Vox

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.

---

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.

View Link

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.”

View Link

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.

View Link

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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!

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

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.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

A grizzly bear and her cub traverse a steep hillside in June 2024. in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming.

In the early 1900s, long before smartphones and selfie sticks, tourists flocked to Yellowstone National Park — not for the geysers or scenery, but for a grotesque show: A nightly spectacle of grizzly bears raiding cafeteria scraps from open-pit landfills like desperate, starving pirates.

The bears were in dangerous proximity to humans: Hungry bears tore at open car windows. Tourists posed a little too close with their film cameras. Yellowstone park rangers logged dozens of injuries each year — nearly 50 on average.

Eventually, the Park Service ended the nightly landfill shows: feeding wild animals human food wasn’t just dangerous, it was unnatural. Bears, ecologists argued, should eat berries, nuts, elk — not leftover Twinkies. In 1970, the park finally shut down the landfills for good.

By then, though, grizzlies were in deep trouble. As few as 700 remained in the lower 48 states, down from the estimated 50,000 that once roamed the 18 Western states. Decades of trapping, shooting, and poisoning had brought them to the brink. The ones that clung to survival in Yellowstone National Park learned to take what scraps they could get and when they were forced to forage elsewhere, it didn’t go so well.

More bears died. Their already fragile population in the Yellowstone region dipped to fewer than 250, though one publication says the number could have been as low as 136, according to Frank van Manen, who spent 14 years leading the US Geological Survey’s grizzly bear study team and now serves as an emeritus ecologist.

The Yellowstone bears had been trained to rely on us. And when we cut them off, their population tanked.

And so in 1975, the US Fish and Wildlife Service placed grizzly bears on the endangered species list, the country’s most powerful legal mechanism to stave off extinction.

The grizzly’s place on the list afforded them some important protections under the Endangered Species Act (ESA). Hunting was off limits, as was trapping or poisoning, and the listing included rigorous habitat protections. Grizzlies slowly came back.

Today, more than 1,000 grizzly bears live in and around Yellowstone alone, and tourists who visit the park by the millions every year can observe the bears — no longer desperately feeding on trash but lumbering in and out of meadows with their trailing cubs, or sitting on their haunches feasting on elk carcasses.

The recovery effort was a major success, but it’s brought a whole new slate of issues.

In recent years, grizzlies have spilled out of their stronghold in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem — a broad swath of Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming — and into human territory, where coexistence gets messy. In 2024 alone, more than 60 grizzlies were killed in Wyoming, most of them lethally removed by wildlife officials after killing cattle, breaking into cabins and trash cans, or lingering in residential neighborhoods.

It’s the classic species recovery paradox: the more bears succeed and their populations expand, the more trouble they get into with humans.

And now, a controversial debate rages over whether or not to delist the grizzly bear. No species is meant to be a permanent resident on the Endangered Species List. The whole point of the ESA is to help species recover to the point where they’re no longer endangered. A delisting would underscore that the grizzlies didn’t just scrape by in the Yellowstone area — they exceeded every population requirement in becoming a thriving, self-sustaining population of at least 500 bears.

But to remove federal protection would mean grizzly bears would face increasing threats to their survival at a time when some biologists argue the species’ recovery is shaky at best.

The stakes here are bigger than just the grizzly bear alone  — what happens next is about proving that the ESA works, and that sustained recovery is possible, and that ESA protection leads to progress. Because if a species like the grizzly, which has met every biological benchmark, still can’t graduate from the list, then what is the list for?

“The [ESA] is literally one of the strictest wildlife protection laws in the world…but in order for people to buy into it, they have to have respect for it,” says Kelly Heber Dunning, a University of Wyoming professor who studies wildlife conflict. “If it starts to be seen as…part of the culture war, that buy-in will go away.”

What’s the Endangered Species Act for anyway?

Since President Donald Trump has taken office, the Republican Party’s assault on the Endangered Species Act hasn’t been subtle.

The Fix Our Forests Act — which sounds like it attempts a wildfire and forest health solution — actually fast-tracks large-scale logging at the expense of fragile ecosystems and imperiled species. Trump allies in Congress, like Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert with the Pet and Livestock Protection Act, flagrantly prioritize political agendas over science, according to the nonprofit National Resources Defense Council. The House Natural Resources Committee has also suggested weakening the Marine Mammal Protection Act with an apparent intent to unravel protections for species like the North Atlantic right whale and the Gulf of Mexico Rice’s whale. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum has called to remove “burdensome regulations” standing in the way of Trump’s desire to unleash America’s energy potential. Project 2025, the conservative playbook, even explicitly calls to delist the grizzly bear.

But ironically, to prevent a full unraveling of one of the world’s most powerful protections for wildlife and wild places, conservationists need to grapple with the mission creep of the ESA.

When Republican President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act in 1973, the country’s wildlife had been in a century-long nosedive. After decades of habitat destruction, unregulated hunting and industrial expansion, federal officials had already flagged more than 70 species at risk of extinction — with many more lining up behind them.

In the decades that followed, the ESA proved to be one of the most powerful conservation tools in the world. More than 50 species, including the Canada goose and bald eagle, thrived with their newfound federal protections and were later delisted; another 56 species were downgraded from endangered to threatened. But others, like the black-footed ferret, Houston toad and the red wolf, for example, remain endangered — even after almost 60 years of federal attention.

Today the act protects more than 2,300 plant and animal species in the US and abroad. And still more wait in line, as overworked federal biologists triage petitions amid dwindling resources, aggressive layoffs and budget cuts.

But when it comes to the grizzly bear, the debate has become bigger than just biology — it’s become a referendum on what the Endangered Species Act is for, says David Willms, a National Wildlife Federation associate vice president and adjunct faculty at the University of Wyoming.

“The ESA is a science-based act,” he says. “You have a species that is struggling, and you need to recover it and make it not struggle anymore. And based on the best available science at the end of the day, you’re supposed to delist a species if it met those objectives.”

Animals in the political crosshairs

The Endangered Species Act is at odds with President Donald Trump’s plan to “unleash American energy.” His administration has even proposed to rescind the definition of “harm” under the ESA. But as broader attacks on the law play out, consequential battles are being waged on individual species. Read the following stories to learn more:

Black-footed ferrets: This animal is on the edge of extinction. Trump just fired the people trying to save it.

The delta smelt: Why does Trump hate this tiny fish so much?

The dunes sagebrush lizard: The tiny lizard that will test Trump’s “drill, baby, drill” agenda

Lesser prairie chicken: Trump officials are trying to yank this animal’s last shot at survival

Monarch butterflies: The fate of this beloved creature is in Trump’s hands

Red wolves: Less than 20 red wolves remain in the wild. We had a plan to save them.

The trouble begins when species linger on the list indefinitely, not because they haven’t recovered but because of what might happen next, out of fears of possible future threats.

But the ESA was only meant to safeguard against “reasonably foreseeable future threats,” Willms argues. Congress has the ability to protect species indefinitely —  like it did for wild horses under the 1971 Wild and Free-Roaming Horses and Burros Act or for numerous species of birds under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. But those were specific, deliberate laws.

“If there are other reasons why somebody or groups of people think grizzly bears should be protected forever, then that is a different conversation than the Endangered Species Act,” he says.

But this power works in the opposite direction, too. If grizzly bears stay on the list for too long, Congress may well decide to delist the species, as lawmakers did in 2011 when they removed gray wolves from the endangered species list in Montana and Idaho.

Those kinds of decisions happen when people living alongside recovered species, especially the toothy, livestock-loving kind, spend enough time lobbying their state’s lawmakers, says Dunning, the wildlife conflict researcher.

When Congress steps in, science tends to step out. A political delisting doesn’t just sideline biologists, it sets a precedent, one that opens the potential for lawmakers to start cherry-picking species they see as obstacles to grazing, logging, drilling, or building. The flamboyant lesser prairie chicken has already made the list of legislative targets.

“Right now, the idea of scientific research has lost its magic quality,” she says. “We get there by excluding people and not listening to their voices and them feeling like they’re not part of the process.”

And when people feel excluded for too long, she says, the danger isn’t just that support for grizzly bears will erode. It’s that the public will to protect any endangered species might start to collapse.

The case for delisting the grizzly

For Dan Thompson, Wyoming’s large carnivore supervisor, the question of delisting grizzlies is pretty simple: “Is the population recovered with all the regulatory mechanisms in place and data to support that it will remain recovered?” he says. “If the answer is yes, then the answer to delisting is yes.”

That’s why Thompson believes it’s time to delist the grizzly. And he’s not alone. The Greater Yellowstone ecosystem population is “doing very well,” says van Manen. In fact, grizzlies met their recovery goals about20 years ago.

Getting there wasn’t easy. After the landfills closed and the bear population plummeted, it took a massive, decades-long effort from states, tribes, federal biologists, and nonprofits to bring the grizzlies back. The various entities funded bear-proof trash systems for people living in towns near the national parks and strung electric fences around tempting fruit orchards. They developed safety workshops for people living in or visiting bear country, and tracked down poachers.

And little by little, it worked. Bear numbers swelled, and by the mid-2000s, more than 600 bears roamed the Yellowstone area.

Given this success, the US Fish & Wildlife Service proposed delisting the grizzlies for the first time in late 2005. Environmental groups sued, arguing bears needed continued federal protection as whitebark pine, an important food source, diminished. Bears could starve, groups maintained, and their populations could plummet again. But a subsequent federal study of what, exactly, grizzly bears eat, found that while grizzlies do munch whitebark pine seeds during bumper years, they don’t depend on the trees to survive. In fact, grizzlies consume no fewer than 266 species of everything from bison and mice to fungi and even one type of soil.

“Grizzly bears are incredibly opportunistic and use their omnivorous traits to shift to other food sources,” says van Manen. So losing one food — even a high-calorie one — did little to change the population.

The move to delist them paused as the federal government addressed the federal court’s concerns, including researching the grizzly bear’s diet.

And bear numbers kept climbing. In 2016, the Fish and Wildlife Service — under President Barack Obama — updated delisting requirements including more expansive habitat protections, stricter conflict prevention, and enhanced monitoring. The agency then proposed a delisting. The following year — under Trump — it delisted the grizzly bear.

This time the Crow Indian Tribe sued and — determining in part that delisting grizzlies in the Yellowstone region threatened the recovery of other populations of grizzlies — a federal judge overturned the government’s decision to delist the bears and placed them back on the list. In 2022, Wyoming petitioned the Fish and Wildlife Service to delist bears in the Yellowstone region. The service took a few years to analyze the issue, and then this January, days before the Biden administration ended, it issued a response to that petition: Grizzly bears would stay on the Endangered Species List.

All of these years of back and forth reflected the change in how the federal government viewed the grizzly population, largely a result of the bear’s own success. The Yellowstone region’s bears, they argued, are no longer distinct from bear populations in northern Montana, Idaho, and Washington. And because northern populations haven’t met the recovery benchmarks yet (with the exception of a population in and around Glacier National Park), the species as a whole is not yet recovered.

But the goalposts for delisting grizzlies keep moving, Thompson told Vox.

Grizzly bears would still be managed even after a delisting. States would be responsible for them, and — miracle of miracles — state and federal agencies actually agreed on how to manage grizzlies after ESA protections end.

Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana are committed to maintaining between 800 and 950 grizzly bears if the creature ever leaves the endangered species list. And states like Wyoming know how to manage grizzly bears because for years, under the supervision of the feds, they’ve been doing the gritty, ground-level work. Wyoming’s wildlife agency, for example, traps and relocates conflict bears (or kills problem bears if allowed by the Fish and Wildlife Service), knocks on doors to calm nervous landowners, hands out bear spray, and reminds campers not to cook chili in their tents.

Despite all that, “nobody trusts us,” Thompson, with Wyoming’s state wildlife agency, said. “There’s always going to be a way to find a reason for [grizzlies] not to be delisted.”

Delisting now might be the right decision. It would still be a gamble

Even though grizzly bears may be thriving in numbers, they’re not ready to go it alone, says Matt Cuzzocreo, interim wildlife program manager for the Greater Yellowstone Coalition Grizzlies.

The Greater Yellowstone Coalition has spent millions of dollars over the past few decades helping bears and humans more successfully coexist. But whatever comes next needs to build on the past 50 years of working with locals. As bears expand into new territory, they’re crossing into areas where residents aren’t used to securing garbage and wouldn’t know how to respond to 600-pound predators ambling down back roads or into neighborhoods.

Simply removing bears from the list and handing management to the states, which is the default after a species delisting, isn’t enough, says Chris Servheen — not when so much is still in flux. Servheen, who led the Fish and Wildlife Service’s recovery program for 35 years, helped write the previous two recovery plans. He says a delisting could leave them dangerously exposed.

“Politicians are making decisions on the fate of animals like grizzly bears and taking decisions out of the hands of biologists,” Servheen says.

Montana and Idaho, Servheen points out, already allow neck-snaring and wolf trapping just outside Yellowstone’s borders — traps that also pose a lethal threat to grizzlies. And now, the Trump administration has slashed funding for the very biologists and forest managers tasked with protecting wildlife.

Once states take over, many are expected to push for grizzly hunting seasons, and some, like Wyoming, have already set grizzly bear hunting regulations for when the creatures are no longer protected. Layer that on top of existing threats — roadkill, livestock conflicts, illegal kills — and it’s easy to imagine a swift population slide.

“It’s a perfect storm for grizzlies,” Servheen says. “We’re seeing attacks on public land agencies, the sidelining of science, predator-hostile politicians muscling into wildlife decisions, and relentless pressure from private land development. Walking away from the grizzly now — after all we’ve invested — just feels like the worst possible timing.”

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

Justice Neil Gorsuch, the author of the Court’s new attack on Medicaid, shakes hands with Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. | Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty Images

Federal law says that “any individual eligible for medical assistance” from a state Medicaid program may obtain that care “from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required.” In other words, all Medicaid patients have a right to choose their doctor, as long as they choose a health provider competent enough to provide the care they seek.

On Thursday, however, the Republican justices ruled, in Medina v. Planned Parenthood, that Medicaid patients may not choose their health provider. And then they went much further. Thursday’s decision radically reorders all of federal Medicaid law, rendering much of it unenforceable. Medina could prove to be one of the most consequential health care decisions of the last several years, and one of the deadliest, as it raises a cloud of doubt over countless laws requiring that certain people receive health coverage, as well as laws ensuring that they will receive a certain quality of care.

All three of the Court’s Democrats dissented.

Justice Neil Gorsuch’s opinion in Medina is a trainwreck of legal reasoning. It’s hard to think of a principled reason why, two years after the Court took a much more expansive approach to Medicaid law in Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023), the Republican justices abruptly decided to reverse course. It is easy, however, to see a political reason for the Medina decision.

The plaintiff in Medina, after all, is Planned Parenthood, an abortion provider Republicans love to hate. Medina involved South Carolina’s attempt to forbid Medicaid patients from choosing Planned Parenthood as their health provider, a policy that violates federal law.

In an apparent attempt to spite Planned Parenthood, the Republican justices have now effectively repealed that law. This is not aberrant behavior from this Court’s Republican majority.

Four years ago, before the Court overruled Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, the justices considered a Texas law which permitted private bounty hunters to sue abortion providers and collect bounties of at least $10,000 from them. The Texas law was an obvious attempt to cut off abortion rights in violation of Roe, but five of the Republican justices joined an opinion by Gorsuch, which held that this sort of law could not be challenged in federal court because, Gorsuch claimed, abortion providers must wait until after they are hauled into court by a bounty hunter to assert their rights.

Medina fits within the same legal tradition. When a case involves abortion providers, the Court’s Republican majority is frequently willing to twist the law into any shape necessary to ensure that the abortion providers lose.

What was the specific legal issue in Medina?

A federal law known as “Section 1983” lets state officials be sued if they deprive someone of “any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws.” This is arguably the most important civil rights law ever enacted by Congress. Without it, many federal laws and constitutional provisions would be unenforceable.

Medina turns on Section 1983’s reference to “rights” protected by federal law. Past Supreme Court decisions establish that not all federal laws create a right that can be enforced under Section 1983 and so the Court has developed a set of rules to determine which laws do.

Before Thursday’s decision in Medina, the key case laying out this framework was Talevski. Talevski held that a federal law creates enforceable rights when it is “‘phrased in terms of the persons benefited’ and contains ‘rights-creating,’ individual-centric language with an ‘unmistakable focus on the benefited class.’”

Thus, before Thursday, the key question was whether a law’s text focuses on the individuals who benefit. A hypothetical federal law which provides that “no state may prevent a hungry person from eating at Taco Bell” would be enforceable, under Talevski, because this hypothetical law centers the people who benefit from it (people who are hungry). A similar statute stating that “states shall not impede access to cheap burritos” would likely not be enforceable under Talevski, because it does not mention who is supposed to benefit from these burritos.

Under Talevski, Medina is an easy case, and it should have ended in a 9-0 victory for Planned Parenthood. Here is the relevant statutory language from the Medina case:

A State plan for medical assistance must … provide that … any individual eligible for medical assistance (including drugs) may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required (including an organization which provides such services, or arranges for their availability, on a prepayment basis), who undertakes to provide him such services.

This law is full of the kind of “individual-centric language” demanded by Talevski. It provides a right to “any individual.” It provides that these individuals “may obtain” care from their chosen provider. And it concludes with a pronoun (“him”) which refers back to the individuals who benefit from this law.

There is simply no way to reconcile Gorsuch’s Medina opinion with Talevski.

So how does Gorsuch try to get around Talevski?

The Republican justices largely try to get around Talevski by ignoring it, or by misrepresenting what it said. Notably, the key words laying out Talevski’s legal rule — that federal laws are enforceable through private lawsuits if they are “phrased in terms of the persons benefited” — appear nowhere in Gorsuch’s opinion.

Instead, Gorsuch introduces some new principles into federal Medicaid law that are likely to confuse judges who must apply his decision to other provisions of the Medicaid statute.

In its brief, for example, South Carolina suggested that a federal law must use the magic word “right,” or it is unenforceable under Section 1983. Gorsuch’s opinion doesn’t go quite this far, but it does repeatedly point out that the provision of Medicaid law at issue in Talevski, which the Court held to be enforceable, uses this magic word in its text.

Unlike Talevski, however, Medina does not articulate a clear legal rule which lower court judges can apply to other provisions of Medicaid law. It does not even explicitly overrule Talevski. Instead, Gorsuch mostly just points to some random features of the law at issue in Medina, and then leaves readers to guess how to determine which Medicaid laws are still enforceable.

Gorsuch, for example, finds it quite significant that a different provision of federal Medicaid law allows states to exclude some providers who are convicted of a felony from their Medicaid program — a fact that is completely irrelevant under Talevski. He also notes that the provision at issue in Medina “appears in a subsection titled ‘Contents.’”

It’s hard to understand how this title is relevant. Moreover, this segment of Gorsuch’s opinion appears to conflict with the explicit text of a federal law, which states that a provision of Medicaid law “is not to be deemed unenforceable because of its inclusion in a section…specifying the required contents of a State plan.”

Gorsuch also includes an ominous line suggesting that, in the future, his Court will read Medicaid laws very narrowly: “Though it is rare enough for any statute to confer an enforceable right,” Gorsuch claims, “spending-power statutes like Medicaid are especially unlikely to do so.”

Thursday’s decision, in other words, is likely to have sweeping implications for low-income Americans’ health care, even if it was handed down solely to wound Planned Parenthood. Federal Medicaid law is riddled with provisions governing how states must operate their Medicaid programs, including requirements governing who must be covered, and rules governing patient safety. The Talevski case, for example, concerned a law which prohibits nursing homes from using psychotropic drugs “for purposes of discipline or convenience” when they are “not required to treat the resident’s medical symptoms.” Under Medina, many of these laws may now be rendered unenforceable.

It should be noted that, even under Gorsuch’s decision, there is still one possible way to enforce the law permitting Medicaid patients to choose their health providers — the federal government could cut off some or all Medicaid funding to South Carolina. Realistically, however, this remedy would only make matters worse. It does not help Medicaid patients to take away their funding, and so the federal government has historically been exceedingly reluctant to use this blunderbuss of an enforcement mechanism.

After Medina, that means that much of federal Medicaid law may effectively cease to function.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

Factory farming is a particularly wicked problem to solve.

It’s a moral atrocity, involving the confinement and slaughter of hundreds of billions of animals globally each year. It’s a blight on the environment. It’s terrible for slaughterhouse workers, many of whom suffer from PTSD, anxiety, or depression. Yet factory farming produces something almost everyone wants and that has become culturally, economically, and politically entrenched: cheap meat, milk, and eggs.

Despite strong public concern for cruelty to farmed animals and large swathes of Americans telling pollsters that they’re trying to cut back on meat, we keep eating more of it. And research has shown that it’s nearly impossible to persuade most people otherwise. But a new study, which hasn’t yet been published and is currently under review at an academic journal, might complicate that consensus.

Learning how the sausage gets made

In the experiment, University of Toronto professors Lisa Kramer and Peter Landry recruited 1,149 students and separated them into two groups. One group watched a 16-minute clip from the harrowing animal rights documentary Dominion about the treatment of pigs in meat production, while a control group watched a video about the role mushrooms play in forest ecosystems.

In surveys taken before the study, immediately after watching the video, and a week later, participants were asked to choose a protein — bacon, chicken, steak, tofu, or none — to add to a meal.

Before watching the video, 90.1 percent of students chose meat in their meal; a week after watching the video, 77.9 percent did — a 12.2 percent decline. Demand for pork, specifically, fell more sharply.

“Turns out, it’s harder to order meat after watching Dominion,” Seth Ariel Green, a research scientist at Stanford University’s Humane and Sustainable Food Lab, wrote in a blog about the study. “And it’s especially harder to order pork after watching the segment on pigs.” (Green didn’t work on the study but did provide the authors feedback on its design.)

Plenty of researchers have shown videos similar to Dominion to study participants and found little to no effect. So what made this one different? Kramer and Landry say it could simply be the high-quality nature of the film.

It was filmed in high definition and artfully edited, with close-up shots of distressed pigs, while most other factory farm footage is low-quality and shaky. It’s a disturbing and unflinching look at industrial pig farming, though the narrator — actor Rooney Mara — speaks with a flat tone, as she carefully guides the viewer through practices that, on their face, should be illegal but are common and lawful. Some of those practices include:

Confining pigs in tiny crates for virtually their entire livesSlamming runt piglets head-first into concrete as a form of cheap euthanasiaRemoving piglets’ tails, teeth, and testicles without pain reliefUsing carbon dioxide gas chambers to knock pigs unconscious prior to slaughter, which can cause extreme suffering

What’s more, the clip that participants watched makes no appeal for them to eat less meat or more plant-based foods, leaving viewers to come to their own conclusions. “The task of connecting the experiences of pigs on industrial-scale farms (as depicted in the video) to one’s own consumption choices is left entirely to the viewer,” Kramer and Landry wrote in the paper. (A lot of studies on the impacts of factory-farming documentaries use advocacy videos that directly ask the viewer to eat less meat.)

The study certainly has limits. For one, the average participant was 22 years old and participants skewed slightly female; young people and women are both groups that are more likely to be concerned about cruelty to farmed animals. And it only followed the participants for one week after the experiment.

Lastly, researchers didn’t track what participants actually ate. Instead, the students indicated which protein they would add to a meal, with the understanding that they had a roughly 50 percent chance of winning a voucher for the meal they chose at a university cafeteria. At first, this struck me as a poor proxy for real-world behavior. But the researchers noted thatanother study that used a similar voucher approach and tracked what students actually ate found little discrepancy.

All this suggests that persuading individuals to eat less meat — a goal that many in the animal advocacy movement have largely given up on — might not be as hopeless as previously thought.

Why animal rights groups largely gave up on trying to change people’s diets

The University of Toronto study results pleasantly surprised Green, who researches how to move society away from factory farming. For a time, he had been convinced that efforts to persuade people to eat less meat — especially with appeals to animal welfare — were ineffective.

His beliefs were informed by his research: Late last year, he and some colleagues published a meta-analysis, which is currently under peer review, looking at more than three dozen rigorous studies designed to persuade people to eat less meat. Overall, the studies found little to no effect. (It’s worth noting, however, that a few studies involving much lengthier interventions, like reading an essay and joining a 50-minute group discussion or sitting through a lecture, have demonstrated sizable effects).

This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletter

Sign up here for Future Perfect’s biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more.

Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at [email protected]!

Green’s findings align with a change in the animal rights movement that took hold around a decade ago.

Since the 1970s, animal advocates have poured a lot of resources into persuading people to go vegetarian or vegan. Organizations ran expensive advertising campaigns, handed out millions of pamphlets at universities, lectured in classrooms, and penned letters to the editor and op-eds in newspapers, among many other tactics. But in spite of all the effort, American meat consumption kept rising.

By 2015, the largest animal advocacy organizations were shifting their focus toward political and corporate campaigns to ban some of the most egregious factory-farm practices, like tiny cages for pigs and egg-laying hens. Some groups also advocated for technological change — namely, making plant-based meat taste better, more affordable, and more widely available. The idea was that instead of trying to influence one person at a time, which had proven so difficult, they’d instead change the food system.

The pivot produced a lot of tangible progress for animals: Over a dozen states have restricted cages for farmed animals, and plant-based meat tastes better and is more widely available than ever. But I’ve wondered whether animal advocates have given up on public persuasion too soon, and in turn, made it harder to maintain their hard-won institutional and technological progress.

Progress won through corporate or political campaigns might struggle to withstand backlash “if there isn’t also culture change happening and people’s attitudes shifting” about factory farming, Laura Driscoll, a social scientist who works at the Stray Dog Institute — a foundation that funds groups working to reform the food system — told me.

For example, plant-based meat sales jumped significantly between the late 2010s and early 2020s, but they’ve recently dipped back down. There might be a bigger market for these products, and more consumers might be immune to the fallacious argument that they’re overly processed, if more people were persuaded of the ills of factory farming.

Some states are now rolling back animal welfare laws that advocates had previously persuaded them to adopt, while some members of Congress are pushing to eliminate all state-level cage bans. Many food companies that pledged to eliminate eggs from caged hens in their supply chain aren’t following through. In the absence of a broader base of voters and consumers who see factory farming as an important social issue, corporations and politicians know they can backslide without much resistance.

The art of persuasion

Compared to straightforward metrics like how many pigs are still trapped in cages, culture change is “harder to understand and harder to measure,” Driscoll said, so it’s hard to know how much animal rights groups should invest in it. And if it works, it takes a lot of time and repeated exposure to get there. A study participant may not alter their meat consumption after watching one video or reading an essay, but they might change over time if they hear about it enough — and hear persuasive messages that appeal to them.

Currently, people are receiving very few messages about factory farming or meat reduction, as it’s rarely covered in the news or discussed by politicians. Videos about the issue hardly ever go viral, and animal advocacy groups have pulled back from education and persuasion.

Meanwhile, as Green told me, consumers are inundated with messages telling them to eat more meat. Some of those messages are explicit, like fast food advertisements or influencers telling us we need more (animal) protein, to implicit ones, like recipe videos on social media or our friends and family members eating a standard American diet rich in meat. Meat companies also mislead consumers to believe farmed animals are treated much better than they actually are.

It’s hard to imagine the public making meaningful reductions in meat consumption or advocating for significant changes to factory farming in this political, social, and information ecosystem. As researchers are prone to saying, more research is needed to know what could persuade more people on this issue: “There’s just not that much great research out there,” Green said. “If you’re a researcher in this field and you want to make a contribution, it’s not that hard to be the first person to do something.”

The case for both dietary change and meat industry reforms can be made persuasively. Based on the Dominion study, it might only take 16 minutes of an unvarnished look into factory farms for it to break through to some people. In today’s crowded attention environment, capturing those 16 minutes of people’s time will be harder than ever, but Green said it’s still worth the effort.

“I think that persuasion is a beautiful thing where we try to convince people using reason and argument, and take them seriously” as moral agents, he said. “I do not want to give up on this.”

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

In small US towns, emergency fire and ambulance first responder agencies are still mostly staffed by volunteers — a practice that was put in place in the 1970s and 1980s. But these volunteers are increasingly older, with fewer young people signing up than in previous decades.

Higher cost of living and a diminishing rural population have made volunteering less appealing than it used to be. We interviewed experts in the field of emergency response to figure out how to get those volunteers back, and the answer may be a simple one: pay them for their time.

This video is presented by T-Mobile. Our sponsor has no editorial influence over how we report our stories, but their support makes videos like these possible. To learn more, click here.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

Birthday posting anxiety is real.

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

Birthdays are supposed to be fun. You eat cake, you open presents, maybe you have a party. They can also, however, become a source of pressure and anxiety. And for many teens today, birthdays are a time when the public nature of social media and the private joys of friendship awkwardly collide.

Teens often post celebratory photos or messages on their Instagram stories for friends’ birthdays, Kashika, 19, told me a few weeks ago in a conversation about kids and friendship. Then the birthday kid will reshare those posts to their own account. The number of posts you share “forms an image of how many friends you might have,” Kashika explained.

Kashika, a contributor to the podcast This Teenage Life, remembered seeing classmates share tons of birthday stories, and thinking, “Oh my God, they’re so popular.” Then, on her birthday, not a single person posted a story for her. “I felt really bad,” she said.

The birthday post (or lack thereof) has become a common source of anxiety, according to experts who work with kids. Teens report “feeling a lot of pressure to post for people’s birthdays, to post in a certain way, to post efficiently, effusively,” Emily Weinstein, executive director of Harvard’s Center for Digital Thriving, told me. On the flip side, teenagers worry about having enough people post on their birthdays to “signal that you have people who really care about you” or to “show that you have a sufficient number of friends,” Weinstein said.

Birthday wishes are one way that teens feel pressure to “perform closeness” on social media, posting photos and messages of affection publicly “both as part of being a good friend and as a way of validating their own social acceptance and connectedness,” Weinstein and Carrie James wrote in their 2022 book, Behind Their Screens.

Performing closeness isn’t new — teens used to decorate one another’s lockers for birthdays, Devorah Heitner, author of the book Growing Up in Public: Coming of Age in a Digital World, told me (we did not do this at my school, and now I feel left out). But social media adds a new layer of labor to kids’ already fraught social lives, forcing them to make calculations about how to celebrate their friends online — and how to respond if their friends don’t do the same for them.

The pressure to post

Birthdays on social media offer a whole buffet of new stressors, kids and experts told me. For one thing, posts are easier to quantify than locker decorations. “You can literally just count the likes or count the reposts,” Heitner said. “That’s very vivid.”

Even posting on other people’s birthdays can be nerve-wracking, kids say. “I used to post for every friend that I had,” Divya, 19, told me. But then she realized that other kids were only posting birthday stories for friends who had posted birthday stories for them. “It felt very weird,” Divya said, because she didn’t personally care if someone had posted a birthday message for her or not.

There’s also pressure to make your birthday post reflect the level of your friendship. “If someone is your best friend, you have to make it extra special,” Divya, a This Teenage Life contributor, told me. “You have to just do it for the sake of making your friends feel special on social media.”

That pressure to craft the perfect birthday post that communicates the specialness of a friendship is part of a larger pattern, experts say. On the one hand, “social media offer compelling opportunities to validate relationships and show public support for others,” Weinstein and James write. On the other, “when so much of posting is an expectation and over-the-top compliments are the norm, being authentic can feel nearly impossible and knowing what’s authentic can be like reading tea leaves.”

The pressure to perform closeness can be exhausting and annoying, kids say. One 17-year-old, Michelle, told Weinstein and James that she’d recently gotten stressed because she liked a friend’s photo but couldn’t think of a comment right away. “I get really nervous about it too, because I have to think of something quick, and it has to be something really good,” she said. Once she’d engaged by liking the post, the clock was suddenly ticking. “There’s definitely expectations to comment on a post.”

Especially among younger teen girls, “there’s a feeling that if we are close, people should know we’re close,” Weinstein said. If they’re not representing their friendship online through likes, comments, and posts, some teens feel “they’re not somehow not doing justice to the relationship.”

As Kashika put it, Instagram stories and other social media posts become “like a declaration in society that this person is my friend.”

Pushing back on the pressure

Performing closeness is far from unique to teenagers — adults are doing the same thing when they post cute photos and adoring captions on their anniversaries, Heitner said. And getting fewer birthday posts than you’d like, or fewer than other people get, can feel lousy whether you’re celebrating your 14th birthday or your fortieth. After all, millennials on Facebook arguably invented birthday posting culture (and stressful birthday comparisons along with it).

But for teenagers, whose needs for social approval and inclusion are so high, an underwhelming birthday on Instagram can be especially hard, Heitner said.

Luckily, teens are developing some of their own ways of coping with the pressure social media puts on their friendships. Some are just using Instagram less in general, Heitner said. “It is socially acceptable now to be a kid who’s like, ‘I don’t really like this. I barely check it.’”

Others are learning to draw a distinction between performed closeness and the real thing. Kashika felt bad “for a while” when no one posted on her birthday, she told me. But “then I thought, no, this is just part of social media,” she said. “It does not actually depict our real friendship. And then my mood got a little better.”

What I’m reading

Families are reporting disturbing conditions at Texas immigration detention facilities, including adults fighting with children for clean water, and a lack of medical care for a boy with a blood disorder whose feet became so swollen he couldn’t walk.

The Trump administration is reinstating some research contracts at the Education Department that were initially terminated by DOGE, including a study on how to help kids with reading difficulties.

The idea of giving kids a “’90s summer” may be a fantasy now that YouTube exists.

My little kid and I have been revisiting Arnold Lobel’s Mouse Soup, which includes stories about a lady who becomes obsessed with a rosebush growing out of her couch, and some rocks who learn the power of perspective.

From my inbox

When I talk to teens, I like to ask them what adults these days get wrong about young people. What don’t we understand? Now I’m posing this to you — whether you’re a kid or an adult with kids in your life, what do you think grown-ups are getting wrong? What aspects of kids’ lives today need to be demystified or explained? Let me know at [email protected]!

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

Check in with yourself often when you’re wearing a health tracker.

You’d think I would have been more self-conscious about walking around New York City while wearing no fewer than six health trackers at a time. For the first six months of this year, I wore smart rings on both hands, fitness bands on both wrists, biosensors plugged into my arms, and sometimes even headphones that monitored my brain activity. I was a little embarrassed, sure, but mostly I was anxious.

This health tracking ensemble was part of an experiment — a failed one, I’ll admit. By tracking as many health metrics as possible, I thought I’d find a way to feel younger, more energetic, and more fit. Products like the Oura ring, the Whoop band, the Apple Watch, and a growing variety of continuous glucose monitors promise to track things like your heart rate, body temperature, and metabolic health metrics, while their companion apps crunch that data into actionable advice about how to live your life. If one health tracker is good for you, theoretically, half a dozen should be great.

What I learned from obsessively tracking my health for half a year is that paying too much attention to what your body is doing can ruin your life. Or at least it can ruin your understanding of healthy living, since too much information can steer your brain toward assuming the worst. Looking at the readouts from these fitness tracking apps sent me down dark holes of Googling symptoms and self-diagnosing conditions that my doctor assured me I did not have. But, I reasoned, he did not have all of the data that the health tracker collected, so he could be wrong, and AI, which is increasingly embedded in this tech, is very good at diagnosing things.

I wouldn’t caution against any and all health tracking. Now that the experiment is over, I’m only ever wearing one health tracker at a time. I’ve gained a new appreciation for how technology could become an essential part of healthy living in the near future, if you do it right. I’m not saying I have all the answers, but there are some things I would recommend to tracker-curious readers. And there are some things I would avoid at all costs.

Do wear a smart ring when you sleep

Out of over a dozen gadgets tested, the one device that I added to my daily routine is an Oura ring that I only wear at night. (During the day, I wear an Apple Watch.) An Oura ring is a sensor-packed smart ring that measures a lot of the same things as a smartwatch, but is easier to wear while you sleep. The ring keeps track of your heart rate and movement to sense how well you sleep. Exactly how it does this is controversial with some sleep doctors, but it nonetheless generates a sleep score, which is oddly compelling.

The first thing I do every morning, I’m almost embarrassed to say, is check my sleep score in the Oura app. If it’s bad, I feel vindicated for feeling groggy. If it’s good, I feel energized, even if I still feel groggy. The sleep score is a made-up metric, one that may or may not be correct based on how Oura’s algorithms calculate various factors, but paying attention to the score was helpful for me.

“The way that we think about how we’ve slept can really make us feel better,” Thea Gallagher, a psychologist at NYU Langone Health, told me. “If we think we’ve had a good night of sleep, we will actually feel better physically and mentally and emotionally.”

Placebo effect notwithstanding, I’m also surprised by how much I listen to an app when it tells me to go to bed. Thanks to the Oura app, I’ve developed better sleeping habits, and frankly, I feel better.

Do start out with a clear goal in mind

When I first got an Apple Watch, I liked the rings that track how much you move. Moving more seemed like an easy goal that would improve my health. But some trackers seem to collect data for the sake of collecting data, with no particular objective.

Continuous glucose monitors, or CGMs, have been lifesavers for people with diabetes for years, but a growing list of companies sell them to non-diabetics over the counter. These biosensors stick a filament into your skin that measures the amount of glucose in your interstitial fluid, which can give you a good guess about what your blood glucose is at any given moment. If you don’t know a lot about how metabolism works, the readouts can be horrifying. The first bowl of cereal I ate spiked my blood sugar outside of the normal range, which threw me into a panic — a panic that didn’t entirely subside until I stopped wearing these sensors.

Part of what fueled that anxiety was the fact that I didn’t actually know how to make sense of the data that these monitors spit out. Most of them alert you when your glucose is spiking and then give you some kind of score, but it’s not clear what a good score indicates other than that you’ve managed to eat fewer carbs, probably. The whole experience can feel like a high-tech diet.

“There’s not a lot of time and effort spent on figuring out what is the actual question that I have that’s really important to me and that I’m willing to go through some some effort and troubleshooting in order to come out the other side with a genuine discovery that I can use in my regular life,” said Gary Wolf, a tech journalist and founder of Quantified Self, a community of people who have been tracking their health metrics since the mid-2000s.

Don’t send your poop or blood to anyone in the mail

Health tracking isn’t confined to wearable devices. Some companies, like Viome, Function Health, and Ultrahuman, are getting into the labwork business. The idea is that you can pay for extra testing and get all the results back in an app that promises to help you understand the intricate details of your gut microbiome or metabolic health. Some assign you a biological age based on your test results, and all of them cost many hundreds of dollars.

I did a battery of tests through Viome, including the gut microbiome test, which involved filling up little vials with poop and blood and dropping them at a post office. (Disclosure: Viome waived the fees for me.) The results seemed to tell me nothing that I didn’t already reveal on the pre-test questionnaire, but I did have the opportunity to buy some very expensive supplements to address my problem areas. I don’t recommend doing any of this.

Don’t pay for a subscription unless the gadget really improves your life

If you’ve ever seen someone wearing a band around their wrist with a little hunk of plastic where the watch face should be, you’ve seen a Whoop band. This fitness-forward health tracker works a lot like a smartwatch without a screen, but the app is geared toward gym rats. The app not only gives you a strain score that measures how hard you’ve worked out, it also encourages you to recover. It costs $30 a month to enjoy all the features.

It’s not just Whoop that wants you to keep paying. Oura also charges a subscription fee to unlock all of its features, but it’s just $6. Apple has the Fitness+ subscription for $10, but that includes a bunch of classes, not unique features on the Watch. All of these little fees add up over time, so if you really just want basic functionality, skip the subscription. Without it, you can still see your sleep, readiness, and activity scores on an Oura ring. (That’s all I look at anyway.) The Whoop band doesn’t work at all if you don’t pay.

Do take breaks

The best advice I got from the many experts I talked to throughout my health tracking journey was to take off the devices from time to time. The absolute flood of information about my health often made me uneasy, and it even led to some disordered behaviors, especially when it came to tracking my glucose levels and seeing my readings start veering away from normal levels. Still, I wondered if I shouldn’t intervene somehow.

“Sometimes atypical results found by wearables can make people anxious, and it may be difficult to offer them definite reassurance for these results,” said Dr. David Klonoff, president of the Diabetes Technology Society. “If traditional medicine cannot provide definite answers, then these people sometimes turn to natural or alternative medicine.”

Some health tracking companies want to take your money every month to keep using their services. Some want to sell you the latest generation of their device. Some want to sell you supplements. They all want you to keep using the trackers and apps, even if they’re not necessarily making you healthier. That’s good to keep in mind.

So check in with yourself when you’re wearing a health tracker. Take it off, and leave it off for a while. Without a torrent of alerts telling you to stand, sleep, or eat, you may actually feel better.

A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter.Sign up hereso you don’t miss the next one!

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

The MAGA movement has a particular vision of the ideal American family.

For starters, there are lots of kids. There’s a dad who works a manufacturing job to provide for them financially. And, according to many influential figures on the right, there’s a stay-at-home mom who holds it all together.

Prominent Republicans from Vice President JD Vance to Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri have floated policies aimed not just at boosting birth rates, a key conservative goal in recent years, but also encouraging parents to stay home with kids, as Caroline Kitchener reported at the New York Times earlier this year.

Those advocating these policies typically don’t specify which parent should stay home. But Hawley, Vance, and other Republicans have been vocal about the importance of male breadwinners and women’s childbearing and childrearing responsibilities, and within the larger MAGA project of pronatalism and manufacturing resurgence, it’s fairly clear who the stay-at-home spouse is supposed to be.

Most American families, however, look very different from the MAGA dream. In 2024, 74 percent of mothers with children under 18 participated in the labor force. As of the previous year, 45 percent of moms, and a full 69 percent of Black moms, were breadwinners in their households. There are nearly 25 million working moms in the country, about 14 percent of the total labor force. And in 2023, the average American estimated that a family of four needed $85,000 per year to get by, an amount difficult to achieve on one income.

These realities raise a basic question about social conservatives’ goals: Would it even be possible to reverse decades-long global trends in women’s employment and convince mothers to stay at home? Pronatalist policies generally have not worked well to increase birth rates. Manufacturing jobs probably aren’t coming back. But can President Donald Trump’s allies find a way to make their goals for moms a reality?

After several weeks of speaking with experts, I have good news for Vance et al: There is an answer. You just have to give moms a million dollars.

The history of moms at work

Stay-at-home motherhood is sometimes portrayed as a natural or original state of humanity, something women began to deviate from around, say, the second wave of feminism in the 1960s. In fact, mothers have moved in and out of various kinds of work over the course of American history.

“People treat the 1950s as the conventional ideal,” said Matt Darling, a senior research associate at the policy research firm MEF Associates who has written on mothers in the labor force. But if you go back to the 1800s, most white women and their husbands worked together on farms. “The household was an economic unit,” Darling said.

As the American economy transitioned from agricultural to industrial, Darling has written, more men went to work in factories and more women focused on child care and other work in the home. Stay-at-home motherhood was never universal — Black women in the US, for example, have always worked in high numbers, with the highest labor force participation rate since record-keeping began in the 1970s, and likely before, Michelle Holder, an economics professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told me.

But in the mid-20th century, families with a male breadwinner and stay-at-home wife were more common than they are today. In 1950, 29 percent of women — 46.4 percent of single women and 21.6 percent of married women — participated in the labor force. Rather than representing a historical norm, the 1950s were one particular point in time during which a subset of American families found it most efficient for one parent to work outside the home and one to work inside it.

That point in time was also fleeting — women’s labor force participation climbed steadily from the late 1940s, peaking at 60 percent in 1999 before dropping slightly. In 2024, 57.5 percent of women were in the labor force. During the same time period, men’s labor force participation dropped steadily, from 86.4 percent in 1950 to 68 percent today.

What would make moms stay home?

To reverse these trends and get moms back in the home, Republicans have proposed a few ideas. One is to open up public lands for housing development, with the goal of reducing housing costs. Lower housing prices, some believe, could make it easier for families to live on one income. (It is not clear if opening up public lands would actually reduce housing costs, or how much lowering housing costs would really affect people’s decisions around kids and family.)

Another plan is to change the tax code. Right now, parents get a tax credit of about $2,000 for each child they have, and an additional credit of up to $6,000 to help defray the expenses of child care. Some Republicans want to reduce the child care credit and add that money to the lump sum parents get per kid, possibly bumping it up to $5,000.

Research on increases to the child tax credit has shown a small effect on moms’ labor force participation, Darling told me. For example, the temporary expansion of the child tax credit in 2021 led to a reduction in employment among mothers with low levels of education, according to one 2024 study.

But for most mothers — even those who might like to stay home — an extra $3,000 per kid isn’t enough to counteract the powerful forces that have transformed the American workforce over the last half-century.

“Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed”

Some of the most pressing forces are economic. “Our expectations about what a middle-class life is like have changed to some degree” since the 1950s, Tara Watson, the director of the Center for Economic Security and Opportunity at the Brookings Institution, told me. Houses have gotten larger and more expensive. There’s a greater expectation that kids will go to college, which also costs a lot of money. Extracurriculars like youth sports are pricier and more regimented than they once were.

If you wanted to make it easier for families to get by on one income, you’d have to make that income bigger by raising wages, some experts say.

“The federal minimum wage hasn’t been raised since 2009,” Holder told me. Raising that would exert upward pressure on low-wage jobs in general, putting more money in parents’ pockets. While Republicans have not generally supported minimum wage increases, one advocate of stay-at-home parenthood, Sen. Hawley, is sponsoring a bill that would boost the federal minimum to $15 an hour.

But there’s a catch. Some believe that the transition to dual-earner families happened not because of rising costs, but because of rising incomes. It sounds counterintuitive, but Darling has laid out the case, citing the work of Nobel Prize-winning economist Claudia Goldin. Essentially, wages began to rise in the years after WWII, especially in fields like office work that were more open to women than factory labor had been.

Rising wages gave moms an increasing incentive to work — if they stayed home, they’d be leaving more and more money on the table. (Some research also posits that women are more likely to work outside the home when their potential earnings outstrip the cost of child care.) As Darling put it to me, “it might not be worth it for me to take a job when it’s $10 an hour, but it might be worth it to me when it’s $15.”

If more women started working in part because of rising wages, then boosting wages even more might incentivize even more women to work. Instead, the only way to get more women to stay home, some say, would be to pay them to do just that.

What’s the going rate for giving up your career?

It’s not unheard of: According to the Times, Sen. Jim Banks (R-IN) has introduced a bill that would pay stay-at-home parents for providing child care, an approach that’s been proposed by some liberals as well. The bill would allow subsidies that currently go to child care providers through the federal Child Care & Development Block Grant to go to family members instead.

The idea of compensating family members for providing care isn’t new, or unique to Republicans — a number of states, including New Jersey, offer payment for what’s known as family, friend, and neighbor care. But subsidy rates tend to be very low, and some family members who receive them say they’re not even enough to cover the cost of what children need (like diapers and food), let alone enough to provide someone with a living wage.

If you really wanted lots and lots of American moms to leave paid work for stay-at-home care, you’d have to pay them more — a lot more.

That’s because you’re not just replacing their income (which, in 45 percent of cases, pays the majority of bills in the household); you’re also working against 75 years of American culture.

A hundred years ago, many American women would have been very happy to take money to stay home, said Alice Evans, a senior lecturer at King’s College London who writes about gender roles across societies. Their society already idealized (white) stay-at-home motherhood and they gained prestige and status from their role as moms. Today, however, “women see success and status in having a career.”

“Are we giving them a million dollars?”

That success has been very real, and goes beyond pure economics. When American women entered the workplace, they achieved greater independence and the ability to leave bad marriages. Many found new social relationships and new sources of meaning and fulfillment. Women gained more power in society, more seats in Congress and on corporate boards, and more rights (though none of this came without struggle or backlash).

In a 2023 McKinsey report on women in the workplace, 80 percent of women said they wanted to be promoted, the same share as men. A full 96 percent said their career was important to them.

To get women to drop out of the workforce, then, the government would need to give them enough money to overcome the powerful incentives, both financial and social, that drive them to work. “Maybe if someone offered me a million, I’d stop doing my Substack,” Evans joked.

When I asked Goldin, who won the Nobel in 2023 for her work on women’s employment, whether policies like baby bonuses or larger child tax credits would convince moms to stay home, she replied, “Are we giving them a million dollars?”

What if even $1 million isn’t enough?

Obviously neither Evans nor Goldin has studied whether giving moms a check for $1 million would convince them to stay home with their kids. Even in today’s inflationary times, that number is basically a shorthand for a lot of money.

The point is, if you want mothers to give up all the benefits they get from working, you’re going to have to make it really financially attractive. And that’s expensive.

If there are about 25 million working moms in the US, giving each one a million dollars would cost the US about $25 trillion, an amount that dwarfs even the $2.8 trillion Trump’s “big, beautiful bill” is projected to cost the country over the next 10 years. Costs grow even more if the $1 million is an annual payout rather than a one-time sum. Paying only moms in the labor force without offering the same sum to moms already caring for kids at home also seems unfair — including the around 9 million stay-at-home moms in the US would boost the total even further.

“There’s really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy”

And that’s all before we factor men into the equation. A two-parent home with a stay-at-home mom requires another person to be the sole breadwinner — according to a lot of socially conservative thinkers, that person should be a man, ideally a husband.

But that puts a lot of pressure on young men, many of whom aren’t even sure they want to get married, let alone bear the sole financial responsibility for a family, Evans pointed out. “It’s not just about giving women a million,” she said. How much would you have to pay men to go back to a 1950s nuclear family model, in which the entire burden of providing for a family rested on their shoulders?

Getting a large number of moms to quit their jobs would also have indirect costs. The 25 million mothers working today are treating patients, teaching kids, selling products, and contributing to the country’s GDP in innumerable ways. “There’s really no way to consider having even a fraction of those women withdraw from the labor force without it affecting the American economy,” Holder said.

Trump and members of his administration have at times hinted that shrinking the American economy is acceptable if it allows the country to return to its manufacturing past. But tariffs purportedly designed to bring manufacturing jobs back home (and, some hope, bring men back to their former position of dominance in families and society) have been so unpopular that the administration has had to walk many of them back. It’s hard to imagine that tanking the economy to get moms back in the home would fare much better.

There are also surprisingly popular cultural forces — think tradwife influencers — encouraging women to prioritize stay-at-home motherhood, but it’s a campaign that’s unlikely to succeed at scale, due to cultural fragmentation and the hyperpersonalization of social media. “It’s much, much harder for, say, government to change people’s values” than it might have been in the past, Evans said, “because we’re not all watching the same shows.”

There are, of course, other options for supporting American families. If policymakers wanted to help moms with the costs and challenges of raising kids, they could institute national paid leave programs, Holder said. They could also make child care more accessible and affordable.

In surveys, a significant minority of moms say the best setup for them would actually be to work part-time. If we wanted to make part-time work easier for parents, we could tackle unpredictable part-time schedules that make it hard for workers, especially at the lower end of the wage spectrum, to balance work and child care, Darling said.

All this would probably cost less than $25 trillion. But if what Republicans want is to get moms back in the home, they’re going to have to pay up. I will take my million in cash.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testifies before a House subcommittee on June 24, 2025, in Washington, DC. | Kayla Bartkowski/Getty Images

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: An influential panel that makes vaccine recommendations announced today that it was reviewing its guidelines for children — a decision with massive public health implications that reflects Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s growing influence over federal vaccine policy.

What’s the context here? Kennedy is an anti-vaxxer who has repeatedly pushed lies about the supposed harms of vaccines. Earlier this month, he replaced every sitting member of the advisory panel with his own picks, some of whom share those anti-vax views.

Why do the guidelines matter? The panel’s recommendations are usually (if not always) adopted by the federal government. They have been the standards followed by pediatricians in advising their patients and most schools in setting vaccine requirements. Health insurers have been required to cover the recommended shots for most patients.

Is anyone doing anything about this?!? Yes. The medical community is mobilizing to produce alternative vaccine guidance, which will probably align with the pre-Kennedy medical consensus. But while that may help people make choices based on the best available science, the competing guidelines are also likely to create confusion.

But shouldn’t we have a debate over vaccines? We do have a debate. Vaccine recommendations are the product of intense scientific scrutiny; prior iterations of this expert panel have had lengthy debates, scrutinizing studies that are peer-reviewed and replicable. Kennedy’s claims about the harms of vaccines have been tested in this arena and continually debunked. But now — thanks to Kennedy and the 52 Republican senators who confirmed him — those views may be being smuggled into official federal recommendations.

What’s the big picture? For decades, there has been an apolitical, scientific process for figuring out how to harness the power of vaccines to save millions of lives. Kennedy’s appointment broke that consensus. Now we’re all waiting to see if his panel’s review discourages parents from doing what medical science says is best for children’s health.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Today’s edition made me quite mad, so I’m fortunate that I also came across a reminder of medical progress: a podcast about advances to treatments for morning sickness. I know I say this a lot, but smart people are working continually to make things better for all of us, and we should take heart in that. Thanks so much for reading, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

Zohran Mamdani attends a campaign rally, calling for enforcement of the New York’s sanctuary city laws. | Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images

It’s hard to overstate how much this was not supposed to happen.

On Tuesday night, Zohran Mamdani — a 33-year-old socialist and state lawmaker — trounced former Gov. Andrew Cuomo in New York City’s Democratic mayoral primary. This was remarkable on a few different levels. For Mamdani, merely becoming Cuomo’s main competitor would have been an improbable achievement, since doing so required the newcomer to leapfrog a thick field of (heretofore) more prominent progressives.

Once Mamdani established himself as the left’s standard-bearer, his victory became plausible. But most observers envisioned the socialist winning in a very specific way: Although Mamdani would surely lose the first round of balloting to Cuomo, the conventional wisdom went, he might ultimately eke out the nomination thanks to New York City’s ranked-choice voting (RCV) system. Under RCV, voters can stipulate their second, third, fourth, and fifth choices, and then their votes are reallocated as low-polling candidates are gradually eliminated. As of Monday morning, the betting site Polymarket had given Mamdani just a 6.7 percent chance of winning the first round outright.

In reality, Mamdani defeated Cuomo in that round by more than 7 points, leading the governor to concede even before the electorate’s backup votes were considered. Mamdani will still need to win November’s general election to become mayor, where he will face an independent run from incumbent Eric Adams, among other potential rivals. But the socialist assemblyman is now the overwhelming favorite to become the next mayor of New York City, which is overwhelmingly Democratic.

All this makes Tuesday’s outcome a great news story — and useful fodder for anyone who wishes to declare that the traditional rules of politics are obsolete.

Some on the left have suggested that Mamdani’s victory proves Democrats do not need to moderate their party’s image to compete for national power. This argument does not make much sense. To secure a Senate majority in 2026, Democrats will need to win multiple states that backed Donald Trump over Kamala Harris by double digits. And even if Democrats give up on winning Senate control next year and shoot for doing so in 2028, they will still need to win in states that voted for Trump all three times he was on the ballot.

According to some political scientists, pollsters, and pundits, doing this will require Democrats to moderate their national reputation, since modern voters tend to judge candidates less by their own idiosyncratic positions than by their party’s general image. In this analysis, acquiring the power necessary for advancing even incremental progressive change federally requires the Democratic leadership to observe strict ideological discipline. So long as the party’s brand is toxic to the median voter in Ohio — who backed Trump every single time he’s been on the ballot — Democrats will have no prayer of passing ambitious federal legislation or confirming liberal Supreme Court justices.

This theory could very well be wrong. But a socialist winning 43.5 percent of the vote in a Democratic primary in New York City does not tell us much about its validity one way or another.

As a general rule, one should not try to extract timeless laws of political physics from the results of an off-year municipal elections in overwhelmingly Democratic cities. And this seems all the more true of a mayoral race as idiosyncratic as this year’s, in which moderate Democrats chose to line up behind a scandal-plagued former governor who’d resigned in disgrace.

That said, Mamdani’s resounding victory remains an extraordinary event that few anticipated. It’s therefore worth considering what it could tell us about where Democratic politics is going and what effective campaigning in 2025 looks like.

Any attempt to extrapolate national political trends from a single municipal election should be tentative. But if there are portable lessons from Mamdani’s triumph, these strike me as the most plausible:

1) Being charismatic and good at speaking off-the-cuff is important

This one might go without saying. But in both 2020 and 2024, the Democratic Party nominated presidential candidates who struggled to coherently and comfortably explain their policy views in unstructured conversations. Relatedly, both Joe Biden and Kamala Harris also maintained highly limited media availability.

By contrast, Mamdani appeared to accept virtually every media opportunity available to him. In addition to incessantly shooting and releasing his own shortform videos to social media, Mamdani appeared on such varied programs as the morning radio show The Breakfast Club and wonky finance podcast Odd Lots. By making himself ubiquitous over every channel available to him, Mamdani was able to overwhelm Cuomo’s large advantage in paid media. The former governor’s $25 million super PAC proved no match for the socialist assemblyman’s viral videos and affable interviews.

Of course, this “flood the zone” strategy only worked because Mamdani is a gifted politician with a quick mind and endearing affect. Unfortunately, these traits are not as common among the Democratic political class as they should be.

The importance of being able to eloquently communicate and perform authenticity — across a wide array of media formats — in today’s environment was already apparent before Tuesday night. But Mamdani’s win underscores the power of such fundamental political skills.

2) Straightforward, populist messaging about affordability seems resonant

Mamdani emerged out of a New York City left that has championed some unpopular social causes. At one time, Mamdani endorsed defunding the police and abolishing the standardized test that determines admission to the city’s elite public high schools.

But during his 2025 campaign, Mamdani moderated on both those fronts, while putting rhetorical emphasis on his plans for increasing affordability. His pledge to contain costs for ordinary New Yorkers — while combating the well-heeled interests that inflated them — enjoyed pride of place on his campaign’s website and in its advertisements.

Mamdani’s platform was radical in many respects. His calls for fare-free buses, public grocery stores, and a $30 minimum wage put him sharply to the left of mainstream Democrats.

And yet, there was a remarkable amount of overlap between Mamdani’s messaging and Kamala Harris’s most effective appeals in 2024. According to the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, this was Harris’s best-testing ad in last year’s campaign:

Here is the top of Mamdani’s campaign platform:

The commonalities between these two messages are plain: In both cases, the candidate argues that things are too expensive, your rent is too high, and they will bring your costs down by building housing and cracking down on abusive landlords. Further, in their own very different ways, both Harris and Mamdani spoke to the public’s concern over high grocery prices.

To reiterate, we should be very cautious about assuming a tight overlap between the kind of politics that succeeds in a New York mayoral primary and that which sells in a general presidential election. But sophisticated ad-testing already indicated that simple, populist messaging about increasing affordability plays well with swing voters. The fact that such messaging also helped Mamdani catch fire in New York City should increase our confidence in the potency of such rhetoric.

3) Attacking your opponent as insufficiently pro-Israel is not a surefire bet

Mamdani’s opponents focused much of their attacks on his left-wing views about the Israel-Palestine conflict. Mamdani is a supporter of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement, which seeks to coerce the Israeli government into honoring its obligations under international law — including the government’s withdrawal from occupied Palestinian territories and recognition of the right of Palestinian families displaced in 1948 to return to their ancestral homes within Israel. These demands could entail an end to Israel’s existence as a Jewish-majority state. Mamdani refused to express any commitment to the preservation of such a state, suggesting that he was supportive of any resolution to the conflict that ensured “equal rights for all,” whether that involved the formation of a single democratic binational state throughout Israel and Palestine, or a two-state solution.

Mamdani was also harshly critical of Israel’s war crimes in Gaza and vowed that as mayor, he would arrest Benjamin Netanyahu, were the Israeli prime minister ever to step foot in New York City.

These stances put Mamdani at the far-left pole of the Democratic Party’s debate over Israel-Palestine. Cuomo and his supporters saw this as a great vulnerability and made it the centerpiece of much of their negative messaging.

And yet, in the most Jewish city in the United States, such attacks didn’t pack the punch that Cuomo had hoped.

This may be indicative of a broader shift in the politics of Israel within the Democratic Party. The Netanyahu government’s utter contempt for Palestinian life in Gaza — its years-long bombardment of its civilian infrastructure, obstruction of humanitarian aid, and avowed interest in ethnically cleansing the territory — have taken a toll on the state’s standing within an increasingly diverse Democratic coalition. In 2022, 40 percent of Democrats sympathized more with the Israelis than the Palestinians in Gallup’s polling, while 38 percent said the opposite. Three years later, Democrats now sympathize with the Palestinians over the Israelis by an unprecedented 59 percent to 21 percent margin.

4) The odds of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning in 2028 look higher

Finally, it is easier to picture Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning the Democratic Party’s 2028 presidential nomination today than it was yesterday.

Mamdani just demonstrated the power of youth, charisma, good looks, and the avid support of a mass-membership political organization in a Democratic primary. Those personal qualities — combined with the organizational and social media heft of the Democratic Socialists of America — enabled Mamdani to prevent any other progressive rival from gaining oxygen. Among young, college-educated New Yorkers eager for progressive change, there was no serious competition.

Were Ocasio-Cortez to run in 2028, she would take all these same advantages into the primary. To be sure, Mamdani’s showing also illustrated the potential challenges that any progressive will face in seeking to become Democratic standard-bearer. Even while stomping to victory, Mamdani lost majority-Black areas by 18 percentage points, according to the New York Times. Further, Democratic voters are liable to worry more about the electability of a staunch progressive in a presidential primary than a New York City mayoral one. Nonetheless, over the past 24 hours, Ocasio-Cortez gained 2 points in the betting market for the 2028 Democratic nomination.

Ultimately, Ocasio-Cortez’s future political prospects — along with those of socialists and progressives more broadly — may depend in no small part on Mamdani’s governing performance, should he win in November. A socialist mayor in America’s media capital will be heavily scrutinized. And making good on his promises to increase affordability and improve public services will likely require Mamdani to demonstrate ideological flexibility: Some of the biggest drivers of unaffordability in NYC involve regulations that benefit politically connected interest groups at the broader public’s expense.

In any case, the future trajectory of Democratic politics remains uncertain, and the party’s best bet for reclaiming national power remains contested. Tuesday’s returns cannot settle any argument about where Democrats must go from here. But Mamdani’s extraordinary success should inform that debate.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

A view of the famous anti-US mural in central Tehran, Iran, that depicts the US flag with bombs and skulls on April 10. | Hossein Beris/Middle East Images/AFP via Getty Images

In April 1980, President Jimmy Carter authorized Operation Eagle Claw, an ill-fated military operation to rescue the American hostages held at the US embassy in Iran. Since then, every US president has ordered at least one — usually more than one — military intervention in the Middle East and North Africa.

Under Ronald Reagan, there was the bombing of Libya and the deployment of Marines to Lebanon. Under George H.W. Bush, there was Operation Desert Storm. Under Bill Clinton, airstrikes against Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq and against al-Qaeda in Sudan. Under George W. Bush, the invasion of Iraq. Under Barack Obama, a multicountry counterterrorist drone campaign, the toppling of Muammar al-Qaddafi’s regime in Libya, and the redeployment of US troops to Iraq to fight ISIS. Under Donald Trump’s first term, an expanded campaign against ISIS, missile strikes against the Syrian regime, and the targeted assassination of Iran’s most powerful military leaders.  Under Joe Biden, the deployment of US troops to the region following the October 7, 2023, attack and the airstrikes against Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

Now, in his second term, Trump has crossed another Rubicon, becoming the first US president to use military force on the soil of America’s longtime adversary, Iran. Though a ceasefire has now been declared, it’s very possible this crisis is only beginning, particularly if, as US intelligence agencies reportedly believe, much of Iran’s nuclear program is still intact after the strikes.

Trump’s pivot toward the Middle East is a surprising turn from this president. This is a very different message from the one he delivered in Saudi Arabia just last month when he decried “neocons” and “interventionists” for ill-considered attempts to remake the region through force. Trump has said in the past, in reference to the Iraq war, that “GOING INTO THE MIDDLE EAST IS THE WORST DECISION EVER MADE IN THE HISTORY OF OUR COUNTRY,” and he has generally appeared to view the region — apart from wealthy Gulf States — as a hopeless war zone with little to offer the US.

While he was often stymied in his attempts to withdraw troops in his first term by hawkish advisers, this time many of his senior appointees have been so-called “restrainers,” who advocate pulling back from US military commitments overseas or “prioritizers,” who want to shift attention to what they see as the more important challenge posed by China. Until very recently, they appeared to have the upper hand.  But in the current crisis, the US actually relocated important military assets from the Pacific to the Middle East to the consternation of some Pentagon officials.

The stated desire to end “endless wars” in the Middle East and shift to bigger priorities is something the Trump administration has in common with the other two post-Iraq war presidencies. Barack Obama was elected in large part because of his opposition to the war in Iraq. In 2011, his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, promised a “pivot” to Asia and the Pacific for US foreign policy priorities. The Arab Spring and the rise of ISIS got in the way of that, and the phrase “pivot to Asia” became a running joke in US foreign policy circles. Joe Biden withdrew US troops from Afghanistan — not a Middle Eastern country but very much the archetypal “endless war” of the post-9/11 era — and put forward a foreign policy vision emphasizing great power competition with China. His national security adviser infamously described the Middle East as “quieter than it has been in decades” just days before the October 7 attacks shattered that quiet and shifted his boss’s priorities.

“Right now, President Trump is having what I call his ‘Michael Corleone’ moment, and at some point, every president has one,” said Brian Katulis, a senior fellow at the Middle East Institute, referring to Al Pacino’s famous line in The Godfather III, “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in.”

But why does this dynamic keep repeating?  Why, 45 years after Operation Eagle Claw and 22 after the invasion of Iraq, can’t the US military “get out” of this region?

The Middle East is still important…and still has a lot of problems

One big reason why the US keeps getting drawn into the Middle East’s crises is that those crises keep happening.

“The Middle East is an area of enduring national security interest of the United States, and it’s far from stable,” said Emily Harding, a former CIA analyst now at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “And as a result, we’re going to keep getting dragged in until it reaches something resembling stability.”

Why is it an important interest? The simple answer is economics. The Middle East contains two of the global economy’s most important chokepoints: the Strait of Hormuz, through which 20 percent of global oil flows, and the Red Sea, through which 12 percent of global trade flowed until shipping was disrupted by Houthi attacks.

The “no blood for oil” slogans of Iraq War protesters were an oversimplification, but it’s undoubtedly true that keeping the region’s oil and gas flowing to the world has been a US priority since Franklin Roosevelt met with the king of Saudi Arabia aboard a cruiser on the Suez Canal in 1945, kicking off the modern US-Saudi relationship. In the 1970s, the principle that the US would use military force to prevent any country from a hostile takeover of the Gulf region, and its vast energy supplies, was enshrined as the “Carter Doctrine.”

Today, thanks to domestic production, the US is much less directly dependent on Middle Eastern oil than it used to be, but disruptions in the region can cause global energy prices to spike.

Beyond economics, events ranging from the 9/11 attacks to the Syrian refugee crisis have illustrated that the Middle East’s regional politics don’t always stay regional.

America’s unique relationship with Israel is another reason why the US is continually involved in regional crises. For decades, the US has supported Israel and attempted, with mixed success, to help mediate its relationships with its neighbors and with the Palestinian territories. But the US military actually actively participating in Israel’s wars rather than just sending weapons — as happened to some extent under Biden and now much more explicitly under Trump — is a fairly new dynamic.

America is still the region’s preeminent outside power

Ever since the 1960s, when Britain withdrew many of its “East of Suez” troop deployments, America has been the preeminent military power in the region. That remains true despite growing concern in Washington about China or Russia’s influence.

When crises do erupt, the US, with more than 40,000 troops in bases throughout the region and close security and political partnerships with key powers in the region, is often the outside power best positionedto intervene. When the Houthis began attacking shipping traveling through the Red Sea, there was little question of what country would lead the operation to combat them, much to the irritation of America Firsters like Vice President JD Vance.

Michael Wahid Hanna, director of the US program at Crisis Group, says another reason the US often feels compelled to intervene in Middle East crises is that it “had a major role in fomenting” something. He pointed to what he called the “two great sins of the post-Cold War era for the United States,” the failure to secure a resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict in the 1990s, when the US enjoyed far more leverage than it does today, and the invasion of Iraq. Both continue to drive instability in the region today.

As Secretary of State Colin Powell’s famous “Pottery Barn rule” warned in the run-up to the war in Iraq, “if you break it, you own it.”

What if we’re the problem?

Advocates of US engagement in the Middle East argue that if we pull back, it will create power vacuums that will be filled by malign actors. Obama felt compelled to redeploy US troops to Iraq just three years after withdrawing them when the country’s military collapsed in the face of ISIS.

But advocates of foreign policy restraint argue that the US isn’t doomed to keep intervening, and that its presence isn’t actually helping.

Stephen Wertheim, senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, believes that US security partnerships can actually embolden governments in the Middle East to escalate crises, knowing that they can count on US support to deal with the consequences. The most recent illustration is Benjamin Netanyahu’s decision to attack Iran, made under the correct assumption that he would have backup from the Trump administration.

“What we have is a delusion in which we think that we can continue to maintain close security partnerships with states in the Middle East, station hundreds of thousands of US service members around the region indefinitely, and that somehow the next bombing will restore deterrence, and we’ll get to peace and stability,” he said. “That hasn’t worked for my whole lifetime.

Taking the long view

Whether you think America is uniquely positioned to provide stability or that it’s the cause of the instability, voters should probably treat promises of pivots away from the Middle East with skepticism.

Promising to bring American troops home is always going to be a political winner. And whether it’s a rising China or America’s own borders, one thing there’s agreement on across the political spectrum is that America’s core security interests are not in the Middle East. That’s especially true as the country’s post-9/11 focus on terrorism has faded.

But, says Michael Rubin, senior fellow and Mideast specialist at the American Enterprise Institute, “Most Americans understand history through the lens of four-year increments. We believe each administration starts with a tabula rasa.”

Administrations are often optimistic that one military campaign (such as Israel’s recent decimation of Iran’s Axis of Resistance) or one grand bargain (such as the Biden administration’s attempts to reach a Saudi-Israel normalization deal that would also revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process) will resolve the region’s issues enough that America can move on to other things.

The region’s leaders, many of whom have been in power for decades, often take a longer view. More likely is that the regional crises, some of which we’ve played a role in creating, will be occupying America’s attention for administrations to come.

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

We started our Money Talks column to take a closer look at people’s relationships, their money, and their relationships with money, all of which intersect in unexpected ways. We’ve heard from dozens of people in conversation with their business partners, friends, loved ones, and the not-quite categories in between, on topics ranging from how they handle splitting bills when one person makes more money than the other to what it’s like running a 55-year-old coffee shop with your elderly father.

We’re looking for small-business owners who are willing to get candid with a reporter about the financial and emotional realities of running or working at a small business. Are you best friends or family members trying to make a business work? Perhaps a pair of exes putting their differences aside for the company? What’s it like working for yourself and with your business partners? What inspired you to start your business? How have you been affected by economic uncertainty, or technology, or cultural shifts? What are the best parts of your job, and the hardest parts? We want to know!

If you have a story to share, let us know in the Google form below or at this link.

View Link

---

From Vox via this RSS feed

Millions of people use ChatGPT for help with daily tasks, but for a subset of users, a chatbot can be more of a hindrance than a help.

Some people with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) are finding this out the hard way.

On online forums and in their therapists’ offices, they report turning to ChatGPT with the questions that obsess them, and then engaging in compulsive behavior — in this case, eliciting answers from the chatbot for hours on end — to try to resolve their anxiety.

“I’m concerned, I really am,” said Lisa Levine, a psychologist who specializes in OCD and who has clients using ChatGPT compulsively. “I think it’s going to become a widespread problem. It’s going to replace Googling as a compulsion, but it’s going to be even more reinforcing than Googling, because you can ask such specific questions. And I think also people assume that ChatGPT is always correct.”

People turn to ChatGPT with all sorts of worries, from the stereotypical “How do I know if I’ve washed my hands enough?” (contamination OCD) to the lesser-known “What if I did something immoral?” (scrupulosity OCD) or “Is my fiance the love of my life or am I making a huge mistake?” (relationship OCD).

“Once, I was worried about my partner dying on a plane,” a writer in New York, who was diagnosed with OCD in her thirties and who asked to remain anonymous, told me. “At first, I was asking ChatGPT fairly generically, ‘What are the chances?’ And of course it said it’s very unlikely. But then I kept thinking: Okay, but is it more likely if it’s this kind of plane? What if it’s flying this kind of route?”

For two hours, she pummeled ChatPGT with questions. She knew that this wasn’t actually helping her — but she kept going. “ChatGPT comes up with these answers that make you feel like you’re digging to somewhere,” she said, “even if you’re actually just stuck in the mud.”

How ChatGPT reinforces reassurance seeking

A classic hallmark of OCD is what psychologists call “reassurance seeking.” While everyone will occasionally ask friends or loved ones for reassurance, it’s different for people with OCD, who tend to ask the same question repeatedly in a quest to get uncertainty down to zero.

The goal of that behavior is to relieve anxiety or distress. After getting an answer, the distress does sometimes decrease — but it’s only temporary. Soon enough, new doubts arise and the cycle starts again, with the creeping sense that more questions must be asked in order to reach greater certainty.

If you ask your friend for reassurance on the same topic 50 times, they’ll probably realize that something is going on and that it might not actually be helpful for you to stay in this conversational loop. But an AI chatbot is happy to keep answering all your questions, and then the doubts you have about its answers, and then the doubts you have about its answers to your doubts, and so on.

In other words, ChatGPT will naively play along with reassurance-seeking behavior.

“That actually just makes the OCD worse. It becomes that much harder to resist doing it again,” Levine said. Instead of continuing to compulsively seek definitive answers, the clinical consensus is that people with OCD need to accept that sometimes we can’t get rid of uncertainty — we just have to sit with it and learn to tolerate it.

The “gold standard” treatment for OCD is exposure and response prevention (ERP), in which people are exposed to the troubling questions that obsess them and then resist the urge to engage in a compulsion like reassurance-seeking.

Levine, who pioneered the use of non-engagement responses — statements that affirm the presence of anxiety rather than trying to escape it through compulsions — noted that there’s another way in which an AI chatbot is more tempting than Googling for answers, as many OCD sufferers do. Whereas the search engine just links you to a variety of websites, state-of-the-art AI systems promise to help you analyze and reason through a complex problem. That is extremely enticing — “OCD loves that!” Levine said — but for someone suffering from the disorder, it can too easily become a lengthy exercise in co-rumination.

Reasoning machine or rumination machine?

According to one evidence-based approach to treating OCD, called inference-based cognitive behavioral therapy (I-CBT), people with OCD are prone to a faulty reasoning pattern that draws on a mix of personal experiences, rules, hearsay, facts, and possibilities. That gives rise to obsessive doubts and tricks them into feeling like they need to listen to those doubts.

Joseph Harwerth, an OCD and anxiety specialist, offers an illustration of how trying to reason with the help of an AI chatbot can actually further confuse the “obsessional reasoning” of people with OCD. Considering what you might do if you have a cut on your finger and struggle with contamination OCD — where people fear becoming sullied or sullying others with germs, dirt, or other contaminants — he writes, “You wonder: Can I get tetanus from touching a doorknob? You may go to ChatGPT to investigate the validity of that doubt.” Here’s how he imagines the conversation going:

Q1: Should you wash your hands if they feel dirty?

A1: “Yes, you should wash your hands if they feel dirty. That sensation usually means there is something on your skin, like dirt, oil, sweat, or germs, that you will want to remove.” (When asked for its reasoning, ChatGPT said it based its answer on sources from the CDC and WHO.)

Q2: Can I get tetanus from a doorknob?

A2: “It is extremely unlikely to get tetanus from a doorknob, unless you have an open wound and somehow rubbed soil or contaminated material into it via the doorknob.”

Q3: Can people have tetanus without realizing it?

A3: “It is rare, but in the very early stages, some people might not immediately realize they have tetanus, especially if the wound seemed minor or was overlooked.”

Then, your OCD creates this story: I feel dirty when I touch doorknobs (personal experience). It is recommended by the CDC to wash your hands if you feel dirty (rules). I read online that people can get tetanus from touching a doorknob (hearsay). Germs can spread through contact (general facts). It is possible that someone touched my door without knowing they had tetanus and then spread it on my doorknob (possibility).

In this scenario, the chatbot enables the user to construct a narrative that justifies their obsessional fear. It doesn’t guide the user away from obsessional reasoning — it just provides fodder for it.

Part of the problem, Harwerth says, is that a chatbot doesn’t have enough context about each user, unless the user thinks to provide it, so it doesn’t know when someone has OCD.

“ChatGPT can fall into the same trap that non-OCD specialists fall into,” Harwerth told me. “The trap is: Oh, let’s have a conversation about your thoughts. What could have led you to have these thoughts? What does this mean about you?” While that might be a helpful approach for a client who doesn’t have OCD, it can backfire when a psychologist engages in that kind of therapy with someone suffering from OCD, because it encourages them to keep ruminating on the topic.

What’s more, because chatbots can be sycophants, they may just validate whatever the user says instead of challenging it. A chatbot that’s overly flattering and supportive of a user’s thoughts — like ChatGPT was for a time — can be dangerous for people with mental health issues.

Whose job is it to prevent the compulsive use of ChatGPT?

If using a chatbot can exacerbate OCD symptoms, is it the responsibility of the company behind the chatbot to protect vulnerable users? Or is it the users’ responsibility to learn how not to use ChatGPT, just as they’ve had to learn not to use Google or WebMD for reassurance-seeking?

“I think it’s on both,” Harwerth told me. “We cannot perfectly curate the world to people with OCD — they have to understand their own condition and how that leaves them vulnerable to misusing applications. In the same breath, I would say that when people explicitly ask the AI model to behave as a trained therapist” — which some users with mental health conditions do — “I do think it’s important for the model to say, ‘I’m pulling this from these sources. However, I’m not a trained therapist.’”

This has, in fact, been a big problem: AI systems have been misrepresenting themselves as human therapists over the past few years.

Levine, for her part, agreed that the burden can’t rest solely on the companies. “It wouldn’t be fair to make it their responsibility, just like it wouldn’t be fair to make Google responsible for all the compulsive Googling. But it would be great if even just a warning could come up, like, ‘This seems perhaps compulsive.’”

OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, acknowledged in a recent paper that the chatbot can foster problematic behavior patterns. “We observe a trend that longer usage is associated with lower socialization, more emotional dependence and more problematic use,” the study finds, defining the latter as “indicators of addiction to ChatGPT usage, including preoccupation, withdrawal symptoms, loss of control, and mood modification” as well as “indicators of potentially compulsive or unhealthy interaction patterns.”

“We know that ChatGPT can feel more responsive and personal than prior technologies, especially for vulnerable individuals, and that means the stakes are higher,” an OpenAI spokesperson told me in an email. “We’re working to better understand and reduce ways ChatGPT might unintentionally reinforce or amplify existing, negative behavior…We’re doing this so we can continue refining how our models identify and respond appropriately in sensitive conversations, and we’ll continue updating the behavior of our models based on what we learn.”

(Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

One possibility might be to try to train chatbots to pick up on signs of mental health disorders, so they could flag to the user that they are engaging in, say, reassurance-seeking typical of OCD. But if a chatbot is essentially diagnosing a user, that raises serious privacy concerns. Chatbots aren’t bound by the same rules as professional therapists when it comes to safeguarding people’s sensitive health information.

The writer in New York who has OCD told me she would find it helpful if the chatbot would challenge the frame of the conversation. “It could say, ‘I notice that you’ve asked many detailed iterations of this question, but sometimes more detailed information doesn’t bring you closer. Would you like to take a walk?’” she said. “Maybe wording it like that can interrupt the loop, without insinuating that someone has a mental illness, whether they do or not.”

While there’s some research suggesting that AI could correctly identify OCD, it’s not clear how it could pick up on compulsive behaviors without covertly or overtly classifying the user as having OCD.

“This is not me saying that OpenAI is responsible for making sure I don’t do this,” the writer added. “But I do think there are ways to make it easier for me to help myself.”

---

From Vox via this RSS feed