees), quickly, before they could challenge their deportations in court, make any defense, or argue they were falsely accused. However, news of Trump’s intention to do this had leaked earlier that week. And, believing the order was imminent, progressive activists filed a lawsuit Saturday morning on behalf of five Venezuelan plaintiffs in US federal custody who feared deportation. US District Judge James Boasberg quickly ordered that those five plaintiffs could not be deported for 14 days, and set a hearing on the topic for late Saturday afternoon. Yet Boasberg’s initial order did not fully block Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act — because he didn’t yet know Trump had already invoked it. Later Saturday afternoon, shortly before the hearing began, the Trump administration made the Alien Enemies Act proclamation public. Then, while the hearing was underway, two deportation flights departed the US, headed for El Salvador. Around 6:47 pm Eastern time, Boasberg issued a verbal order blocking all deportations under the Alien Enemies Act (not just those of the five plaintiffs). He specified that his order may entail turning planes around. He issued his order in writing at 7:26 pm Eastern time. At that point, the two deportation flights had left US territory. Trump officials discussed what to do and decided not to turn those flights around. Additionally, a third deportation flight reportedly departed the US shortly after Boasberg’s order was issued. All three flights eventually landed in El Salvador, where 261 immigrants — mostly Venezuelans, but also some Salvadorans — were turned over to Salvadoran custody. A Trump official told the Washington Post that 137 of them were deported under Alien Enemies Act authority, with the rest being deported under other legal authority. (The five Venezuelans who sued were not deported and remain in US custody.) Trump officials’ claims about what happened here will soon be scrutinized in court Per Axios’s Marc Caputo, White House deputy chief of staff for policy Stephen Miller “orchestrated” all this with Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. Caputo’s sources claim their goal was to have the deportations already finished before any judge stopped them — and they were somewhat foiled. “We wanted them on the ground first, before a judge could get the case, but this is how it worked out,” an anonymous official told him. Furthermore, Caputo’s administration sources claim that they only declined to order the planes back “on advice of counsel,” with the fact that two planes were over international waters being decisive. But this would not justify allowing the third flight to depart the US shortly after Boasberg’s order. More details may be coming soon, as Boasberg has scheduled another late afternoon hearing Monday to question whether the administration complied with his order. For now, though, this seems like the latest effort from the Trump administration to test the limits of what they can get away with in defying the courts. Which means we may find out what, if anything, the courts can do in response.
President Donald Trump greets Chief Justice John Roberts as before Trump’s address to a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on March 4, 2025. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The question of what happens if the Trump administration openly defies a federal court order has hung over the United States since President Donald Trump’s second term began. If that happens, it will trigger a constitutional crisis. Now, that long-awaited crisis may be upon us. On Saturday, Trump issued a proclamation claiming the authority to deport Venezuelan nationals that, he claims, are members of a criminal gang known as Tren de Aragua. Trump alleges that these foreign nationals may be swiftly removed under the Alien Enemies Act of 1798, a law that has only been invoked three times in American history — the last time in World War II. Trump’s claim is highly dubious. The Alien Enemies Act permits the president to order the removal of all citizens of a foreign nation when there is a “declared war” with that nation, or when “invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government.” The United States is not at war with Venezuela. Nor has the Venezuelan government invaded or even threatened to invade the United States. Not long after Trump issued his proclamation, on the same Saturday evening, federal Judge James Boasberg issued two orders that temporarily halted it. The first is a temporary restraining order seeking to prevent any deportations from taking place under Trump’s proclamation until Boasberg has time to hold a full hearing and determine how to proceed in this case. The second order certifies this case, known as J.G.G. v. Trump, as a class action lawsuit concerning “all noncitizens in U.S. custody” who are subject to Trump’s Saturday proclamation. That order forbids the government from “removing members of such class (not otherwise subject to removal) pursuant to the Proclamation for 14 days or until further Order of the Court.” Which brings us to the potential constitutional crisis. At a Saturday hearing on this case, lawyers for the plaintiffs told Boasberg that two planes containing Venezuelans who were deported under the proclamation were “in the air.” During that hearing, Boasberg ordered that “those people need to be returned to the United States.” He also acknowledged, however, that once the planes land and their occupants deplane, he no longer has jurisdiction to order their return. In a document filed Monday morning, the plaintiffs’ attorneys cite publicly available flight data as well as news reports, which suggest that the Trump administration allowed these planes to land and discharge their passengers after Boasberg issued his order. If that is true, then the Trump administration defied the order and can potentially be held in contempt of court. Meanwhile, in a second case known as Chehab v. Noem, the federal government may have removed Dr. Rasha Alawieh, a Lebanese national and professor at Brown University’s medical school, in violation of a court order requiring the government to give the court 48 hours notice before she is removed. The facts in this case are rapidly evolving, however, and two of her lawyers recently withdrew from the case. The Justice Department, for what it is worth, claims that Alawieh was deported after federal authorities found “sympathetic photos and videos” regarding the terrorist organization Hezbollah on her phone. There is also some uncertainty about the timing of the flights in each of the cases. In the case of the Venezuelan deportations, the document plaintiffs filed Monday primarily asks Boasberg to seek clarification from the government about whether these flights landed and discharged their passengers after the judge’s order. It’s also possible that these passengers were deported pursuant to some authority other than the Saturday proclamation, in which case Boasberg’s order would not apply to them. Yet, even if it turns out that no one was deported illegally, the government still must comply with court orders against it, including temporary orders issued while a judge was trying to determine if the government acted illegally. So what can be done if Trump is defying a court order? The Trump administration claims that Boasberg exceeded his authority when he issued his orders, and it points to the alleged Hezbollah connection to justify its actions in Dr. Alawieh’s case. It’s far from clear, however, whether the ultimate merits of either case are relevant at this very early stage of this litigation. If a litigant disagrees with a temporary restraining order, the proper course of action is typically to wait until the judge holds a full hearing on the case and to argue that the order should not be extended. If the judge disagrees, that decision can be appealed to a higher court. But a litigant cannot simply defy a court order because they think it is wrong. Indeed, under normal circumstances, a party that defies a court order can be held in contempt of court and be subject to fines, imprisonment, or other sanctions. But it’s far from clear whether such a contempt order could be enforced if Trump is determined to give the middle finger to the judiciary. As Alexander Hamilton wrote in the Federalist Papers, the courts “may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend upon the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments.” Federal court orders, including contempt of court orders, are enforced by the US Marshals Service, a law enforcement agency housed in the Executive Branch of government. So Trump could potentially order the Marshals to not enforce any court order against his administration. If that happens, there are few legal mechanisms remaining to make Trump obey the law. The obvious remedy for a president who commits serious legal violations and refuses to comply with court orders against him is impeachment. But, even if a Republican US House would agree to impeach Trump — a highly unlikely proposition — it takes 67 votes in the Senate to remove a president. And the Senate couldn’t even find 67 votes to declare Trump ineligible for the presidency after he incited a mob to attack the US Capitol in 2020. For now, at least, the J.G.G. case appears to be moving very quickly. And it remains to be seen whether the Trump administration can plausibly argue that its behavior is legal. If it turns out that the administration is determined to violate court orders it does not like, however, then it is likely that the legal system has run out of tools to check Donald Trump.
Gabby Petito in American Murder: Gabby Petito. | Courtesy of Netflix What makes something an “American” crime? It’s a question that’s inadvertently surfaced in true crime entertainment lately. The trend started with the twin pillars of O.J. Simpson television projects in 2016 — American Crime Story: The People v. O.J. Simpson, Ryan Murphy’s fictionalized account of the 1995 trial, and the documentary series O.J.: Made in America. Since then, we’ve seen a number of true crime shows — most docuseries, but scripted ones too — being given the title “American [X].” Netflix has been especially keen on the naming trend recently. There’s 2023’s Waco: American Apocalypse, about the deadly Branch Davidian siege in Texas in 1993. Last year’s American Conspiracy delved into a gnarly conspiracy theory linked to the death of a freelance journalist in West Virginia in the early ’90s. American Nightmare told the horrific story of a woman’s encounter with cops who refused to believe her abduction had been real. In addition to American Crime Story, which also aired seasons about the murder of Gianni Versace and the Clinton impeachment scandal, there are the other “American” series. American Murder has so far covered the killings of three different women (Shanann Watts, Laci Peterson, and Gabby Petito), while American Manhunt has looked at the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombing, O.J. Simpson from Bronco chase to trial, and the quest to track down Osama bin Laden. The trend shows no sign of stopping: Hulu will soon air Good American Family, a dramatization of the convoluted story of Natalia Grace. Brand strategist and linguist Laurel Sutton suggests that the phenomenon grew out of American Psycho, in which novelist Bret Easton Ellis consciously used the title as a critique of the country’s culture and values that helped create a monster. These true crime shows, similarly, are “attempting to identify something that is specifically American about the kinds of crimes or criminals that they’re profiling,” she says. What that something is, though, is in the eye of the beholder. “Branding anything with ‘America’ is designed to have all these different resonances for all these different people,” Sutton explains. That’s partly why the word is effective from a marketing perspective, “because it applies to so many different things depending on who you’re talking to.” It’s also a uniquely American trend: “You don’t see that branding in other places. You don’t see German Crime or Dutch Housewives.” In a 2016 piece on the trend of “American” shows in that era, a branding expert put forth that the word America “codes for a multiplicity of perspectives and outlooks, which is why the word is so common in anthology series, yet also points to a larger collective experience, which is why the word accompanies so many shows that explore race and gender.” Cristina Mislán teaches media history at the University of Missouri School of Journalism, and she points out that the true crime genre acts as “something of a black mirror” to the nation itself, with its history of violence and current precarious status. To call these shows American, she suggests, “says something about what this country is” — with all its contradictions and complications on full display. One way to think about this bumper crop of true crime titles is that they’re intended to be read ironically, to make you aware that there’s some lie at the heart of what’s being examined. For example, each of the victims profiled in the American Murder series has been a middle-class white woman supposedly living out a heteronormative version of the “American dream.” For the Peterson and Watts families, that package included marriage, children, and financial prosperity; for Gabby Petito, it included traveling the country with her boyfriend in an idealized #vanlife. All three women projected a positive, upbeat public image, but all three had partners who ultimately murdered them. The American Murder series takes pains to highlight the ways in which the murders evince larger social themes, including domestic violence, the pressures of parenthood, and, in Petito’s case, the inadequate protections of law enforcement. The series also makes sure you understand it’s aware of the problem it’s perpetuating: “Missing White Woman Syndrome,” wherein the stories of white women who vanish consume far more public interest than those of people of color. Sutton suggests the irony is part of the appeal; both she and Mislán spoke of a kind of catharsis that can come from seeing this uneasy juxtaposition onscreen. “I think a lot of Americans do have this ironic awareness,” Sutton said. “You want to watch something to see yourself get taken down a little bit. As an American, we’re gonna find out how horrible Americans really are, and I know this in my soul, but it’s nice to hear somebody else say it.” At the same time, that irony only goes so far when true crime shows inherently peddle what they critique. While American Murder takes pains to demonstrate Shanann Watts’s intense focus on presenting the “perfect” family image for her social media audience, it’s hard not to see such shows as examples of the voyeurism they condemn. True crime’s fixation on mining individual cases for storytelling may also be part of the problem. “We often want to place everything on individual stories because this is a country of individualism,” Mislán points out. “Part of Americanness and American exceptionalism is this idea of rugged individualism.” Take American Nightmare, which makes a compelling argument that systemic misogyny undergirded the police response to victim Denise Huskins when she was abducted from her home in 2015. It is both a valiant attempt by the documentarians and all too easy for the audience to zero in on the singular crime at hand regardless. Mislán argues that we have an easier time focusing on the discrete stories of drama, tragedy, and occasional triumph offered by true crime — but a much harder time thinking about the structures that make them possible. “We tend to not be able to think systemically,” she said, pointing specifically to the impact of policing and the crime beat on American criminal justice.“We get some catharsis, but we never actually hold the system to account at the end of the day.” Still, there are so many basic aspects of American society that get interrogated through true crime that it remains, for many people, a useful lens through which to think about larger issues. “Crime is a place where everything is heightened,” Sutton says. That pulls us in, and creates an opportunity for us to contemplate how, under the right circumstances, we too could end up in a story like this. Even these series’ attempts at rectifying narratives that have long been sensationalized imply something about American identity. As Mislán points out, sensationalism is the point: our insatiable appetite for true crime, and the willingness of the media to capitalize on that, is the reason there’s even a narrative to begin with. To look at the current crop of “American” true crime, then, is to come up with a portrait of America that’s illuminating: clearly flawed, built on broken systems and cultural beliefs that need interrogating — but perhaps, striving for something better.
For a chance at a youthful complexion, you could slap rendered cow fat on your face, rub snail slime into your wrinkles, or get a salmon sperm facial right after a microneedling treatment. You read that right: These are things actual people are doing. Influencers, celebrities, and everyday consumers alike are touting the youthful glow such animal-derived products bring to their complexion. For some consumers, opting for a product like beef tallow is an intentional decision to move away from the conventional skincare products typically sold at the drug store or Sephora. It’s understandable — every day, it seems, we’re told of new horror about how forever chemicals and microplastics are embedded into our environment and bodies. From food to skincare, US consumers have shown they want to distance themselves from potentially unhealthy or toxic ingredients. They’re looking for products that market themselves as clean, concerned that the ingredients in typical treatments are worsening issues like acne or are harmful for long-term health. Beef tallow is a type of MAHA-ism for beauty (and for food, too). One surprising thing I’ve struggled with bad eczema flare-ups my whole life, so I know what it’s like to be frustrated with endlessly dry and patchy skin. But according to Sentient, the benefits of beef tallow as a skincare product are “largely unremarkable.” And while some may see relief for their skin ailments, it could also worsen their issues. Just like any product for the skin, there is no one-size-fits-all solution. The cosmetics industry sold over $400 billion worth of products in 2023, with skincare making up the sector’s largest category. It’s easy to get sucked into the rabbit hole that is becoming beautiful, especially in a world that is all about maximizing self-improvement. Skincare, in particular, is a personal issue for me — I’ve had eczema my whole life, and when I’m having a particularly bad flare-up, I feel insecure and desperate for a cure. There’s nothing wrong with wanting to feel good about yourself. But there is an ethical problem if feeling good about yourself comes at the expense of animals — and that’s increasingly the case with these new clean beauty trends. The cosmetics sector has long — and, at times, quietly — depended on animals, much like the agriculture and fashion industries. Way before folks were spending $44 on beef tallow whipped with chamomile, everyday products like hair-strengthening shampoos featured keratin (usually derived from animal fur or hooves), lipstick pigments depended on carmine (ground-up bugs), and anti-aging moisturizers incorporated collagen (a structural protein found in animal hides and fish skin). That’s not including animal testing to ensure the safety of ingredients in cosmetics. While some consumers are intentionally seeking out animal-derived products and treatments, plenty of consumers aren’t necessarily concerned about what’s in their cosmetics, or are perhaps unaware of how a certain science-y sounding ingredient is sourced. Instead, they orient more toward what’s trendy or seemingly effective. Whatever the reason may be for using animal-based skincare and beauty products, we’re still ignoring a larger problem. Just because something comes from an animal, it doesn’t mean the process of getting into our hands is “clean” or “natural.” And even if some of these animal-derived products have beneficial properties for our skin, it still comes at a cost bigger than we realize. In reality, many of these beauty trends that claim to be against the “toxic” nature of mainstream wellness or those touting the benefits of animal-based products are upholding the very industries that are harming our planet. And in turn, it’s harming ourselves — a steep cost for beauty. “Clean” living, dirty consequences When I saw beef tallow hawked on social media, one question immediately came to mind: How were these businesses sourcing their animal ingredients? That led me to look up “beef tallow for skin” on Amazon, where there were pages upon pages of results. They all used similar language to describe their product: “ancestral,” “natural,” “organic.” Most of the sellers advertised themselves as small businesses and included images of cows on their product packaging, to further hammer home that what you’re purchasing differs from big, mainstream beauty. Beef tallow for skin is made by taking the fat of a cow and rendering it until it’s ready to be whipped into a cream-like moisturizer. So where are these cows to begin with? Of the nine products I looked at with 300 reviews or more on Amazon, only one named a small farm in Virginia as a supplier. The others simply listed that their tallow came from “grass-fed” cows. While the term “grass-fed” may suggest to some consumers the pinnacle of animal welfare and sustainability, the reality is far more complicated. For starters, virtually all cows spend most of their lives on pasture eating grass; it’s only until their final months that they’re moved into feedlots, which are pastureless, outdoor dirt pens — in essence, factory farms for cattle. (Per USDA guidelines, “grass-fed” cows are never supposed to enter feedlots and remain on pasture during their final months, though the agency doesn’t go on to ranches to verify them and there’s a long history of meat companies misleading the public on these types of claims.) Feedlots are worse for animal welfare, but “grass-fed” beef has its own sustainability problems, so there are tradeoffs between the two systems. But ultimately, sustainability and animal welfare claims on animal products are poorly regulated, and it’s even harder to trace/verify these claims once they wind up on a skincare product. “Terms like sustainability, farm-raised, so forth, are pretty broad,” said Glynn Tonsor, an agricultural economist and assistant professor at Kansas State University. “There’s not an internationally accepted standard that you got to cross-check on.” So language like “grass-fed” doesn’t help determine the source of the beef or how high-quality it is — but businesses use them anyway in marketing their products because they’re aware these terms appeal to consumers and elicit a sense of naturalness and quality. One of the beef tallow moisturizers on Amazon with over 700 reviews had no website to find any other information — just an Amazon storefront with other beef tallow beauty products. It also advertised its beef tallow as “organic,” a claim that should make you raise your eyebrow because the US Department of Agriculture does have regulations for food products labeled as organic. While the USDA doesn’t oversee cosmetics, beauty products with agricultural ingredients can be organic-certified by the USDA if they meet the standards. “There’s hardly any organic beef production,” says Richard Sexton, a University of California Davis agricultural economist, when I asked him about beef by-product sourcing. “I don’t really know how they can say that the by-products are organic.” Tonsor added another way to think about vague claims on products: “If somebody tries to sell you gluten-free water, don’t pay a premium for it.” And while “grass-fed” can give off the vibe of a more green, natural, or sustainable process, it’s actually worse for the climate, says Matthew Hayek, an assistant professor of environmental studies at New York University. “Grass-fed trades off not eating corn and soy for living longer, requiring more land, and producing more greenhouse gasses,” the 2024 Future Perfect 50 honoree told me. Over a third of methane emissions from human activity comes from our agricultural practices, with cattle being the main driver. (Cattle burps are rich in methane). Big environmental impacts like global greenhouse gas emissions can feel abstract, but for the people living near big cattle operations, the externalities from these facilities are anything but. Hundreds to thousands of beef cattle can be found on a singular feedlot, and they generate huge amounts of manure. In the US, factory farms — including those raising cows, pigs, and chickens —produce nearly a trillion pounds of waste a year, which ends up in giant piles, massive lagoons, or sprayed onto neighboring fields as fertilizer. People who live within miles of factory farms report terrible stenches that keep them indoors and force them to have their windows closed. When animal waste breaks down, it forms pollutants like ammonia gas. Ammonia emits a deeply unpleasant smell, and exposure can lead to symptoms like headaches, irritated eyes, skin, and lungs. One study found that there are 12,700 premature deaths annually attributed to increased fine particulate matter pollution (largely driven by ammonia) from the production of animal-based food. And 4,000 of those deaths are specifically attributed to beef cattle. Communities near factory farms have also reported animal waste polluting their waterways with nitrates. So while “grass-fed” beef tallow for skin has been popularized by content creators on platforms like TikTok for it being “natural” and “clean” because it’s animal-derived, it’s likely that it’s helping bolster an industry that’s polluting local communities and our planet. Tallow isn’t the only cattle by-product used in skincare that has serious environmental consequences. A 2023 collaborative investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, The Guardian, Center for Climate Crime Analysis, ITV, and O Joio e O Trigo found that collagen operations in Brazil drove the deforestation of at least 1,000 sq. mi of tropical forest as well as violence against Indigenous peoples occupying that land. Brazil is the world’s largest exporter of beef, and as demand for collagen booms, more land will be needed to raise cattle. The cattle industry has driven 80 percent of Amazon forest loss in Brazil, according to the investigation. Even calling beef tallow or collagen “by-products” undermines how useful they can be as profit-makers to the meat industry, even if they generate far less money than the parts we eat. “If something fetches a price, then it’s not a by-product,” Hayek said. “It’s another revenue generating production stream. It’s a co-product.” The strangeness of snail slime and salmon sperm Sourcing for even more niche animal-based products, like snail mucin and salmon sperm skincare treatments, is not as easy to track as beef. Both were popularized in South Korea, a leader in the cosmetics and skincare industry. Snail mucin has made a recent comeback in the US with popular products like COSRX’s snail essence formula, which has nearly 4,000 reviews on Ulta, a cosmetics chain. An article from Racked reported that the process for sourcing and extracting snail mucin is intentionally mysterious because beauty companies don’t want their competition to know the technology they use. A 2022 Business Insider video showed just that, however, uncovering how one snail production hub in Italy extracted their mucin. After receiving the snails from local snail farms, the small creatures were placed inside machines where they were sprayed with an acidic solution that caused the snails to excrete their slime. The institution said it was a cruelty-free process, but after repeating this process a few times, the snails were euthanized and were used for cooking and other cosmetic products. Salmon sperm facials are much newer to the scene than snail mucin. In South Korea, the process involves injecting polydeoxyribonucleotide (PDRN), which are fragments of DNA from salmon sperm, all over the face. In the US, salmon DNA injections have not been approved by the FDA, so cosmetic spas often apply PDRN topically after microneedling in order for the product to be absorbed. Jennifer Aniston, who has received a salmon sperm facial, had the same question as I did when I first heard about these treatments: “How do you get salmon’s sperm?” she asked the Wall Street Journal in 2023. I called up eight cosmetic spas to ask where they sourced their salmon DNA, and scoured several others’ websites for any details. While there appears to be at least a few PDRN products being used by professionals, the one that came up the most was Rejuran. Their website for cosmetic spas says they source PDRN from wild salmon in Korea, and their retail US website says they seek ways to reduce their environmental impact across their operations. I emailed Rejuran for more details about where the salmon comes from for their PDRN-based products, as well as if their environmental efforts extend to how they source their salmon. They have not yet responded. Most of the fish we use today comes from aquaculture production, which farms fish and other aquatic life, while the rest is wild caught in fisheries. While fish has less of an environmental impact than other animals commonly used for consumption (like cows), fisheries still come with their fair share of sustainability issues, like damaging seabeds, unintentionally catching other marine animals, and overfishing. The individualism of “clean” beauty If you take an extra minute or two to think about it, the strangeness of using animals for something as superficial as perfect skin starts to set in. Couple that with obscure sourcing practices, harmful environmental impacts, and questionable animal welfare practices, and the cost of it all starts to add up. But when you feel the pressure to look a certain way, it’s easy to gloss over how the sausage — or in some cases, serum — gets made. The desire to have a healthy body, to have access to healthy food and water, and for our environment to be free from harmful toxins is a right we all deserve. This newest iteration of skincare trends advertised as clean, natural, and animal-derived, however, ultimately does nothing to make that goal a reality. Want to let go of animal products in your skincare routine? Here’s how to start: This list by Shop Like You Give a Damn lays out common beauty and skincare ingredients that are always, often, or sometimes animal-derived. Next time you’re shopping for a new moisturizer or serum, you can use the list to cross-reference and determine which products are free of animal-based ingredients. There’s no official definition of clean beauty, but the general idea refers to skincare and cosmetics that exclude ingredients that could be harmful to our bodies, like parabens. Much of this parallels the rise of returning to “clean living” and “ancestral diets.” People are cutting out dyes, preservatives, and ultra-processed foods in favor of eating high protein, animal-based diets and using only “non-toxic” products. It’s a lifestyle that’s been around for a while but it’s making a strong comeback in tandem with the Make American Healthy Again movement. As it tends to be with wellness and beauty, this revitalized uptick in animal-based beauty is deeply individualistic. Here’s how you can look younger longer, here’s how you can be more beautiful, here’s how you can remove toxins from your body. The prioritization of personal validation over communal health encourages people to trust surface-level statements about what’s “clean” and what’s not at face value. It’s true that nearly everything humans do is extractive one way or another, but that’s not a reason to avoid acknowledging our participation in that cost. If people want to get real about healthier communities and a cleaner world, it can’t be done alone by individually buying your way toward there. It’s much harder and more complicated than that, and I know that the average person doesn’t have the resources to seriously address these issues. Stronger regulations for both the food and beauty industry could take the responsibility off of consumers and instead put it on companies. In 2022, the US passed the Modernization of Cosmetics Regulation Act, which intended to do this very thing by giving the Food and Drug Administration regulatory power over cosmetics. But according to Allure, advocates feared that implementation would be delayed after Donald Trump won the 2024 election due to potential FDA cuts. Just last month, hundreds of employees at federal health agencies, including the FDA, were fired. In the meantime, maybe a small step in the right direction is to look away from our reflection in the mirror, pay more attention to what we’re consuming, and to dig a little deeper if the cost — supporting industries that are contributing to local air and water pollution, climate change, and questionable animal welfare practices — is worth the price.
US President Donald Trump meets with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte in the Oval Office of the White House in Washington, DC, on March 13, 2025. | Mandel Ngan/AFP Throughout his first term as president, Donald Trump repeatedly threatened to leave NATO, an alliance that in his view allows other countries who don’t spend enough on their own defense to get a free ride on US security guarantees. His former national security adviser John Bolton has written that he believes Trump would have followed through on the threat if he’d been reelected in 2020. This term, though, despite deepening tensions with Europe, Trump hasn’t said much about leaving the alliance. His secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, has avowed, “The United States remains committed to the NATO alliance and to the defense partnership with Europe. Full stop.” At this point, the better question is whether Trump has effectively made the alliance irrelevant. The US is still a NATO member. But Trump has consistently undermined its core principle that members will treat any attack on another member’s territory as an attack on their own, and come to the attacked member’s aid. This principle of mutual defense only works if both the allies and their adversaries believe that it’s credible — that countries would actually put the lives of their own citizens on the line to defend allies. In the case of Trump and NATO, the guarantee is getting a lot harder to believe. “Would Donald Trump choose to go and fight for Estonia?” said Dalibor Rohac, a senior fellow and expert on European politics at the American Enterprise Institute. “I think at some level, it requires a suspension of disbelief to think that he would.” Trump’s second term has already been far more alarming, from a European perspective than the first, thanks to actions including Trump’s abrupt pivot toward Russia in the Ukraine war, the Oval Office humiliation of Volodymyr Zelenskyy, his new tariffs, JD Vance’s combative speech at the Munich Security Conference, the territorial threats toward NATO members Canada and Denmark, and reports that the president is considering redeploying troops from Germany to Russia-friendly Hungary. European leaders might have thought of Trump’s first term as an aberration, a bizarre four years followed by a return to normalcy. His return to the White House made clear they may be dealing with a very different United States going forward — one whose security commitments can’t be taken for granted in the long run, even if Trump is replaced by another Joe Biden-style transatlanticist in four years. Recent statements from European leaders suggest they are not so confident about the credibility of America’s commitment to the alliance. “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,” French President Emmanuel Macron said in a recent televised speech to the nation. “Strategic autonomy” from Washington has long been a priority for Macron, and something of a French tradition dating back to the formation of the alliance. It was more surprising to hear Germany’s likely incoming Chancellor Friedrich Merz, hailing from a center-right party with a strong transatlanticist tradition, say that “After Donald Trump’s statements…it is clear that the Americans are largely indifferent to the fate of Europe” and that Europe must work as quickly as possible to “achieve independence from the US.” Some of this work will involve steps to increase defense spending, military readiness, and aid to Ukraine that are already underway. There have also been increasing conversations on the continent about developing an independent nuclear deterrent, outside of Washington’s control. Either way, it’s clear that the alliance that has been the bedrock of Western security strategy for nearly 80 years is no longer what it was. Without actually leaving it, Trump may have simply made NATO irrelevant. Does the heart of the NATO treaty even still exist? The core of the NATO alliance is spelled out in Article 5 of the alliance’s founding treaty: “The Parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.” In the event of such an attack, each member pledges to “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force, to restore and maintain the security of the North Atlantic area.” In practice, this guarantee was an effective deterrent to first the Soviet Union, and then Russia, because of the involvement of the United States, the NATO country with by far the largest conventional military and nuclear arsenal. Washington has had fierce disagreements with other NATO members in the past: the war in Iraq, for example. Trump is also hardly the first president to suggest that America’s core interests lie elsewhere — Barack Obama also tried to execute a “pivot to Asia” — or that European countries should take more responsibility for their own defense. But the current hostility to the very idea of the alliance is unprecedented. “It has been core to every administration until now to affirm in a positive way that the United States is committed to the defense of Europe, that it is committed to Article 5,” said Ivo Daalder, who served as US ambassador to NATO during the Obama administration. “That is the cornerstone of our engagement in the world.” But, Daalder added, “Trump has, from 2016 onwards, put question marks behind that commitment.” It’s not just Trump’s threats to leave the alliance. He has called into question whether the US would follow its obligations under the treaty at all. In 2020, he reportedly told European officials, in a closed-door meeting, “You need to understand that if Europe is under attack, we will never come to help you and to support you.” During his 2020 campaign, he said he would invite Russia to do “whatever the hell you want” to “delinquent” members of the alliance. During a recent meeting with reporters in the Oval Office, Trump said his “biggest problem” with NATO is that he doubts whether the mutual defense clause would work in practice, saying, “If the United States was in trouble and we called them, we said, we got a problem…do you think they’re going to come and protect us? They’re supposed to. I’m not so sure.” Article 5 has been invoked exactly once since NATO’s founding in 1949: after the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The alliance did come to America’s aid. Soldiers from over a dozen NATO countries died in the war in Afghanistan that followed. The other ostensible reason for Trump’s ire during his first term was the failure of most NATO members to meet a target, set in 2014, of spending at least 2 percent of their GDP on defense. In 2021, just six member countries hit that goal. But things have changed since then: 23 of the alliance’s 32 members now meet the 2 percent target. Trump can, with some justification, take a victory lap for this change (though Vladimir Putin surely deserves more credit). And during a meeting at the White House last week, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte praised him for prodding members to spend more. But Trump has also upped the ante, saying European countries should be spending 5 percent on defense, more than any NATO country, including the United States currently spends. NBC recently reported that Trump is considering calibrating America’s NATO membership so that it is not bound to defend countries that don’t meet a set spending target. It’s hard to imagine how this would work in practice. The countries on NATO’s Eastern flank, like Poland and the Baltic countries, which are the most concerned about being attacked by Russia, are already spending the most on defense. (Officials from these countries often point out that they spend more, as a percentage of GDP, than the United States.) And the right-wing parties in Europe that the Trump administration has publicly aligned itself with, including Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz and France’s National Rally, are the ones blocking higher defense spending at both a national and continent-wide level. Trump’s calls for higher spending often seem less like a genuine policy demand than a cudgel to wield against an alliance he doesn’t much care for in the first place. Trump’s statements, Daalder said, have “weakened the confidence that allies feel to the point that, I would argue, allies now are no longer convinced that, in fact, the United States is committed to Article 5.” And if they are no longer convinced, it’s fair to ask whether Article 5, de facto, still exists. Europe’s nuclear future For the moment, “the dominant strategy for European governments is to kind of try to act as if NATO didn’t exist and make sure that they are ready to face the dangers alone,” Rohac said. Some of this will involve increasing defense spending and increasing and building up conventional capabilities. Parties in Germany, for instance, agreed this week to a historic deal to exempt defense spending from the country’s constitutionally enshrined limits on government borrowing. But from its founding, the NATO alliance and Article 5 have also been tied to nuclear strategy and French President Charles de Gaulle’s famous question of whether the US would be willing to “trade New York for Paris” in the event of a nuclear war with the Soviet Union. “The ability of the United States to reassure allies that it’s willing to destroy itself in a nuclear war to defend them is a difficult case to make under the best of circumstances,” Daalder said. “It’s a nearly impossible case to make under the present circumstances.” Even before Trump returned to office, there had been increasing debate on the continent about whether Europe needs to build out nuclear deterrence independent of Washington. Currently, two European countries have nuclear weapons of their own. Britain’s are assigned to NATO, and experts question whether its program could even survive without US support; France has a fully independent deterrent. The US also maintains an arsenal of around 100 B61 gravity bombs — the smallest nukes in the US arsenal but still big enough to kill thousands if detonated over a city — in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. In his recent speech, Macron repeated an offer he has made several times in the past to extend the protection of France’s nuclear arsenal to other European countries. In a recent speech, Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk said he was taking Macron’s offer seriously and that Poland “must reach for the most modern capabilities also related to nuclear weapons and modern unconventional weapons.” The ability to rely on the US for nuclear deterrence is one reason far fewer countries have nuclear weapons today than many expected at the dawn of the nuclear age. For instance, the US convinced what was then West Germany to renounce the development of nuclear weapons of its own in exchange for protection under the US nuclear umbrella. But if allies concluded that extended deterrence is a sham, further proliferation seems inevitable. Russia is watching If NATO allies their doubts about the reliability of Article 5, it seems inevitable that the alliance’s adversaries may start to doubt it as well. The war in Ukraine has, in many ways, been the ultimate demonstration of the value of NATO: Despite billions of dollars in weapons and aid crossing Ukraine’s borders, Russia has not directly attacked Poland or any other NATO country’s territory. Hostile as he may be to NATO, Putin does appear to respect Article 5. But for how long? “With the threats that Russia is voicing toward the Baltic states, toward Poland, toward Finland, of course we are worried,” Lithuanian Defense Minister Dovile Sakaliene said during a meeting with reporters on a recent visit to Washington. “Their military capability is growing even while waging full-scale war in Ukraine.” Given the difficulties it’s had and is still having in Ukraine, it’s hard to imagine Russia launching an all-out invasion of another country, let alone a NATO member, in the next few years. But Russia has been carrying out more alleged “gray zone” attacks on Western countries, ranging from election interference to maritime sabotage to arson. Responding and deterring attacks like these is already a challenge, given the difficulties involved in definitely attributing them to Russia and the fact that they fall short of the kind of armed aggression envisioned in the NATO treaty. But they could well get more aggressive if NATO’s commitment to mutual defense starts to look less ironclad. A future, more Europe-led NATO would likely be focused more on the alliance’s original purpose of deterring Russian aggression on the continent, rather than the overseas deployments in places like Afghanistan and Libya. For some European policymakers, there is a silver lining to Trump’s attitude Though they may not appreciate the crudeness of his approach, many concede he has a point that Europe should take greater responsibility for its own defense and make more of the decisions about its own defense priorities, rather than letting Washington set them. But that’s going to require a new way of thinking. “What will we do for leadership?” asked Nick Witney, a British former diplomat and EU official, now with the European Council on Foreign Relations. “For 80 years, that’s always been easily solved. We go and ask the Americans, and whatever they say, that’s what we should do.” The past 80 years may have been an era in which Europe felt uncomfortably dependent on the US for security, but it’s also been a period of unprecedented peace on the continent. A future with less American presence in the alliance will require new ways of thinking and risk old sources of trust reemerging. Some policymakers have raised concerns about the rest of Europe relying on French nuclear weapons as a deterrent, given the real possibility France too could be governed by Russia-friendly right-wing populists in a few years Trump’s actions and statements undoubtedly call the future of US participation in NATO into question, Witney added. But “no one quite wants to let go of the security blanket.”
On Monday, the National Institutes of Health (NIH) posted on X that it would terminate over 400 grants, adding up to some $250 million in funding, to Columbia University over its response to pro-Palestinian protests. The following day, the Trump administration pulled $800 million in USAID-related grants from Johns Hopkins University, academia’s biggest research and development spender. These cuts come on top of last month’s announcement of major rollbacks to what are known as indirect costs — money the NIH gives research institutions on top of project-specific grants to cover necessary expenses like building maintenance, utilities, and administrative staff salaries. Many universities — both large and small, public and private — rely on the NIH to sustain a lot of their day-to-day operations. Any threat to that funding poses an existential threat to higher education. Without the jobs, medical research, and technological developments made possible by these institutions, people outside of academia could miss out on breakthrough treatments for diseases like cancer, and will be more vulnerable to public health crises. As a result, the US will likely lose its technological competitiveness on a global scale, which could damage the economy in the long run. The indirect cost cuts have been temporarily blocked by a federal judge, but the chaos still compelled many universities to preemptively tighten their belts. Some institutions are paring back on graduate programs: freezing new faculty hires and PhD student applications, accepting fewer students than usual, or even rescinding existing offer letters. The UMass Chan Medical School pulled back on all of its admissions offers for the fall 2025 term, blaming funding uncertainty for biomedical research. Why exactly has the Trump administration seemingly declared war on academic biomedical research? In theory, depriving future researchers of places in academia could push them toward the private sector, which potentially aligns with a conservative pro-business approach. But the antipathy goes deeper than that. Vice President JD Vance has said that “the universities are the enemy.” Attacking science and higher education, whether under the guise of reducing taxpayer waste or punishing antisemitism, was always part of this administration’s plan. But its haphazard destabilization of the scientific enterprise won’t automatically funnel would-be biomedical PhDs into pharmaceutical or biotech companies, especially when there already aren’t enough jobs in those industries now to absorb the flood of highly educated people applying for them. If turned away from grad school, it’s more likely that young scientists will take their talents to other countries, or leave the field altogether. While the headlines have been about STEM funding, academic departments that fall far outside the NIH’s purview — like history, or comparative literature — are also being affected. That’s because research groups in STEM departments bring in the big federal grants universities depend on, while arts and humanities research largely rely on money the university pulls from endowments, tuition, and state funding. Without the NIH’s money, universities may be forced to divert funds from humanities to STEM departments, where research facilities and equipment are way more expensive. As a result, when well-resourced STEM departments fall, they take humanities down with them. And when graduate programs downsize, universities lose the PhD students that keep research and undergraduate education afloat. And without grad student labor, the whole academic system crumbles. Academics are terrified, and they should be. There’s only so much instability that young scholars can stomach to chase careers that the government is actively destroying. We risk losing an entire generation of future experts, and the potential harm that could cause is incalculable. And yet, even academia’s stoutest defenders would acknowledge there were serious problems with STEM graduate education even before Trump took office again. If done intentionally, downsizing PhD training programs could be a good thing. While the way these sudden funding cuts are being carried out cause far more chaos than positive change, universities do need fewer PhD students — and to take better care of those they admit. We have too many grad students For most of American history, higher education was limited to the privileged few. That changed after World War II, when the GI Bill made universities dramatically more accessible. Cold War-era investments, many of them motivated by post-Sputnik competition with the Soviet Union, subsidized the growth of PhD programs in STEM fields, all aiming to advance the nation’s strategic interests in science and military readiness. And those fields kept growing. Today, the pool of potential PhD candidates across all disciplines is much larger than it was during the Cold War. Roughly 40 percent of Americans over 25 are college graduates, and over 8.5 million of them have a doctorate or professional degree. Earning a medical, law, or business administration degree often equips students for high-earning careers (and, in many cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt). But the academic job market is bleak for newly minted PhDs, and it has been for decades. In STEM fields, it’s not uncommon for PhD grads to spend at least five years in postdoctoral positions, earning under $60,000 annually, all with no guarantee of ever landing a faculty job. And while STEM grads who can’t find a home in academia can often turn to jobs in biopharma or engineering, humanities graduates are much more dependent on academic employment — and those jobs are increasingly scarce. In 2020, fewer than half of new humanities PhDs had a job lined up at graduation. When much of what you’re producing can’t find a market, it’s a good sign you’re oversupplying. But while the glut of PhDs is bad for recent graduates, it is convenient for universities that use grad students as a cheap, talented, and highly motivated workforce. Because they are often defined as “trainees,” universities often get away with treating early-career academics like apprentices, rather than workers. More grad students means more research and teaching for a fraction of the cost of hiring full-time professors to do the same. (Perhaps unsurprisingly, unionization efforts among grad students are generally met with hostility from administration and faculty, who fear stalled scientific progress and undergraduate education.) As universities are forced to pare down on graduate admissions in light of Trump’s attacks on science and higher education, they’ll have to reckon with the consequences of losing the people who do the bulk of academia’s dirty work. With fewer junior scientists, research groups will produce less data and publish fewer papers, potentially jeopardizing the careers of young professors who rely on trainees and publications to earn tenure. Fewer graduate student instructors will also mean inflated class sizes for undergraduates. It’s easy to dismiss cuts to PhD programs as problems confined to ivory towers. I spent six years earning a neuroscience PhD, and it’s difficult to garner sympathy for someone who voluntarily sacrificed the bulk of her twenties studying the intricacies of the orbitofrontal cortex. But the truth is that academic research lays the groundwork for virtually every innovation and advancement that comes from private corporations. Fundamental research — even that which doesn’t have any obvious market value — drives progress. When universities lose part of their academic workforce, the costs extend far beyond campus. The question isn’t whether we need researchers — we do. It’s how we can sustainably support knowledge production while treating academic workers with the dignity they deserve. PhD programs have no choice but to focus on quality, not quantity “As long as I’ve been in the profession, science has run on a series of strange cultural practices that rely on uncompensated labor,” C. Brandon Ogbunu, an assistant professor in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Yale, wrote in Undark last week. Generations of researchers have accepted these conditions as part of the job, but they’re not. Exploitative systems can — and should — be dismantled and rebuilt. Not through the chaos and confusion of Trump’s cuts, but through gradual admissions reductions and strategic cuts to brand-boosting money pits (like sports). There is an opportunity to envision a better academia — one that values, adequately trains, and fairly compensates young scholars. When researchers aren’t scrambling to make ends meet or anxious about their career prospects, they can devote more mental energy to their work. Properly supported scholars take bigger intellectual risks, and are more likely to pursue ambitious, potentially groundbreaking work. And, quite simply, all workers deserve a living wage. Ranking systems, which are used to recruit students and establish a reputation, often include ratios of doctoral students to total students or faculty in their calculations. NIH grants also require applicants to prove they’ve trained and retained PhD students, incentivizing universities to produce more PhDs — whether those graduates have job prospects or not. One potential fix: admit fewer grad students, pay each student more, and measure success in terms of individual job placements, mentorship quality, and research impact. Long-term positions for senior scientists and lecturers can pick up the slack, and maintain institutional memory better than a transient workforce-in-training ever could. Without these incentives, departments won’t be punished by funders for reducing graduate program admissions or for supporting students in leaving if grad school ends up being a poor fit. With fewer students to support, universities could afford to increase PhD stipends, many of which currently fall well below the cost of living, especially in humanities departments. (PhD stipends usually range between $20,000 and $45,000 per year, with many universities paying humanities and social science students thousands less than that.) As the foreign aid community comes to terms with the fact that it needs to be ruthless about prioritizing what it can do with fewer resources, academia may need to do the same. As devastating as these cuts to higher education are, it may be the shock the system needs to make much-needed changes. Pulling the rug out from under hopeful PhD applicants was not the way to downsize academia — but we do have too many PhDs. On the other side of this chaos, if there’s anything left at all, could be a pared-down system that prioritizes quality over quantity. The Economist published a cynical take on grad school back in 2010: “Many of those who embark on a PhD are the smartest in their class and will have been the best at everything they have done,” they write. “Few will be willing to accept that the system they are entering could be designed for the benefit of others, that even hard work and brilliance may well not be enough to succeed, and that they would be better off doing something else.” But producing specialized knowledge creators and expert researchers is a good deal for any country trying to solve big societal problems, and devaluing it risks driving smart people out of the US, where their work is under attack. While PhD programs often fail to teach students how to teach, communicate with regular people, or navigate corporate politics, they do train people to read deeply, plan challenging projects, and execute them with discipline. We need that now more than ever.
A Vox reader asks: If we have “separation of church and state,” why do we give religious schools tax exemption? How come religious schools get government funding? Why was Trump allowed to campaign on religion and publicly sell Bibles? Why does it say “In God We Trust” on our money? Why is “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance? The concept of “separation of church and state” isn’t quite as ironclad as you may think. The First Amendment prohibits laws “respecting an establishment of religion,” a provision that many Americans believe should create a firm wall of separation between church and state. But the Constitution also does not enforce itself. In the United States, we rely on judges and Supreme Court justices to determine what the Constitution means and to apply it to individual cases. That means that the amount of church and state separation in the United States tends to ebb and flow depending on who sits on the Supreme Court. The idea that the government should play no role in funding or encouraging religion probably hit its high water mark in the mid-20th century. As the Supreme Court said in Everson v. Board of Education (1947), “no tax in any amount, large or small, can be levied to support any religious activities or institutions, whatever they may be called, or whatever form they may adopt to teach or practice religion.” That suggests that it is unconstitutional to fund any religious activity with money collected from taxes. Beginning in the Nixon administration, however, the Court started to move steadily rightward. Nixon filled four of the nine seats on the Supreme Court, though most of his nominees were relative moderates compared to the increasingly ideological justices chosen by Presidents Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump. Today, the Republican Party has a 6-3 supermajority on the Supreme Court, and when church and state cases have come before them, all six of those Republicans have behaved exactly how you would expect members of a political movement closely aligned with conservative Christianity to behave. That means that the Court is now actively tearing down whatever barrier used to exist between church and state. Why is religion in public schools and on American money? Let’s start with Carson v. Makin (2022), in which the Republican justices concluded that, if a state offers vouchers to help some students pay for private education, it must allow those vouchers to be spent on religious schools. The Court also recently announced that it will hear two other cases, out of Oklahoma, which are likely to require states to fund religious charter schools. If you’re looking for an explanation for this shift, you will not find it in the Constitution, as the text of the First Amendment has not changed. You will find it instead within the shifting personnel within the Supreme Court. The question of whether taxpayers must fund religious schools is a hotly contested one and is likely to hinge on which political party controls the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. But it’s worth acknowledging that there are people of faith in both political parties. Americans of all political persuasions care a great deal about their churches, mosques, temples, and synagogues. Indeed, that may explain why Trump — who, as a private citizen campaigning for office, had a First Amendment right to say anything he wanted to say about religion — chose to center religion in his campaign and even sell Bibles. The Bible is literally the most popular book in the world, and millions of American voters look fondly upon politicians who align themselves with it. And this reality also shapes how, say, US tax policy functions. There’s never been a serious effort to strip religious charities, including houses of worship, of their tax-exempt status. And there probably never will be, because the people who attend those houses of worship are voters, and they would likely rise up in outrage if such a thing were attempted. That said, the Constitution has also long been understood to forbid religious discrimination. So these tax exemptions must be offered equally to people of all faiths. If a church can claim a tax exemption, a mosque must also be able to claim that same exemption on the same terms. Similarly, there are some largely ceremonial or symbolic nods to religion — such as the use of the phrase “In God we Trust” on US coins, or the opening of many legislative sessions with a prayer — that, as the Supreme Court said in Marsh v. Chambers (1983), are “deeply embedded in the history and tradition of this country,” a history and tradition that — especially early on — was intertwined with Christianity. The courts have left many of these symbolic acknowledgments of religion in place, in part because attempting to dislodge them is unlikely to be successful. To understand why, consider a controversy that briefly flared up during the second Bush administration. In 2002, a federal appeals court ruled that the inclusion of the words “under God” in a public school’s daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance violates the Constitution. That decision triggered a massive backlash among members of Congress, including a bipartisan proposal to amend the Constitution to permit “a reference to God in the Pledge of Allegiance or on United States currency.” This controversy died down after the Supreme Court ruled, in Elk Grove Unified School District v. Newdow (2004), that the appeals court never had jurisdiction to issue its decision in the first place. But the whole incident stands as a warning to Americans who want to drive symbolic references to religion out of government altogether. While there may be plausible legal arguments for this position, law is ultimately subordinate to politics, and those politics favor religion — especially Christianity.
The buzzwords “diversity, equity, and inclusion” are everywhere right now, but you can’t be blamed if you don’t quite have a handle on what they mean. The origins of DEI date back to the civil rights era — but recently “DEI” has been thrown around with regard to everything from plane crashes to Super Bowl halftime performances. These business practices are under renewed scrutiny now, thanks to conservative activists and President Donald Trump’s newly enacted policies. That’s something Eric M. Ellis spends a lot of time thinking about. Ellis is the president and CEO of Integrity Development, a consulting firm that helps businesses with DEI programs. “I think that everybody is looking for a sense of belonging,” he says. Over the past 30 years, his outlook on implementing DEI in the workplace has changed. “When I started doing this work in the ’90s,” he says, “I thought my job was to be a diversity ghostbuster. I had a formula.” Now he does things differently. “I changed my style from one of blaming and shaming to one of becoming more transparent around my own biases, because I believe that bias is a human condition,” Ellis said. So how do companies address that bias now? And what does DEI’s future hold? We explore that on this week’s episode of Explain It to Me. You can 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’s your school of thought when it comes to DEI in the workplace? I ask people: What’s the No. 1 diversity issue in the workplace? And they’ll start brainstorming: “It’s classism or it’s sexism or racism.” And I’ll say, “No. The No. 1 diversity issue in the workplace is the one that affects you.” At the end of the day, I think that everybody is looking for a sense of belonging. It’s interesting listening to your definition of DEI. It’s very different from what we’re talking about in the news right now. Does DEI getting a bad rap surprise you at all? No. One of the best ways to get attention is by negativity and sensationalism. So DEI being misrepresented, demonized, or defined in convenient ways doesn’t surprise me. Does that mean that I don’t recognize that there are some opportunities within the space of DEI? I absolutely recognize that, but I don’t think that the people that are going after it the hardest are interested in that. It’s stereotyping the entire industry. You actually have to evaluate each and every effort to determine if it’s something that’s adding to the business’ bottom line and making it more effective for everybody or if it’s something that’s out of line and needs to be changed or eliminated. How have you seen DEI efforts evolve over time? It started off as civil rights training, then affirmative action training, then sensitivity training. Then it was racial sensitivity; race and gender sensitivity; diversity; diversity and inclusion; diversity, equity, and inclusion. So we’ve got alphabet soup going on. For the most part, when we started, diversity efforts were put in place to ensure meritocracy. Today, people act as though DEI is synonymous with lowering standards. But then we’ll see those same people bringing on people that are completely unqualified to do their job, and blame DEI as something that is bringing down standards and [leading to] hiring unqualified people, which is absolutely not the case. Have you seen a major change in how for-profit companies are responding to this in the wake of President Donald Trump’s second term? There are three categories of responses from the organizations that I’ve worked with. There are some that are closing up the tent. There are some that are pausing or pivoting. And then there’s some that are staying the course and doubling down. Organizations have to do what they believe is in their best interest. One of the things that I don’t think that we should do is force organizations to do DEI when it’s against their own values. In other words, organizations ought to stand where their values are. If they don’t believe in this, then they ought to walk away. They probably should have never started it. For organizations that are just afraid and concerned and don’t want to get run over, I understand people pivoting, and I don’t have a problem with that. And then some people have the strength, the size, the power, the conviction that they are staying the course. And that’s admirable. Is this just going to kind of be a rebrand? Will there just be different words to use for these programs? I’m not sure, but I know that the government has said that they are going to be keeping a keen eye out for that. What I see companies doing most is maintaining their messages internally and changing what they do externally. How effective are these policies in the first place? Ultimately, you have to engage in structural change. I think one of the things that the Supreme Court’s decision around affirmative action brought to the surface was that oftentimes organizations are trying to have their cake and eat it, too. They don’t want to admit to structural inequities, but they then want to implement DEI initiatives. I don’t think you can have it both ways. You actually are going to have to identify where we are structurally and systemically falling short around being fair and equitable to all people as a justification for engaging in DEI initiatives. And then when you do that, it should be based upon our work, fairness, equity around the work, not simply identity politics. And I think too often we start conflating equality and fairness and justice with identity and preference. I hear what you’re saying about systemic change. And I feel like for a lot of companies DEI looks like greens in the cafeteria during Black History Month. And that’s cool and all, but how do you enact actual systemic change? Activities and events don’t change the culture. You have to study yourself — not just do an inclusion survey — but look at all systems and processes: pay equity, the performance management systems, performance evaluation. If an organization is looking at its whole structure and improves that, then the business will be more successful as well. It will be more diverse, but it will also be more successful.
A child gets a malaria vaccination at a hospital in Yala, Kenya, on October 7, 2021. In about three short months, the Trump administration took a wrecking ball to foreign aid, threatening millions of lives and livelihoods around the world. After initially pausing all US foreign aid spending for 90 days, President Donald Trump handed over the reins to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The damage as DOGE went about clear-cutting the US Agency for International Development (USAID) was swift and extensive. Health clinics from Afghanistan to Burundi shuttered. Oxygen tanks, HIV and malaria medications, and other medical supplies amounting to at least $240 million remain stuck at ports or storage facilities around the world. Ebola prevention and response funding, which Musk claimed at the end of February was restored with “no interruption” during the 90-day freeze, is reportedly still not operational, according to several public health experts. Whether it’s aid for malnutrition, clean water, or outbreak response, even a handful of days can undo years of progress in the making. The Trump administration slashed at least $54 billion in foreign aid contracts. Around the world, around 60,000 aid workers lost their jobs, including some 2,000 USAID employees. Much of the world has lost its primary health support, and they won’t get it back anytime soon. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who took over as USAID’s interim leader in early February, announced Monday that 83 percent of the agency’s programs had been canceled, while other restored projects have been shrunk considerably. The administration has not yet published a full list of all affected programs and projects. But former USAID workers and contractors are counting up canceled projects based on termination notices received by project staff. So far, many foundational global health efforts to treat malnutrition, prevent newborn and maternal mortality, or eliminate infectious diseases such as HIV, malaria, tuberculosis, malnutrition, and polio have been impacted. Projects that aimed to improve infectious disease surveillance in foreign countries and to help prevent and contain future pandemics — which could directly impact American health and security — were also cut. These cuts and the US’s recent withdrawal from the World Health Organization come on top of years of declines in global funding for health. The timing couldn’t be possibly worse: Five years after the Covid pandemic began, the world now faces a surge of infectious disease outbreaks from dengue and malaria to Ebola and even a mysterious but deadly disease in Congo. The consequences that have been documented so far are severe and widesweeping, and yet they represent an incomplete tally of how billions of lives and livelihoods will be affected now or in the future. Here is everything we know about the US foreign aid’s global health effects around the world in three charts. Millions of patients stranded Until very recently, USAID worked in 160 countries to spread democracy, reduce poverty, improve health, prevent and contain infectious disease outbreaks and provide food, clean water, and education to rural, underserved, refugee, and conflict-affected communities. In the decades since President John F. Kennedy established the agency in 1961, USAID became a household name in many countries. US foreign aid in those decades was a critical and oft-studied tool of global diplomacy, and one that — until recently — has had consistent bipartisan support. When it comes to aid, the US is irreplaceable. US donations to the United Nations in 2024 comprised 40 percent of all funds for humanitarian aid. The US donated almost half of all global food aid and made huge contributions to the World Health Organization for disease outbreaks and health emergencies. In all, the US spent more than $10 billion on health aid around the world in 2024. Countries in sub-Saharan Africa received the lion’s share of that aid, but developing countries everywhere have been affected by US funding cuts. Here are some key impacts that the US foreign funding freeze has had so far: An estimated 3.8 million women lost access to contraception globally. 9 million people in Afghanistan — nearly a quarter of the population — will no longer receive US-funded healthcare services . Nearly 700,000 people in Burkina Faso and Mali have lost access to water, food, or health services. The World Food Programme, for which the US is the largest single donor, has shut down its operations in South Africa, where 27 million people are at risk of hunger as the country faces its worst drought in decades. In Nigeria, 25,000 extremely malnourished children will no longer be receiving food assistance by April. Perhaps the most important program targeted is the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR). PEPFAR, which provides testing services and treatment to prevent and treat HIV, is credited with saving some 25 million lives. Although the program was not entirely cancelled, several major contracts were cut or shrunk down considerably. As a result, 20.6 million people, including almost 600,000 children, are no longer receiving HIV treatment that was previously funded by the US. Experts estimate that HIV burden could increase sixfold in the next four years. The Trump administration’s dismantling of USAID and other government agencies has been messy. There have been a flurry of lawsuits still awaiting court decisions that allege the Trump administration’s actions against USAID and its contractors are unlawful; however, on Monday, a federal judge declined to order the administration to restore canceled contracts. China is already moving into the void. Local media outlets from Nepal to Colombia have reported that representatives of the Chinese government have already come forward with offers to expand its assistance in areas from agriculture and disaster relief to health care and poverty alleviation. After floods devastated parts of Madagascar, Chinese officials mounted their first-ever humanitarian response in the country. Within days, Chinese aid tents lined the Ikopa River. How much China will aim to capitalize on this opportunity is not yet clear. And while the US foreign aid freeze and cuts have already had enormous repercussions, its full effects won’t be felt in full for months or even years to come. USAID-funded agriculture programs, for instance, were not able to disperse seeds in time for planting, which means that farmers may miss an entire growing season, a spokesperson for a US nonprofit company that receives USAID contracts told me. This will worsen food insecurity and could plunge families into poverty. In other places, time-sensitive mosquito control activities — like spraying insecticide to kill larva before they become mosquitos — were missed, which will likely result in an explosion of dengue, malaria, and other mosquito-borne infectious diseases in a few months. A lack of US funding for polio eradication efforts will likely lead to an additional 200,000 polio cases a year. Some 10.6 million cases of tuberculosis and 2.2 million deaths will not be prevented in the void of US foreign aid funding. If you’re an optimist, then you might hold on to a bit of hope that some of these programs might be restored, that the bipartisan consensus that once supported foreign aid can be rebuilt. But as the days go by, that seems increasingly unlikely. The hard reality is that the Trump administration’s actions have left massive gaps in global aid that will ultimately be measured in lives lost.
Sandra Lindsay, left, a nurse in New York, received the first Covid-19 shot on December 14, 2020, in New York City. | Mark Lennihan/Pool/Getty Images For most people, the Covid-19 pandemic, which officially began five years ago this month, marked their first encounter with case counts and N-95 masks and lockdown orders. Not me, though. I was a young reporter for Time magazine in Hong Kong in early spring 2003, when we started getting reports about a strange new sickness spreading in southern China, just across the border. On March 15, exactly 22 years ago today, that sickness was given a name by the World Health Organization: severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS). The SARS outbreak didn’t get much attention in the US because the country only had a small number of cases, and the worst of it overlapped with the invasion of Iraq. But back in Hong Kong, which became an epicenter of the outbreak, we had no idea when or if it would end. Looking back on those days now, it feels like a dry run for what the entire world would experience less than two decades later with another coronavirus. Overnight, all of Hong Kong wore surgical masks. Airports, hotels, and restaurants were abandoned. At the Time offices in the city, editors sweating through uncomfortable N-95 masks debated sending some staff to work from home, to keep the magazine going if our building were to be closed. I interviewed scientists about the possibility of a vaccine or treatment, and was told that if one were needed, it would certainly take years for it to be developed. We ended up getting lucky with SARS. The coronavirus that caused it turned out to be far less infectious than it first appeared, and the outbreak ended up petering out — though not before more than 8,000 people were sickened and 774 died around the world. With Covid, of course, we were not that lucky. More than 7 million people have been confirmed to have died from Covid so far, a number that is both still rising and almost surely an undercount. The political, social, and educational side effects of the pandemic were enormous, and are still playing out. It was, simply put, a global catastrophe — one of the few events that is truly worthy of that name. So why in the world would I put Covid in a newsletter that’s supposed to be about good news? A Covid pandemic before 2020 would have been far worse Having lived through and covered both SARS and Covid, I sometimes like to run a thought experiment: How would we have responded back in 2003 if SARS had turned out to be as dangerous as Covid? Think back to 2003. Smartphones didn’t exist, and even laptops were less common. Video-calling was essentially nonexistent — if you told someone you were going to “Zoom” with them, you would have gotten very strange looks. What this all means is that remote work and remote schooling and telemedicine — which, as problematic as they all turned out to be, did keep the economy, education, and medical care moving forward during the pandemic — would have essentially been impossible. By one estimate, without remote work, US GDP would have declined twice as much as it ultimately did in that first year of the pandemic. All those Zoom meetings and cloud documents were a literal economic lifeline. Or take the virus itself. It was months after the first cases of SARS before the coronavirus causing it was successfully identified by scientists. I still remember visiting Hong Kong University’s Queen Mary Hospital in April 2003, and peering through an electron microscope at the virus’s distinctive, sun-like corona. In Covid, thanks to vast improvements in the speed of genetic sequencing, full genomes of the virus were being distributed well before the world was fully aware of what Covid was. Or vaccines. In 2003, early work on mRNA vaccine technology was only beginning, and BioNTech — the company that was responsible for the groundbreaking research on mRNA vaccines — wouldn’t be founded for another five years.. Before Covid, it took anywhere from five to 15 years — if not longer — to develop a vaccine for a new virus. Had we needed one during SARS, we would have almost certainly been in for a long wait. But during Covid, the first vaccine candidates were produced by Pfizer-BioNTech on March 2, 2020 — less than two months after work on the vaccines had begun. Sandra Lindsay, a nurse in New York, received the first Covid shot on December 14, 2020, less than nine months later. And while advances in science were the first necessary steps, the US government, for all its flaws, acted with impressive urgency and ambition. We never would have received vaccines as quickly without the genius of Operation Warp Speed. By supporting the simultaneous development of multiple vaccine candidates, the parallel execution of multiple stages of vaccine development and trials, and by guaranteeing a market for the vaccines with billions of dollars, Operation Warp Speed lived up to is name. Beyond the science, the bipartisan relief bills kept poverty from spiking during those first, terrible months of the pandemic. In fact, poverty actually dropped in 2021 compared to the years before the pandemic, with child poverty falling by more than half. Don’t forget what we accomplished I realize that almost no one wants to look back at the Covid pandemic, and certainly not with pride. The subsequent virus variants and new waves increasingly evaded even our best vaccines, keeping the pandemic going for years while eroding belief in them. Division over the public health decisions made during the pandemic, from mask requirements to school closures, still linger, poisoning the political atmosphere. Perhaps hundreds of millions of people are experiencing the effects of long Covid, their every day a reminder of the pandemic’s toll. The collective trauma we suffered is still with us. And yet, I worry that all that pain and anger will cause us to neglect the amazing accomplishments of those years. Not just the scientists and officials who got us those vaccines in record time, but the doctors and nurses who toiled endless hours on the front lines of the pandemic, or the essential workers who kept things going while the rest of us isolated. My fear is not just that we’ll forget that heroism, but that when the next pandemic comes — as it inevitably will — we’ll forget that we have shown the ability and the will to fight it. On the five-year anniversary of the pandemic, there has been no shortage of articles about what we got wrong during Covid — and yes, in retrospect, we got many, many things wrong. I realize “it could have been worse” isn’t exactly the most stirring rallying cry after something as catastrophic as Covid. But it’s still true, and we shouldn’t overlook the people whose work ensured it wasn’t. A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Four years ago, Richard Hanania was a little-known right-wing intellectual, one of many posters building a brand with tweets and Substack posts attacking “wokeness” and other conservative bugbears. But in the middle of 2021, one of his ideas took off. In an article called “Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law,” Hanania argued that many issues conservatives worry about aren’t just cultural, but also stem from civil rights law — and specifically from Executive Order 11246, an order signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 that requires most federal contractors to take “affirmative action” in their hiring. In 2023, Hanania expanded on the article in a book, The Origins of Woke: Civil Rights Law, Corporate America, and the Triumph of Identity Politics. That year, Hanania appeared on Vivek Ramaswamy’s podcast, where he talked to the then-presidential candidate about EO 11246 and suggested that the next Republican president should repeal it and replace it with an order banning affirmative action from government contractors. Ramaswamy said he liked the idea. On President Donald Trump’s first day in office, he followed Hanania’s blueprint to the letter. “I was happy,” Hanania recently told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. “I wasn’t anybody special. I didn’t have any reason to think anyone would listen to me. And eventually I saw the outcome that I wanted.” This episode is not unique. Many Trump 2.0 decisions, from purging the federal workforce to re-hiring a DOGE employee who made racist comments online, have their origins in a small group of ring-wing intellectuals, what Vox’s Andrew Prokop has called the “very-online right.” This group encompasses well-known figures like Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, as well as posters like Hanania. Today, Explained co-host Noel King recently spoke with Hanania about his journey from anonymously posting racist and misogynist diatribes to wielding real political influence in the early days of Trump’s second administration, and why he’s now grown disenchanted with the movement that adopted his ideas. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. In the summer of 2023, you were a public intellectual. You’d been writing op-eds for the New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic. And then that August, the Huffington Post reported that years earlier you’d written racist, misogynist posts on right-wing websites. I’m going to read a couple of those here: “For the white gene pool to be created, millions had to die.” “Race mixing is like destroying a unique species or a piece of art. It’s shameful.” “Hispanic people don’t have the requisite IQ to be a productive part of a first-world nation.” You said Muslims can’t assimilate because of “genetic and IQ differences between them and native Europeans.” And you suggested that people with low IQ might be sterilized. Were those sincere beliefs that you held? Yes. I can’t lie to you and tell you that those weren’t sincere beliefs. Some of the ways I phrased it was sometimes getting a rise out of people. But I can’t deny that I did hold those views. This, I should note, was around 2010, 2011. So by the time it came out of the Huffington Post, it was about 12, 13 years later. But, yeah, I had some views that I now consider repugnant, and [that] I was actually writing against, before that August 2023 exposition. What led to you holding those views? I think I was just young and angry. I saw these ideas that you couldn’t talk about, certain things like male-female differences, the idea that America was a racist country, which I didn’t believe at the time and I don’t believe now, or at least racist enough to explain disparities between groups of people. I didn’t like censorship. I didn’t like a lot of the things that conservatives in later years would turn against, [like] DEI, which was at an early stage right there. And so I was angry. I was looking for people who were angry like me. And I think it was probably a lot of personal things going on in my life. By about 2012, 2013, I had sort of grown out of it, which I think often happens. In November of 2023, after the Huffington Post exposed you, you tweeted, “people complain about Jews running America. Do they actually believe it should be run by the voters of Baltimore or Appalachia? Doesn’t seem that anti-Semites have thought this through.” So that was years after you were young. Well, I would make a distinction between that and the earlier stuff. There’s a long intellectual tradition of people not believing in a kind of naive form of direct democracy, going back to the American founders, to today — and even before the American founders, going back to the ancient Greeks. I said Appalachians and inner-city Baltimore — I was saying generally poor communities, which are on average less informed about politics and have views that might not be the most coherent about making policy. Bringing up the Jews in that context was defending Jews, saying, “Accepting your premise, if Jews do control America, what’s the alternative?” They are disproportionately a smart, educated group of people. And I say smart, educated people having disproportionate power in society is a good thing. So I don’t see that as as racist or hateful or anything like that. While those quotes you read at the beginning, I will grant you that those are things that I wouldn’t stand by and nobody else should. By the summer of 2023, you had built a broad audience in both mainstream media and also on Twitter and Substack. What was the thrust of your main argument? I had an article which eventually turned into my book, The Origins of Woke, which argued that a lot of the cultural issues that conservatives were mad about — a lot of the ideas about disparate impact, a lot of the ideas that, you know, you couldn’t be hard on crime because it has an impact on one group of people more than the other group of people, or you couldn’t have standardized tests or and so forth — a lot of that was kind of baked into civil rights law. Not necessarily the text of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but a lot of judicial interpretation and executive action that came in the years and decades that followed. So I was arguing that conservatives were upset about this thing they called DEI or wokeness, and they were seeing it as mainly a cultural issue. Oh, look at Target, look at the State Department, look at what they’re all doing. And my argument was [that] there is a policy agenda here that you can focus on. When did it become clear to you that this argument that you were making was resonating? It was right away. It was something that conservatives were already interested in and they needed to understand that there was a policy solution to the problems they were concerned about. Vivek Ramaswamy, when he was unknown before he was running for president, wrote a book called Woke, Inc. I reviewed it for a publication called American Affairs. I criticized it based on some of my ideas, that he didn’t talk about civil rights law. We were concerned about the same things, but he didn’t bring up the kind of history that I talked about here. He actually reached out and we started to be in touch based on that. I explained to him a lot of these things. I appeared on his podcast. He started talking about it. He started going on campaign stops later when he was running for president and saying, “First day, I will repeal Executive Order 11246” [the law requiring affirmative action in federal contracting], and this was the executive order that I mentioned in my book that Johnson signed in ’65. Trump actually gets into office and Trump does sign a repeal of Executive Order 11246. It does a lot of the other things that I recommended. So it was quite a journey where I think I played a role in putting these ideas on the map. What was the goal of ending 11246? What did you want to happen? Ending Executive Order 11246 was part of a broader project to take the government out of the idea that it should be taking consideration of race and sex, or enforcing such considerations onto the private sector, in terms of hiring, in terms of promotion. There’s perhaps a role for the government to play in terms of ensuring non-discrimination as discrimination was understood. The concept was understood in 1964 when the Civil Rights Act was passed. But a lot of cultural changes within institutions were adopted as a defense against potential lawsuits and against potential loss of government contracts. So I wanted less DEI, less race- and sex-based governance, and less encouraging institutions to take positions that a lot of Americans don’t agree with. Richard, was corporate America actually complaining? Because it seems like if you run a big American corporation… [you] would look at the idea of diversity and would say, this is a good thing, because I want to sell things to American people and therefore having people within the company at a very high level who understand how to sell things to American people is a great thing. It’s good if they come from all kinds of backgrounds. Well, that’s true. I would respect business decisions on these things. If they want to have a program, that’s one thing. But these were mandates coming from the government and also the subjects of lawsuits. And sure, you can say, “I want to do market research on Hispanics,” or maybe have someone in the room who knows something about women’s products or things like that. I don’t think that there’s necessarily a strong correlation between that and, say, demographic balancing based on census categories. And I go into how the census categories were determined. It’s kind of arbitrary, right? I mean, it’s like the government cares that you have a certain number of Blacks or Hispanics, they don’t care if they are immigrants who just came here yesterday, or they are people who are culturally completely assimilated into the mainstream, as long as they have a Hispanic name. So there are good corporate reasons to sometimes take into account race, sex, cultural background. I don’t deny that. I don’t think that that’s necessarily what civil rights law has been forcing on companies. The Trump administration did what you wanted. It eliminated DEI. And then it put Pete Hegseth in charge of the Pentagon, and Kash Patel in charge of the FBI, and Dan Bongino as the deputy director of the FBI. These gentlemen are not merit picks. And these are obvious examples. But this is why Americans who are skeptical of your argument will say, look, you’re never really going to get merit. If we eliminate DEI, we’re going to go back to “the president picks a guy who he thinks looks handsome on TV.” Do you put any stock in that argument? Absolutely, Noel. I’ve had some contacts with the Trump administration. I think one reason I have not been even closer to the Trump administration is that I’ve been highly critical of a lot of the non-DEI-related actions that he’s taken. I agree with you. I think some of these picks are certainly not merit-based. They don’t even rise to the level of public decorum and ethics you often expect from someone who’s going to be the FBI director or the head of the Department of Defense. I don’t think those are the only two choices: DEI/race-based governance or people that Trump thinks looks good on TV. I think you could have a merit-based system that looks at people, takes them as individuals, takes into account their qualifications, takes into account what the president is trying to accomplish, and that has more responsible people in positions of power. You’ve clearly become disenchanted with MAGA. You wrote a piece this week that’s making the rounds. It’s called “Liberals Only Censor. Musk Seeks To Lobotomize.” What happened, Richard? When it looked like Trump was going to be the nominee and he might be president, I wanted my ideas to be listened to, and I wanted them to do certain things. At the same time, I don’t just write about DEI. I write about a wide range of topics. I say what I believe on those topics. I think there’s a level of corruption here, a level of blatant sort of corruption to the way government is working that is unprecedented, at least in our recent history. I was always against social media censorship. I thought this was a way to suppress conservative voices. But then Elon Musk buys Twitter. I’m happy. I say, “Okay, we’re going to have free speech.” And my goodness, it’s become a sewer! And I think that honesty and virtue and politics matter, and what I’ve seen from the conservative movement, that I’ve seen from MAGA, the conservative movement in general, as it’s become MAGA-fied, has just horrified me. And I’ve felt the need to speak out about this. How do you feel about this movement that you are a part of, descending into what we have today? I’m unhappy. We all know Trump’s flaws. The first administration, though, we saw him surround himself with mostly responsible people. And so you can have a distaste for Trump and say, “Look, he’s still putting the same judges on the federal judiciary that DeSantis — or in many cases, Ted Cruz or Jeb Bush — would have.” And so you could say, “Well, I don’t like Trump, he can be sort of distasteful, but the movement is more than just Trump.” Now, you can’t really say that anymore. I mean, he’s picking people who nobody would have believed it possible to have a high-level government position, like Robert F. Kennedy [Jr.], like Kash Patel. These are people who would only be chosen, appointed by Trump. The Trump administration, if you’re just looking in terms of pure policy, there’s a lot I like, there’s no reason to be too upset there. But if you’re looking at where the movement is going, [when it comes to] how political movements and how people in power should behave and act in their relationship to truth and the relationship to the rest of society, I think it’s gotten pretty bad.
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.”
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