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Is boredom over?

This story originally appeared in***Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone.Sign up here for future editions***.

As a millennial, I had my fair share of ’90s summers. I rode my bike, I read, I spent a lot of time doing nothing. My friends from home like to tell the story of the time they came by my house unannounced and I was staring at a wall (I was thinking).

Now, as a parent myself, I’ve been highly invested in the discourse over whether it’s possible for kids to have a “’90s summer” in 2025. This year, some parents are opting for fewer camps and activities in favor of more good old-fashioned hanging around, an approach also described as “wild summer” or “kid-rotting.”

On the one hand, sounds nice! I liked my summers as a kid, and I’d love to give my kids more unstructured playtime to help them build their independence and self-reliance (and save me money and time signing up for summer camp).

On the other hand, what exactly are they going to do with that unstructured time? Like a majority of parents today, I work full time, and although my job has some flexibility, I can’t always be available to supervise potion-making, monster-hunting, or any of my kids’ other cute but messy leisure activities. Nor can I just leave them to fend for themselves: Norms have changed to make sending kids outside to play til the streetlights come on more difficult than it used to be, though those changes started before the ’90s. The rise of smartphones and tablets has also transformed downtime forever; as Kathryn Jezer-Morton asks at The Cut, “Is it really possible to have a ’90s summer when YouTube Shorts exist?”

After talking to experts and kids about phones and free time, I can tell you that the short answer to this question is no. But the long answer is more complicated, and a bit more reassuring. Yes, kids today reach for their devices a lot. But especially as they get older, they do know how to put them down. And hearing from them about their lives made me rethink what my ’90s summers really looked like, and what I want for my kids.

Kids’ free time is different now

Parents aren’t imagining the differences between the ’90s and today, Brinleigh Murphy-Reuter, program administrator at the Digital Wellness Lab at Boston Children’s Hospital, told me. For one thing, kids just have less downtime than they used to — they’re involved in more activities outside of school, as parents try to prepare them for an increasingly competitive college application process. They’re also more heavily supervised than in decades past, thanks to concerns about child kidnapping and other safety issues that began to ramp up in the ’80s and continues today.

Free time also looks different. “If you go back to the ’80s or early ’90s, the most prized artifact kids owned was a bicycle,” Ruslan Slutsky, an education professor at the University of Toledo who studies play, told me. Today, “the bike has been replaced by a cell phone.”

The average kid gets a phone at the age of 10, Murphy-Reuter said. Tablet use starts even earlier, with more than half of kids getting their own device by age 4. If kids are at home and not involved in some kind of structured activity, chances are “they’re on some kind of digital device,” Slutsky said.

It’s not as though all millennials had idyllic, screen-free summers — some of my best July memories involve Rocko’s Modern Life, for example. But kids’ screen time is qualitatively different now.

According to a Common Sense Media report published in 2025, 35 percent of viewing for kids up to the age of 8 was full-length streaming TV shows, while 32 percent was on platforms like YouTube. Sixteen percent were short-form videos like TikToks, Instagram Reels, or YouTube Shorts. Only 6 percent of kids’ viewing was live TV, which honestly seems high (I am not sure my children have ever seen a live TV broadcast).

It’s not completely clear that YouTube is worse for kids than old-fashioned TV, but it can certainly feel worse. As Jezer-Morton puts it, “kid rotting in the ’90s was Nintendo and MTV; today’s version is slop-engineered for maximum in-app time spent.”

It is undeniably true that in the ’90s, you’d sometimes run out of stuff to watch and be forced to go outside or call a friend. Streaming means that for my kids’ generation, there is always more TV.

And the ubiquity of phones in both kids’ and adults’ lives has made enforcing screen time limits more difficult. “It’s tough to take away something that they have become so dependent on,” Slutsky said.

Older kids can be remarkably savvy about their screen time

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that a lot of what kids do on their devices isn’t actually watching YouTube — it’s gaming. Kids in the Common Sense survey spent 60 percent of their screen time playing games, and just 26 percent watching TV or video apps.

Gaming can actually have a lot of benefits for kids, experts say. “Video games can support relationship building and resiliency” and “can help to develop complex, critical thinking skills,” Murphy-Reuter said. Some research has found that educational media is actually more helpful to kids if it’s interactive, making an iPad better than a TV under certain circumstances, according to psychologist Jacqueline Nesi.

“Just because it’s on a screen doesn’t mean it’s not still fulfilling the same goals that unstructured play used to fulfill,” Murphy-Reuter told me. “It just might be fulfilling it in a way that is new.”

Meanwhile, kids — especially older teens — are actually capable of putting down their phones. Akshaya, 18, one of the hosts of the podcast Behind the Screens, told me she’d been spending her summer meeting up with friends and playing pickleball. “I spend a lot of my days hanging out outside,” she said.

Her cohost Tanisha, also 18 and a graduating senior, said she and her friends had been “trying to spend as much IRL time as we can while we’re still together this summer.” She, Tanisha, and their other cohost Joanne, also 18, have been enjoying unstructured summers for years — though they had internships last summer, none of them has been to camp since elementary school.

Joanne does worry that the ubiquity of short videos on her phone has affected her attention span. “I feel like it’s easy to just kind of zone out, or stop paying attention when someone’s talking,” she said.

At the same time, she and her cohosts have all taken steps to reduce their own device use. Tanisha deleted Instagram during college application season. Akshaya put downtime restrictions on her phone after noticing how often she was on it. “In my free time, if I ever feel like I’m doomscrolling, like I’ve been on social media for too long, I usually try to set a specific time when I’ll get off my phone,” she said.

Overall, 47 percent of kids have used tools or apps to manage their own phone use, Murphy-Reuter told me.

The sense I got from talking to Tanisha, Joanne, and Akshaya — and that I’ve gotten in interviews with teenagers and experts over the last year — is that teens can be quite sophisticated about phones. They know, just as we do, that the devices can make you feel gross and steal your day, and they take steps to mitigate those effects, without getting rid of the devices entirely.

Kids “really are very much in this digital space,” Murphy-Reuter said. And many of them are adept at navigating that space — sometimes more adept than adults who entered it later in life.

All that said, Tanisha, Joanne, and Akshaya are 18 years old, and talking to them made me realize that “wild summer,” at least of the unsupervised variety, may just be easier to accomplish for older kids. I can’t quite imagine letting my 7-year-old “rot” this summer. Yes, he’d want to watch way too much Gravity Falls, but he’d also just want to talk to me and play with me — normal kid stuff that’s not very compatible with adults getting work done.

It’s certainly possible that kids were more self-reliant — more able to occupy themselves with pretend play or outdoor shenanigans for long stretches of time — before they had devices. But I’m not sure how much more.

While writing this story, I realized that the lazy, biking, wall-staring summers of my youth all took place in high school. Before that, I went to camp.

What I’m reading

The Trump administration is declining to release almost $7 billion in federal funding for after-school and summer programs, jeopardizing support for 1.4 million kids, most of them low-income, around the country.

An American teen writes about why Dutch kids are some of the happiest in the world: It might be because they have a lot of freedom.

A new study of podcast listening among low-income families found that the medium fostered creative play and conversations among kids and family members, which are good for child development.

Sometimes my older kid likes to go back to picture books. Recently we’ve been reading I Want to Be Spaghetti! It’s an extremely cute story about a package of ramen who learns self-confidence.

From my inbox

A quick programming note: I will be out on vacation for the next two weeks, so you won’t be hearing from me next week. You will get a summery edition of this newsletter on Thursday, July 17, so stay tuned. And if there’s anything you’d especially like me to cover when I get back, drop me a line at [email protected]!

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From Vox via this RSS feed

President Donald Trump speaks during an address to a joint session of Congress at the US Capitol on March 4, 2025. | Allison Robbert/AFP via Getty Images

President Donald Trump is about to achieve his biggest legislative victory yet: his “one big, beautiful bill” — the massive tax– and Medicaid-cutting, immigration and border spending bill passed the Senate on Tuesday — is on the verge of passing the House of Representatives.

It’s a massive piece of legislation, likely to increase the national debt by at least $3 trillion, mostly through tax cuts, and leave 17 million Americans without health coverage — and it’s really unpopular. Majorities in nearly every reputable poll taken this month disapprove of the bill, ranging from 42 percent who oppose the bill in an Ipsos poll (compared to 23 percent who support) to 64 percent who oppose it in a KFF poll.

And if history is any indication, it’s not going to get any better for Trump and the Republicans from here on out.

In modern American politics, few things are more unpopular with the public than big, messy bills forged under a bright spotlight. That’s especially true of bills passed through a Senate mechanism called “budget reconciliation,” a Senate procedure that allows the governing party to bypass filibuster rules with a simple majority vote. They tend to have a negative effect on presidents and their political parties in the following months as policies are implemented and campaign seasons begin.

Part of that effect is due to the public’s general tendency to dislike any kind of legislation as it gets more publicity and becomes better understood. But reconciliation bills in the modern era seem to create a self-fulfilling prophecy: forcing presidents to be maximally ambitious at the outset, before they lose popular support for the legislation and eventually lose the congressional majorities that delivered passage.

Presidents and their parties tend to be punished after passing big spending bills

The budget reconciliation process, created in 1974, has gradually been used to accomplish broader and bigger policy goals. Because it offers a workaround for a Senate filibuster, which requires 60 votes to break, it has become the primary way that presidents and their parties implement their economic and social welfare visions.

The public, however, doesn’t tend to reward the governing party after these bills are passed. As political writer and analyst Ron Brownstein recently pointed out, presidents who successfully pass a major reconciliation bill in the first year of their presidency lose control of Congress, usually the House, the following year.

In 1982, Ronald Reagan lost his governing majority in the House after using reconciliation to pass large spending cuts as part of his Reaganomics vision (the original “big, beautiful” bill). And the pattern would repeat itself for George H.W. Bush (whose reconciliation bill contradicted his campaign promise not to raise taxes), for Bill Clinton in 1994 (deficit reductions and tax reform), for Barack Obama in 2010 (after the passage of the Affordable Care Act), for Trump in 2018 (tax cuts), and for Biden in 2022 (the American Rescue Plan and the Inflation Reduction Act).

The exception in this list of modern presidents is George W. Bush, who did pass a set of tax cuts in a reconciliation bill, but whose approval rating rose after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.

Increasing polarization, and the general anti-incumbent party energy that tends to run through midterm elections, of course, explains part of this overall popular and electoral backlash. But reconciliation bills themselves seem to intensify this effect.

Why reconciliation bills do so much political damage

First, there’s the actual substance of these bills, which has been growing in scope over time.

Because they tend to be the first, and likely only, major piece of domestic legislation that can execute a president’s agenda, they are often highly ideological, partisan projects that try to implement as much of a governing party’s vision as possible.

These highly ideological pieces of legislation, Matt Grossman, the director of Michigan State University’s Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, and his partners have found, tend to kick into gear a “thermostatic” response from the public — that is, that public opinion moves in the opposite direction of policymaking when the public perceives one side is going too far to the right or left.

Because these bills have actually been growing in reach, from mere tax code adjustments to massive tax-and-spend, program-creating bills, and becoming more ideological projects, the public, in turn, seems to be reacting more harshly.

These big reconciliation bills also run into an issue that afflicts all kinds of legislation: It has a PR problem. Media coverage of proposed legislation tends to emphasize its partisanship, portraying the party in power as pursuing its domestic agenda at all costs and emphasizing that parties are fighting against each other. This elevates process over policy substance. Political scientist Mary Layton Atkinson has found that just like campaign reporting is inclined to focus on the horse race, coverage of legislation in Congress and policy debates often focuses on conflict and procedure, adding to a sense in the public mind that Congress is extreme, dysfunctional, and hyperpartisan.

Adding to this dynamic is a quirk of public opinion toward legislation and referenda: Proposals tend to get less popular, and lose public support, between proposal and passage, as the public learns more about the actual content of initiatives and as they hear more about the political negotiations and struggles taking place behind the scenes as these bills are ironed out.

Lawmakers and key political figures also “tend to highlight the benefits less than the things that they are upset about in the course of negotiations,” Grossman told me. “That [also] occurs when a bill passes: You have the people who are against it saying all the terrible things about it, and actually the people who are for it are often saying, ‘I didn’t get all that I wanted, I would have liked it to be slightly different.’ So the message that comes out of it is actually pretty negative on the whole, because no one is out there saying this is the greatest thing and exactly what they wanted.”

Even with the current One Big Beautiful Bill, polling analysis shows that the public tends not to be very knowledgeable about what is in the legislative package, but gets even more hostile to it once they learn or are provided more information about specific policy details.

Big reconciliation bills exist at the intersection of all three of these public image problems: They tend to be the first major legislative challenge a new president and Congress take on, they suck up all the media’s attention, they direct the public’s attention to one major piece of legislation, and they take a pretty long time to iron out — further extending the timeline in which the bill can get more unpopular.

This worsening perception over time, the public’s frustration with how the sausage is made, and the growing ideological stakes of these bills, all create a kind of feedback loop: Governing parties know that they have limited time and a single shot to implement their vision before experiencing some form of backlash in future elections, so they rush to pass the biggest and boldest bill possible. The cycle repeats itself, worsening public views in the process and increasing polarization. For now, Trump has set a July 4 deadline for signing this bill into law. He looks likely to hit that goal, or at least come close. But all signs are pointing to this “beautiful” bill delivering him and his party a big disappointment next year. He’s already unpopular, and when he focuses his and the public’s attention on his actual agenda, it tends not to go well.

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It’s okay to be scared of AI. You should learn to use it anyway.

ChatGPT’s most advanced models recently served me a surprising statistic: US productivity grew faster in 2024 than in any year since the 1960s. Half that jump can be linked to generative AI tools that most workers hadn’t even heard of two years earlier.

The only problem is that it’s not true. The AI made it up.

Despite its much-documented fallibility, generative AI has become a huge part of many people’s jobs, including my own. The numbers vary from survey to survey, but a June Gallup poll found that 42 percent of American employees are using AI a few times a year, while 19 percent report deploying it several times a week. The technology is especially popular with white-collar workers. While just 9 percent of manufacturing and front-line workers use AI on a regular basis, 27 percent of white-collar workers do.

Even as many people integrate AI into their daily lives, it’s causing mass job anxiety: A February Pew survey found that more than half of US employees worried about their fate at work.

Unfortunately, there is no magic trick to keep your job for the foreseeable future, especially if you’re a white-collar worker. Nobody knows what’s going to happen with AI, and leadership at many companies is responding to this uncertainty by firing workers it may or may not need in an AI-forward future.

“If AI really is this era’s steam engine, a force so transformative that it will power a new Industrial Revolution, you only stand to gain by getting good at it.”

After laying off over 6,000 workers in May and June, Microsoft is laying off 9,000 more workers this month, reportedly so the company can reduce the number of middle managers as it reorganizes itself around AI. In a note on Tuesday, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy told employees that the company would “roll out more generative AI and agents” and reduce its workforce in the next few years. This was all after Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei warned AI would wipe out half of all entry-level white-collar jobs in the same timespan, a prediction so grim that Axios coined a new term for AI’s imminent takeover: “a white-collar bloodbath.”

This is particularly frustrating because, as my recent encounter with ChatGPT’s tendency to hallucinate makes clear, the generative AI of today, while useful for a growing number of people, needs humans to work well. So does agentic AI, the next era of this technology that involves AI agents using computers and performing tasks on your behalf rather than simply generating content. For now, AI is augmenting white-collar jobs, not automating them, although your company’s CEO is probably planning for the latter scenario.

Maybe one day AI will fulfill its promise of getting rid of grunt work and creating endless abundance, but getting from here to there is a harrowing proposition.

“With every other form of innovation, we ended up with more jobs in the end,” Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor and author of the newsletter One Useful Thing, told me. “But living through the Industrial Revolution still kind of sucked, right? There were still anarchists in the street and mass displacement from cities and towns.”

We don’t know if the transition to the AI future will be quite as calamitous. What we do know is that just as jobs transformed due to past technological leaps, like the introduction of the personal computer or the internet, your day-to-day at work will change in the months and years to come. If AI really is this era’s steam engine, a force so transformative that it will power a new Industrial Revolution, you only stand to gain by getting good at it.

At the same time, becoming an AI whiz will not necessarily save you if your company decides it’s time to go all in on AI and do mass, scattershot layoffs in order to give its shareholders the impression of some efficiency gains. If you’re impacted, that’s just bad luck. Still, having the skills can’t hurt.

Welcome to the AI revolution transition

It’s okay to be scared of AI, but it’s more reasonable to be confused by it. For two years after ChatGPT’s explosive release, I couldn’t quite figure out how a chatbot could make my life better. After some urging from Mollick late last year, I forced myself to start using it for menial chores. Upgrading to more advanced models of ChatGPT and Claude turned these tools into indispensable research partners that I use every day — not just to do my job faster but also better. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

But when it comes to generative AI tools and the burgeoning class of AI agents, what works for one person might not be helpful to the next.

“Workers obviously need to try to ascertain as much as they can — the skills that are most flexible and most useful,” said Mark Muro, a senior fellow at Brookings Metro. “They need to be familiar with the technology because it is going to be pervasive.”

For most white-collar workers, I recommend Mollick’s 10-hour rule: Spend 10 hours using AI for work and see what you learn. Mollick also recently published an updated guide to the latest AI tools that’s worth reading in full. The big takeaways are that the best of these tools (ChatGPT from OpenAI, Claude from Anthropic, and Google Gemini) can become tireless assistants with limitless knowledge that can save you hours of labor. You should try different models within the different AI tools, and you should experiment with the voice features, including the ability to use your phone’s camera to share what you’re seeing with the AI. You should also, unfortunately, shell out $20 a month to get access to the most advanced models. In Mollick’s words, “The free versions are demos, not tools.”

“If I have a very narrow job around a very narrow task that’s being done repetitively, that’s where the most risk comes in.”

You can imagine similar advice coming from your geeky uncle at Thanksgiving circa 1984, when personal computers were on the brink of taking over the world. That was the year roughly the same percentage of white-collar workers were regularly using PCs at work as are using AI today. But the coming AI transition will look different than the PC transition we’ve already lived through. While earlier digital technologies hit frontline workers hardest, “AI excels at supporting or carrying out the highly cognitive, nonroutine tasks that better-educated, better-paid office workers do,” according to a February Brookings report co-authored by Muro.

This means AI can do a lot of the tasks that software engineers, architects, lawyers, and journalists do, but it doesn’t mean that AI can do their jobs — a key distinction. This is why you hear more experts talking about AI augmentation rather than AI automation. As a journalist, I can confidently say that AI is great at streamlining my research process, saving me time, and sometimes even stirring up new ideas. AI is terrible at interviewing sources, although that might not always be the case. And clearly, it’s touch-and-go when it comes to writing factually accurate copy, which is kind of a fundamental part of the job.

That proposition looks different for other kinds of white-collar work, namely administrative and operational support jobs. A Brookings report last year found that 100 percent of the tasks that bookkeepers and clerks do were likely to be automated. Those of travel agents, tax preparers, and administrative assistants were close to 100 percent. If AI really did make these workers redundant, it would add up to millions of jobs lost.

“The thing I’d be most worried about is if my task and job are very similar to each other,” Mollick, the Wharton professor, explained. “If I have a very narrow job around a very narrow task that’s being done repetitively, that’s where the most risk comes in.”

It’s hard to AI-proof your job or career altogether given so much uncertainty. We don’t know if companies will take advantage of this transition in ways that produce better products and happier workers or just use it as an excuse to fire people, squandering what some believe is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform work and productivity. It sucks to feel like you have little agency in steering the future toward one outcome or the other.

At the risk of sounding like your geeky uncle, I say give AI a try. The worst-case scenario is you spend 10 hours talking to an artificially intelligent chatbot rather than scrolling through Instagram or Reddit. The best-case scenario is you develop a new skill set, one that could very well set you up to do an entirely new kind of job, one that didn’t even exist before the AI era. You might even have a little fun along the way.

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Eating a hot dog on July Fourth isn’t just traditional. It’s patriotic.

From iconic red, white, and blue rocket pops (hello, Red Dye 40!) to nitrate-loaded hot dogs and the all-day parade of sugary drinks and alcohol, this quintessential American holiday is a celebration of freedom — and, often, dietary chaos.

And yet these days, many of us seem to be having second thoughts about the American diet. Our food is too processed, too loaded with dyes and preservatives. The country’s obesity and diabetes epidemics, which have led to an explosion in the diagnoses of related chronic health conditions, have put the issue front and center, with much of the blame being placed on what we eat and all of the additives and preservatives it contains. About half of US adults believe food additives and chemicals are a large or moderate risk to their health — higher than the perceived risks of infectious disease outbreaks or climate change, according to a recent poll from Ipsos, a global market research firm.

We all worry about microplastics, nitrates, food dyes, and ultra-processed foods. And US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made improving Americans’ diets and our food supply a top priority. It’s a policy emphasis that’s popular with the public: Two-thirds of US adults believe artificial dyes and pesticides make our foods unsafe to eat — and these are opinions that transcend political leanings, according to Ipsos.

And regardless of our entrenched food system, people are trying to make healthier decisions in their daily lives: 64 percent of US adults say they pay more attention to food labels than they did five years ago, according to the public health nonprofit NSF International. But we are frustrated: Only 16 percent of Americans say they find claims on food labels trustworthy.

It may sound unbelievable on a holiday when Americans will gladly stuff their faces with ultra-processed junk while wearing flag-laden paraphernalia, but these days, many of us actually wish the products in our grocery stores looked a little more like the ones across the Atlantic. Just 37 percent of American adults said in the NSF International survey that our food labeling was better than in other countries. Most Americans say they want changes to how foods at our grocery stores are labeled.

American food really is different from what can be found in Europe, both in its substance and in its packaging.

But while we’re probably not doing any favors to our health by consuming ultraprocessed foods loaded with artificial ingredients that are banned elsewhere, the biggest source of our health woes isn’t necessarily these artificial dyes and preservatives. It’s the cholesterol and saturated fat in that hot dog, the sugar in that lemonade, and those ultra-processed potato chips. Americans consume about twice as much sugar as other rich countries do on average, eat more ultra-processed foods, and consume more trans and saturated fats than Europeans. We also eat enormous portions, and calories, no matter where they come from, are a big part of the problem.

Americans are generally in poorer health than our peers in Europe, and US life expectancy continues to trail behind other wealthy countries. Rich Americans actually fare worse than poor Europeans, according to one study.

A new era of American greatness starts at the picnic table this July Fourth. Yes, we ostensibly rebelled against an English monarchy in order to be able to do whatever we want, even eat whatever we want. But if we want to catch up to our European rivals again in how healthy we feel, how productive we are, and how long we live — we need to take a closer look at the stuff we’re putting in our bodies.

American food really does have different stuff in it

Doctors widely agree that ultra-processed foods and food additives are bad for children’s health. Yet they have become more and more readily available over the decades: One 2023 study found 60 percent of the food that Americans buy has additives, a 10 percent increase since 2001.

Kennedy, the head of the Department of Health and Human Services, the country’s top health agency, has made overhauling US food production a top priority. His department’s recent MAHA report highlights steps taken by other countries, including France and the Nordic countries, to discourage people through their dietary guidelines from eating ultra-processed foods. The report lists several additives and artificial ingredients that are permitted in American food but are banned or heavily restricted across the pond. Kennedy suggests that the US should follow suit.

So where might we begin?

Let’s start with Red Dye 40, the color additive found in foods such as Froot Loops and M&Ms that has been linked to hyperactivity in children and, according to some animal studies, has been shown to accelerate tumor growth in mice. The US has not placed any special requirements on Red Dye 40, aside from its listing alongside other ingredients. But the European Union has required a clear warning label on any food with the dye, and some countries (including Germany, France, and Denmark) have banned it outright. A similar warning could be adopted here.

There are other additives casually lurking in American foods that have been restricted in other countries. Here are a few:

Titanium dioxide: Another food coloring that can be added to candies like Skittles and coffee creamers for a bright white effect. The EU banned it in 2022 because of evidence it could affect the human body’s genetic material, while the US continues to allow its use.Propyl paraben: This preservative is regarded as safe in the US, often added to mass-produced American baked goods such as Sara Lee cinnamon rolls or Weight Watchers lemon creme cake. But its use has been prohibited in the EU because of research indicating it could mess with hormone function.Butylated hydroxytoluene: Another preservative that’s sometimes added to breakfast cereals and potato chips to extend their shelf life. It’s generally regarded as safe for use in the United States despite evidence that it could compromise kidney and liver function and concerns that it could cause cancer. In the EU, however, its use is subject to strict regulation.

There are some artificial sweeteners, too — aspartame, sucralose, and saccharin — that are permitted in the US and the EU, but generally, Europe puts many more restrictions on unhealthy artificial ingredients than the US does.

Kennedy is pledging he’ll do something about it. His biggest win so far is securing voluntary commitments from food manufacturers to remove a variety of artificial dyes — yes, including Red Dye 40 — from their products before the end of 2026. If they fail to comply, he has suggested new regulations to put a limit on or outright prohibit certain substances of concern.

But are these ingredients the most important problem with our July Fourth cookouts? They are part of the issue. But there’s more to it.

The real problem is the American diet, dyed or not

Here’s a revealing comparison: In 2018, the United States banned trans fats, an artificial ingredient derived from oils that has been linked to heart disease and diabetes — 15 years after Denmark did the same thing. For more than a decade, Americans kept eating a ton of trans fat — something that is so bad for you that it can simultaneously increase bad cholesterol while lowering good cholesterol.

While that is probably not the entire reason that the US has double the obesity and diabetes rates as Denmark does, it is a telling example. A fatty and highly processed ingredient that is linked to two of the biggest health problems in the United States persisted for years in American food, long after the Europeans had wised up.

It’s a pattern that, across the decades, explains the enormous gulf between the typical American’s diet and the Mediterranean diet that dominates much of Europe. During the 20th century, amid an explosion in market-driven consumerism, convenience became one of the most important factors for grocery shoppers. Americans wanted more meals that could be quickly prepared inside the microwave and dry goods that could last for weeks and months on a pantry shelf, and so these products gained more and more of a market share. But that meant that more American food products were laced with more of the preservatives and additives that are now drawing so much concern.

Americans have also always eaten more meat, cheese, and butter, animal products high in saturated fats as opposed to the unsaturated fats that come from oils like olive oil and are more common in European diets, for years. Our meat obsession was turbocharged by a meat industry that tapped into patriotic sentiments about pioneering farms making their living off the frontier. Eating a diet with more animal products is associated with a long list of health problems, particularly the cardiovascular conditions that remain the biggest killers of Americans.

We should push our policymakers to pass regulations that get rid of artificial additives, but that alone is insufficient. You can find too much fat and too much sugar around the picnic table. Some of it is unnatural, but plenty of it is. America has to figure out how to encourage people to eat low-fat, low-sugar, whole-food diets. That’s the real path to better health.

MAHA has some good ideas. Its emphasis on whole foods, not processed ones, is a step in the right direction. But Kennedy’s prescriptions are contradictory: Kennedy wants to make it easier for people to find whole foods at their nearby store, while Republicans in Congress propose massive cuts to food stamps. Kennedy’s MAHA report rails against the overuse of pesticides, but Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency is rolling back restrictions on their use.

Those contradictions are a reminder that, though Kennedy has shone a light on a worthwhile issue, we can’t and we shouldn’t expect the government to fix our food problems all on its own. This is America, after all, where we pride ourselves on individualism.

The occasional indulgence is not a big deal. It’s what we do on July 5 that really matters.

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Sean “Diddy” Combs accepts the BET Lifetime Achievement Award on stage during the 2022 BET Awards at Microsoft Theater on June 26, 2022, in Los Angeles, California. | Leon Bennett/Getty Images for BET

Jurors in the federal criminal trial of Sean “Diddy” Combs reached a mixed verdict Wednesday, finding the rapper and music mogul not guilty of the three most serious charges levied against him.

The jury deliberated for 13 hours across three days before reaching the verdict and found Combs guilty of two of the five charges against him, both for transportation to engage in prostitution.

They found Combs not guilty of the more serious offenses: sex trafficking and racketeering conspiracy. Combs will avoid the harshest sentence — life in prison — but could still face up to 20 years if given the maximum sentence for his remaining convictions. The outcome was seen as a victory for Combs, who responded by falling to his knees before his courtroom chair, applauding the courtroom gallery, and crying out, “Thank god” and “I love you” several times.

The verdict concludes a seven-week trial that contained plenty of lurid details about Diddy’s decades of “freak-offs” and other sex parties, along with shocking anecdotes of his bizarre and controlling behavior toward both his girlfriends and his employees. The defense ultimately chose not to present any witnesses for Diddy but rested after cross-examining the prosecution’s case, relying largely on a strategy of persistently hammering away at the credibility and motivations of the prosecution’s witnesses.

With all that hammering away, the Diddy trial resurfaced some of the very same rape myths that the Me Too movement worked to dismantle a few short years ago, including the one about the perfect victim. The fact that the defense’s tactics appear to have been by and large successful is just the latest indication that America is prepared to put the lessons of Me Too in the rearview mirror.

1. What was the verdict? What does it mean?

Jurors convicted Diddy on two charges under the Mann Act of transporting his then-girlfriend, Cassie Ventura, and another woman known in the courtroom only as Jane for the purposes of prostitution. He was found not guilty, however, of sex trafficking Ventura or Jane.

Effectively, that means while the jury accepted the state’s argument that Diddy illegally transported the women for purposes of engaging in sex work, they were not convinced that the women were actually coerced into participating in these acts.

Legal analyst Paul Mauro, who correctly predicted this split verdict, emphasized that the prosecution had to prove coercion. Given that Judge Arun Subramanian excluded all discussion about coercive control — the overall environment of controlling behavior that can have a coercive effect upon an abuse victim — from the trial, the jurors may not have had enough context to accept the prosecution’s framing of events.

Jurors revealed that they were most divided on the first charge of racketeering conspiracy, telling Judge Subramanian on Tuesday that they were deadlocked before ultimately finding him not guilty. This is a lesser charge than racketeering itself, but it requires that prosecutors prove the defendant participated in a criminal enterprise and agreed to commit crimes to further that enterprise.

This is a complicated charge, however, since it requires the jury to accept that Combs intended to run a criminal enterprise. The defense instead portrayed Combs as a swinger with a troubled history of incidents of domestic abuse rather than a controlling, powerful mogul who systematically used his many businesses to support illegal sexual activities.

2. What happens next?

Prosecutor Maurene Comey has stated the government will seek the maximum on the remaining two counts, which means Combs could still face up to 20 years in prison — 10 years for each count.

Judge Subramanian, a federal district court judge, is currently weighing whether to release Combs from detention while awaiting his sentencing hearing.

3. What new information did we learn from Diddy’s trial?

From the moment testimony in the case kicked off May 12, the trial was packed with one jaw-dropping anecdote after another. Ventura, Combs’ ex-girlfriend, played an inadvertent role in jump-starting the federal investigation into Combs when 2016 surveillance footage surfaced in 2024, that appears to show Combs violently beating her in a hotel hallway.

In addition to that harrowing moment, a litany of Combs’ former girlfriends and staff testified to experiencing what amounted to decades of abusive and controlling behavior from Combs. Bryana Bongolan, a friend of Ventura’s, testified that Combs once allegedly hoisted her to the balcony ledge of a 17th-story apartment and then threw her into the balcony furniture. One longtime staffer, Capricorn Clark, testified that Combs threatened to kill her on the first day she worked for him, physically assaulted her, and at one point, forced her to come with him to stalk Kid Cudi, whose car he later allegedly firebombed out of jealousy over Cudi’s relationship with Ventura.

Multiple former Combs staffers testified to having been required to take polygraph tests by Combs to keep their jobs, sometimes including days of grueling interrogations before he was satisfied. Often, the abuse staff allegedly endured was every bit as terrifying as the incidents against his girlfriends. One former staffer, using the pseudonym Mia, testified that she was forbidden to lock the doors or leave the property while she was staying at Combs’ residence. At one point, she alleged on the stand, Combs began a pattern of intermittently sexually assaulting her over the eight years she worked for him.

Even though Combs was acquitted on the most serious charges against him, it will be hard — justifiably so — for the public to erase many of these stories and allegations from their collective memory.

4. What does the mixed verdict mean for Me Too?

The jury’s mixed verdict represents, in a sense, the fraught place the Me Too movement holds in America’s public consciousness these days.

Me Too arguably opened the door for the federal investigation into Combs, which appears to have kicked off after Ventura filed a civil lawsuit against him in 2023. In it, Ventura made the first shocking public accusations that Combs was involved in human trafficking and sexual assault, launching the stream of accusations that would end in a criminal trial and a mixed verdict.

Ventura filed her lawsuit under the New York Adult Survivors Act (NYASA), a law explicitly passed as a response to the Me Too movement. It offered survivors of sexual violence a one-year window, from November 2022 to 2023, to file civil lawsuits against their alleged attackers, even if the statute of limitations had lapsed.

The idea behind the NYASA was to acknowledge the unusual cultural moment that Me Too created. It’s well established that survivors of sexual assault frequently face too much shame to acknowledge what happened to them, which is part of why sex crimes are so difficult to prosecute: By the time a survivor decides to come forward, the statute of limitations may well have lapsed. The Me Too movement briefly created a space in which survivors were able to acknowledge what had happened to them, which meant that suddenly, a lot of people were coming forward about sex crimes that could no longer be prosecuted. The NYASA was designed to allow survivors to get closure for their attacks in civil court, without reopening the door to criminal charges.

Although Ventura eventually settled her civil lawsuit with Diddy, it led to more accusations. It turned out that some of the charges were still prosecutable in criminal court, and that’s where the federal case began. Me Too and its legal victories made the whole thing possible.

All the rape myths that the Me Too movement was supposed to have debunked have slunk their way back into the level of acceptable discourse.

Yet at the same time that the NYASA was making it possible for survivors to face their attackers in court, a backlash against Me Too was mounting across America. Cultural consensus began to coalesce around the opinion that Me Too had gone too far. Coverage of the Johnny Depp and Amber Heard domestic violence case in 2022 devolved into a gleefully misogynistic spectacle. The status of feminism dropped precipitously in public opinion polls. Most traumatically of all, the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, depriving generations of women of the reproductive freedom with which they were born.

Now, the cultural energy that animated public interest in the first wave of Me Too trials has faded away. All the rape myths that the Me Too movement was supposed to have debunked have slunk their way back into the level of acceptable discourse, especially the one about how no true rape victim will appease their attackers. During Ventura’s cross-examination, lawyers for Combs dwelled at length on text messages in which Ventura appeared to speak positively about the encounters Ventura now says she was coerced into participating in. If she were really raped, their argument implied, she would never have been willing to pretend otherwise.

In real life, it’s extremely common for victims of sexual assault to maintain contact with their attackers, even sometimes covering for them. Most perpetrators of sexual violence know their victims, and in many cases — especially in these celebrity trials — they hold professional or financial power over their victims, too. All of those facts combine to leave survivors frequently unwilling to completely sever ties with their attackers. All of this was discussed at great length in Me Too discourse back in 2017.

Yet Harvey Weinstein has high-profile supporters who make much of the fact that his victims maintained contact with him after he attacked them. Combs’s lawyers relied on the same argument in this case, and the judge blocked prosecutors from presenting expert testimony on coercive control. Apparently, the angle convinced enough members of the jury that they felt no need to convict Combs of the most serious charges he faced.

Me Too achieved real legal victories, but they were temporary — a one-year statute here and there. Its great achievements were its cultural changes. And every day, it seems they are chipped away more and more. The mixed verdict in Combs’s case, and Combs’s partial victory, show just how badly they’ve already eroded.

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The Senate budget bill pares back incentives for renewable energy and aims to boost fossil fuels like coal.

The first solar cell ever made was built in the United States. Tesla, based in the US, was once the largest EV manufacturer in the world. The lithium-ion battery was codeveloped in the US.

But today, China — not the US — is the largest manufacturer of solar cells and batteries. China’s BYD — not Tesla — is the largest EV manufacturer in the world. And China is starting to outrun the US on research and development investment.

The US has a long history of taking the lead in clean energy, and a long history of losing it. And President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill,” which passed the Senate on Tuesday, would again leave the US on the margins of a global clean energy revolution that it could have dominated.

For years now, clean power has been the largest source of new electricity in the US. Solar, batteries, and wind are on track to make up more than 90 percent of new electricity capacity on the US power grid this year. Wind and solar now produce more electricity on the US power grid than coal. Almost twice as many Americans work in clean energy compared to fossil fuels, and the sector is still growing.

But thanks to the bill, that may not be the case for much longer.

Some of the more extreme provisions in earlier drafts of the bill have been removed, like an excise tax targeting renewable energy. But the latest version of the bill rolls back many of the investments from the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act, the single-largest US investment to address climate change by giving the energy transition a boost. It calls for more rapid phaseouts of tax credits for wind and solar power and eliminates a $7,500 tax credit for the purchase of a new electric vehicle. The spending bill working its way through Congress doesn’t just undo incentives for clean energy — it also creates a new tax credit for coal.

These provisions are in line with Trump’s longstanding antipathy toward renewable energy and disbelief in climate change. But they stand to hobble the US economy more broadly.

The US is facing significant load growth on the power grid for the first time in decades as the tech industry scrounges for electrons to power their electricity-devouring data centers. Energy demand is rising and the cheapest, most readily deployable supplies of energy are being throttled.

The alternatives, however, are not likely to make up the gap in time. Fossil fuels take longer to ramp up. The US is currently the largest oil and gas producer in the world, but it can take years to site, permit, and acquire the materials to build power plants that burn these fuels. Since these are internationally traded commodities, their prices can fluctuate based on factors beyond the US’s control.

Right now, oil prices are at four-year lows and natural gas prices are falling, and when prices are low, it’s much harder to make the business case for more mining, drilling, and power plants, even with incentives. Trump may have some levers to pull — he can, for example, open up more federally managed lands for energy production — but many of those leases sit unused because energy companies don’t want to create a supply glut. Meanwhile, employment in the oil and gas industry remains volatile, while coal jobs are continuing their decades-long decline.

“We’re in this moment of surging demand and you can’t build another gas turbine for at least five years beyond what’s already been booked,” said Robbie Orvis, senior director for modeling and analysis at the think tank Energy Innovation. “We have this demand growth that’s going to have to be met. The only thing you can build to meet it on the timeline needed over the next five to 10 years is solar, wind, or battery storage.”

The Senate bill does extend tax credits and loan programs for nuclear energy and geothermal power. However, the cuts in the bill would also slow efforts to build up the domestic energy supply chain needed to bolster other zero-emissions technologies, from raw materials like lithium and rare earth minerals to battery factories. It would do little to relax the bottlenecks for connecting new power plants to the grid, which are adding years to project timelines. The US is also dismantling research and development that could yield the next energy breakthrough. On top of all this, Trump’s tariffs are raising operating costs not just for renewables, but also for the fossil fuels he loves so much.

The net result is a policy suite that will not only hamper clean electricity, but energy overall, making it more expensive for everyone across the country. According to Energy Innovation, the Senate bill would reduce how much energy the US adds to the grid in the years to come compared to the current trajectory, thereby increasing household electricity prices on average by $130 per year, eroding almost a trillion dollars in economic productivity, and costing 760,000 jobs by 2030.

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While the US is putting clean energy in reverse, other countries are racing ahead. Clean energy technology investment is poised to increase to $2.2 trillion this year around the world. Renewables are on track to overtake coal as the biggest power source in the world this year. Wind, solar, and batteries are still getting cheaper. Effectively, the US is ceding one of the biggest growth industries in the world to China, particularly as developing countries industrialize and other wealthy countries look to decarbonize their economies.

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The case for more clean energy — lower costs, faster deployment, fewer greenhouse gas emissions — remains robust. Even with all the deliberate obstacles the Trump administration is placing ahead, there are some wind, solar, and battery projects still poised to come online in the US as they work their way through the pipeline, albeit at a much slower pace than before.

But without continued investment, the US will lose ground to the rest of the world and condemn itself to dirtier, more expensive energy while worsening a problem that will extract a dear toll from the economy.

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President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs a House Republican meeting at the Capitol on May 20, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is the centerpiece of his legislative agenda, and the stakes are high.

The bill has four major pillars: renewing his 2017 tax cuts, implementing new tax cuts, spending billions on a border wall, US Customs and Border Protection, and the military, and increasing the debt ceiling. The bill itself is a smorgasbord of policy and could also affect clean energy programs, student loans, and food assistance, but perhaps the most consequential changes will be to Medicaid.

The bill was approved by the House in May and passed a key Senate vote on Saturday. Republicans are divided over competing priorities; some want to extend Trump’s tax cuts and boost immigration and defense spending, while others worry about the $2.6 trillion cost and cuts to Medicaid. Republican lawmakers aim to pass the bill by Friday using budget reconciliation, but it’s unclear if all 53 Republican senators will agree.

This is a developing story. Follow along here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis.

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Christina Vallice.

Vox editor-in-chief Swati Sharma and vice president of development Nisha Chittal announced today that veteran video journalist Christina Vallice has joined the brand as head of video. She begins her new role on July 7.

“I’m thrilled to welcome Christina to Vox. She is an exceptionally talented video journalist and newsroom leader who will be instrumental in shaping the next chapter of Vox video,” Chittal said. “She brings a wealth of experience to the role, and understands how to break down complex topics in an accessible way. I can’t wait to see how she will take Vox’s explanatory video journalism to new heights.”

In her role, Vallice will oversee Vox’s award-winning video department, continuing the brand’s signature explainer videos as well as leading expansion and experimentation with new formats in vertical shortform video and podcast video. She will oversee video strategy and publishing across all of Vox’s platforms, including Vox’s flagship YouTube channel with over 12 million subscribers, Instagram, TikTok, and website and owned platforms.

Vallice joins Vox after serving in leadership roles at the Wall Street Journal*,* Yahoo Finance, and Vice, following more than a decade producing at NBC News.

Most recently, Vallice was the director of video series and events at Yahoo Finance. There she led a team to deliver in-depth, original reporting on the investments that are leading to advancements in tech, science, and AI, newsmaker interviews with prominent CEOs and business leaders, and spearheaded the cross-newsroom coordination for major coverage events.

At the Wall Street Journal*,* Vallice served as the senior executive producer of news and specials, directing a global team spanning New York, London, and Singapore to produce daily news videos, in-depth explainers, international  features, video investigations and documentaries across various platforms. Under Vallice, theJournalearned two national Emmy nominations for its first feature-length documentary and  its first video investigation.

Before her time at Yahoo Finance and the Journal, Vallice was a supervising producer at Vice, and helped launch the award-winning HBO broadcast, Vice News Tonight. Prior to that, Vallice spent 11 years at NBC Nightly News, delivering fast-turn stories under tight deadlines both in edit and in the field, producing coverage on a wide variety of major news stories.

Vallice received her master’s degree in broadcast journalism from Syracuse University’s Newhouse School of Public Communications after earning her undergraduate degree at Binghamton University.

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A group of doctors join abortion rights supporters at a rally outside the Supreme Court on April 24, 2024, in Washington, DC | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

By the time Republican Rep. Kat Cammack arrived at a Florida emergency room, she was facing an urgent medical crisis: Her pregnancy, then five weeks along, had become ectopic and now threatened her life. It was May 2024, and though Florida’s new and particularly restrictive six-week abortion ban did allow abortion in cases like hers, Cammack said she spent hours convincing hospital staff to administer the standard treatment for ending nonviable pregnancies. Doctors expressed fears about losing their licenses, prompting Cammack to pull up the legislation on her phone to show them that her case fell within legal parameters.

Now pregnant again, Cammack recently described her experience to the Wall Street Journal, accusing the political left of “fearmongering” and creating confusion among healthcare providers that ultimately puts patients at risk. Her view — that confusion stems from abortion rights advocates, not the laws themselves — has become a rallying point for anti-abortion leaders.

Christina Francis, the head of the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, blames mainstream medical groups like the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists (ACOG) for misleading doctors about when they can provide abortions in states with bans.

“They’ve…stated that doctors couldn’t intervene in those [life-threatening] situations or they would face prosecution, and in fact, they’re still peddling that lie,” she told Vox. “They [just] put out posts on the anniversary of Dobbs saying the same thing, and they have a ‘Blame the Bans’ campaign where they’re actively lying to practicing physicians and telling them that they have to wait until their patient is actively dying.”

But doctors argue they’re scared for good reason. The laws create genuine legal risk in complex medical situations, particularly when state officials contradict the courts’ interpretations of medical exceptions. That uncertainty played out dramatically in late 2023 in the case of Kate Cox, a Texas woman whose pregnancy developed fatal fetal abnormalities; a judge ruled the law’s exception permitted her abortion, but the state’s attorney general threatened to prosecute any doctor who performed the procedure. (Cox ultimately crossed state lines to end her pregnancy.) Other high-profile cases of doctors hesitating to provide emergency care have surfaced in the media, adding significant pressure on anti-abortion lawmakers who insist there’s no legislative ambiguity to be found.

Partly in response, red state lawmakers have been moving to address — or at least signal they’re addressing — gray areas in their laws, passing “clarifications” to give doctors more concrete guidance on when they can provide emergency abortions and how criminal penalties would kick in. The Guttmacher Institute found that this is one of the top legislative trends for reproductive health care this year, with 42 bills introduced across 12 states. Three of those bills — in Texas, Kentucky, and Tennessee — were signed into law, and Texas’s took effect earlier this month.

Most Americans — across parties, genders, and regions — favor allowing abortion when the pregnancy endangers the mother’s life or results from rape or incest, and strong majorities also back exceptions for severe fetal anomalies or serious health problems. All state abortion bans currently include exceptions to “prevent the death” or “preserve the life” of the pregnant patient, and many also include some sort of health exception, typically to prevent “permanent” damage to a “major” bodily function. The new clarification bills could help prevent the death of some patients but do little to expand access to some of the abortion exceptions voters support.

Clarifying laws that were supposedly clear

The new bills proposing amendments to abortion bans are fueling debates over whether incremental improvements are worth the risk of creating false confidence that major legal obstacles have been resolved. This year’s fight in Kentucky clearly captured that disagreement.

The state’s local ACOG chapter helped craft the legislative language and supported the proposed clarification bill, calling it an “acceptable short-term solution.” However, the national ACOG organization, along with Planned Parenthood and some OB-GYNs with Kentucky Physicians for Reproductive Freedom, successfully urged Gov. Andy Beshear, a Democrat, to veto it. “Although supporters of House Bill 90 claim it protects pregnant women and clarifies abortion law in Kentucky, it actually does the opposite,” Beshear declared. (The legislature overrode the governor’s veto two days later.)

As confusion mounts, supporters of abortion restrictions have doubled down on the argument that this is really not a big deal. Francis, the head of the anti-abortion OB-YGN group, argues that the bans are clear and don’t need to be rewritten — doctors simply need better education. “So many of these state laws have been in place for either three years or close to three years, and there’s not been a single doctor prosecuted for intervening when a woman’s life would be in danger,” she said.

But Francis also acknowledged that physicians were left without reliable guidance from hospitals, state agencies, and professional associations, institutions with attorneys who are themselves uncertain. A Washington Post investigation from late 2023 found that hospital lawyers and compliance teams often hesitated to advise doctors definitively, leaving physicians unsure when and how they could legally act.

Some anti-abortion leaders have gone so far as to allege that physicians are deliberately withholding abortion care to make a political point. Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti of Tennessee argued it wasn’t his state’s ban that was harming women, but “other factors like doctors’ independent choices not to provide permissible abortions.”

Still, even as conservatives double down on their accusations of fear-mongering, Republican-led states have been quietly adjusting their laws to ease doctors’ fears of being prosecuted for providing emergency care.

Utah lawmakers rewrote their emergency exception so doctors do not need to wait for an “immediate” threat to a patient to provide an abortion. Some states, like Idaho, have moved to scrap their “affirmative defense” provisions — meaning doctors would no longer have to be charged with a crime first and then prove in court that the abortion was medically necessary. Tennessee moved this year to provide specific examples of what constitutes a permissible exception, including PPROM (the rupture of fetal membranes before 24 weeks of gestation), severe preeclampsia (a high blood pressure disorder), and other infections risking uterine rupture.

Texas’s changes to its abortion law took effect on June 20. Its legislation, like Utah, clarifies that doctors can perform abortions when a pregnant patient faces a life-threatening condition caused or worsened by pregnancy without waiting for that risk to become “imminent.” The law also standardizes the definition of “medical emergency” across various state statutes, and it requires training for doctors and lawyers to learn more about these exceptions.

“We all thought it is important that the law be crystal clear,” state Sen. Bryan Hughes, who introduced Texas’s clarification bill this year, said in the legislature. Last fall he defended his state’s abortion ban, which he also authored, as “plenty clear” and blamed news organizations for muddying the waters.

The new Texas bill was backed by the Texas Medical Association, the Texas Hospital Association, and leading anti-abortion groups like the Texas Right to Life. Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, one of the largest national anti-abortion lobbying groups, praised the passage of Texas’s law, stating it will “end the confusion caused by the abortion lobby through direct education to doctors.”

Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America also championed a South Dakota law passed last year that required the state to produce a video on how doctors can legally perform abortions to save the life of a pregnant woman. In the state’s subsequent six-minute video, the South Dakota Department of Health secretary says a patient does not need to be “critically ill or actively dying” for a doctor to end a pregnancy. (Abortion rights supporters have blasted the video, which they say provides no real guidelines or legal clarity to practicing physicians.)

Some legal advocates for abortion rights warn the reforms will fail to resolve the underlying confusion.

The bills are “not to clarify anything. This is just so politicians can say they fixed it,” Molly Duane, a senior attorney at the Center for Reproductive Rights, told Vox. “The reason I know this is because the anti-abortion lobby has been pretty open about the fact that they were the ones drafting the bills. For a lawyer like me that spends all day, every day, looking at these, it’s quite obvious that there’s no additional language here that addresses the questions the doctors actually have.”

ACOG also opposed Texas’s bill, and the group’s general counsel Molly Meegan wrote last month that “the solution to a bad law is not to further legislate that law. It is to get rid of the law.”

The tough choices abortion rights supporters face

One of the hard realities abortion rights advocates face is that in order to secure more legal protection for physicians working under vague abortion bans, they often must accept language crafted by anti-abortion lobbyists that could make things worse in the future. That controversial language can limit what types of procedures get classified as abortion or can introduce ideological terms like “maternal-fetal separation,” which are not standard in mainstream medical practice and can help justify or require medical alternatives to abortion, like cesarean deliveries and inductions of labor, that carry greater risk for patients.

While such semantic distinctions may offer doctors some short-term legal protection, activists warn they risk reinforcing a false moral hierarchy between “good” and “bad” abortions and stigmatize some forms of care rather than helping the public understand that all these procedures fall under the same broader category of abortion.

Some of the bills also codify new fetal personhood language, which is part of an effort to extend constitutional protections to embryos. Abortion advocates warn this sort of language could help anti-abortion lawmakers strip patients and doctors of additional rights down the line. Gov. Beshear echoed these concerns in his veto announcement, blasting the clarification bill for using “new definitions that have been advanced by advocates who oppose in vitro fertilization and birth control.” He warned that using such language sets “a stage for future legislation and litigation” that put health care options at risk. Many physicians say they do not feel reassured by these clarifications. If anything, they feel more confused and nervous.

The push for clearer laws reveals a fundamental tension: Abortion rights advocates say exceptions like “ectopic pregnancy” with no further detail are too vague, yet also argue that the practices of medicine are too complex to codify in law. Republican lawmakers point to legislative language granting deference to physicians’ “reasonable medical judgment,” but advocates say that standard is still too open-ended. More precise language might help in typical cases but risks excluding the edge cases where doctors need protection most.

Given these trade-offs, abortion rights supporters are left grappling with a basic strategic question: whether imperfect progress is worth the potential costs.

“I think that’s the age-old question,” said Kimya Forouzan, a state policy researcher at the Guttmacher Institute, which has been tracking legislative trends. “If one person could get help getting an abortion that’s great but at the same time these [clarification] bills are not causing the problem that abortion bans create to go away.”

Sarah Osmundson, a maternal-fetal medicine physician in Tennessee, captured the challenge of working with patients facing high-risk pregnancies in a state with a strict abortion ban. Writing in the New York Times in 2023, she explained why she supported modest changes to her state’s abortion ban, even as she understood the arguments of fellow abortion rights supporters that such imperfect amendments come with risks. “I worry that reproductive rights advocates may be digging into untenable positions and failing to listen to those affected most by the current reality,” she wrote. “Do we support incremental changes that provide minimum safety for pregnant women and physicians?”

Ultimately, lawmakers drafting clarification bills have been careful to not expand access to care in any significant way. Many still exclude abortions for rape and incest — despite polling showing that majorities of Americans want those carve-outs — and almost no state allows abortion for mental health reasons, despite mental health conditions accounting for over 20 percent of pregnancy-related deaths in the US. Many European countries permit mental health as an acceptable health exception to abortion bans.

Looking ahead, Americans should expect to see more incremental legislative tweaks coupled with state-mandated training, as anti-abortion leaders hail the passage of such medical education, or “Med Ed,” laws. Whether this strategy proves durable may depend on how much evidence accumulates that the core problems — criminal penalties, prosecutorial discretion, hospital risk management — run deeper than confusion about legal language.

The Med Ed campaigns represent an acknowledgment that something needed fixing. The remaining question is this: What happens when the fixes don’t fix it?

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President Donald Trump speaks to members of the media as he departs a House Republican meeting at the US Capitol in May to promote his signature bill. | Andrew Harnik/Getty Images

Republicans are barreling ahead to try to pass President Donald Trump’s “one big, beautiful bill” — legislation that somehow manages to combine massive fiscal irresponsibility with devastating spending cuts.

The bill would keep the “Trump tax cuts” originally passed in 2017 in place, while adding some new tax breaks and new spending on immigration enforcement and the military.

It would also make deep cuts to government spending on Medicaid, the clean energy industry, student loans, and food stamps, though exactly how deep these cuts will be isn’t yet clear, as the GOP continues to debate the bill.

Yet under any scenario, these cuts will be insufficient to get anywhere near covering the bill’s massive cost — one estimate suggests it will add $3.9 trillion to the debt.

Republicans are trying to rely on only their party’s votes to pass it through Congress and hope to send it to Trump’s desk this week. Democrats are uniformly opposed.

On Monday, the Senate began considering amendments on its version of the bill (the House passed its own version last month). But much remains unsettled as they attempt to hammer out a final compromise.

Why does Trump want to pass this bill so much?

Trump is pushing hard to ram this bill through because he wants to take care of four things at once.

First, if Congress does nothing, the lower income tax rates Trump signed into law in 2017 are set to expire at the end of this year. That would mean higher taxes for practically everyone — a political disaster.

Second, the bill fulfills a few Trump campaign promises by creating some tax breaks, such as new tax deductions for tip wages and overtime pay.

Third, the bill includes new spending on immigration enforcement (such as Trump’s border wall) and certain military priorities (like his planned “Golden Dome” missile defense shield).

Fourth, the bill raises the US debt ceiling — the limit on new debt the government can issue, which Congress periodically squabbles over raising — by $5 trillion.

Who gets hurt by the bill

All of this tax cutting and new spending is very expensive — it amounts to about $5 trillion over the next decade. So the bill also does some spending cuts: about $1 trillion. These cuts are overwhelmingly targeted at Democratic or liberal-coded priorities and constituencies.

For one, Medicaid would be cut deeply — perhaps by as much as 18 percent, due to new work reporting requirements and other changes that the Congressional Budget Office estimates would push 12 million people off the program.

The clean energy industry would also be hammered. The current Senate bill not only rolls back Biden-era tax credits but also imposes a painful new tax on wind or solar projects using Chinese components.

Student loans and food stamps are the other areas that would face particularly steep cuts.

The exact extent of all these cuts is yet to be determined. Some in the GOP are seeking to soften the Medicaid and clean energy cuts at least somewhat, but conservative hardliners are pressing to slash spending even more.

The public spectacle this week will be on the Senate floor as amendments get votes, but the real action will happen behind the scenes as GOP leaders attempt to cut a deal that can win over nearly every House and Senate Republican.

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The biting midge spreads Oropouche virus.

Oropouche virus disease was a relatively rare illness for decades, lurking on the margins of tropical rainforests in the Caribbean and South America.

Sporadic reports of an infection causing fevers, coughs, chills, and body aches emerged among people living near or moving into the jungle. A tiny insect called a midge spreads the disease, and the earliest known case dates back to 1955 in a forest worker near a village called Vega de Oropouche in Trinidad. Since most people who were infected with the virus recovered on their own and since cases were so infrequent, it barely registered as a public health concern.

But a few years ago, something changed.

A major Oropouche fever outbreak beginning in 2023 infected at least 23,000 people across Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Peru. It wasn’t just confined to remote wilderness areas but was spreading in metropolises like Rio de Janeiro. In some cases, travelers were infected and then brought the virus home: So far, Oropouche fever has sprung up in the US, Canada, and Europe in people returning from the afflicted region. The outbreak has killed at least five people.

The sudden rise of Oropouche disease startled scientists and health officials. Since its discovery, there have only been around 500,000 known cases. By contrast, there are upwards of 400 million dengue infections each year. It’s likely then that many more Oropouche infections have gone undetected, especially since its symptoms overlap with those from other diseases and there’s little active screening for the virus.

What you’ll learn from this story

What Oropouche fever is, how you can identify is and what spreads the disease.What researchers know about the startling outbreak across South American in 2023 and 2024.The threat the disease’s spread poses to the United States.

Now, researchers are looking back at the outbreak to try to find out what they missed and what lessons they can apply to get ahead of future epidemics. Oropouche virus is a critical case study in the complicated factors that drive vector-borne diseases. Dynamics like deforestation, urban sprawl, international travel, and gaps in surveillance are converging to drive up the dangers from infections spread by animals.

And as the climate changes, new regions are becoming more hospitable to the blood suckers that spread these diseases, increasing the chances of these seemingly-remote infections making it to the US and getting established. That means more people will face threats from illnesses that they may never have considered before.

“It’s very likely that these public health problems that people before called ‘tropical disease’ are not so tropical anymore and are basically everywhere,” said William de Souza, who studies arboviruses — viruses spread by arthropods like insects — at the University of Kentucky. “Vector-borne disease is not a local problem; this is a global problem.”

The rising specter of Oropouche fever comes at a time when the United States is cutting funding for research at universities, pulling back from studying vector-borne disease threats, and ending collaborations with other countries to limit their risk.

The Oropouche virus is a classic case study in how humans worsen vector-borne disease

The Oropouche virus belongs to the family of bunyaviruses. They appear as spheres under a microscope, and they encode their genomes in RNA, rather than DNA as human cells do. RNA viruses tend to have high mutation rates, making it harder to target them with vaccines and increasing the odds of reinfection. Oropuche’s relatives include the viruses behind Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever, spread by ticks, and Rift Valley fever, spread by mosquitoes.

“Vector-borne disease is not a local problem; this is a global problem.”

William de souza

Oropouche spreads mainly through the bites of a 1- to 3-millimeter-long insect called, appropriately, a biting midge (Culicoides paraensis). Midges are sometimes called sand flies or no-see-ums in the US, and they breed in damp soil, rotting vegetation, and standing water. Like mosquitoes, they feed on blood to drive their reproduction, but their minuscule bodies can easily slip through mosquito nets. When a midge bites an infected host, it can pass on the pathogen to a human during a subsequent bite. There’s also evidence that the virus may be sexually transmissible, but no such cases have been documented yet. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that male travelers from regions where Oropouche is spreading should not have sex for six weeks if they show symptoms of the disease.

Vector-borne diseases like Oropouche continue to surprise us because there are so many variables that have to align in order to spread them — the pathogens, the vectors, the hosts, and the environment.

Unlike diseases like Covid-19 or influenza, vector-borne illnesses don’t spread directly from person to person. Instead, they require an animal, often arthropods like ticks, midges, and mosquitoes. The range, reproduction, and behavior of these organisms add another confounding factor in the spread of the diseases they carry. Globally, vector-borne diseases account for 17 percent of infectious diseases, leading to more than 700,000 deaths per year, according to the World Health Organization. But not every part of the world is equally vulnerable.

In cooler regions, vector-borne infections are often a minor public health concern, but in countries like Brazil, “it’s at the top,” said Tatiane Moraes de Sousa, a researcher at the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz) in Rio de Janeiro. “Oropouche before 2024 was concentrated just in the Amazon. Last year, we saw the spreading of Oropuche in almost all Brazilian states.”

That gets to the first obstacle in tracking Oropouche: Which animals are the reservoirs for the virus and where are they? So far, researchers have detected the virus in animals including sloths, capuchin monkeys, marmosets, domestic birds, and rodents. These organisms form what’s known as the sylvatic, or forest, cycle of the virus. How the virus jumps between all these animals and which ones are most concerning for people is not known.

Additionally, it may be possible that other insects may be able to carry the Oropouche virus, but it’s not clear whether they can spread it to humans.

The pattern that does emerge is that when people spend more time inside and around the fringes of tropical rainforests, where the animals that harbor the virus and the insects that spread them reside, they’re more likely to get infected. With deforestation and development, more people are moving into areas where the disease naturally spreads.

“This is a classical example of how human behavior can lead to the emergence of a pathogen,” said Natasha Tilston, who studies Oropouche virus at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

People can travel great distances, and as people move back and forth from the wilderness to cities, they can unwittingly carry viruses like Oropouche. If enough of them gather in cities where vectors are present, they can trigger an urban epidemic cycle as the virus travels from person to midge to person. This was likely the pattern in the 2023–24 outbreak in major cities in South America.

It’s also true that more health workers were on guard for Oropouche and thus identified more infections. “The outbreak is probably a combination of one, there are more cases, and two, we’re also looking for a lot more than we did before,” Tilston said, noting that some past outbreaks of dengue may have actually been Oropouche as well.

What set off the outbreak?

One factor is that the virus likely evolved. Viruses mutate all the time, and most mutations are either inconsequential or detrimental to the virus, slowing or stopping its reproduction. But occasionally, a change can confer an advantage or make the pathogen more destructive. The Oropouche virus has a genome structure that makes it even more prone to a type of mutation called reassortment.

“Reassortment is when you have two similar viruses infect the same cell and they mix genomes,” explained University of Kentucky’s de Souza. “People previously infected by the old virus are now susceptible to new infection. This could help explain why the Amazon region, where this has been circulated for a long time, saw this emerge, because people were probably reinfected.”

The strain behind the outbreak appears to reproduce faster and cause more severe illness than prior varieties as well.

Part of the reason this outbreak racked up so many infected people is that health officials were starting to deploy the tools to identify on a wider scale. Particularly in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, more health departments across the region built up their tools to detect viruses.

But researchers still aren’t sure exactly what spurred the virus to spread so suddenly across so many countries. Travel restrictions imposed during the Covid-19 pandemic started relaxing in 2023 and made it easier for people to move back and forth from the rural areas where the virus is endemic to the cities where it became established.

The 2023 to 2024 outbreak also coincided with a powerful El Niño event that brought gargantuan amounts of rain and triggered unprecedented flooding across many parts of South America. These were also years that set new temperature records. Higher temperatures can speed up the reproduction of the virus inside midges. But scientists aren’t exactly sure how this heat and water affected the vectors, though Brazil has seen outbreaks of other infectious diseases in the aftermath of floods.

“El Niño and other climate phenomena have been associated with the change of the patterns of many different vector-borne diseases,” de Souza said. “For Oropouche specifically, we don’t have the answers yet, but the likelihood of impact is very high.”

On top of all this, there aren’t any specific ways to keep an outbreak in check once it ignites. There are no vaccines or treatments for Oropouche fever yet. So when all the factors align to spread the disease, there isn’t much people can do to target the disease, and when it reaches a new area, there aren’t as many people with immunity and few health workers who know what they’re dealing with.

How the US is preparing for diseases like the Oropouche virus

Fortunately, the Oropouche outbreak has died down, but a variety of infections are gaining a toehold in new places as infected people travel and as vectors move into new habitats, and the US is increasingly vulnerable. According to the CDC, the number of vector-borne disease cases per year has doubled in the US since 2001.

Last year, the US saw transmission of mosquito-borne diseases like Eastern equine encephalitis and West Nile virus. Malaria, a disease once eradicated across the country, saw the first local infections in 20 years in 2023 in Florida and Texas. Vectors like the Asian tiger mosquito are spreading further north as the climate changes and expands favorable conditions for its survival.

With travelers moving back and forth from regions where diseases are endemic, many will unwittingly bring back dangerous souvenirs, whether a stowaway insect in their luggage or an infection in their blood. And with midges, mosquitoes, and ticks spreading to new regions, dangerous pathogens are extending their reach.

There are ways to slow the spread of these diseases, however, and the US has managed to do so before. The US famously launched a successful campaign to eradicate malaria within its borders.

The first step is to simply acknowledge the threat. As Oropouche showed, there may be diseases lurking closer than we realized that we simply haven’t bothered to look for.

It’s fairly simple to do things like dump standing water where insects can breed or spray insecticides on midge breeding grounds. But some places are getting creative, working to build up habitats for fish, bats, birds, and dragonflies that are natural predators of mosquitoes and midges to limit their spread. Limiting the destruction and development in wilderness areas can reduce the likelihood of diseases spilling over from animals into humans.

Some regions are looking at even more drastic ways to stymie vectors. One measure that’s gaining traction is deploying sterile male mosquitoes. When they mate, they produce eggs that won’t hatch, thus reducing the population of the insect. Brazil recently inaugurated a factory that breeds mosquitoes to carry a bacterium known as Wolbachia that prevents the mosquitoes from reproducing easily, slowing the viruses that cause dengue, Zika, and chikungunya, a disease that can cause fever and joint pain, now established in the Americas. Hawaii is using these mosquitoes to arrest the spread of avian malaria.

Vaccines and treatments are critical tools for addressing the diseases directly. Many pathogens can be controlled with these measures, but because they more commonly spread in poorer countries, there is less investment in containing them. Many vector-borne diseases like Oropouche are considered “neglected,” and so when they do spread beyond their typical range, there isn’t much available to help those who get sick. But the growing burden of these diseases demands a new generation of tools that can target multiple threats. “We are seeing so many outbreaks that we need broad vaccines,” said Fiocruz’s Sousa.

Additionally, vector-borne diseases aren’t each waiting for their turns. Countries can have multiple outbreaks at the same time on top of all the other health concerns that emerge during severe weather like extreme heat or the healthcare disruptions in the wake of a disaster like a major storm. “We are seeing cumulative threats because we are seeing not just one vector-borne disease,” Sousa said. “In a lot of scenarios, we are also maintaining high levels of communicable diseases.”

Right now, some health departments are being proactive, keeping an eye out for sick travelers, collecting mosquitoes in the wild to see what kinds of germs they’re carrying, and coordinating with researchers across the country.

“We’ve been having bi-weekly meetings with CDC to talk about the potential for Oropouche coming into the US and spreading,” said Bethany Bolling, zoonotic virology group manager at the Texas Department of State Health Services. “We’ve seen in the past that Florida and Texas are some of the primary areas where these new viruses start to establish, so in Texas, we’re trying to be aware of Oropouche and what the vectors are.”

For the US, Brazil’s experience with Oropouche is an important lesson that could help health officials prepare and counter the disease when it inevitably arrives.

“There is a real threat to the United States,” Tilston said. “I think we have all the right settings, and I think it’s just a matter of everything being in the right place at the right time. With climate change, it’s just really a matter of when it’s going to happen.”

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The Moscow, Idaho, house where four University of Idaho students were found dead on November 13, 2022, is shown on November 29 after vehicles belonging to the victims and others were towed away earlier in the day. | Ted S. Warren/AP

Update, June 30, 2025, 6:30 ET: Bryan Kohberger has agreed to plead guilty to all charges in the murders of the Idaho Four. The plea deal allows him to avoid the death penalty in exchange for serving four consecutive life sentences for the murders.

What made their deaths all the more terrifying was how elusive their killer seemed — until a sudden arrest made everything even scarier.

Sometime after midnight on November 13, four University of Idaho students — Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves — were all viciously attacked while sleeping in an off-campus townhouse. They were each, as eventual criminal charges would reflect, “stabbed and murdered with premeditation with malice and forethought.”

Throughout the seven tense weeks that followed, the case now known as the Idaho student murders rocked the small town of Moscow, Idaho, became a riveting true crime obsession, and sparked a global media frenzy.

But although everything that happened after their deaths would become international news, the lead-up to the quadruple homicide was completely uneventful. And so, nothing seemed to stick: There were no suspicious actions, changes, or alarming behaviors prior to the murders, and no immediate suspects, no big compelling clues, no key witnesses in the aftermath. An unknown intruder or intruders had simply entered the house, stabbed to death four of the six sleeping students inside, and then quietly slipped into the night.

Still, as the University of Idaho community struggled to come to terms with the killings and cope with their fear of the perpetrator, local and federal investigators were hard at work. By late December, despite the massive amount of resources devoted to the investigation, along with a stream of steady case updates, the case appeared to be on the verge of going cold. But on December 30, Moscow police announced they’d made an arrest in the case.

Bryan Kohberger, 28, had no apparent connection to any of the victims. Instead, he was a graduate student at a neighboring university, with an unsettling history and an obsession with true crime. The abrupt identification of the alleged killer, and the excavation of his personal background, meant that one of the most senseless, shocking crimes in recent memory became even more tragic.

Had four devoted friends — two of whom were dating, two of whom were lifelong best friends — lost their lives to a would-be serial killer?

The probable cause affidavit for the arrest, as well as the wealth of information that has since trickled out about the case and the alleged perpetrator, sheds new light on an extraordinarily horrific crime and the equally extraordinary criminal investigation that followed it. What finally led to Kohberger’s arrest was simply excellent investigative work: a mix of well-organized policing, groundbreaking forensics using genetic genealogy, and old-fashioned detective work. As Kohberger heads to trial this fall, the secrets of the criminal they caught are still being unearthed.

The murders

Xana Kernodle, Ethan Chapin, Madison Mogen, and Kaylee Goncalves were all University of Idaho undergraduates, all involved in the campus Greek system, and all fast friends. Kernodle, 20, was a bubbly junior majoring in marketing; she was dating Chapin, 20, a triplet and a fun-loving sports management major. Mogen and Goncalves, both 21, had been inseparable since the sixth grade. They did everything together: lived together, went to school together, and, ultimately, died side by side.

On the night of Saturday, November 12, 2022, everything seemed normal. Kernodle and Chapin went to a party at the Sigma Chi fraternity; Mogen and Goncalves went out to a bar, then hung out at a food truck for a bit. By 2 am Sunday, according to the probable cause affidavit, everyone had gathered at the house on King Road where Mogen, Goncalves, and Kernodle lived with two other roommates. Goncalves, as reported in January by Dateline, had recently moved out of the townhouse as she prepared to graduate early and take a job in Austin, Texas, but she’d returned for the weekend to hang out with Mogen. Months later, this news would fuel public speculation that whoever was watching the house saw her return — and saw it as an opportunity.

The three-story house was accessible primarily by a secure door with a coded entry on the bottom floor, as well as by a sliding glass door on the main level (second floor) of the house. The lower entry was locked, but the sliding glass door might have been more easily accessible.

At 4 am, Kernodle ordered Jack-in-the-Box; at 4:12 am, she was on her phone, surfing TikTok. Sometime in the next few minutes, the attack began. She tried to fight off her attacker — but by 4:25 am, she and her boyfriend would both be dead.

Note: the following section contains disturbing details of the crime.

The killer attacked on the second and third floors of the house, entering each of the victims’ rooms for separate attacks — but he left the roommates on the main and lowest floors alive. He used a large Ka-Bar knife of the style used by the US Marine Corps.

Nearby surveillance footage captured audio of the attacks around 4:17 am, including distressed sounds and barking from Goncalves’s dog. As revealed in the affidavit, one roommate told police she heard noises and crying, but didn’t understand what she was hearing. Although she opened her door repeatedly to see what was happening, she saw nothing alarming — though she did report hearing Goncalves say, “There’s someone here.” Some time later, over sounds of crying coming from Kernodle’s room, she heard a male voice saying, “It’s okay, I’m going to help you.”

The third time she opened her door, it was to the sight of a man clad all in black and wearing a mask, walking toward her. As she stood in “frozen shock,” the killer walked by her room; it’s unclear whether or not he saw her. With his face mostly covered, the roommate noted the only thing she could see clearly: the suspect’s “bushy eyebrows.” That detail would later prove accurate.

Still stunned, the roommate returned to her room and locked her door, while the killer exited through the sliding glass door on the apartment’s main floor.

Then he vanished.

The aftermath: A media frenzy and public speculation run amok

On Sunday, at 11:58 am, 911 received a phone call from a roommate’s phone, during which multiple people at the scene spoke to the dispatcher.

This 911 call has not been released, but there’s been considerable confusion due to reports of “an unconscious person” at the scene. Police clarified that “the surviving roommates summoned friends to the residence because they believed one of the second-floor victims had passed out and was not waking up”; this statement, however, led to widespread bafflement from the public about how a bloody crime scene involving multiple fatalities could have been so misunderstood and misreported.

The murders immediately made national headlines and left the community in disbelief. Despite police initially stating there was no “ongoing community risk,” the panic was real. Once news of the deaths broke, so many students on the 11,000-member University of Idaho campus fled the school that the university decided to allow students an optional early Thanksgiving break. Concerned calls to 911 spiked, and residents expressed fear of a Ted Bundy-like predator stalking and choosing their victims randomly. Early police statements didn’t help clear this up; after initially releasing contradictory statements about whether the attack had been personal or random, police settled on the inclusive conclusion that it was “an isolated, targeted attack,” but that they had “not concluded if the target was the residence or its occupants.”

Online sleuths immediately latched onto the murders, with speculation running rampant both locally and online. Police released bodycam footage taken the night of the murders, from unrelated nearby interactions. It’s unclear if the footage led to tips that proved useful in Kohberger’s eventual arrest, but it did lead to a flurry of rumors and speculation that brief, blurry motion in the background of the video might be a group of people running from the crime scene.

On the hunt for clues, people pored over the four victims’ social media, accusing everyone from their friends to random people who showed up in the background of Instagram photos. The food truck, which ran a Twitch livestream, became a huge source of public speculation, with people examining footage of Goncalves and Mogen hanging out by the truck, looking for any clues that someone may have been stalking the two women.

Police had to issue statements formally clearing multiple people (and one animal) of suspicion, including the surviving roommates, an ex-boyfriend of one of the victims who she had repeatedly called the night of the attack, a random man who was at the food truck, and, most bizarrely, a University of Idaho professor who was fingered for the crime by the “inner spirit” of a tarot reader on TikTok. (The tarot reader continues to insist the professor ordered Kohberger to carry out the murders.)

That bonkers sidebar in this morbid case lends an idea of how chaotic things looked from the sidelines: a heinous crime, with an apparent lack of witnesses, no significant leads, and a lack of serious suspects — but plenty of distracting, obfuscating, unhelpful social media noise. When, on December 7, police asked the public for help locating a white Hyundai Elantra that had allegedly been spotted at the crime scene, it seemed to many people to be less like a real, promising lead and more like busywork: After all, a generic white car? What could be more of a needle in a haystack?

But as improbable as it seemed, police focus on that generic white car was exactly right.

Five days after the murders, a criminology doctoral student at Washington State University changed the title on his white 2015 Hyundai Elantra, before driving it cross-country from Idaho to his parents’ home in Pennsylvania. His attempts to prevent authorities from tracing the car, however, overlooked one thing:

Police had his DNA.

The investigation and arrest of Bryan Kohberger

What’s striking about the investigation into Kohberger, as the affidavit makes clear, is both how quickly police homed in on him as a person of interest, and how seamlessly multiple law enforcement agencies worked together to apprehend him — collaborating across multiple states, jurisdictions, and even the country.

The first big lead in the case came from nearby surveillance footage, which captured a “white sedan” repeatedly circling the neighborhood between 3:20 am and 4:20 am.

Police tracked the car to Pullman, Washington, about 10 miles away, home to the Washington State University campus. Meanwhile, an FBI expert identified the make and model, and even narrowed down the year range of the car: a 2014-2016 Hyundai Elantra.

With that detail in hand, WSU campus police officers quickly tracked down a Hyundai Elantra owner who attended the school and lived near the last place the car had been seen on surveillance the night of November 13: Kohberger.

By November 29, just over two weeks after the murders, the Moscow Police Department had a copy of Kohberger’s driver’s license photo, complete with his “bushy eyebrows.”

Cell phone records showed Kohberger’s phone traveling from Pullman in the direction of Moscow the night of the murders, before it was shut off completely between 2:47 am and 4:48 am — “consistent with Kohberger attempting to conceal his location during the quadruple homicide,” according to the affidavit. They also showed Kohberger apparently returning to the scene of the crime in Moscow at approximately 9 am that day — still several hours before authorities would be alerted to the scene — and then immediately returning to his house in Pullman.

But while authorities had strong circumstantial evidence tying Kohberger and his white car to the crime, the smoking gun in this case had been recovered from the crime scene on the first day of the investigation: an empty knife sheath with a trace of DNA from an unknown male.

Armed with this clue, authorities turned to the groundbreaking technique that’s led to arrests in many cases since the 2018 arrest of the Golden State Killer: genetic DNA matching. In this process, investigators upload DNA to genealogy websites and then build out a potential family tree for a suspect (or, in many cases, an unidentified missing person). Then, using context clues and other practical detective work, they follow the family tree and trace which member is most likely to be a match.

The use of genetic genealogy is controversial. Currently, only two genealogy websites, GEDmatch and Family Tree DNA, allow law enforcement to use DNA from their users. Both are opt-in, meaning the user has to give explicit consent for the use, though GEDmatch encourages users to opt in and boasts that its genetic DNA matching has assisted in closing over 500 cold cases. That number seems accurate given how regularly genetic DNA matching is now used to solve crimes — and it may soon be even higher thanks to a recently developed predictive algorithm that could allow police to more quickly zoom in on the correct branch of a DNA family tree.

Police were able to match the DNA on the knife sheath with DNA from Kohberger’s father, gathered from trash at Kohberger’s parents’ home. And that match was definitive, excluding 99.99 percent of the population from being the father of the suspect.

Meanwhile, Kohberger and his dad embarked on a multi-day road trip from Washington to Pennsylvania. License plate readers across the country mapped them traveling from state to state: Colorado, Indiana, Pennsylvania. On December 15, they were stopped twice by Indiana patrol officers in a very short timespan for tailgating. A law enforcement source later told Fox News that a task force, which had Kohberger under surveillance requested that the Indiana troopers pull him over specifically so that they could get a glimpse of his hands to see if there were any cuts or other injuries. (In bodycam footage of one of the two stops, Kohberger and his father appear only briefly on camera.) The FBI, allegedly part of the task force, later denied to Fox that it had given any orders to waylay Kohberger; it’s unclear if the task force was acting independently, or if the two stops were a complete coincidence.

On December 30, after surveilling Kohberger for several days, the Pennsylvania State Police executed a raid on the home of his parents in the largely rural Chestnuthill Township, complete with smashed windows and broken doors. After being extradited back to Idaho, all the while under constant media scrutiny, Kohberger appeared in the Latah County District Court in Moscow on Thursday, January 5, and documents related to his arrest were unsealed by the court.

That was the first time the world had heard of Bryan Kohberger. But internet sleuths quickly got to work uncovering his strange and ominous background.

The fallout: Kohberger, his background — and what’s next

Kohberger was a Pennsylvania native who grew up in the suburbs. His high school classmates described him as “analytical,” interested in human behaviors — but one friend described a physically and emotionally abusive friendship to the New York Times that “got so, so bad that I just shut down when I was around him.”

Kohberger graduated from Northampton Community College in 2018 with an associate degree in psychology; two years later, he graduated from DeSales University, then went on to study criminology there as a grad student. While there, he took classes under legendary forensic profiler Katherine Ramsland, a household name in the world of true crime thanks to her long career and dozens of books covering famous cases. He also participated in a research study into criminal behavior, for which he recruited on Reddit using a retroactively chilling descriptor: “This study seeks to understand the story behind your most recent criminal offense, with an emphasis on your thoughts and feelings throughout your experience.” After getting his master’s degree in 2022, he began studying at Washington State as a criminology and criminal justice doctoral student.

There are striking parallels between Kohberger and the Golden State Killer, Joseph DeAngelo Jr. Both men gravitated to law enforcement: DeAngelo was a police officer; Kohberger worked as a security guard for a local school district and had recently applied for an internship with his local police department, claiming he wanted to aid rural law enforcement with data collection and analysis. Both had glowing newspaper write-ups for small acts of valor they had performed.

Both men also cased their crime scenes extensively: phone records showed Kohberger returning to the area of the King Road house again and again — “on at least 12 occasions” per the affidavit — beginning in June 2022, the earliest date that police could obtain records. That might be significant for multiple reasons. One of the rumors police downplayed about the case was that Kaylee Goncalves had expressed fear of a “stalker” in the weeks prior to the murders. This led to heated speculation that Goncalves was the focus of the attack, but authorities have never confirmed this. The evidence, instead, might point toward Kohberger being fixated, as authorities originally suggested, on the house itself.

Kaylee’s father, Steve Goncalves, who’d been critical of police during the many weeks of scant updates, had nothing but praise for the investigation after the arrest, stating in a January 5 interview that “all is forgiven.”

“People think Idaho is so old-fashioned and outback, but these guys — they hit a home run, man,” he said. “That affidavit is impressive.”

“Impressive” might be an understatement: The swiftness with which police managed to identify, carefully build a strong case against Kohberger, track him across the country, and arrest him, all while working with multiple agencies and somehow managing to keep his identity from leaking to the public, is extremely rare. It’s even more extraordinary given how many victims were involved, how unusual the crime was, how many agencies were involved, and how intense the public and media scrutiny was.

The triumph of the investigation, however, is tempered by the realization that Kohberger seems to have been working the criminal justice system in order to become a better criminal. Each half of the resolution to this case is a cold counter to the other: On the one hand, a picture of what we all, desperately, want policing to look like; on the other, a picture of what the criminal justice system too often becomes: exploitable.

Still, it’s easy to imagine this investigation becoming a major case study for what effective policing can and should look like: law enforcement working with the community and with each other, and building the case methodically, based solely on the evidence.

Perhaps most unusual of all is just how strong the case against Kohberger appears from the outset. Eyewitness? Check. Video surveillance of his car? Check. DNA match? Check. Implicating cell phone records? Loads. As of May, the prosecution has produced roughly 10,000 pages of documents and over 10,000 photos, along with massive amounts of video and audio data in the case. Even without the added circumstantial evidence of Kohberger’s own obsession with criminal psychology, this would be a hard defense to mount.

In May, apparently in order to avoid a preliminary hearing, the prosecution impaneled a secret grand jury which indicted Kohberger on May 16. Kohberger was indicted on four felony charges of first-degree murder and one charge of burglary.

At his subsequent arraignment on May 22, Kohberger chose to “stand silent” when asked to plead to the charges; the court entered a plea of “not guilty” on his behalf. His trial is tentatively scheduled to begin on October 2, 2023.

For now, apart from the probable cause affidavit, the details of the case against Kohberger are still limited. The case is currently under a restrictive gag order that’s led to repeated courtroom challenges from both victims’ families and media outlets. At a May 22 hearing on the gag order, Latah County Judge John C. Judge commented on the “irreparable harm” the media had done to the case, without going into specifics. The judge worried the case’s high-profile media coverage would make it impossible for Kohberger to receive a fair trial, and told the Associated Press, one of the litigants requesting the gag order to be lifted, to “tone it down.”

Despite the gag order, new information continues to trickle out about Kohberger himself. In January, the New York Times reported that Kohberger had long struggled with mental health issues and drug addiction, as well as, allegedly, a rare neurological condition called visual snow.In February, the Times further reported that Kohberger’s university had investigated him for various complaints, including following one student to her car, and getting into repeated altercations with his supervising professor. That ultimately resulted in his termination shortly after the murders.

News Nation also reported allegations that Kohberger received complaints for condescending behavior and harsher grading toward female students. During that same period, Kohberger allegedly broke into the home of a woman and then offered to install security cameras on her behalf.

And perhaps most damningly, after he went home for the holidays, according to Dateline, Kohberger acted suspiciously and constantly wore latex gloves around the house, alarming his family members so much that at one point, his disturbed relatives searched his car, looking for evidence of his involvement in the Idaho murders.

Even as media coverage inevitably shifts away from the four deceased victims and their surviving roommates to focus on Kohberger, it’s important not to let his story supersede theirs.They leave us a legacy of living life to the fullest, of unabashed joy and camaraderie that shines throughout the wide digital footprint of the students’ social media. In a now-famous Instagram post, made on the day of the murders, Goncalves snapped several photos of her roommates, including Kernodle, Mogen, and Chapin. “One lucky girl to be surrounded by these ppl everyday,” she wrote.

Update, May 23, 3:50 pm: This story was originally published on January 7 and has been updated several times to include new details about the case.

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The Congressional Budget Office estimates that defunding Planned Parenthood would raise the deficit by about $300 million. | Leonardo Munoz/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty Images

Three years after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, Republicans in Congress are poised to further erode access to abortion and reproductive care.

President Donald Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” would not only directly threaten reproductive care by defunding Planned Parenthood and other abortion providers, it would also incentivize insurers for Affordable Care Act plans in some states to drop abortion coverage or make it significantly more expensive.

And it would slash Medicaid coverage, impacting Americans’ ability to access medical care of all sorts. Though Medicaid funds cannot fund abortions except under very narrow circumstances, the cuts would threaten access to non-abortion reproductive care. Many abortion providers, including Planned Parenthood, also offer health care in the form of contraceptives, treatment for sexually transmitted diseases, and cervical cancer screenings.

GOP lawmakers are targeting a July 4 deadline to pass the bill. It passed the House in May and cleared a key procedural vote in the Senate on Saturday. Following a rapid-fire vote on a series of amendments, the bill could go up for a final vote in the Senate as soon as Monday night. GOP lawmakers have faced many internal disagreements about the bill, but there’s a strong push to include both attacks on Planned Parenthood and cuts to Medicaid.

If the initiatives go through, they’ll come at a time when abortion rights and access are under attack, but the actual number of abortions has increased.

Monthly abortions in the US are up about 19 percent nationally since the Supreme Court struck down Roe in the 2022 case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization.

That’s driven almost entirely by the increasing prevalence of medication abortion. It also comes despite the fact that accessing in-person abortion care has become significantly harder, with many women having to travel much further to their nearest clinic due to closures.

Republicans in Congress are trying to create additional hurdles to accessing such care and other women’s health services, both in-person and via telehealth — even in states that have sought to protect reproductive rights. A Supreme Court ruling on Thursday allows states to move forward with their attempts to defund Planned Parenthood will make their task easier.

“What we’ve heard from a lot of anti-abortion politicians since Dobbs is that this was just the way to return the issue to the states,” said Katie O’Connor, senior director of federal abortion policy at the National Women’s Law Center. “It indicates that their ultimate goal is what we’ve always known: They want abortion to be out of reach for everybody, everywhere, and under every circumstance.”

Republicans are trying to close even more abortion clinics

There are now 37 fewer brick-and-mortar abortion clinics in the US than there were in March 2022, before the end of Roe. Many of the closures have been in states that have passed laws that ban abortions in all but narrow circumstances.

That has resulted in women across large tracts of the southern US and Midwest now having to travel much further to go to an abortion clinic in person. That has limited the options available to people who can’t just rely on medication abortion prescribed via telehealth or who sought other forms of reproductive care at these facilities.

The GOP spending bill would bring on the closure of additional clinics by defunding Planned Parenthood, the single largest abortion provider in the US, and other abortion clinics for at least 10 years. That would be disastrous not only for abortion access, but also for access to non-abortion reproductive care for low-income people.

The organization estimates that almost 200 of their clinics could close as a result of the legislation, affecting 1.1 million patients, the vast majority of whom live in states where abortion is legal. That includes its two clinics in Alaska, the only remaining abortion providers in the state, said Laurel Sakai, Planned Parenthood’s national director of public policy and government affairs.

Since 1977, the Hyde Amendment has banned the use of federal funds for abortion, with some narrow exceptions for when the life of the pregnant person is endangered or when pregnancy is the result of rape or incest. But Planned Parenthood, as a provider of general reproductive services, receives reimbursements from Medicaid, as well as federal grants through the Title X program, which funds affordable family planning and related preventative care for low-income families.

If Republicans were to cut off those funds, as proposed in the draft Senate bill, “there just simply aren’t enough other providers to be able to take on the care that Planned Parenthood gives,” Sakai said.

The reproductive rights think tank Guttmacher Institute found that federally qualified health centers — often pointed to as an alternative to Planned Parenthood by proponents of measures to defund the organization — would have to increase their capacity to administer contraceptive care by 56 percent to fill the gap.

Planned Parenthood closures could affect not just the availability of in-person abortions, but also medication abortion.

“A lot of the doctors who provide medication abortion care do so through Planned Parenthood and other brick-and-mortar clinics,” O’Connor said. “We certainly have a lot of providers who are doing telehealth now, but there’s still a good number of providers who provide medication abortion at brick-and-mortar clinics.”

The provision to defund Planned Parenthood, which the Congressional Budget Office estimates would raise the deficit by about $300 million, faced procedural hurdles.

Because Republicans are trying to pass their bill via a process known as budget reconciliation, there are certain rules about what kind of provisions can be included. That includes a requirement that a provision included in a reconciliation package must have a “more than incidental” impact on the budget.

Senate parliamentarian Elizabeth MacDonough reportedly determined Monday that the Planned Parenthood provision qualifies.

That clears the way for Congress to defund the organization, along with last week’s Supreme Court ruling allowing states to do the same. On Thursday, the justices ruled that Planned Parenthood and one of its patients could not challenge South Carolina’s efforts to deny Medicaid funds to the organization.

Coverage for abortion could also shrink or become more expensive

In its current form, the Republican spending bill would not only cause abortion clinics to close. It would also affect insurance coverage for abortion and reproductive care.

For one, 10.3 million fewer Americans are projected to be enrolled in Medicaid by 2034 if the bill passes. That may make it prohibitively expensive for them to access reproductive care other than abortion care, which is not covered under Medicaid.

The bill also excludes Affordable Care Act marketplace plans that offer abortion coverage from cost-sharing reductions, which decrease out-of-pocket costs for lower-income individuals. That won’t affect ACA marketplace plans in the 25 states that currently prohibit those plans from offering abortion coverage. But elsewhere, it will incentivize insurers administering ACA plans to either drop coverage for abortion or, in states where they are legally required to offer such coverage, increase premiums.

It’s not clear exactly how much premiums could increase in those states, which include California and New York, or whether insurers may find ways to make up for the loss of cost-sharing reductions.

But O’Connor said that reproductive rights activists anticipate that the provision is just an “opening salvo in a continuing fight that would ultimately pit those states that require coverage against the federal government and put insurers in an impossible position.”

“What we assume is that this is just the first of many tactics that this Congress and this administration might take to make it more difficult for insurers to cover abortion,” she added.

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President Donald Trump takes part in a press conference on recent Supreme Court rulings in the briefing room at the White House on June 27, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The Republican Party’s saving grace is supposed to be its commitment to economic growth and consumer abundance.

Sure, the GOP may see unemployed cancer patients as shiftless mooches — and the Lorax as literature’s greatest villain — but for precisely those reasons, Republicans are allegedly able stewards of industrial development: Unconstrained by concerns about inequality, the environment, or social justice, the GOP will unleash the private sector’s productive potential. Republicans won’t balance Americans’ hunger for cheap gasoline against their enlightened interest in cleaner air or a cooler planet — they’ll get you the cheap fuel now. And they won’t weigh America’s stake in technological supremacy against the risks of unregulated innovation — they’ll give cutting-edge companies whatever they need to achieve global dominance.

At least, this is the impression that Republicans have tried to cultivate, and which voters largely bought last November. According to polling by Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Americans in 2024 believed that the GOP would be better than Democrats on the economy and cost of living — but worse on income inequality and the environment — and considered the former issues more important.

But the GOP’s priorities aren’t as advertised. President Donald Trump’s agenda does not ask Americans to accept a dirtier atmosphere and more inegalitarian social order in exchange for cheaper goods, faster technological progress, and national industrial dominance. Rather, it asks us to accept not only greater inequality and environmental degradation, but also, higher prices, slower technological progress, and worse industrial performance for the sake of…I’m not sure what. Perhaps the conservative movement’s cultural grievances? Or Trump’s odd ideological fixations?

In any case, Trump has long made his disregard for affordability and economic growth plain. As of mid-June, Trump’s tariffs were still poised to increase Americans’ annual cost of living by $2,000 on average, while knocking 0.6 percent off of economic growth. His administration’s assault on funding for scientific research, meanwhile, has undermined US tech companies. And his crackdown on immigration is both chasing top-tier talent out of the US and exacerbating labor shortages in the construction industry, thereby slowing the pace of housing and infrastructure development.

Now, with his inaptly named One Big Beautiful Bill (BBB) — which is poised to clear the Senate this week — Trump is rounding out his “worst of both worlds” agenda.

Predictably, his tax cut package would exacerbate inequality, taking health care and food assistance away from poor people in order to shower tax breaks on the wealthy. And the legislation also evinces contempt for the environment, offering new subsidies to American coal producers. More remarkably, however, BBB would also increase electricity prices for consumers while undermining America’s competitiveness in a range of critical sectors.

Specifically, the latest version of Trump’s bill aims to throttle the production of renewable energy in the US. The legislation not only phases out federal subsidies for wind and solar power by 2027, but also imposes a new excise tax on renewable projects that use inputs made in China. Since Chinese firms dominate green energy supply chains, a very high percentage of all wind and solar development in the United States would be adversely impacted by the tax. What’s more, Trump’s legislation would actually reinforce American green energy companies’ dependence on Chinese suppliers by curtailing subsidies to domestic manufacturers of solar panels, wind turbines, and batteries. (As of this writing, some Republican senators are pushing an amendment that would strike the excise tax from the bill. But that amendment’s fate is unclear. And even if it is adopted, Trump’s legislation would still curtail subsidies to the solar and wind industries.)

Taken together, these measures could slash the amount of new clean energy capacity added to America’s grid over the next 10 years by more than 72 percent, according to an analysis from the Rhodium Group.

That scarcity will translate into higher electricity costs for consumers. According to a variety of recent studies, merely ending federal tax credits for wind and solar could push up the average family’s energy bill by as much as $400 per year within a decade.

While increasing US households’ costs, Trump’s bill also reduces American firms’ competitiveness in some of the world’s fastest-growing industries. On one level, this is obvious. Renewables accounted for more than 90 percent of all newly added electricity generation last year. Even if America clings tightly to fossil fuels, demand for wind and solar energy is going to surge worldwide in the coming decades. If the United States actively sabotages its clean power industry, it will cede a larger share of the global energy market to China and other rival nations.

Less intuitively, the BBB also undermines America’s artificial intelligence industry. AI companies need vast amounts of new electricity to power their data centers. And renewables are uniquely well-suited to provide such power. At present, utilities can build wind and solar much faster than new natural gas plants, as there is a years-long backlog in the global market for natural gas turbines. Likewise, nuclear energy takes an enormous amount of time and regulatory wrangling to expand. Thus, if the federal government makes building renewables slower and more expensive, then American AI firms’ progress could also be stymied.

This has led some in the tech industry to criticize the bill. “We urge the Senate to prioritize a reliable and resilient energy mix that advances AI innovation and growth and reject provisions that will harm the U.S.’s ability to compete in the global race for AI and energy dominance,” Janae Washington, a spokesperson for the Information Technology Industry Council, told the Washington Post on Sunday.

Elon Musk, meanwhile, declared Saturday that “The latest Senate draft bill will destroy millions of jobs in America and cause immense strategic harm to our country! Utterly insane and destructive. It gives handouts to industries of the past while severely damaging industries of the future.”

Even one of the bill’s strongest proponents — the pro-fossil fuels advocate Alex Epstein — has lamented its new tax on renewables with Chinese inputs, as has the US Chamber of Commerce.

Nevertheless, as of this writing, that tax remains in the legislation.

It is therefore a mistake to see Trump’s agenda as prioritizing innovation over equality or affordability over the environment. The BBB doesn’t concentrate wealth or degrade the climate in pursuit of some higher objective. Rather, it treats increasing inequality and boosting carbon emissions as ends in themselves — goals that it is prepared to pursue even at great cost to America industrial competitiveness and living standards.

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Man’s best friend, or so we think.

Dog people tend to be pretty confident they know what’s going on with their animals.

When we put out a call on the Explain It to Me podcast for dog owners to tell us about their connection to their furry friends, the responses ranged from “soul dog” to “love of my life” to “I believe I can read my dog’s mind.”

But how well can we see inside a dog’s mind, really? That’s a question Alexandra Horowitz has been investigating for decades. She runs the Dog Cognition Lab at Barnard College in New York and has written four books on how dogs experience the world.

When we called her up for our episode, she told Explain It to Me guest host Noam Hassenfeld that understanding that experience starts with the nose.

“They are smelling animals. Smell is their primary sense,” Horowitz said. “My interest is in saying, ‘Okay, let’s try to understand the dog’s way of seeing the world through their nose, instead of just assuming that they’re just like us, but furrier and sitting on the floor where I’m sitting on a couch.’”

Horowitz talked to Noam about her experience with nose-first living, how dogs’ smell shapes their perception of time, and whether, after all these years of research, she feels any more confident she knows what’s going on with her fuzzy friends. Below is a transcript edited for length and clarity. But make sure to listen to the whole thing—it’s a great interview.

How do you start to take a dog’s point of view? You did a little experiment about this at one point, right? Where you pretended to be a dog? Or how should I put that?

Yeah, I tried to step into some of the dog’s behaviors in order to understand them a little bit. Humans are visual creatures, right? We see the world first, and we assume the world is out there looking like it is to everybody, the way it looks to us. Of course, it doesn’t.

But if you’re a smelling creature, how do you see the world? Smells don’t just appear when you open your nose. If you look at dog behavior, they go and search out smells, right? They spend a lot of time with their nose on the ground or smelling objects that are nose height. And they sniff a lot more than we do. Our sniffs are pretty feeble, and they’ll do seven sniffs a second if they wanna get a really good sense of something. And so I tried to do those things.

That was just the first step, going around and saying, like, “All right, what are smells down at dog height? And what does something smell like if I put my nose right up to it?”

I feel like I need to get a bit more detail here. Where are you walking around trying to smell things at dog height?

Well, I did this in New York City. Right where I live.

If a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend.

So no one gave you a second thought, right? Because it’s New York City.

Oh no, people moved away from me, that’s for sure. But I walked out of my house and followed what my dog did. Where he sniffed, I would lean down and sniff with him. Is it a tree post protecting a tree from people on the sidewalk? Is it a bush? Is it the grass? I didn’t sniff other dog butts cause there are other issues involved there, but, you know, if a friend met us and my dog sniffed the friend, I also sniffed the friend.

What do you think this experience of trying to smell everything the dog smells told you about what it might be like to be a dog?

The big lesson for me was that, unlike the way I had characterized smells in my life, which I think is very human, as good or bad, right? Smells are something appealing, maybe a food smell, or something unappealing, like in New York, garbage in the summer is a very distinctive smell. But for dogs, smells are just information about the way the world is. So their world is wrought of smells the way ours is wrought of visual images.

You know, when I think of looking at the world, I create a spatial map of the world, right? Like, I’ll walk through my apartment and I’ll look around. Here’s the door, here’s the window, here’s the hall. What does that mean for the world you live in if you’re mapping it by smelling it?

Smells move, and that’s one of the interesting things about them. We know this — you have a cup of coffee, you put it on the table, and you can smell it on the other side of the table. So where that coffee is, is a slightly different space to a, let’s say, purely olfactory creature than to a visual creature. It’s right in the cup to me, but to somebody who’s seeing the world through smell, it’s in this whole kind of universe around the cup as the smells go into the air.

Oh, that’s fascinating.

So things are casting off smells all the time. That doesn’t mean that there’s nothing concrete and real. It just means that it’s a little more transient than we see.

Does the way a dog relies on smell also change their perception of time?

Yeah, I think time is in smell. My presence in this room really smells to my dog. And when I’ve been gone for an hour, I’m still sort of in the room to them, but a little less. After a day, I’m a lot less in the room. And so they’re sort of…noting time, time passing by the changeability of smells.

There’s something reassuring in the fact that I’m still here when I’m not here for them.

Wow. That is kind of beautiful and also kind of sad. I don’t know, imagining you fading slowly out of a room, it feels like a very different type of thing to experience.

Maybe I haven’t ever thought of it as sad. I mean in a way,  there’s something reassuring in the fact that I’m still here when I’m not here for them. When I come home and I’ve been with another dog or I’ve had some experience which might potentially leave an odor on my clothes, they can experience that by just smelling me, and seeing where I’ve been. To me, that’s extra neat, you know, not melancholy.

A lot of the people we’ve heard from in this episode — they talk about this ability to understand their dog and this connection they have. And then talking to you, it seems we’re actually just really different. What does that difference mean to you? Do you find that difference exciting? Do you find that difference daunting?

As an experimenter, I do find it daunting that they’re quite different than we are perceptually, and therefore probably cognitively, but also exciting, right? There’s a lot of possibilities, a lot of things we can investigate and learn. As a person who lives with dogs, there’s the mystery of it — the mystery of what it’s like to be a smelling creature. Even though there’s this fundamental difference between us, we co-exist and seem to share a lot of things. We share space and share a life. I find that mystery delightful, and I don’t try to solve it in my ordinary life.

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From Vox via this RSS feed

According to my phone, I’ve been averaging about 6,600 steps a day so far this year. My meager effort pales in comparison to the 15,000, 20,000, or even 30,000 steps I see influencers on my feed bragging about regularly.

The algorithm likes to remind me of my shortcomings. Although the long-held standard benchmark of 10,000 steps has been debunked, it seems many are aiming even higher these days. TikTok and Instagram feed me clip after clip of productive people racking upward of seven miles over the course of three-plus hours and multiple walks. They wake up at 4 am to walk. They walk and check emails. They walk and read. They walk to the grocery store or during meetings. They stride on walking pads, treadmills, and outdoors. They flash their Apple Watches to the camera to show their progress.

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To be clear: There is nothing wrong with walking — it’s a free and low-impact exercise that, compared to running, has greater mass appeal. Americans are overwhelmingly sedentary, spending an average of 9.5 hours a day seated, and anything that inspires people to move more is good news. But quantifying your every step, tracking every ounce of protein ingested, or hours slept can border on obsessive. The current cultural fixation on nutrition and fitness also speaks to a shift toward beauty standards that once again idealize thinness. Mix that with American hustle culture, and you have a recipe for turning a low-key activity into a compulsion.

“This all comes down to how much our culture values productivity above everything else,” says Keith Diaz, an associate professor of behavioral medicine at Columbia University Medical Center. “It’s just another metric that we measure ourselves by.”

From leisure to optimization

Walking is perhaps one of the most functional and accessible forms of movement: It gets you where you want to go, and you don’t need any special equipment to do it. The vast majority of people walk at some point during their day without having to think too much about it. It makes sense, then, that walking has come in and out of fashion as a form of exercise throughout history. In the late 1800s, leisure walking became a popular sport. A century later, at the height of the fitness boom in the 1980s, walking got a rebrand and a refresh, thanks to a book called Heavyhands touting the benefits of walking with weights. “That became,” says Danielle Friedman, the author of Let’s Get Physical: How Women Discovered Exercise and Reshaped The World, “a way to make walking not seem weak.”

To achieve a textbook hot girl walk, you must walk four miles while expressing gratitude and envisioning your goals.

The pandemic was a major boon for walking. With gyms and fitness studios closed and cabin fever setting in, many took to strolling as a way to get moving out of the house. Walking was gentler and less punishing than the high-intensity fitness trends of the early 2000s, Friedman says. “The pendulum swung a little bit more toward just appreciating movement for movement’s sake,” she says. But as social media caught on — the original “hot girl walk” clip was posted on TikTok in January 2021 — walks became more performative. Walking now had a purpose. To achieve a textbook hot girl walk, for instance, you must walk four miles while expressing gratitude and envisioning your goals. Over time, the step counts ballooned.

Keeping careful track of your mileage also has a long history. The first modern pedometer was designed in 1965 in Japan. Called the manpo-kei, or 10,000 steps meter, this simple act of marketing helped cement the 10,000-step threshold as a benchmark that one should strive to hit for good health and well-being.

The science doesn’t quite back up the marketing. Recent research has found that among women in their 70s, as few as 4,400 steps a day is related to lower mortality, compared to 2,700 steps or less. Those who walked more had even less risk for early mortality, but those benefits tapered off at more than about 7,500 steps. Another study of middle-aged adults found that those who took 8,000 steps were less likely to die early from heart disease and cancer compared to those who only took 4,000 steps. Again, the benefits plateaued after 8,000 steps. Similar findings suggest that 7,000 steps was the magic number (the studies, it should be noted, were observational and could not prove causation.) If you’re walking for health, 7,000 to 8,000 steps, however, seems like a pretty good bet.

These days, everyone’s got a step counter in their pocket or on their wrist. Health tracking apps on phones and wearables like the Apple Watch, Oura, Fitbit, and Whoop have made it much easier to account for every single step. Health-related tracking can be extremely motivating when it comes to behavior change. When you have specific health or fitness goals, tracking is a good way to measure success. “You have a target and you have a means to measure it,” Diaz says, “which is great.”

At the same time, you should want to engage in that activity because you like it and not because your watch or an influencer is telling you to move. Unless you’re intrinsically motivated to achieve that goal — I walk because I like the way it feels — tracking can veer into compulsion. Once you’ve hit a benchmark of 10,000 or 15,000 or 20,000 steps, you may feel compelled to meet, or exceed, it every day or else fall into a shame and anxiety spiral. “When the Fitbit first came out,” Diaz says, “I used it for a couple weeks, and I just had to put it away because I couldn’t do it anymore. If I didn’t hit 10,000 steps in a day, it’d be nine o’clock at night and…I’d be circling my little, tiny living room for 20 minutes just to get my steps to where I need them to be. I’m sitting there, like how is this healthy in any way, shape, or form that I’m obsessing over a number?”

Although quantifying an activity increases how often you do it, you start to enjoy it less.

Soon, something that previously brought you enjoyment can start to feel like work. Although quantifying an activity (like counting steps or the number of pages read) increases how often you do it, you start to enjoy it less, a 2016 study found. This change can happen within a few days of tracking, the study’s author Jordan Etkin, a professor of marketing at Duke University, says.

When participants were able to see their results, they would continue the activity. But when they weren’t shown their data, they lost the motivation to continue. “The reasons for doing the activity shift from being because you like it or find some other value in it,” Etkin says, “to being because it gives you this sense of accomplishment and productivity. When you don’t get that anymore, because you’re not tracking how many of these things you’re doing, it’s less valuable to you.”

Instead of just moving for movement’s sake, perpetual tracking assigns status and morality to basic bodily functions. Hitting a certain step count is “good” and having a low readiness score is “bad.” The number acts as a marker of wellness. These days, the ideal embodiment of that wellness has pivoted back toward thinness. No longer is a step just a step or a gram of protein a bit of nourishment — it’s all in service of optimization of a skinnier, healthier self. People who track their health want every step to count, to matter, Etkin says. If it isn’t being documented, it may as well not have happened. “That introduces new dynamics into how people decide what and whether and when to do things,” she says, “based on whether it’s going to be recorded.”

A healthy balance

By no means should you stop walking if it improves your mental and physical health. But if the pressure of hitting a specific target every day causes anxiety or you’re unable to forgo walking for a day, you may need to reconsider your relationship with your goals. This is “because you’re obsessing over this outward signal, and it becomes this unhealthy striving for perfectionism,” Diaz says. People can start to ignore their body’s cues for rest and push themselves to injury.

In order to maintain a more flexible outlook on your goals, Diaz suggests setting a range target — maybe 8,000 to 12,000 steps a day — or weekly benchmarks. If you know you’re going to be moving a lot on the weekend, you won’t be so fixated on a weekday where your step count is lower.

Any wellness lifestyle should be sustainable. If your body and schedule allow for 20,000 steps a day, go for it. If it feels like a chore, you run the risk of burning out. It’s worth asking yourself if any of your fitness-related hobbies are still enjoyable or if they inspire stress or obligation, Diaz says. Fitness isn’t always fun, but it should, hopefully, relieve anxiety, not cause it.

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Klarna, PayPal, and Venmo stickers at checkout at the Macy’s flagship store in New York City on November 24, 2023. | Bing Guan/Bloomberg via Getty Images

You’ve probably noticed it by now: You’re shopping online for some makeup or a new pair of running shoes or a water table for your toddler, and when you go to check out, you have a new option — why not break up the cost into four payments, made over time?

US consumers, especially Gen Z and millennial ones, have been embracing “buy now, pay later” services like Klarna and Afterpay with gusto the last few years. It’s not hard to see the attraction: Unlike a credit card, most BNPL plans don’t carry interest, and they generally don’t impact your credit score (though that is now changing).

On social media people tout BNPL as a way to buy stuff you want but don’t have the cash for right then — or maybe ever. And that’s starting to show up in the data: Leading BNPL company Klarna — which recently partnered with the food delivery service DoorDash, spawning a thousand memes — saw its net losses from consumers not paying their loans more than double in the first quarter of this year.

All this has Kyla Scanlon worried. Scanlon is an author and economic commentator, best known for breaking down economic issues through blog posts and videos on social media. In a video she published shortly after Klarna announced its partnership with DoorDash, Scanlon called the rise of BNPL a symptom of our “poor-impulse-control economy.”

“What I worry about is that the convenience and the impulsivity that it allows for allows for the expansion of the grift economy, of a world where people are spending money on things that they don’t need to and they’re just totally lost in that cycle,” Scanlon told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Scanlon talked to King about buy now, pay later, Gen Z’s relationship to debt, and what financial responsibility looks like in today’s economy. Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

You’re a commentator, you’re a public intellectual, you’re also a member of Gen Z, and you speak directly to Gen Zers who are operating in the economy. How are young people using BNPL?

A lot of Gen Zers have had very common interactions with debt. Student loan debt is a big part of the life of a Gen Zer. Medical bills, anything involving a credit score. Debt has been so normalized for the younger generation that when they see something like BNPL, it’s like, “Oh, this is just casual debt.”

For young people, they’ve been raised in the shadow of the 2008 crisis and student loan debt. It’s just what they do with their money.

This is interesting, that debt has always been available to Gen Z. If you’re an older millennial like I am, that’s not really the case. You might remember getting your first credit card when you were 22, but there was no Apple Pay. You couldn’t just pay for stuff on your phone.

And it strikes me that my nieces and nephews who are teenagers, they can do that. They have this ease with paying for stuff and taking on debt for stuff that never occurred to me when I was young.

A lot of that is structural. In 2020, the government sent out unemployment checks. In 2021, the Fed had rates really close to zero. We’re always talking about the deficit. We’re always talking about how much money the United States as a country owes. And so I think for everybody, they’re looking at that and they’re like, If the government owes all this money, surely I can have a little bit of debt, too.

And then credit scores have become such a core part of the American identity. It really informs a lot — how you can buy a house or if you can even get certain loans. I think people view debt as structural to themselves as a person, and that’s increased. And I think it really has a lot to do with the environment that Gen Z has grown up in and the fact that these tools are so readily available and they’re so easy to use.

Talk to me a bit about debt. Is it dangerous?

When you look at debt systemically, it’s not inherently a bad thing. Like most things, it’s a tool. Like social media, you could say it’s bad, but it’s just a tool. It’s all about how you use it. Same with debt.

BNPL in itself isn’t evil, especially if you can pay it all off without having to face those high interest rates. Credit cards themselves aren’t evil. But it’s really about the system that encourages these sorts of products to be created.

Real wages were stagnant for a really long time. The entry-level labor force has really deteriorated. It’s very tough to get a job right now. If you’re graduating from college and the college wage premium has eroded quite a bit, rent is high because we don’t build enough housing. Groceries are up. People are looking at the very high prices, the impossibility of ever buying a house, the struggles that they might be facing in the labor force.

It’s like, Well, sure, it might be irresponsible to use BNPL to get a moisturizer from Sephora, but what else am I going to do? I don’t see a solution before me. And so I think that’s been the big thing with debt — we’ve used it as a tool in order to navigate some of the hairier parts about being in the United States right now.

I think historically you might say, Look, you can’t afford the Sephora lotion right now, why don’t you just wait? And it sounds like what you were saying is that’s a bit of a privileged or maybe old-fashioned idea of how paying for things works.

Right! I think, “Why don’t you just wait?” ignores some of the ladder issues that we’re facing as Gen Z, younger people — even millennials, in some capacity, are facing this broken-ladder problem where they could wait to buy that moisturizer, but that would require the entry-level labor market to free up again, that would require wages to really speed up, that would require the housing market to normalize.

So I think a lot of people blame younger people for using debt and using BNPL. And you should be careful — I don’t think you should be living above your means in an extravagant way. But it really is a psychological buffer of sorts, where people are just like, Well, I don’t know what else to do, so I’m going to go buy this thing.

It is an element of instant gratification, the same thing that we see in social media, but for Gen Z-ers and younger people. There isn’t that stability, that expectation of stability in the traditional sense. And so I think these little small luxuries matter — buying that moisturizer matters because it is indulgent in a certain way, but it’s also an act of agency in an economy that doesn’t feel like it’s allowing you into it.

It does feel like there is some American ethos here that says, To live is to be in debt**, and we’ve all accepted that.**

I mean, that’s the only way you can get by sometimes. There’s that misquoted statistic about living paycheck to paycheck. It’s not 60 percent of Americans living paycheck to paycheck. It’s far lower, but I think a lot of people just feel like, one wrong move and the whole thing could come tumbling down.

And so we have these issues that are outside of the realm of consumer packaged goods being delivered where we have to really start thinking through actual solutions to these problems, because they’re not going to fix themselves. The incentives are too misaligned.

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Justin Bieber at the 64th Annual Grammy Awards on April 3, 2022. | Angela Weiss/AFP via Getty Images

It was abundantly clear to everyone that Huda wasn’t doing well.

Huda Mustafa, the breakout villain on Love Island USA‘s seventh season, spiraled after viewers voted to separate her from Jeremiah Brown, with whom she’d developed an intense connection early in the current season. Over several episodes, she eavesdropped on Jeremiah’s conversations, interrogated the woman he was re-coupled with, and broke down repeatedly. Her despondent face became a viral meme.

Viewers, and later Huda herself, had a simple and notably Gen Z explanation for what she was experiencing: The lovelorn reality star had officially “crashed out.”

Justin Bieber received the same labelrecently, for his strange behavior on social media and a viral standoff with paparazzi. While some of his fanbase voiced more serious concerns over the state of his mental health, many tagged the singer’s antics as telltale signs of a typical “crashout.”

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It’s not just celebrities. Go on TikTok, and users are posting videos of themselves venting, sobbing, or throwing physical tantrums with some sort of caption claiming that they’ve “crashed out.” In other cases, they’re describing “crashing out” in response to other people.

The catchall phrase is shorthand for the unfiltered actions of a person who is angry, anxious, confused, stressed out, or experiencing mental health issues. It can describe a range of behavior, from emotional outbursts to altercations to withdrawals. There are a lot of ways that “crashing out” can look, but like obscenity, you know it when you see it.

The term has floated around on the internet for a while now; Know Your Meme credits its popularity to rapper NBA YoungBoy, who used the term in his 2017 song, “Stepped On.” Since the 2020s, the concept has been used both humorously and in earnest to discuss the fallout from issues as global as the state of the world, as personal as relationship or work stress, or as low stakes as struggling with a hairstyle. Practically any problem, big or small, can warrant a “crashout.”

One of the most striking things about the phrase is how general it is. Why is a generation raised on pop-psychology jargon, with more access to mental health resources and experience talking about their own needs, painting these episodes with such a broad brush? Is Gen Z abandoning traditional routes of managing their mental health, or has a burnout generation found a more radical way to cope?

It’s no secret that Gen Z is particularly stressed out. According to a 2024 Harmony Healthcare IT study, nearly half of Gen Zers struggle with mental health issues, with 1 in 3 taking prescription medication for mental health. Anxiety and depression are the most common conditions. The Covid-19 pandemic has been seen as a cause for the Gen Z mental health crisis, while other studies point to social media as a huge factor.

Meanwhile, research suggests that Gen Z might be growing more resistant to traditional therapy. A study in the American Journal of Psychology this year found that 37 percent of participants born between 1997 and 2012 said that seeking counseling was “mentally weak.” This was a higher percentage than the 27 percent of millennials, Gen Xers, and baby boomers that were surveyed combined.

If therapy’s relatively unpopular, social media is booming, and it seems like many teenagers and young adults have turned to their favorite influencers and online advice to get through tough times. On TikTok, for example, “crashouts” are often encouraged as a necessary form of catharsis. Even if you aren’t naturally experiencing these outbursts, users posit them as a quick and easy fix for stress and anger.

One user, @masonblakee, posted a video of himself looking relaxed in a car with the caption, “How it feels when you finally crash out on someone after keeping your mouth shut for a while.”

Another, @gazellechavez, made a video sharing the supposed benefits of occasionally “crashing out.”

“Once you hit rock bottom, there’s only one way you can go — up,” she says.

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Still, professionals are more skeptical of these viral directives, as they’re being confronted with them at work. Rebecca Hug, a clinical counselor and core faculty in clinical mental health counseling at University of Phoenix, says she regularly encounters clients who’ve “absorbed the idea that emotional ‘crashing’ is a valid coping strategy.”

“This mindset discourages the development of essential skills like self-regulation, resilience, and perspective-taking,” Hug says. While she says these sorts of reactions are “developmentally appropriate for teenagers,” it’s a more crucial problem for people in early adulthood.

New York-based psychologist Sabrina Romanoff shares similar concerns about these viral “crashing outs,” saying that TikTok has become “a double-edged sword for mental health.”

“On one hand, it’s a space where young people can find validation and connect with people who share similar experiences,” she says. “On the other hand, it’s a platform with a high circulation of unqualified advice, often oversimplifying and promoting unhealthy ideas.”

For instance, several videos frame the act of “crashing out” on other people as a joyful and even empowering experience. But at what point do these emotional eruptions become abusive or signal one’s failure in communicating with others?

Romanoff adds that there’s a danger to the internet automatically labeling these sorts of behaviors as “crashouts” without acknowledging possible underlying causes.

“When we see repeated posts about these breakdowns, it can inadvertently create a culture where these moments are expected or even glorified rather than seen as a signal that something deeper needs attention,” she says.

Prior to the “crashout” trend, Gen Z had already built a reputation for publicizing their emotional meltdowns online. TikTok and Instagram Stories have become increasingly popular sites for influencers and average users to cry and vent. Hug says viral “crashouts” reflect how “emotional dysregulation is increasingly externalized and even socially validated.” Rather than having these intimate moments in private with friends or family members, users can receive immediate support from strangers that they may not receive in real life. This public sharing seems, in part, symptomatic of a loneliness epidemic affecting Gen Z. According to a Pew Research Center study this year, the cohort experiences higher rates of loneliness than previous generations.

However, vulnerability has also proven to be a recipe for virality and a strategy to build loyal audiences. Hug says the visibility of emotional struggles can “blur the line between authentic expression and performative vulnerability.”

Hence, there’s an obvious incentive for certain people to discuss and post their crashouts. Not everyone may come from a particularly dire or desperate place. After all, Hug says that many of these posters’ concerns seem to reflect “normal developmental stress rather than clinical pathology.”

Still, she says that it’s important for young people to develop self-regulation skills and utilize mental health resources rather than normalizing these reactions under the guise of “crashing out.” Unfortunately, emotional maturity doesn’t get as many likes.

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Ten areas in the sky were selected as “deep fields” that the Dark Energy Camera imaged several times during the survey, providing a glimpse of distant galaxies and helping determine their 3D distribution in the cosmos. The image is teeming with galaxies — in fact, nearly every single object in this image is a galaxy.

Last Thursday, I took my son to the Rose Center for Earth and Space at New York’s Museum of Natural History. In the Hayden Planetarium, we watched a simulation of the Milky Way bloom above us, while the actor Pedro Pascal — who truly is everywhere — narrated the galactic dance unfolding on the screen.

It was breathtaking. But it didn’t compare to what was blasted around the world just a few days later, as the new Vera C. Rubin Observatory began broadcasting its “first light” — its inaugural images of the cosmos. I found myself pinching-to-zoom through a picture that contains roughly 10 million galaxies in a single frame**,** a vista so vast it would take 400 4-K TVs to display at full resolution. I could hold the universe itself on my screen.

Eye on the sky

Perched 8,660 feet up Cerro Pachón in the Chilean Andes, where the crystal-clear nights provide an exceptionally clear window into space, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory began construction in 2015 with funding from the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Energy. Named for the pioneering astronomer Vera Rubin, whose work on galaxy rotation helped prove the existence of dark matter, the observatory was built to run a single, audacious experiment: the 10-year Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

It will photograph the entire Southern Hemisphere sky every few nights to tackle four grand goals: unmask dark matter and dark energy, inventory the Solar System’s asteroids and comets, chart the Milky Way’s formation, and capture every transient cosmic event.

What makes Rubin so special is its eye, which is a marvel. At its core is a 27-foot-wide dual mirror cast from 51,900 pounds of molten glass that is still light enough to sweep across the sky in seconds. The mirror directs a flow of light from the cosmic depths to the 3.2-gigapixel LSST Camera,a 5-by-10-feet digital jumbotron that is the largest digital camera ever made. It’s like a massive magnifying glass paired with the world’s sharpest DSLR: Together they capture a swath of the night sky equivalent to 45 full moons every 30 seconds.

And those images, which will be continuously shared with the world, are jaw-dropping. The headlining shot from Rubin’s debut, nicknamed “Cosmic Treasure Chest,” stitches together 1,185 exposures of the Virgo Cluster, our nearest major collection of galaxies, some 55 million light-years away.

But the Rubin Observatory is about much more than producing pretty cosmic wallpaper. Its unprecedented scale gives it the ability to search for answers to grand questions about space science. The NSF notes that Rubin will gather more optical data in its first year than all previous ground telescopes combined, turning the messy, ever-changing sky into a searchable movie.

It’s not just pretty pictures

As I’ve written before, the world has made great strides in planetary defense: Our ability to detect and eventually deflect asteroids that could be on a collision course with Earth. Rubin has already begun paying dividends toward that goal.

In a mere 10 hours of engineering data, its detection software identified 2,104 brand-new asteroids — including seven near-Earth objects, heavenly bodies whose orbit will bring them near-ish our planet.

That haul came from just a thumbnail-sized patch of sky; once Rubin begins its nightly scan of the whole Southern Hemisphere, it’s projected to catalog over 5 million asteroids and roughly 100,000 NEOs over the next decade, tripling today’s inventory. That will help NASA finally reach its congressionally mandated target of identifying 90 percent of the 25,000 city-killer-class NEOs (those over 140 meters) estimated to be out there.

How powerful is Rubin’s eye? “It took 225 years of astronomical observations to detect the first 1.5 million asteroids,” Jake Kurlander, a grad student astronomer at the University of Washington, told Earth.com. “Rubin will double that number in less than a year.”

And the images that Rubin captures will go out to the entire world. Its Skyviewer app will allow anyone to zoom in and out of the corners of space that catch Rubin’s eye, including celestial objects so new that most of them don’t have names. Looking at the app gives you a sense of what it must have been like to be one of the first human beings, gazing up at a sky filled with wonder and mystery.

Finding perspective in a pixel

It might seem strange to highlight a telescope at a moment when the world feels as if it is literally on fire. But the Vera Rubin Observatory isn’t just a triumph of international scientific engineering, or an unparalleled window on the universe. It is the ultimate perspective provider.

If you open the Virgo image and zoom all the way out, Earth’s orbit would be smaller than a single pixel. Yet that same pixel is where thousands of engineers, coders, machinists, and scientists quietly spent a decade building an eye that can watch the rest of the universe breathe, and then share those images with all of their fellow humans.

Seeing Rubin’s images brought to mind the lines of Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer.”

I wander’d off by myself,

In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time,

Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

On days when life on our little world feels chaotic, Rubin’s first-light view offers a valuable reminder: We’re just one tiny part in a tapestry of 10 million galaxies, looking up from our planet at the endless stars.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

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Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) at a stop on their Fighting Oligarchy tour on April 12 in Los Angeles, California. | Mario Tama/Getty Images

The signs have been bubbling up for months: The Democratic base is fed up with the status quo of their party. Democratic voters believe their party leaders are out of touch, and they don’t think they’re rising to meet this moment. They want more confrontation with President Donald Trump, and they’re hungry for an inspiring, forward-looking economic vision.

That sentiment comes through in just about all the polling of the party, in focus groups with voters, and in anti-Trump protests and populist rallies since Trump’s inauguration.

The latest sign of this frustration might just be the stunning result of New York City’s mayoral primary this week. The victory of a self-proclaimed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani over the embodiment of the Democratic establishment, former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo, all with high turnout and a comfortable margin of victory, suggests Democratic voters are open to radical change. Of course, there are plenty of peculiarities that make a New York City primary contest a bit of a unique case: a toxic early front-runner, ranked-choice voting, and an open field of candidates during an off-year election. These specifics all make it risky to try to draw national implications from a local race.

But there’s at least one big warning for national Democrats from this upset: the kind of anti-establishment energy that boosted Mamdani exists in Democratic enclaves around the country. It feels familiar — reminiscent of 2009 and the rise of the Tea Party among the Republican Party’s conservative base that ended up remaking the GOP. The energy also feels similar, but more widespread, than what boosted progressive victories during primaries in Trump’s first term. And that energy suggests that the forces that remade the GOP could be aligning for Democrats to face a Tea Party moment of their own.

It remains to be seen whether this revolt will turn into a leftward shift of the party’s ideological positions. But it appears at least likely to result in targeting older and established incumbents, replacing the party’s leadership, or, at a minimum, forcing those leaders to be more aggressive against Trump, accommodating of younger leaders, and less complacent when faced with populist anger.

So as the national Democratic Party continues its post-2024 soul-searching, its incumbents and leaders are getting a clear warning. The ingredients are here for a populist revolt within the Democratic Party. Will leaders adjust and listen?

Democratic voters are on board with generational change

This year’s Democratic rage is very different from the last time Trump was elected president: The base wants not just confrontation with Republicans but to replace the party’s leadership entirely.

Consider a June Ipsos poll of Democrats, the latest of many surveys showing the Democratic base is unhappy with the state of their party. About half of Democrats are “unsatisfied with current leadership,” and 62 percent said “party leaders should be replaced.” This dissatisfaction is historic. Going back to 2009, Democrats haven’t been this upset with their party before. As noted, the last time a party’s base was worked up was during the Republicans’ Tea Party movement, which culminated in Trump’s GOP takeover.

Unlike previous moments of Democratic infighting, this divide isn’t primarily about ideology. That same June poll found that Democrats want their party to focus more on affordability, on getting the wealthy to pay more on taxes, and health care expansion. Older and younger Democrats are broadly in agreement about prioritizing economic concerns over social issues — and there aren’t that many differences between what younger and older Democrats want to prioritize.

Instead, it’s a fight over priorities. There’s a huge gulf between what each cohort of Democratic voters think their party does focus on and what it should focus on, particularly because younger Democrats are more progressive and think their leaders don’t care enough about universal health care, affordability, or taxing the rich.

On this front, age is becoming the big dividing line within the party. Previous polls have shown that overwhelming shares of Democratic voters want their party to run “younger candidates that represent a new generation of leadership” and “encourage elderly leaders to retire and pass the torch to the younger generation.” Dissatisfaction with “the establishment” is overwhelming.

The result of these combined feelings may lead to more Mamdani moments, according to some activists and strategists. Already a handful of younger candidates have announced primaries of longtime incumbents in California, Illinois, and Indiana. More are expected in blue states like Massachusetts and New York, including in the New York City region. Even party activists have announced that primarying older incumbents should be a party priority.

And there are signs this energy exists at every level of politics. At the grassroots, liberal, anti-Trump energy is still bubbling up through smaller but more frequent protests. Though it may seem like the 2017–18 #Resistance protests were more visible than those of 2025, various tracking efforts show that protests this year are happening more often and in a more localized manner. One metric from Harvard, for example, finds that there have been more than 15,000 protests since Trump’s second inauguration. In that same time in 2017, the number was smaller: over 5,000 protests.

How far can we expect this new movement to go?

As far as turning this energy into political action, there are also clear signs. Since Tuesday’s primary, the progressive political organization Run for Something, which recruits and supports young people who want to run for office, is reporting a surge in candidate recruitment, with more than 2,700 people signing up to explore campaigns as of Friday afternoon.

The organization’s president, Amanda Litman, says it’s one of the biggest spikes in interest since Trump’s election, mirroring the grassroots intensity generated after the Elon Musk-backed Department of Government Efficiency began to make cuts across the federal government and when Democrats helped avoid a government shutdown this spring. And it brings the number of young potential candidates who have expressed interest in running for office since Trump’s election to more than 50,000 people.

“We are seeing more young people than ever before raise their hands to run, not in spite of the chaos, but because of it. They are bringing urgency, boldness, energy, and their lived experience to the table. They are ready to change what leadership looks like in this country,” Litman said.

How successful these efforts at generational change will be remains to be seen.

The GOP’s internal revolt back in 2009 and 2010 contributed to the party’s takeover of the House by boosting conservative and Republican enthusiasm, but Tea Party candidates had more success in winning primaries than winning general elections. (That dynamic shifted some after Trump’s total takeover of the party.)

Similarly, calls for the Democrats to move left, and embrace a more progressive agenda, seem to resonate with a party whose membership has become much more liberal over the last 20 years. But that might be a misreading of a national electorate’s mood, particularly after a presidential election that showed large segments of the electorate were hostile to Democrats’ “liberal” identity.

Insurgent populist candidates have many steps ahead to win primaries and then prove they can win general elections. But it’s not inconceivable to think they can do it. There was a time when the GOP’s populist wing was considered fringe — extreme, even. We all know how that turned out.

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Justice Clarence Thomas, the author of the Court’s new pornography decision. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

The Supreme Court upheld a Texas anti-pornography law on Friday that is nearly identical to a federal law it struck down more than two decades ago.

Rather than overruling the previous case — Ashcroft v. ACLU(2004) — Justice Clarence Thomas’s opinion spends at least a dozen pages making an unconvincing argument that Friday’s decision in Free Speech Coalition v. Paxton is consistent with the Court’s previous decisions. Those pages are a garbled mess, and Thomas spends much of them starting from the assumption that his conclusions are true. All three Democratic justices dissented.

That said, Free Speech Coalition makes two very significant changes to the Court’s approach to free speech protections for pornography, and these changes are clearly stated in Thomas’s opinion.

In Ashcroft, the Court struck down a federal law that basically required pornographic websites to screen users to determine if they are over the age of 18. One reason for this decision is that it was far from clear that websites were actually capable of performing this task. As the Court had acknowledged in an earlier case, “existing technology did not include any effective method for a sender to prevent minors from obtaining access to its communications on the Internet without also denying access to adults.”

This mattered because, long before the internet was widely available, the Court had established, in cases involving phone sex lines and televised pornography, that “the objective of shielding children” from sexual material is not enough “to support a blanket ban if the protection can be accomplished by a less restrictive alternative.” These decisions established that adults have a First Amendment right to view sexual material, and this right cannot be diminished in an effort to keep that material from children.

Accordingly, in Ashcroft, the Court ruled that the federal age-gating law must survive the toughest test that courts can apply in constitutional cases, known as “strict scrutiny.” Very few laws survive this test, and the law at issue in Ashcroft did not.

The Court’s ruling in Free Speech Coalition, however, changes the rules governing laws that seek to block minors’ access to pornography, but which also may prevent adults from seeing that material. While much of Thomas’s opinion is difficult to parse, one significant factor driving the Court’s decision is the fact that technology has evolved. The internet, and internet pornography, is much more widely available than it was two decades ago. And it may now actually be possible to reliably age-gate pornographic websites.

Now, laws like the one at issue in Free Speech Coalition are only subject to a test known as “intermediate scrutiny” — a test which, as the name implies, is less strict. Under this somewhat less rigid framework, an anti-pornography law will be upheld “if it advances important governmental interests unrelated to the suppression of free speech and does not burden substantially more speech than necessary to further those interests.”

According to Thomas, in Free Speech Coalition, the “important governmental interest” at issue in this case is “shielding children from sexual content.”

Intermediate scrutiny, it should be noted, is not a paper tiger. Laws that discriminate on the basis of gender, for example, are typically subject to intermediate scrutiny. And most of these laws are struck down. But the new rule announced in Free Speech Coalition gives states broader leeway to restrict access to pornography.

Additionally, Thomas’s opinion also implies that adults have no legal right to keep their decision to view sexual material private.

The plaintiffs in Free Speech Coalition argued that “the unique stigma surrounding pornography will make age verification too chilling for adults.” Pornography users are likely to be reluctant to submit their ID to a site like Pornhub, for example, out of fear that the website will be hacked. This is likely to be especially true for people who are trying to keep their sexual orientation a secret, or people who could face serious career consequences if their private sexual behavior became public.

But Thomas’s opinion is exceedingly dismissive of the idea that privacy matters in this context. “The use of pornography has always been the subject of social stigma,” he writes. But “this social reality has never been a reason to exempt the pornography industry from otherwise valid regulation.”

It’s unclear just how far Thomas, or the rest of his colleagues, would take this conclusion. Could a state, for example, require everyone who wants to look at a pornographic video to submit their names to a government agency that will publish them on a public website? At the very least, however, Free Speech Coalition suggests that lawyers challenging anti-pornography laws may no longer raise privacy arguments as part of their challenge.

The Court’s decision is likely to make life miserable for judges

Free Speech Coalition makes clear that the era when the courts struck down nearly all laws regulating sexual speech is over. The government will now play a larger role in regulating online content depicting sex.

There is a very good reason, moreover, why pre-Free Speech Coalition courts took a libertarian approach to sexual speech. Although the First Amendment has been part of the Constitution since the late 1700s, it was largely meaningless for most of American history. And the government routinely prosecuted people for saying things, or for producing art, that regulators or law enforcement found objectionable. Under the 1873 Comstock Act and similar state laws, for example, people were routinely jailed for selling erotic literature or nude art, even works that are now widely considered masterpieces.

This regime began to change in the middle of the twentieth century, when the Court started protecting speech of all kinds, including both sexual and political speech. In Roth v. United States(1957), for example, the Court established that sexual speech and art could only be banned if the “average person, applying contemporary community standards” would determine that “the dominant theme of the material, taken as a whole, appeals to prurient interest.”

Later Supreme Court decisions tweaked this rule, and they also focused on whether the challenged speech or art has “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.” Speech that does have such value is protected.

All of these legal tests, however, are quite vague. And the question of whether a particular film or photo has serious artistic value is rather obviously in the eye of the beholder. Hence Justice Potter Stewart’s infamous statement that he may not be able to come up with a coherent legal framework to determine what sort of material should be banned, “but I know it when I see it.”

The result was that, for much of the 1970s, the justices literally had to meet in the basement of the Supreme Court to watch pornographic movies that were the subject of prosecutions, in order to make subjective calls about which movies should be protected by the First Amendment.

Those movie days, as described by Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong in The Brethren, were thoroughly humiliating experiences. Justice John Marshall Harlan, for example, was nearly blind during many of these screenings, so one of his law clerks had to describe what was happening on the screen to him — often prompting Harlan to explain “By Jove!” or “extraordinary!”

Meanwhile, filmmakers would often try to work within the Court’s “serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value” framework by including political discussions or similar matters in a movie that was otherwise about sex. According to Woodward and Armstrong, for example, one such film ended with a speech “on the comparative merits of Communist and Western societies.”

The point is that, once the Court decided that some sexual speech is protected by the Constitution, it was extremely difficult to come up with a principled way to distinguish art that is too sexy to be protected by the First Amendment from art that is not. And the Court’s attempts to do so only made a mockery of the justices.

Eventually, the combination of Supreme Court decisions that read the First Amendment broadly, and technologies like the internet that made it very difficult to suppress sexual speech, ushered in an era where pornography is widely available and mostly unregulated.

In upholding the Texas law at issue in Free Speech Coalition, the Court could end this era. But the justices are likely to make their own lives miserable as a result. Texas’s law incorporates many of the Supreme Court’s past pornography decisions, only restricting speech, for example, that “lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value for minors.”

Thus, if Texas wants to apply this law to Pornhub, some poor judge will have to watch much of the content on that website to determine if it has literary, artistic, political, or scientific value — and whatever that judge decides, their decision will be appealed to other judges who will have to engage in the same exercise.

Justice Thomas and his colleagues, in other words, should probably install a popcorn machine in the Supreme Court building, because they’ve just signed themselves up to recreate the humiliating movie days of the Court’s past.

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President Trump in the East Room of the White House on June 26 | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

When President Donald Trump announced late Saturday that he ordered the bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities, critics on both the left and the right feared a spiral into a wider war.

Yet just two days later, Trump announced a ceasefire deal between Israel and Iran that he claimed would end what he called “the 12-day war” entirely. And though this ceasefire looked quite fragile at first, three days later, it’s still holding.

There’s much we still don’t know about whether Trump’s strikes were successful in their short-term objective of disabling Iran’s nuclear program. And of course, the long-term consequences of the war for Iran and the region are very far from clear.

The past week’s events did, however, clarify some things about Trump and his approach to foreign policy in his second term. Specifically, though Trump attacked Iran’s nuclear program, he quickly pivoted to a ceasefire, suggesting that he’s still wary of the hawks’ transformational “regime change” ambitions. He instead prefers to deal with countries’ existing leaders at the negotiating table — and views military force as a tool to get himself a better deal.

At first, it seemed that Trump had handed hawks on the right a decisive victory. Sweeping aside the concerns of the “America First” faction that urged restraint and feared entanglement in a new “forever war,” Trump supported Israel’s attack on Iran and then sent US bombers in as well.

But what Trump did next is just as revealing. Though the Iranian government was badly weakened, and some hawks were hoping it could be toppled, Trump demurred, dismissing Iran’s retaliation against the US Monday as inconsequential and working to put together a ceasefire. That is, he had an opportunity to push onward for regime change in Tehran but turned it down.

Then, when it looked like the new ceasefire might not hold, Trump profanely berated both Iran and Israel and particularly urged Israel to scale back a retaliatory mission that was in progress. After Israel complied, Trump did a solid for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu with a Truth Social post urging Israeli authorities to cancel Netanyahu’s corruption trial.

Finally, Trump also declared the US strikes a complete success, insisting that Iran’s nuclear program has been wiped out and disputing leaked intelligence estimates that say otherwise. He seems uninterested in hawkish arguments that he hasn’t finished the job. This week, administration officials have even tried to restart nuclear talks with Iran, unlikely as that may seem.

All this suggests that, despite bombing the nuclear sites, Trump has not embraced open-ended war as US foreign policy just yet. He rolled the dice on a risky military operation — but remained intent on avoiding a wider war. He supported Israel — but then, when he wanted the war to stop, called the Israelis out.

It also suggests that Trump, unlike the GOP’s more hawkish faction, is uninterested in seeking transformational regime change in Iran. Despite a Truth Social post on Sunday (after the strikes and before the ceasefire) in which Trump suggested “Regime change” might be a possibility, he didn’t go through with it. During his first presidential run, Trump trashed George W. Bush’s Iraq War as a debacle, and the collapse of Iran’s government would likely bring similar turmoil.

Rather, Trump would prefer to settle things at the negotiating table, and he continues to view military action like his strikes on Iran as another way to enhance his leverage there. If negotiations aren’t going the way he likes, however, dropping bombs is still a card he could play — or at least, that’s what he wants his negotiating partner to fear.

As I wrote before the US struck Iran, Trump has some wariness toward the hawks, but he’s not a dove or a peacenik: If he’s persuaded a military action will go well and make him look strong and successful, he’s happy to endorse it. It is clear, though, that he continues to be wary of more prolonged wars that could go poorly.

So for now at least, Trump appears to lack the appetite for a prolonged, costly, and painful war. He approved the Iran strikes because he thought Iran had been so weakened that he could get away with them, with limited consequences to Americans. But just as soon as he approved them, he hastened to wrap up the conflict.

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A same-sex marriage supporter waves a LGBTQ+ Pride flag in front of the US Supreme Court in Washington, DC. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images

On Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that parents with religious objections to books with LGBTQ+ characters must be allowed to opt their children out of any public school instruction that uses those books. The decision in Mahmoud v. Taylor was handed down along party lines, with all six Republicans in the majority and all three Democrats in dissent.

The Mahmoud case highlights the Republican justices’ impatience to remake constitutional law in a more socially conservative image, especially in cases involving religion. It is certainly possible for public school instruction to violate a religious child’s constitutional rights. The Constitution, for example, forbids government institutions like public schools from coercing students into violating their religious views. As Justice Samuel Alito notes in the Mahmoud opinion, the Constitution would also forbid teachers from openly mocking a student’s faith.

But, as a federal appeals court which previously heard the Mahmoud case warned, we don’t actually know whether the Constitution was violated in this case. Although Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ+ characters for use in public schools, the lower court found that the record in this case contains no information “about how any teacher or school employee has actually used any of the Storybooks in the Parents’ children’s classrooms, how often the Storybooks are actually being used, what any child has been taught in conjunction with their use, or what conversations have ensued about their themes.”

Nevertheless, Alito handed down a fairly broad opinion which is likely to impose substantial new burdens on public schools, and he did so without waiting until the record in this case was more fully developed by lower courts. The result is that many schools may struggle to comply with the new obligations that were just imposed, and most schools are likely to exclude books that introduce queer themes or that even mention LGBTQ+ characters.

Why Mahmoud imposes a severe burden on public schools

The plaintiffs in Mahmoud include Muslim and Christian parents who do not want their children exposed to these books. And their lawyers came to the Supreme Court with an audacious request — seeking a broad decision that parents who object to any form of classroom instruction on religious grounds must be notified in advance, and be permitted to opt their child out of that instruction.

The problem with this request is that schools cannot possibly know, in advance, which religious views are held by which parents, and which books or lessons those parents might find objectionable. In the past, parents have sued school districts objecting, on religious grounds, to lessons that touch on topics as diverse as divorce, interfaith couples, and “immodest dress.” They’ve objected to books which expose readers to evolution, pacifism, magic, women achieving things outside of the home, and “false views of death.”

Courts have historically been very cautious about ruling in favor of parents who raise these sorts of objections, in part due to concerns that schools would be overwhelmed by administrative burden.

Nevertheless, the Court’s decision in Mahmoud largely embraces the plaintiffs’ request — Alito orders the school board to notify parents “in advance whenever one of the books in question or any other similar book is to be used in any way and to allow them to have their children excused from that instruction.”

Alito’s opinion does not discuss how this rule should apply to parents with more uncommon religious beliefs, but the Constitution forbids the government from treating people with idiosyncratic religious beliefs differently than people with more common beliefs. The upshot is that a school may also need to warn parents if a teacher wants to read from a Harry Potter book (because those books are about magic), or if they want to teach a lesson about a famous pacifist like Martin Luther King Jr. Schools may even need to warn parents if any of their children’s teachers are women, just in case a parent objects on religious grounds to women having achievements outside of the home.

That said, Alito’s opinion is slightly narrower than the Mahmoud plaintiffs’ proposed framework. Alito argues that the books at issue are objectionable, not just because they feature LGBTQ+ characters, but because they suggest that certain aspects of queer culture should be “celebrated.” One of the contested books is a medieval fairy tale about a prince who marries a knight. According to Alito, the book “relates that ‘on the two men’s wedding day, the air filled with cheer and laughter, for the prince and his shining knight would live happily ever after.’”

Thus, Alito claims, this book is objectionable not because it includes a same-sex wedding, but because it portrays this wedding as a good thing. Under Alito’s framework, a book that featured a same-sex wedding without portraying it as desirable might not trigger the new rule. Similarly, Alito would likely permit women to work as teachers without warning parents of their femininity, so long as the teacher does not do anything to celebrate their womanhood or suggest that being a woman who works outside the home is a good thing.

Still, schools will likely struggle to determine when they are required to warn parents of a particular lesson under Mahmoud. And schools that draw the line in the wrong place now risk being dragged into an expensive lawsuit.

Schools are likely to be reluctant to teach books with queer themes or characters

One very likely consequence of Mahmoud is that schools will be very reluctant to teach any lesson that mentions homosexuality, transgender people, or anything else that touches on queer sexuality or gender identity. Mahmoud is likely to impose a Florida-style “Don’t Say Gay” regime on every public school classroom in America.

The reason why is fairly straightforward. While it is somewhat unclear how Mahmoud applies to parents who object to fantasy novels or working women, the decision quite clearly limits schools’ ability to teach books with queer characters. Nor is it clear when a book crosses the line from merely mentioning a gay character to celebrating some aspect of gay culture. So schools that want to avoid lawsuits will need to exclude these sorts of books from their classroom altogether.

Lawyers, meanwhile, have a financial incentive to sue schools that behave more boldly. Federal law typically allows the “prevailing party” in a civil rights lawsuit to collect attorney’s fees from the losing party. And suits enforcing Mahmoud are considered civil rights cases because they arise under the First Amendment’s religious liberty provisions.

So, lawyers can search for schools that teach books with LGBTQ+ characters, find a parent who objects to those books, and then sue and demand that the school district pay their client’s bills. School districts that don’t want to be treated like an ATM for anti-LGBTQ+ lawyers, meanwhile, will only be able to avoid these lawsuits by excluding queer-themed books from the classroom entirely.

The Supreme Court, in other words, has decided that in order to accommodate one identity group — religious conservatives — schools should be hypercautious about teaching books that feature members of another identity group — LGBTQ+ people. Given the Court’s Republican majority, that decision is not a surprise. But it is likely to impose very difficult burdens.

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Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Amy Coney Barrett and former Associate Justice Anthony Kennedy talk with President Donald Trump as he arrives to address to a joint session of Congress on March 4, 2025. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

On Friday, the Supreme Court released its long-awaited decision in Trump v. CASA, a case challenging President Donald Trump’s attempt to strip many Americans of citizenship. The Court handed Trump a narrow victory along party lines, with all six Republicans in the majority and all three Democrats dissenting.

The 14th Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States” are citizens, with one narrow exception that does not arise in CASA, so Trump’s executive order trying to strip many babies born in the US of their citizenship is clearly and unambiguously unconstitutional. Multiple lower courts have all reached this same conclusion.

There are three important takeaways from the CASA opinion:

1) It’s not actually about birthright citizenship

The specific issue was whether all the lower courts that struck down the Trump anti-citizenship order may issue a “nationwide injunction,” which would block that order everywhere in the country, or whether they must issue a more narrow injunction that only blocked it in certain states, or for certain families.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s majority opinion concludes that a nationwide injunction is not allowed…sort of. Much of the opinion is about why nationwide injunctions should be impermissible, but a key section suggests that, in this case, one might actually be okay.

Specifically, Barrett says that courts may issue injunctions that are broad enough to ensure that a victorious plaintiff receives “complete relief.” This matters because several of the plaintiffs in this case are blue states that object to Trump’s attempt to cancel many Americans’ citizenship. And they argued that it would be unworkable if birthright citizenship was the rule in some states, but not others.

As Barrett summarizes their arguments, “children often move across state lines or are born outside their parents’ State of residence.” Thus, a “‘patchwork injunction’ would prove unworkable, because it would require [the states] to track and verify the immigration status of the parents of every child, along with the birth State of every child for whom they provide certain federally funded benefits.”

In any event, Barrett does not ultimately say whether she finds this argument persuasive, instead concluding that “the lower courts should determine whether a narrower injunction is appropriate” in future proceedings. So the holding of CASA seems to be that universal injunctions should be rare, but they are permissible in some cases, including, possibly, this case.

2) The arguments against universal injunctions are serious

During the Biden administration, MAGA-aligned federal judges in Texas routinely handed down nationwide injunctions on highly dubious grounds. Indeed, this practice so frustrated Biden’s Justice Department that, even after Trump won the 2024 election, Biden’s solicitor general, Elizabeth Prelogar, filed a brief asking the justices to limit their use.

The best argument against these broad orders is that they place too much power in individual judges, and in plaintiffs who can often shape which judge hears their case. As Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote in a 2020 opinion, “there are currently more than 1,000 active and senior district court judges.”In a world with nationwide injunctions, plaintiffs can shop around for the one judge in America who is most likely to be sympathetic to their cause, and potentially secure a court order that no other judge would hand down.

The most immediate beneficiary of Friday’s decision is Trump, who will now get some relief from nationwide injunctions. And it’s notable that the Republican-controlled Supreme Court waited until a Republican was in the White House before cracking down. Nevertheless, the decision in CASA should also benefit future Democratic administrations, assuming that the GOP-controlled Court applies it fairly to presidents of both parties.

3) This decision does not mean that Trump will succeed in killing birthright citizenship

As mentioned above, Barrett leaves the door open to a nationwide injunction in this very case. She also suggests that opponents of Trump’s anti-citizenship order can bring a class action and obtain relief very similar to a nationwide injunction, although plaintiffs seeking to bring class actions must clear additional procedural bars.

The Court, in other words, resolved very little. It appears that nationwide injunctions are still allowed, at least some of the time. And they might even be allowed in this very case.

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A Somali baby is weighed on a scale before being given a vaccine.

The deadliest country in the world for young children is South Sudan — the United Nations estimates that about 1 in 10 children born there won’t make it to their fifth birthday.

But just a hundred years ago, that was true right here in the United States: Every community buried about a tenth of their children before they entered kindergarten. That was itself a huge improvement over 1900, when fully 25 percent of children in America didn’t make it to age 5. Today, even in the poorest parts of the world, every child has a better chance than a child born in the richest parts of the world had a century ago.

How did we do it? Primarily through vaccines, which account for about 40 percent of the global drop in infant mortality over the last 50 years, representing 150 million lives saved. Once babies get extremely sick, it’s incredibly hard to get adequate care for them anywhere in the world, but we’ve largely prevented them from getting sick in the first place. Vaccines eradicated smallpox and dramatically reduced infant deaths from measles, tuberculosis, whooping cough, and tetanus. And vaccines not only make babies likelier to survive infancy but also make them healthier for the rest of their lives.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr., unfortunately, disagrees. President Donald Trump’s secretary of health and human services (HHS), a noted vaccine skeptic who reportedly does not really believe the scientific consensus that disease is caused by germs, recently announced the US will pull out of Gavi, an international alliance of governments and private funders (mainly the Gates Foundation) that works to ensure lifesaving vaccinations reach every child worldwide. His grounds? He thinks Gavi doesn’t worry enough about vaccine safety (he does not seem to acknowledge any safety concerns associated with the alternative — dying horribly from measles or tuberculosis).The Trump administration had already slashed its contribution to Gavi as part of its gutting of lifesaving international aid programs earlier this year, leaving any US contributions in significant doubt. But if Kennedy’s latest decision holds, it now appears that the US will contribute nothing to this crucial program.

The US is one of many funders of Gavi, historically contributing about 13 percent of its overall budget. In 2022, we pledged $2.53 billion for work through 2030, a contribution that Gavi estimates was expected to save about 1.2 million lives by enabling wider reach with vaccine campaigns.

That’s an incredibly cost-effective way to save lives and ensure more children grow into healthy adults, and it’s a cost-effective way to reduce the spread of diseases that will also affect us here in the US. Diseases don’t stay safely overseas when we allow them to spread overseas. Measles is highly contagious, and worldwide vaccination helps keep American children safe, too. Tuberculosis is becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics, which makes it harder and more expensive to treat, and widespread vaccination (so that people don’t catch it in the first place) is the best tool to ensure dangerous new strains don’t develop.

It is genuinely hard to describe how angry I am about the casual endangerment of more than a million people because Kennedy apparently thinks measles vaccines are more dangerous than measles is. The American people should be furious about it, too. If other funders aren’t able to cover the difference, an enormous number of children will pointlessly die because the US secretary of health and human services happens to be wildly wrong about how diseases work.

But the blame won’t end with him. It will also fall on everyone else in the Trump administration, and on the senators who approved his appointment in the first place even when his wildly wrong views were widely known, for not caring enough about children dying to have objected.

We’re destroying the greatest achievements of our civilization for no reason

Kennedy, it’s worth noting, is not even a long-standing Trump loyalist. He’s a kook who hitched his wagon to the Trump train a few months before the election. He doesn’t have a huge constituency; it wouldn’t have taken all that much political courage for senators to ask for someone else to lead HHS. A lot of his decisions are likely to kill people — from his decision to ban safe, tested food dyes and instead encourage the use of food dyes some people are severely allergic to because they’re “natural” to his courtship of American anti-vaxxers and his steps to undermine accurate guidance on American child vaccination.

Trump could still easily override Kennedy on Gavi, if Trump cared about mass death. But if it holds, pulling out of Gavi is likely to be Kennedy’s deadliest decision — at least so far. He reportedly may not believe that AIDS is caused by HIV, either, and he can surpass the death toll of this week’s decision if he decides to act on that conviction by gutting our AIDS programs in the US and globally.

But whether or not the Gavi withdrawal is the deadliest, it certainly stands out for its sheer idiocy. (The Gates Foundation is going to heroic lengths to close the funding gap, and individual donors matter, too: You can donate to Gavi here.)

None of this should have been allowed to happen. Since Kennedy’s confirmation vote in the Senate passed by a narrow margin with Mitch McConnell as the sole Republican opposing the nomination, every single other Republican senator had the opportunity to prevent it from happening — if they were willing to get yelled at momentarily for demanding that our health secretary understand how diseases work.

I am glad the United States does not have the child mortality rates of South Sudan. I’m glad that even South Sudan does not have the child mortality rates of our world in 1900. I’m glad the United States participated in the worldwide eradication of smallpox, and I was glad that we paid our share toward Gavi until the Trump administration slashed funding earlier this year. I’m even glad that mass death is so far in our past that it’s possible for someone to be as deluded about disease as Kennedy is.

But I am very, very sick of seeing the greatest achievements of our civilization, and the futures of a million children, be ripped to shreds by some of the worst people in politics — not because they have any alternative vision but because they do not understand what they are doing.

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