President Donald Trump has been sending undocumented immigrants to a mega prison in El Salvador without due process. Most of these deportees have no criminal record, yet our government has condemned them to indefinite incarceration in an infamously inhumane penitentiary. In the case of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Trump administration admits that its deportation order was unlawful. In 2019, a court had ruled that Abrego Garcia could not be sent to El Salvador, as he had a credible fear of being persecuted in that country. The White House attributed his deportation to an “administrative error.” The Supreme Court has ordered Trump to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States, but the White House refuses to comply and has publicly vowed that Abrego Garcia is “never coming back.”Some Democrats believe that their party must call attention to this lawless cruelty. Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen and four progressive House members have traveled to El Salvador in recent days to check on Abrego Garcia’s condition and advocate for his due process rights. But other Democrats fear their party is walking into a political trap. After all, voters are souring on Trump’s handling of trade and the economy, but still approve of his handling of immigration. Some Democratic strategists therefore think that Van Hollen and other progressive advocates for Abrego Garcia are doing the president a favor: By focusing on the plight of an undocumented immigrant — instead of the struggles of countless Americans suffering from Trump’s tariffs — they have increased the salience of his best issue and reinforced the narrative that Democrats care more about foreigners than about the American middle class.This story was first featured in The Rebuild.Sign up here for more stories on the lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat — and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz. As one strategist told CNN, “The impulse among lots of Democrats is to always crank the volume up to 11 and take advantage of whatever the easiest, most obvious photo opportunity is. In this case, you get a situation where you’re giving the White House and the Republicans a lot of images and visuals that they think are compelling for them.”Some progressives have declared this argument morally bankrupt. But I don’t think that’s right. Democrats have a moral responsibility to defend both America’s constitutional order and its most vulnerable residents. It does not follow, however, that they have a moral duty to hold press events about Abrego Garcia’s case — even if such photo ops do nothing to abet his liberation, while doing much to boost Trump’s political standing. In my view, the argument that Democrats are doing more harm than good by taking a high-profile stand in favor of due process is not immoral, but simply mistaken. Van Hollen’s trip has plausibly benefited US residents unlawfully detained in El Salvador. And the political costs of such dissent are likely negligible, so long as Democrats keep their messaging about immigration disciplined and eventually shift their rhetorical focus to Trump’s economic mismanagement. The case for Democrats to dodge a high-profile fight over Trump’s deportationsSo far as I can tell, no Democrat is arguing that the party should acquiesce to Trump’s lawless deportations. The concerned strategist who spoke with CNN stipulated that “Democrats should stand up for due process when asked about it.” Rather, the argument is that 1) the party should not go out of its way to elevate immigration as an issue, or invite the impression that the rights of undocumented immigrants are its chief concern, and 2) congressional delegations to El Salvador risk doing precisely that. The case for this position is fairly simple. Voters are much more supportive of Trump’s handling of immigration than of his economic management. In data journalist G. Elliott Morris’s aggregation of recent issue surveys, voters approve of Trump’s handling of immigration by 2.7 points, while disapproving of his approach to inflation and the cost of living by 21.8 points. Therefore, anything Democrats do to increase the salience of immigration plausibly aids Trump. What’s more, elevating Abrego Garcia’s cause above other issues could give voters the impression that Democrats are not prioritizing their own economic concerns. Or at least, this is what Republican strategists seem to believe. Following House progressives’ trip to El Salvador, National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) spokesperson Mike Marinella said in a statement, “House Democrats have proven they care more about illegal immigrant gang bangers than American families.” The NRCC proceeded to air digital ads against 25 swing-district Democrats, in which it offered to buy the representatives’ airfare to El Salvador if they promised to “livestream the whole thing and snap plenty of selfies with their MS-13 buddies.”For those urging Democrats to embrace message discipline, focusing on the due process rights of the undocumented is a lose-lose proposition, accomplishing nothing of substance while damaging the party politically. In this view, Van Hollen’s trip to El Salvador did not actually help Abrego Garcia, whose fate still lies with America’s court system and the White House. To the contrary, Democrats are effectively giving Trump an incentive to ship more undocumented immigrants to a foreign prison without due process. After all, the president wants his opponents to take high-profile stances in defense of the undocumented. If Democrats teach him that they will do precisely that — so long as he violates immigrants’ due process rights — then they will have made such violations more likely in the future, not less.Meanwhile, this faction of wary strategists insist that their party has a genuine image problem. Yes, Trump’s tariffs are deeply unpopular. And as their economic impacts surface, the president’s trade policies are liable to become more salient, no matter what Democrats say or do. But thus far, the public’s declining confidence in Trump is not translating into rising confidence in the Democratic Party. Historically, Democrats always outperformed Republicans on the question of which party “cares more for the needs of people like you,” outpolling the GOP by 13 points on that score as recently as 2017. Yet in a Quinnipiac poll taken after Trump single-handedly engineered an economic crisis with his “Liberation Day” tariffs, the two parties are tied on that question.What’s more, even as the public sours on Trump, the GOP remains more popular than the Democratic Party. In a new Pew Research survey, voters disapproved of Trump’s job performance by a 59 to 40 percent margin. Yet the Republican Party’s approval rating in that same survey was 5 points higher than the Democrats’, with only 38 percent of voters expressing support for the latter. Democrats have time to improve their image; the midterms are well over a year away. So some might wonder why the party should fret about increasing the salience of an unfavorable issue so far from Election Day. But there’s an argument that the party should be doing everything in its power to increase its popularity — and reduce Trump’s — right now. Businesses, universities, and various other civic institutions will need to decide in the coming weeks and months whether to comply with the president’s illiberal attempts to discipline their behavior. The weaker Trump appears to be, the less likely it will be that American civil society acquiesces to authoritarianism.Thus, from this vantage, message discipline is a moral imperative. Centering Democratic messaging on Abrego Garcia’s case might help ambitious Democrats earn small-dollar donations and adoration among the party’s base. But it undermines effective opposition to Trump’s authoritarian regime. RelatedHow Trump could defeat himselfWhy Democrats should learn to stop worrying and love standing up for due processThis argument is reasonable. But in my view, it understates the potential benefits of vigorous advocacy against Trump’s lawless deportations and overstates the political harms. On the substance, Democratic officials flying to El Salvador to check on Abrego Garcia’s condition could plausibly deter abuses against him and other immigrant detainees in that country. Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele may be a reactionary aligned with Trump, but he is surely aware that the United States has a two-party system. His government therefore must give some thought to its relationship with a hypothetical future Democratic administration. Thus, by advocating so forcefully for US residents unlawfully imprisoned in El Salvador, the Democratic Party has given Bukele some incentive to, at a minimum, keep Abrego Garcia and others like him alive (something that his government routinely fails to do with its prisoners).Meanwhile, bringing a measure of comfort to a long-time US resident unlawfully disappeared to a foreign prison is a clear moral good. In an interview with Vox’s Today, Explained podcast, Van Hollen said that Salvadoran authorities have not allowed Abrego Garcia to communicate with his family or his lawyers. Rather, they had kept him isolated from the entire outside world, until a US senator demanded a meeting with him. Only through Van Hollen’s intervention was Abrego Garcia’s wife able to send her greetings to him, or even confirm that her husband was still alive. If an elected official has the power to serve a constituent in this way, it seems worthwhile that they do so.The prospect that Van Hollen might have effectively encouraged more unlawful deportations by taking this course of action — since Trump wants his opponents to do photo ops on behalf of undocumented immigrants — merits consideration. But it strikes me as far-fetched. One could just as easily posit that Democrats ducking this issue entirely would have emboldened Trump to ramp up unlawful deportations. Ultimately, I think the president’s ambitions on this front will be determined by the scope and persistence of the judiciary’s opposition, not by Democratic messaging.It seems possible — perhaps, even likely — that Democrats loudly advocating for Abrego Garcia is politically suboptimal, relative to a monomaniacal focus on the economy. But so long as Democrats act strategically on other fronts, I think the political costs of taking a stand on due process are likely to be negligibly small, for at least five reasons:First, as far as progressive immigration positions go, “The Trump administration should honor court orders and the due process rights of longtime US residents” is pretty safe territory. In March, a Reuters-Ipsos poll asked Americans whether Trump “should keep deporting people despite a court order to stop?” — they said no by a margin of 56 to 40 percent. And an Economist-YouGov poll released Wednesday found voters specifically agreeing that Trump should bring Abrego Garcia back by a 50 to 28 point margin.If Democrats frame Abrego Garcia’s case as a question of Americans’ civil liberties — while reiterating their party’s commitment to enforcing immigration law and securing the border — they should be able to mitigate any political cost inherent to elevating this issue. And that has largely been Van Hollen’s message. As the senator argued at the World Economic Forum on Wednesday, “I keep saying I’m not vouching for Abrego Garcia. I’m vouching for his constitutional rights because all our rights are at stake.” Second, there does seem to be some scope for eroding Trump’s advantage on immigration. On March 1, polls showed voters approving of the president’s immigration policies by more than 10 points. Surveys taken in the last 10 days, by contrast, show that margin has fallen to 2.5 points. It is unclear whether Democrats’ messaging on the Abrego Garcia case had any impact on this decline. But given the timing, that possibility cannot be summarily dismissedThird, some influential right-wingers endorse the Democratic position on Abrego Garcia. Last Thursday, pro-Trump podcaster Joe Rogan detailed his misgivings about the president’s violations of due process:What if you are an enemy of, let’s not say any current president. Let’s pretend we got a new president, totally new guy in 2028, and this is a common practice now of just rounding up gang members with no due process and shipping them to El Salvador, “You’re a gang member.” “No, I’m not.” “Prove it.” “What? I got to go to court.” “No. No due process.”Defending a principle mutually endorsed by Joe Rogan and the Roberts Court does not seem like the riskiest stand that Democrats could take.Fourth, I’m not sure that the media’s coverage of this controversy looks all that different in the alternate dimension where Democrats voiced opposition to Trump’s actions when asked, but otherwise spoke exclusively about his failed economic policies. The president exiling US residents to a foreign prison — and refusing to attempt to repatriate one of them, in defiance of the Supreme Court — is a huge news story. This is a much more shocking and unprecedented event than the House GOP’s quest to cut Medicaid, even if the latter will ultimately inspire more voter backlash. In a world where Van Hollen and his House colleagues never go to El Salvador, the general subject of immigration might have received marginally less media attention over the past week. But I think the effect here is quite small. Fifth, Democratic officials are not speaking out on this entirely at their own direction. Their party’s base is understandably alarmed by the president’s lawlessness. Florida Rep. Maxwell Frost said he traveled to El Salvador because he had received “hundreds and hundreds” of emails and calls from his constituents demanding action on this issue. Thus, there might be some cost to Democratic fundraising and morale, were the party’s officials to uniformly avoid calling attention to the controversy. All this said, I think it’s true that the optimal political strategy for Democrats is to focus overwhelmingly on economic issues. Voters are more concerned with prices and economic growth than with due process. And Trump is most vulnerable on tariffs, Medicaid cuts, and his economic management more broadly.I just don’t think that dedicating some time and energy to championing bedrock constitutional principles — 19 months before the midterm elections — is by itself a perilous indulgence. In any event, to this point, it has proven entirely compatible with driving down Trump’s approval rating, which has fallen by 7 points since February in Pew’s polling. Democrats need to find the economic equivalent of going to El SalvadorGoing forward, Democrats do need to convey that their top concern is Americans’ living standards. If Trump moves ahead with anything resembling his current trade policy, his approval is likely to fall, irrespective of Democratic messaging. But the party needs to make sure that voters see it as an effective alternative on economic issues — one that cares more about the needs of people like them.Throughout the US today, a large and growing number of small business owners, workers, and retirees are suffering as a direct result of Trump’s mindless economic policies. If congressional Republicans get their way, millions more will lose their health insurance as a result of Trump’s fiscal agenda. Democrats must find ways to elevate these stories. Van Hollen’s decision to go to El Salvador evinced some verve and creativity. His party must apply similar energy to the task of dramatizing Trump’s economic misgovernance and communicating their party’s vision for redressing it.Clarification, April 25, 3:45 pm ET: This story originally described Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s status unclearly. He is a longtime US resident.See More:

Creatine — yes, the favorite of gym rats everywhere, a supplement many of us have taken ourselves — is a naturally occurring compound that is already found inside each person. Scientists have been studying creatine since the 1830s and, for more than a century, we have known that it was pivotal for producing energy in our muscles. That, as anybody who was alive in the ’90s may remember, is how creatine first exploded as a consumer product. Swedish researchers published influential research in 1992 demonstrating creatine supplementation’s effectiveness in improving stamina and recovery during the short bursts of physical exercise. It didn’t take long after that for creatine supplements to hit the shelves of drugstores and workout gyms nationwide. And it was popular. Not only was it cheap — a 10-ounce jar of creatine costs $17 on Amazon — but it was also an easy way for bodybuilders and exercise enthusiasts to improve their performance. Today, as many as one in four adults say they have used creatine; $400 million worth of it is sold in the US every year.And this was a supplement that really worked: A 2018 meta-analysis of the available research concluded that creatine is “the most effective nutritional supplement available to athletes to increase high intensity exercise capacity and muscle mass during training.” Across years of studies, no dangerous side effects have been detected. But the most surprising use of creatine supplements is in a setting that could not be further from the image of jacked-up bodybuilders pumping iron: treating depression.In the early 2000s, scientists established creatine’s importance not only for muscle use but also for brain function. The compound helps your brain to convert nutrients into energy and scientists concluded that poor metabolism could help to explain various psychiatric disorders, including depression. In layman’s terms, if your brain wasn’t processing energy efficiently, it could have these negative side effects. If that were true, it would follow that more creatine could improve a person’s brain metabolism and thereby ease their depression. A decade ago, the first clinical trials began testing whether creatine supplements improved depression among people who were also receiving antidepressants and cognitive behavioral therapy. The results have been impressive: A 2024 meta-review concluded that creatine had proven its effectiveness in supplementing those other treatments, leading people to feel better more quickly and be less likely to experience depression again.Now comes a new study, out of India, suggesting creatine could be helpful in treating depression without antidepressants being involved — a preliminary but potentially important finding as we search for cheaper and easier ways to provide help to more people who need it.A fascinating new creatine depression study in IndiaThe study, published earlier this year, was tiny and flew under the radar: 100 participants, in Dehradun, a city of 800,000 in India’s far north. Lead researcher Nima Norbu Sherpa of Glasgow Caledonian University received a grant from an India-based charity, the Universal Human Rights and Social Development Association, to run the experiment.The setting is telling: Part of creatine’s appeal in mental health treatment is not only its potential efficacy but also that it’s cheap and doesn’t require a professional clinician; patients can take it on their own. That made Dehradun, a developing city with a lot of low-income patients and relatively few mental health clinicians, a logical place to test whether creatine could improve people’s well-being without antidepressants, said Riccardo De Giorgi, a clinical lecturer in psychiatry at Oxford and co-author of the paper.The 100 participants, recruited from the city and small surrounding villages, were split into two groups. Both groups took part in talk therapy sessions. One group also received 5 milligrams of creatine every day, while the other got a placebo.After eight weeks, both groups were improving — cognitive behavioral therapy itself is, of course, a well-attested treatment for depression. But the patients who took creatine on top of their therapy were doing better still.The participants answered a nine-question survey at the beginning of the study, which provided a one-number score of the severity of their depression symptoms. People in both groups started a little below 18 on average, indicating moderately severe depression. At the end of the study, the patients taking creatine reported a score of 5 on average, while the control group registered at 11. Eleven people who were taking creatine throughout the study reported going into remission, meaning they could effectively return to normal life; only five people taking placebos said the same. Both groups had about 20 people discontinue their treatment — not uncommon for people with depression, the authors noted. The reported side effects for people taking creatine were mild.It is an eye-catching result, even as De Giorgi emphasized repeatedly that the findings were “incremental and preliminary.” The inevitably sensational nature of the finding — a bodybuilder supplement can help with depression? — warrants being clear and cautious in how we interpret the findings.“Previous sensationalist messages in this research area, e.g., creatine, physical exercise, keto diet, have caused more harm to the science than benefit,’” De Giorgi told me over email.For one, the high dropout rate is reason for skepticism about the precise size of creatine’s effect. More research that replicates the same results is needed before we can be confident that creatine plus therapy is a winning combination.But it’s an area of research worth watching. Peter Attia, a physician who writes about longevity and health enhancement and was not involved with the study, wrote in covering the study’s findings that “since many people already use creatine as part of their supplement routine, it could be an easy addition for those looking to improve mental health without major lifestyle changes.” Its affordability and ubiquity could also make it appealing for people with fewer resources, like those who participated in the India study.He did, however, also caution that more evidence would be necessary before we can figure out whether and how creatine fits into “the therapeutic toolbox.”As we grapple with a global mental health crisis, we need all of the tools we can find. More than two-thirds of the world’s population can’t get access to conventional mental health treatments. If we really have an alternative as cheap and available as creatine, it could make a real difference.See More:

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: FBI agents arrested a Milwaukee County judge this morning on felony charges of interfering with immigration agents, as the Trump administration cracks down on local officials who threaten progress on its deportation agenda.What exactly happened? Last week, federal agents came to Judge Hannah Dugan’s Wisconsin courtroom to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, a Mexican citizen facing domestic violence charges. Dugan is accused of sending the agents away and allowing Flores-Ruiz to leave out a non-public side door, though he was quickly arrested anyway. Today, federal agents were again at the courthouse, this time to arrest Dugan.Is this unprecedented? Not quite. The Trump administration arrested a Massachusetts judge in 2019 on charges of obstructing immigration officials, but they dropped the charges in 2022 after the judge agreed to refer herself to a state review board.What’s the big picture? There’s longstanding tension between federal immigration enforcement and local courts, as local officials argue immigrants won’t attend court unless they can do so without fear of deportation. Some municipalities — sometimes called “sanctuary cities” — officially limit local cooperation with federal immigration enforcement.Trump has issued an executive order calling on agencies to halt federal funding for those cities, an order that a federal judge largely blocked on Thursday. Now, in the Milwaukee case, the administration is threatening officials with personal consequences if they work to stymie federal deportation efforts.What’s the big question? If the charging document is accurate, Dugan went beyond non-cooperation to actively complicate an arrest. But that line can get blurry, and it remains to be seen whether the administration will make good on Trump’s threat to arrest local officials who refuse to fall in line.And with that, it’s time to log off…After work today I’ll be listening to a Today, Explained episode about Hollywood stunts. (You can listen here on Apple podcasts or here on Spotify.) After nearly a century, the Academy Awards are finally recognizing this incredible work with their own category. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here next week.See More:

In recent days, Donald Trump has signaled eagerness to reach a trade agreement with China. The president said Tuesday that his 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports will “come down substantially” in the near future. On Thursday, Trump said that his administration is already negotiating with China over trade, saying, “They had a meeting this morning.” Asked who precisely had a meeting, Trump told reporters, “it doesn’t matter who ‘they’ is.”Yet that same day, China denied the existence of such negotiations, saying that “any reports on development in talks are groundless.” By most accounts, China feels little need to come to the table. Chinese leaders reportedly believe that they can wait Trump out. They’re not enticed by his floated offers of partial tariff relief, but instead favor a total pause on the tariffs, as a condition for commencing negotiations over the two nations’ trade disputes.China’s intransigence may take some US observers (particularly those in the White House) by surprise. The Chinese economy has been suffering from deflation, due to a collapse in its property sector. Manufacturing has been one of the nation’s few economic bright spots. Now, as many as 20 million Chinese workers are at risk of losing their jobs because of a collapse in exports to the US, according to an estimate from Goldman Sachs.Nevertheless, the Chinese government believes that it has the upper hand in this trade fight. And they’re probably right. That could have dire implications for America’s economy, if Trump cannot reconcile himself to a near total capitulation. China has the advantage in its trade war with the US for at least three reasons:1. China’s stuff is more precious than America’s moneyDonald Trump’s trade policies are all rooted in one fundamental — and fundamentally wrong — premise: If America runs a trade deficit with another country, then we are effectively “subsidizing” that nation. After all, in that scenario, our trade partner is receiving more money from us than we are collecting from it.Given this reality, the president long assumed that America could easily win a trade war with China, which runs a large trade surplus with the US. Trump spelled out the logic of his position in 2018, tweeting, “When a country (USA) is losing many billions of dollars on trade with virtually every country it does business with, trade wars are good, and easy to win.” But this is poor reasoning. Trade is not a zero-sum game in which sellers “win” and buyers “lose.” This is easy to see at the individual level. Unless you own a farm or snack-food company, you probably run a trade deficit with your grocery store: Each year, you sell roughly $0 worth of goods to your local Costco or Aldi, while purchasing hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars worth of foodstuffs from them. Yet it does not follow that you are “losing” hundreds of dollars on trade with your grocer annually — the money you give them secures you life-sustaining products. By Trump’s logic, American consumers could comfortably cease all trade with US grocery stores — and therefore win a “trade war” with those grocers — since shoppers “lose” money on transactions with such retailers. Yet money is only useful to the extent it can be exchanged for goods and services. Bread has more utility to a starving man than a wallet full of $20s. Of course, trade between consumers and their local retailers is not perfectly analogous to trade between America and China. But Trump’s idea that buyers always have the upper hand is actually even more misguided when applied to the US-China relationship. Your local Kroger needs to sell things to Americans in order to exist. The same is not true of China, which sells only about 15 percent of its exports to the United States. Without question, Trump’s tariffs will heap pain upon an already faltering Chinese economy. But ultimately, China needs our dollars less than we need its goods, minerals, and industrial inputs.Compensating for a decline in consumer demand is a fairly simple task. Money is not technically difficult to generate: China can partially offset the impact of lost sales to Americans by helping its own people spend more through policies that discourage saving, boost wages, and increase income redistribution. At the same time, China can work on increasing its exports to the rest of the world (a task it is currently pursuing). By contrast, it is not technically possible for the United States to swiftly replace what we gain from trade with China. Beijing has sought to hammer home this point in recent days by abruptly choking off exports of rare earth minerals and magnets to the United States. Such elements are indispensable for manufacturing electronics, batteries, military drones, and countless other essential goods. And America cannot get many of these minerals from anywhere else, at least not at the necessary scale.According to one expert who spoke with the Washington Post, developing a China-free supply chain for all rare earths would take “10 to 15 years.” Many US manufacturers will exhaust their stockpiles of these minerals within the next couple months.And America’s dependence on Chinese industry extends well beyond elements. We also rely on China for electronics, pharmaceutical ingredients, and myriad other goods.A government can increase consumer demand almost instantly by electronically depositing money into its citizens’ bank accounts. By contrast, there is no button that the US can push to instantly replace the physical products that China provides us. 2. America’s allies have little interest in joining our trade warTo the extent that Trump has a strategy for winning his trade war with China, it involves conscripting America’s allies into the fight. The administration says it aims to strike trade deals with the European Union, Japan, and other friendly countries and then “approach China as a group.” It also plans to ask its allies to reduce economic ties with China, as a condition of securing relief from Trump’s tariffs.It is true that America and its allies have some mutual economic grievances against China, which has threatened Western export industries by “dumping” products below cost onto global markets. Nevertheless, America’s allies display little appetite for an economic showdown with China. On Thursday, Bloomberg reported that Japan intends to “push back against any US effort to bring it into an economic bloc aligned against China,” due to the importance of its trade relationship with Beijing. Likewise, the European Commission said this week that it has no intention of “decoupling” from China.The reasons for this reluctance to break with China are not difficult to discern. Japan and the EU are no less dependent on Chinese exports of key minerals and goods than the United States is. And at this point, they have little reason to believe that the US is a more reliable trade partner than China. Beijing is not waging war against Europe’s exporters to protest largely fictional trade barriers; Washington is. So why pursue closer economic alignment with the US at the expense of trade relations with China?Trump’s diplomatic task is made all the more difficult by his failure to articulate a clear set of demands. It is not evident precisely what America’s allies are supposed to be uniting against China to achieve. Trump’s ostensible complaint is that the US runs a trade deficit in goods with China. But it is difficult to conceive how such a deficit could be fully eliminated, given the structural characteristics of each nation’s economy — and even harder to understand what interest Europe or Japan would have in eliminating that deficit.3. This trade war is less politically damaging for the CCP than the GOPThe final reason why the Chinese government has the upper hand in Trump’s trade war is that it will face less domestic political pressure to relent.This is partly because China’s authoritarian government doesn’t need to worry about the next election. But it also reflects the fact that America is unambiguously the aggressor in this fight. Trump’s tariffs weren’t triggered by any particular Chinese action, even if they are partly inspired by Beijing’s genuine trade violations over the past two decades. Xi Jinping therefore should have little difficulty persuading much of the Chinese public to blame Trump for any contraction in their nation’s export industries. In fact, Trump’s tariffs may actually help Xi politically by enabling him to deflect public discontent about economic conditions away from the Chinese Communist Party and toward the United States.For Trump’s party, on the other hand, his trade war already looks politically devastating. Public approval of Trump’s economic management has fallen to 37 percent in Reuters-Ipsos’s polling, his lowest mark ever in that survey. An Economist-YouGov poll, meanwhile, shows Americans saying Trump’s economic actions have hurt them personally more than they’ve helped by a 30-point margin. And these results are consistent with those of other surveys.Critically, the real economic effects of Trump’s trade war with China have barely been felt yet. Manufacturers and retailers have been able to draw on their stockpiles of Chinese wares, delaying the shortages and price spikes that a sustained trade war will produce. If Trump stays the course, it is likely that his approval will fall much lower, jeopardizing the GOP’s fragile grip on the House if not the Senate.For all these reasons, China does not feel compelled to rush to the negotiating table. Xi seems to believe that time is on his side — the longer this trade war drags on, the more desperate Trump will become for a deal. Judging by the White House’s increasingly conciliatory rhetoric — and strained attempts to demonstrate progress toward a settlement — the Chinese president seems to be right.See More:

President Donald Trump has never had any trouble finding women to enthusiastically embrace his agenda. In the electorate, 45 percent of women voted for him; non-college-educated white women and white evangelical women are among his most loyal supporters. At the White House, women stand at his side as he speaks from the podium, sporting what has come to be known as “Republican” makeup and Mar-a-Lago face. That’s despite the fact that both Trump and the MAGA movement are characterized by a vindictive, nostalgic, unapologetic misogyny. Some Trump supporters openly fantasize about how his improbable promise of bringing manufacturing jobs to the US might drive women out of the workplace and force them to become solely wives and mothers, while Trump himself has been found civilly liable for sexual assault.This time around, the most visible women of Trump’s administration are Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Noem has made a meal out of the spectacle of the Trump administration’s spree of lawless deportations, shooting video after video dressed in full military gear and full makeup as she warns migrants that she plans to personally hunt them down and lock them up. Meanwhile, Leavitt, who at 27 is the youngest press secretary ever appointed, presents a softer look, with her blonde waves and form-fitting suits, even as she berates the press from her podium and bars unfriendly outlets from the pool as if she’s disciplining insolent teenagers.The dichotomy Leavitt and Noem are building speaks to a familiar problem among conservative women in politics. As Rebecca Traister put it in 2024, “The questions facing the women of the American right are tricky. Are they supposed to be cutthroat or cute? Cold enough to kill a dog or warm enough to bake an apple pie?”Leavitt and Noem are currently embodying two very different visions of MAGA femininity, each having selected a different path to the same goal: figure out how to wield power on behalf of and stay in the good graces of Donald Trump. They’re each walking a perilous tightrope, staking their careers and reputations on furthering the political goals of a man and movement that implicitly promises to send them straight back into the kitchen. Whether they manage to succeed and make it through four years of the Trump administration remains to be seen. In the meantime, we’ll see their images broadcast endlessly in videos and photographs, showing us their best guesses at how a MAGA woman should present herself.Kristi Noem in 2025. As secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security, Noem is one of the most visible women in the Trump administration. Ivan Valencia/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesKristi Noem’s costumed security theaterNoem has spent much of her young term as Secretary of Homeland Defense in front of the camera, often to disturbing effect. In March, Noem posted to X a video of herself touring CECOT, the infamous and human rights-violating El Salvador prison to which the Trump administration has been sending deportees in defiance of court orders. In it, Noem stands, somber and polished, before a cell crowded with silent, shirtless prisoners. The men are crammed into the frame behind her like living props, as she warns, “Know that this facility is one of the tools in our toolkit that we will use if you commit crimes against the American people.” The casual dehumanization of the prisoners behind her is as characteristic of the particular aesthetic Noem is cultivating as her glossy blowout. On her social media feeds, she poses next to ICE agents on raids in uniform and full glam, as she refers to the migrants she says should be deported as “dirtbags” and “the worst of the worst.” Similarly, in a series of TV ads that ran both domestically and internationally earlier this year (paid for by the Department of Homeland Security with a $200 million budget), Noem stands all made up in a power suit in front of a line of American flags, thanking Trump for securing the country’s borders and once again warning undocumented immigrants against entering the US. The image she’s presenting is a sort of glamazon sheriff, ready to protect the old West from marauders by any means necessary, the lawbook be damned. In other iconography, she nods to her previous career as a rancher, posing with a cowboy hat and a fixed glare at the horizon line. The image she’s presenting is a sort of glamazon sheriff, ready to protect the old West from marauders by any means necessary, the lawbook be damned. Noem has relied on elaborate costume work before. In 2024, as governor of South Dakota — and rumored frontrunner for Trump’s VP slot — Noem released a series of ads promoting open jobs in South Dakota. One after another, she donned the uniform of a highway patrol officer, nurse, and welder, explaining with a playful wink to the camera that she was just filling in. “Freedom works here” was the tagline. It’s one of the ways Noem signals that she is a politician in the same mode as Trump: one who governs by spectacle as much as by policy. Frankfurt school philosopher Walter Benjamin wrote that fascism transforms politics into aesthetics. Rather than change the structures that oppress the masses, Benjamin writes, the fascist merely offers the masses a spectacle that gives them the impression that their desires have been met. Noem’s flashy performance of security theater tells her followers that she is keeping them safe, even as she strips migrants, selected nearly at random, of due process and condemns them to a lifetime trapped in an El Salvador prison. Noem did not always look like this, exactly: Her shifting aesthetic has been well documented in the political press. When she first took national office in 2011 as South Dakota’s representative, she looked like what she was: a strikingly pretty Midwestern mom, with a Rachel haircut and hoop earrings. She kept cutting her hair shorter over the next few years, as many women politicians do — up until Trump took office in 2016. In 2010. Bill Clark/Roll Call for GettyIn 2014. Pete Marovich/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesIn 2017. Bloomberg via Getty ImagesIn 2020. Bloomberg via Getty ImagesThen, abruptly, Noem’s hair became dramatically longer, sun-kissed with blonde highlights and curled into TV-friendly barrel ringlets. Her face seemed to reshape itself, taking on the high cheekbones and frozen forehead characteristic of Fox News hosts. One of the most telling aspects of Noem’s makeover was also one of the most infamous. In March 2024, Noem posted a lengthy infomercial-like video to Twitter thanking a Texas-based dentist’s office for adjusting her teeth. The whole thing so much resembled an advertisement that Noem was sued by a consumer advocacy group, although the case was later dismissed. “I want, when people look at me, [for them] to hear the words that I say, and not be distracted by something that I’m wearing or how I look, or even my appearance,” Noem said in the video, by way of explanation for why she wanted to “fix” her smile so badly. “I want them to focus on my thoughts and ideas.” Noem seems to believe that in order to make her appearance less disruptive — and her gender less disqualifying — her femininity must actually be amplified. Fitting into Trump’s favored aesthetic is a baseline requirement. By disciplining her face and body and teeth and hair to meet a near-parodic standard, Noem appears to be attempting to be so good at being a woman that she is granted the chance to hang like one of the boys — to inhabit the masculine archetype of the sheriff at least some of the time because she looks so feminine doing it. Kristi Noem holds the US flag riding a horse during the Monster Energy Team Challenge in 2020, when she was governor of South Dakota. Chris Elise/Icon Sportswire via Getty ImagesNotably, Noem has critics on the right who don’t appear to think she’s fully pulled it off. “Just stop trying to glamorize the mission and put yourself in the middle of it as you cosplay ICE agent, which you’re not,” said Megyn Kelly in April. Kelly continued: “She is an administrative policy person appointed by Trump because she was very loyal to him. Fine, but stop with the glam.”“Conservatives need a distinct aesthetic, but this one isn’t it,” mused the right-wing culture warrior Christopher Rufo in April. “Agency head shouldn’t pretend to be an operator, feels fake. The message is persuasive — arresting criminal aliens — but the aesthetic draws all the attention away from the content. The subtext here is that Noem does not want you to notice what she is doing, but to notice *her.* This doesn’t advance the policy. It’s vanity.” Noem’s spectacle, in Kelly and Rufo’s formulation, is too much of a spectacle, too ham-handed, so false as to give itself away. Her over-the-top glamour makes it so feminine as to be unserious, even for those who approve of her message.Nonetheless, Noem appears to be nailing the brief for her most important audience. “You’re not allowed to say she’s beautiful,” announced Trump of Noem approvingly last summer, “so I’m not going to say it.”Press secretary Karoline Leavitt has berated the press from the podium in the past and sparred withe reporters. Chip Somodevilla/Getty ImagesKaroline Leavitt’s big brass bandWhen Christopher Rufo decried Noem’s ICE photo op, he outlined what he thought the correct aesthetic for the moment should be. “A successful American aesthetic would be ticker tape, brass bands, jets spraying the red, white, and blue,” Rufo wrote. “It’s a feeling of bright optimism.” The woman in the Trump administration currently playing that brass band is press secretary Karoline Leavitt. Leavitt has not, as Noem has, needed to redevelop a whole extant political and aesthetic style to fit the Trumpist mold. She spent her college years writing pro-Trump editorials for her school’s newspaper, and her first internship after graduating was at the Trump White House press office during his first administration. She built her public persona in the service of Trump, and he rewarded her with a very high-profile position in response. If the frisson of Noem’s self-presentation comes from her military machismo played against her glamorous good looks, Leavitt’s comes from the authoritativeness she adopts on the press podium played against her palpable youth. Her voice still retains the flavor of a young woman’s uncertainty, no matter how stridently she addresses the press corps or how flagrantly she lies. She seems more comfortable filming TikTok-style videos for the White House social media accounts, addressing the camera with an influencer’s cheerful “Hey, guys!”“Trump’s newest press secretary is radiant, blond and apple-cheeked — as if one of Leonardo da Vinci’s Madonnas had been styled for a Fox News hit,” wrote the Washington Post of Leavitt in January. “Her delivery is righteous, if a bit smug. God gives everyone gifts, Leavitt believes; hers is public speaking. And for roughly a half hour, once or twice a week, she delivers Trump’s word to a room filled with professional skeptics.”Leavitt’s rapport with the press may be combative, but within the media-hostile landscape of the Trump White House, she’s still the good cop, which is perhaps to say, the nice girl. The Washington Post notes that her office door is open to reporters and that she peppers her emails with “friendly exclamation points.” Still, “good cop” sometimes plays as junior partner. The large, luxurious office that traditionally goes to the White House press secretary is, in the current administration, occupied by (male) deputy chief of staff for communications Taylor Budowich. Leavitt’s office, down the hall, is less than half the size, an issue of which she has never complained in public. If the snub hurts her ambition, she does not show it. Karoline Leavitt arrives to the White House Easter Egg Roll on the South Lawn. Anna Moneymaker/Getty ImagesOne frequently-told anecdote about Leavitt sums up the classic conservative persona she’s playing with. Last summer, she went on maternity leave from her role as Trump’s campaign press secretary. Three days after giving birth, holding her son in her arms, she turned on the television in time to see an assassin’s bullet narrowly miss Trump’s head. “I looked at my husband and said, ‘Looks like I’m going back to work,’” Leavitt told the right-wing blog Conservateur last fall. (The husband in question is 32 years older than her.) The publication dubbed her a “Wonder Woman” for her decision to return to the office just four days post-partum. The heroic young (white) mother is a classic Republican trope, and Leavitt’s blonde hair and blue eyes equip her to embody it to the fullest. Leavitt’s motherhood feminizes her work in the same way that Noem’s makeover feminizes hers, making her unthreatening to an ideology that aims to undo the advances that allowed women to work in the first place. But where Noem’s glamour carries troubling notes of vanity for her critics, Leavitt’s motherhood can be positioned as selfless, traditional, Americana. Strikingly, though, what keeps coming up in profiles of both Leavitt and Noem is the idea of “sacrifice,” as though their different modes of femininity offer each woman the chance to showcase her submission to Trump. Leavitt gave up recuperation and time at home alone with her young child to serve as Trump’s press secretary. Noem remolded her body in the image of the women with whom Trump surrounds himself. If they are each trying to play out a right-wing archetype, they do so before Trump on bended knee.What should a MAGA woman be? Overtly feminine, certainly. Ambitious, perhaps, but submissive, too. What is most important, always, is an unfailing loyalty to Trump.That, in the end, is the heart of the spectacle of Noem’s militaristic videos and Leavitt’s scolding and lies. What they are selling is whatever they think that Trump thinks a woman should be.See More:

About nine years ago, a new organization called Canary Mission released a YouTube video describing their mission: maintaining a blacklist of anti-Israel college students.American campuses, the video warns, had become hotbeds of anti-Israel extremism: safe spaces for students to attend “Jew-hating conferences and anti-American rallies.” To fight this, Canary Mission would build an extensive database of students and professors who engaged in anti-Israel activity. The primary intent, per the video, is to ensure that anti-Israel students cannot find gainful employment after graduation.“These individuals are applying for jobs within your company,” the Canary Mission video warns. “It is your duty to ensure that today’s radicals are not tomorrow’s employees.”Over the course of the next decade, Canary Mission — which takes its name from the expression “canary in the coal mine” — delivered on its promise. Its database now contains mini-profiles of thousands of students and professors, and has expanded to include professionals like doctors and nurses. People listed in the database have been harassed, disciplined, and even fired. Israeli intelligence has used Canary Mission profiles as justification for detaining listed visitors at the border.And since the second Trump administration began, Canary Mission’s targets have started to be deported from the United States.After plainclothes officers arrested Tufts University graduate student Rümeysa Öztürk on the streets of Boston in late March, Öztürk’s attorneys claimed the sole reason for her arrest was her Canary Mission profile. While the Trump administration claims she had engaged in activity “in support of Hamas,” the private Homeland Security memo justifying her detention only cited an op-ed she had written in support of boycotting Israel, using language very similar to her Canary Mission page. The organization, for its part, is happy to take the credit (though it did not respond to my request for comment). After Öztürk’s arrest, Canary Mission’s X account posted a celebratory tweet claiming “sources point to her Canary Mission profile as the primary cause.” It currently maintains a list of seven other students and professors who it believes should be targeted for deportation. Two of these, Mahmoud Khalil and Mohsen Mahdawi, are currently in ICE custody. Mahdawi was arrested after his name appeared on this list (Khalil was arrested before it was published).Canary Mission’s rise is not really a story about one organization, or even the toxic climate of America’s Israel-Palestine debate. Rather, it is a case study in how civil society organizations — normally seen as pillars of liberal democratic life — can become agents of illiberalism. And when such groups can align themselves with a friendly government, the danger rises exponentially.RelatedThe mysterious rise of the Canary MissionThere are many pro-Israel activist in groups in the United States, and many that focus on college campuses specifically. But Canary Mission is unusual in two respects: its opaque structure and extremely aggressive tactics.Canary Mission’s website does not list a president, board, or a staff directory. On paper, its headquarters are in Israel — specifically Beit Shemesh, a medium-sized city near Jerusalem. Yet the address listed on its paperwork is in a padlocked, seemingly abandoned building.Over the years, reporters have identified some of the Canary Mission’s revenue streams — including significant donations from some prominent American Jewish philanthropies. But much of the Canary Mission’s funding remains anonymous due to its use of a pass-through group, called Central Fund of Israel (CFI). Canary Mission represents a different, and more aggressive, strain of campus pro-Israel activism, one that aims not to debate pro-Palestinian students and scholars but to silence them.American donors can give to CFI without having to disclose whether the money is earmarked for Canary Mission, and CFI can disburse funds to Canary without noting their original source. It’s an unusual setup that effectively allows Canary Mission to keep its funding sources fully anonymous.“It really stands out when you look at other similar organizations in the same ecosystem,” says Yousef Munayyer, the head of the Israel-Palestine program at the Arab Center think tank in DC. “I can’t think of another one that hides their funding like this.”The obvious irony — that an organization dedicated to naming and shaming is itself so opaque — is palpable. But it is necessary, in part, because Canary Mission has been a lightning rod for controversy even within the pro-Israel community.No matter what you think about pro-Israel groups’ views of American college campuses, they clearly have the right to express their views and organize around them. And many of these groups engage in political activity — like documenting Jewish students’ concerns about campus antisemitism or creating new right-leaning Middle East studies journals — that are within the confines of legitimate debate and activism in a democratic society.But Canary Mission represents a different, and more aggressive, strain of campus pro-Israel activism, one that aims not to debate pro-Palestinian students and scholars but to silence them. Lila Corwin Berman, a historian of Jewish philanthropy at New York University, dates this approach to roughly the early 2000s. During that time, pro-Israel organizations like Campus Watch and the David Project began publicly targeting professors and students that they believed had engaged in unacceptable speech. These efforts were haphazard at the outset, publishing specific attacks on allegedly problematic scholars rather than maintaining a full-on blacklist. Canary Mission’s database, first unveiled in 2014, represented a qualitative escalation — one explicitly aimed at creating professional problems for anti-Israel activists.This was highly controversial. In 2018, pro-Israel campus groups at five major universities published a joint op-ed calling on the movement to repudiate Canary Mission.“We are compelled to speak out against this website because it uses intimidation tactics, is antithetical to our democratic and Jewish values, is counterproductive to our efforts and is morally reprehensible,” they wrote.This internal criticism did not do much to stop the Canary Mission’s growth, fueled as it was by unaccountable backers. Today, Canary Mission’s searchable database is vast — containing entries for over 2,000 individuals across 38 states, DC, and five Canadian provinces. How the Canary Mission worksTo understand why Canary Mission is so controversial, start by looking at how its blacklist works.Each individual listing contains both a dossier documenting the target’s alleged offenses and their contact information, including direct links to their social media accounts that can facilitate targeted harassment campaigns. The only official way to get an entry deleted is to release a public apology with evidence of new pro-Israel beliefs; these testimonials are then posted on the “ex-Canary” segment of the Mission’s website.Some Canary Mission targets have said or done something that many would find offensive, such as endorsing the October 7, 2023, massacre. But the vast majority of profiles I could find were individuals who either attended a pro-Palestinian rally or wrote something critical about Israel’s policies towards the Palestinians.Canary Mission will describe this banal activity in threatening terms, like “attending a pro-Hamas rally.” But the speech in question is more than just legally protected: It is exactly the sort of political activity that people in a democracy are supposed to use as a vehicle for expressing their opinion. The Mission’s database isn’t primarily about identifying examples of extreme anti-Israel speech or political violence — it is about trying to silence any criticism of Israel by labeling it antisemitic or pro-terrorist.Rümeysa Öztürk, the Tufts graduate student facing deportation, is a case in point.The Canary Mission profile that reportedly led to her ICE arrest listed a single offense — an op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper calling on the university to (among other things) “acknowledge the Palestinian genocide” and “divest from companies with direct or indirect ties to Israel.” Agree or disagree with these positions, advocating for them is clearly legitimate political speech. There is no plausible case that people like Öztürk constitute any kind of threat to Jews on campus. That she is listed by Canary Mission — and that the organization publicly cheered her arrest — reveals its primary interest in policing speech critical of Israel by any means necessary.This can also be seen by the sheer number of Jewish students and professors on the Canary Mission’s database.The American Jewish community is fairly left-wing; roughly two-thirds disapprove of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right government. While a strong majority supports Israel’s continued existence as a Jewish state, large numbers of American Jews believe its occupation of Palestinian territory is both strategically unwise and morally indefensible. There is also a minority of anti-Zionist American Jews, more prominent in younger generations, who support the dissolution of Israel and its replacement with a binational state.If you scan the Canary Mission database, Jewish students and scholars make up many of the entries. Reading their dossiers, like the profile of eminent Holocaust historian Omer Bartov, their alleged offenses include everything from criticizing the Netanyahu government’s approach to judicial reform to attending a pro-Palestinian demonstration.If Canary Mission were truly about protecting Jews’ rights to participate freely in campus life, then it wouldn’t include them on a database explicitly designed to hurt their career prospects.From the campus to ICEWe don’t know for a fact that the Trump administration is using Canary Mission’s database to identify deportation targets. There is suggestive evidence: The wording in the State Department memo justifying Öztürk’s deportation, for example, is very similar to what appeared on her Canary profile). But so far, there is no direct proof of a link.The depressing thing is that it makes all the sense in the world.Yet regardless of whether Canary Mission entries are currently directing policy, it’s clear they wish to be seen as doing so. They do this not only by maintaining their list of seven people they wish were deported, but also posting messages in support for actual deportations with slogans like “pro-Hamas extremism has consequences” and “no more safe havens for terror supporters.”These messages demonstrate an undeniable hostility to basic liberal values. Canary Mission has graduated from “merely” advocating professional consequences for pro-Palestinian voices to endorsing outright state repression against them. They are sliding down a slippery slope at a rapid clip.The depressing thing is that it makes all the sense in the world. The idea of trying to silence political opponents rather than debate them is dangerous. There are certainly cases where speech merits consequences: If a professor says discriminatory things about Jewish students, for example, or an activist advocates violence against her peers. But these are generally seen as exceptions rather than rules in free societies: the “boundary cases” where toleration for political expression runs up against other important values.Canary Mission was founded on the opposite principle: that an entire category of speech, pro-Palestinian advocacy, should be treated as presumptively illegitimate. They believe the cause of defending Israel is best served not by engaging in rigorous debate and advocacy, but by making a giant list of people who believe the “wrong” things and ensuring they suffer consequences for those beliefs. This is illiberalism as practiced by civil society — and is, necessarily, less dangerous than illiberalism enforced by the state. But when illiberalism takes root in an influential sector of society, such as pro-Israel activism, it becomes a potential ally for an illiberal regime. No elected leader can turn a democracy into an authoritarian regime on their own. They need partners, influential people and organizations that can operate to weaken resistance to democratic backsliding and help create a climate of fear in which anti-government activity is perceived as costly.The go-to examples are usually people with physical power and money — generals, police chiefs, and the wealthy elite. But there’s a growing recognition that other social groups, even ones that seemingly lack soldiers or billions, can assist in undermining democracy’s foundations.In 2001, the political theorists Simone Chambers and Jeffrey Kopstein warned of a phenomenon they termed “bad civil society.” This is a phenomenon that they describe as “civic participation that weakens liberal democracy” — weaponizing the tools of organizing and activism to oppose the very democratic principles that allow them in the first place. At the time, it appeared that “illiberal forces are small, marginalized, and contained” in the United States. However, Chambers and Kopstein warned, this doesn’t mean they’ll always be irrelevant. Even if “illiberal forces cannot destabilize the state,” the authors write, “they can still “contribute to an insidious erosion of values that leaves liberalism vulnerable to all sorts of threat.”Canary Mission’s behavior in the past 10 years shows that this warning was prescient. The organization isn’t just cheering Trump on from the sidelines; they have put together a public list of potential deportation targets. They are gleefully reveling in the fact that their longtime mission of suppressing speech is now backed by force of law.See More:

For most of the last 30 years, the story of religion in America has been a pretty steady one: a constant, and consistent, drop in religious affiliation every year. Starting in the 1990s, the share of Americans who identified as Christian, or identified with any religion at all, began to drop precipitously. At the same time, those with no religious affiliation — nicknamed “nones” — began to spike. Americans have been steadily losing their religion entirely. They haven’t been converting to other religions, or getting religion later in life.That trend might be ending. Over the last five years, the share of Americans who are “nones” has stabilized at roughly 30 percent, across multiple tracking surveys — largely because of one group: zoomers.Sometime around or after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic, young Americans began to find, or at least retain, religious belief at higher rates than previous generations. The numbers tell this story quite cleanly. While the share of “nones” jumped by about 40 percent from 2008 to 2013, the rise began to slow between 2013 and 2018.Then, in 2020, it stagnated. According to associate professor of political science and data analyst Ryan Burge, who has been tracking this trend over the last few years, that stagnation can largely be traced to younger generations now losing their religion at slower rates than older generations. “From a pure statistical standpoint, I don’t know if we can say with any certainty whether there’s a larger share of nones in the United States today than there was in 2019,” he wrote in 2024.Gen Z seems to be the key. Recently, The Economist analyzed findings from the General Social Survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center, and found that zoomers are the only generation not losing their religious affiliation. Why? There’s no unifying explanation for this trend, but it extends beyond the United States. And that suggests that there might be some structural reasons Gen Z is rediscovering faith. Something about post-Covid seems to be bringing youth back to Christianity, specifically, but also to religion in general.There are three potential explanations:A response to the loneliness epidemic?That Gen Z, and younger Americans in general, feels more lonely and isolated from each other and society in general is one of the defining stories of the 2020s. Anywhere from two-thirds to three-quarters of Gen Z reports feeling isolated, alone, or disconnected from the world, a dynamic that has bled into the way they socialize, date, get married, or find community in general.Some have attributed this dynamic to the rise of social media, and of smartphones, in the pandemic lockdown period that defined the adolescence of so much of Gen Z, and a resulting “mental health crisis” in response. Just how unique these are to Gen Z (as opposed to how any generation might have felt during these tumultuous years of life), is up for debate still, but it still follows that some members of this generation who do feel isolated or lost might be finding community and friendship in organized religion.This social aspect to religion, and the idea of a third space or community created through churches, is an oft-repeated explanation in the reporting and surveying of zoomers who are returning to church. Church offers “solace,” and young newcomers report attending services “to feel less ‘lost’.” As one Massachusetts zoomer told The Economist, though friends and family may come and go, “people in church don’t get to reject you.”A response to loss of trust in the establishment?Relatedly, religiosity and spirituality becoming less taboo among Gen Z might be a part of a countercultural, counter-status quo, anti-incumbency energy that has swept many Western democracies since the pandemic’s outbreak. It might seem odd to think of religion as countercultural, but at least for many of the youngest Americans, growing religious disaffiliation has been the popular narrative and posturing of their elders.In that way, it makes sense that religious unaffiliation might have hit a ceiling at the start of the Covid-era, as Western societies — and particularly younger people — began to question orthodoxies, political and secular institutions, and conventional political parties and leaders.Some young respondents to surveys and journalists report that atheism, agnosticism, and indifference to religion became a kind of status-quo, mainstream opinion, boosted in particular by the quick religious dissociation of the millennial generation — the cohort of Americans who seem to have had the strongest liberal and secular bend. At least in the United Kingdom and in the United States, some degree of Gen Z’s slowing religious dissociation is related to an increase in anti-mainstream, anti-status quo religious fervor: In the United Kingdom, for example, where Anglicanism has long been the mainstream, Catholicism has recently fueled the the rise in religious identification. In the United States, where various types of Protestantism used to be associated with elite culture, Catholicism has risen on the right, while various evangelical, and both Catholicism more tolerant nondenominational Christian churches, have grown, as opposed to more popular atheism or agnosticism.There’s a sharp gender divide in who is driving the Gen Z religious shift. Young Gen Z men are becoming much more religious, while young women keeping a religious affiliation are shifting to more politically liberal and tolerant faith traditions, particularly in the US.This gender divide is quite dramatic: Gen Z men are significantly more likely to attend religious services than Gen Z women, a reversal from what the norm was in the US. And young women are leaving American churches en masse, largely because of political and ideological cross-pressures on what these churches teach about gender norms, sexual identity, and gender equality, as well as the roles they offer women in religious institutions and the political leanings of some churches, according to research from the American Enterprise Institute’s Survey Center on American Life.One Survey Center study, for example, found that about two-thirds of young women believe “most churches and religious congregations” don’t treat men and women equally, while the Public Religion Research Institute has consistently found that the “negative treatment of gay and lesbian people” has been key driver of young women away from organized religions. That might be amplified by the fact that high rates of Gen Z women, some three in 10, now identify as LGBTQ.At the same time, the subtle integration of religious traits into the teachings and preachings of some alt-right, manosphere-adjacent content creators who have a particular reach with young men, might be amplifying this tension. The result is a generation of men finding community and belonging in religion, that reinforces their existing political preferences, and causes a further rightward lurch (as was seen in the 2024 election).Will it last?Whether these trends continue doesn’t seem guaranteed. If anything the data suggests we may have reached a temporary equilibrium in religious affiliation and belief that might change as older, more religious Americans, continue to pass away. The strongest social research suggests that biggest driver and predictor of continued religious identification is how religious your parents were — so if a more religious and faithful Gen Z ends up keeping that faith, and raising their children with the same norms, what looked like an inevitable and endless decline in American religiosity may have been less drastic than it appeared.See More:

Growing up in rural Tennessee, power outages were frequent and sometimes fun. With no TV or lights, we played boardgames by candlelight or played outside if the storm stopped. But because my family also ran a restaurant out of our house, sometimes the food in the fridges spoiled, leading to thousands of dollars worth of lost groceries. It never occurred to me so many years ago that a big battery could one day solve this problem. As extreme weather worsens due to climate change, leading millions more to experience debilitating blackouts, the home battery industry is booming. Home batteries are not like the AAA batteries that go in your TV remote control. They’re big, high-capacity lithium-ion workhorses designed to power multiple devices and appliances in the event of a power outage. The amount of energy that can be stored in residential batteries, which is measured in gigawatt hours (GWh), grew by a record 54 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to a new report on energy storage in the United States. It’s now enough to power up to 1 million homes. Growth is even bigger in Europe. Many home batteries are being used to store energy from solar panels, but there’s a burgeoning market for backup batteries that can keep essential appliances, like refrigerators, running during a power outage. Some of these batteries are also smart enough to charge up when energy is cheap and then discharge when it’s expensive to save on utility bills. We’re also starting to see appliances with built-in batteries that make them more efficient and effective.Solving the lost groceries problem is only the beginning. As more people add battery capacity to their homes, the power grid can become more resilient to spikes in energy usage and bring down costs for everyone. While the number of battery-powered houses still make up a minority of all the homes in the US, home batteries are becoming more affordable and accessible, giving the average American household the chance to take advantage of what an electrified future has to offer.One of the more interesting home batteries I’ve come across is made by BioLite, a Brooklyn, New York-based company that got its start building camp stoves that can charge your phone. Backup by BioLite is a home battery specifically designed for the dead fridge problem, or any other dead appliances. The primary unit is a slim battery pack that can fit behind your refrigerator or sit on top of it. It plugs into a standard wall outlet and doesn’t require a contractor or any rewiring to install. Just plug your fridge and any other devices into the Backup’s power strip, and it’s ready to take over in the event of an outage. One $2,000 Backup battery gets you 15 to 30 hours of power, and if you daisy-chain several batteries together, you can get a few days worth of power. “This is not meant to be a niche product for the bleeding-edge solar battery storage expert,” Erica Rosen, BioLite’s vice president of marketing told me when I visited BioLite’s headquarters in March. “This is for folks who are, like, ‘I just threw out $400 worth of groceries. I can never do this again.’”That example hit home for me. But it’s not actually what I think is most useful about the capabilities of home batteries. For people who pay attention to their power bills, Backup and other home batteries make it easier to take advantage of the time-of-use pricing some utilities offer, which makes electricity cheaper during low demand hours and higher when demand is high. Backup, for example, works with an app that lets you schedule the battery to kick in during high demand hours; BioLite is planning to eventually update the app so that this feature works automatically.Plugging solar panels into these batteries gives you even more autonomy over your energy sources. Once you’re actually generating electricity, you can fill up your home batteries without drawing from the grid at all. If there’s an outage, the panels can keep those batteries charged when the sun’s out. If your utility offers it, you can also take advantage of something called net metering, which enables you to sell some of that stored energy back to the grid during peak demand. RelatedIf battery-powered living sounds appealing to you, there are now even more creative ways to ease into it. A company called Copper started selling its battery-equipped stoves this year. The $6,000 Copper Charlie is an electric induction range with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery inside that’s programmed to charge when electricity is cheapest. The range plugs into a regular wall outlet — other inductions require a 240-volt outlet that not all homes have — and the battery supplies enough power for everyday cooking. It also kicks in during power outages so that you can keep cooking if the lights go out. The battery also gives the oven a boost, so that preheating is faster. There is, nevertheless, something unstoppable about the home battery revolution.This is just the first of many battery-assisted appliances that Copper plans to make, according to Weldon Kennedy, the company’s co-founder and chief marketing officer. It’s not hard to imagine how the same basic backup features of the Charlie stove could work in a hot water heater or a washer-dryer. These kinds of appliances require a large amount of energy all at once and then sit idle for hours at a time. It makes great sense to charge them up when energy is cheap and then discharge that stored energy later.“Because you don’t have these giant spikes in energy use across the electrical grid at, say, six o’clock when everyone turns on their electric stove,” Kennedy told me. “It just makes the whole system better.”None of this comes cheap. The Copper Charlie range and Backup by BioLite are four-figure investments. There are other companies in the space, too, but they’re just as expensive. Impulse makes a battery-equipped stovetop that also costs $6,000, and Jackery sells a home backup battery for $3,500 and up. You can find even more expensive and extensive home battery systems from companies like Tesla, Anker, and Bluetti. There are some government subsidy programs available to offset those high costs, but on a federal level at least, it’s not clear if the Trump administration will keep them in place.There is, nevertheless, something unstoppable about the home battery revolution. As certain solutions get cheaper and easier to use, like Biolite’s Backup, other options are becoming more appealing. Electric vehicles, after all, are basically big batteries on wheels, and a growing number of automakers are enabling bidirectional charging, which lets your vehicle power your home or send power back to the grid. GM is even working with some utility companies to help its car owners buy the equipment necessary to turn their EVs into home batteries. Still, with the Trump administration downright hostile to clean energy, the US is lagging behind Europe and China in adopting more battery power. But the cost of battery production is falling fast, and we should expect to see batteries show up in more home appliances in the near future. After all, just one big battery could save you a fridge-full of groceries in the next power outage, and that outage is definitely coming. Climate change is making weather more extreme and unpredictable, which means it’s more essential than ever to be prepared for anything.A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!See More:

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.It’s a stressful time to be a kid.Young people are watching environmental disasters, school shootings, and economic and political uncertainty, all with a level of media (or at least social media) coverage that would have been unimaginable for previous generations. Against this backdrop, they’re also expected to have their lives figured out by an early age, and rack up a laundry list of achievements to cite in an increasingly lengthy and comparison-filled college application process. “You almost have to start working on your college career in middle school,” Jennifer Rothman, director of youth and young adult initiatives at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told me.Given all this, it’s perhaps no surprise that kids need a break. Mental health days — a day off to deal with depression or anxiety, or simply to tend to mental well-being, gained currency among adults during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic — and they’ve taken off among young people as well, with at least 12 states passing laws allowing excused absences for mental health reasons. But as chronic absenteeism remains a problem around the country, some school officials are worried that giving kids mental health days could encourage an attitude that school attendance is optional. “There’s a lot of misconceptions about how important it is to be in school — if I didn’t come to school at all in the pandemic, why do I urgently have to keep coming to school now?” Kent Pekel, superintendent of Rochester Public Schools in Minnesota, said during a webinar last year, according to EdWeek.While concerns about mental health are far from gone, they’re also being joined by fears of learning loss and the acknowledgement that missing even a few days of school can be detrimental to kids’ education. There’s also a widespread worry that students are reaching college, the job market, and the ballot box without basic skills like reading.RelatedSome experts also caution that taking a day off for the wrong reasons could actually make matters worse. “When you get yourself in the trap or downward slide of school avoidance, that’s really hard, and it happens really quick,” Sarah Cain Spannagel, a clinical psychologist in Cleveland who works with children and families, told me.How can kids, families, and educators navigate all this? How do we support kids through a time that’s often scary even for adults, while also making sure they get an education? I posed these questions to experts this week, and the answers I got suggested that while a day off won’t cure a kid’s depression or anxiety (sadly, that doesn’t work for grown-ups, either), time for reset and recovery can help protect kids from getting to a crisis point in the first place. A day off could even show families and schools what’s missing from a kid’s life, leading to less stress and pressure in the future. A mental health crisis for teensDoctors and teens alike have been especially concerned with young people’s mental health in the last five years, with Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general under President Joe Biden, warning in 2021 of a mental health crisis among adolescents. More recent surveys have shown some improvement in the prevalence of teen sadness and depression, but clinicians are still seeing “alarming rates” of anxiety and depression, as well as suicidality and self-harm, Amber Childs, a psychiatry professor at Yale School of Medicine who works on youth mental health, told me.Allowing mental health days can also help destigmatize mental illness, and encourage young people to be open about any struggles they’re going through, rather than hiding them, kids and experts say. Among teens, mental health days have emerged as a popular coping strategy. Students began advocating for them even before Covid hit, and lawmakers in states from Oregon to Utah have agreed, giving kids a designated number of mental health days per year, or simply changing the definition of an excused absence to include psychological reasons.While hard numbers on how many days kids are actually taking are hard to come by, the practice seems to be increasing, perhaps driven by a growing awareness that psychological well-being is as important as physical health, Spannagel said.The concept of a mental health day might sound pretty foreign to previous generations. Growing up, “I never got any days off,” Rothman of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, who has three teenagers, told me. “Your parents were kind of like, you either have to have a fever or you’re throwing up, that’s the only way you’re staying home.”But adults today need to understand “how different the world is now for our kids than it was for us,” Rothman said.Because of social media, young people today don’t have much downtime from social interaction, news, or, well, anything really, Childs told me. Being able to unplug “not only from our digitally enabled lives, but also from the routine things that happen in the social and academic space” can be positive, “whether or not something bad is happening.”Allowing mental health days can also help destigmatize mental illness, and encourage young people to be open about any struggles they’re going through, rather than hiding them, kids and experts say. The right way to use mental health daysHowever, the way we often think about mental health days might not be the most helpful for kids. Rather than using them when a child is already in crisis — “taking the release valve off of the pressure cooker,” as Childs put it — families and schools should use them as “a preventative tool” to keep that pressure from building up in the first place.Ideally, parents can look ahead to a time when kids might have a lot of stressful events coming up, like big exams or performances, then schedule a day off ahead of time. They should also plan how to use the day well. “A mental health day doesn’t equate to chilling on a couch for eight hours straight binging TikTok and television,” Childs said.Instead, Rothman suggests getting outside, reading, drawing, or playing card games — “whatever is calming and helps them feel more like themselves.” For teenagers especially, a day off could be a time to just catch up on sleep, something they’re often lacking due to early high school start times.What kids feel the need to do on a mental health day can also give adults “clues about what might be crowded out during a typical school day or week,” and help build those activities back in on ordinary days so kids don’t get as stressed out and depleted, Childs said. (If kids keep taking days off to sleep, it might be time for the school to consider a later start time.)Taking a day off shouldn’t be a way for kids to avoid something they’re anxious about, like a class, a difficult friendship, or school in general, experts say. Childs suggests that parents look for patterns — if kids keep asking for a mental health day on a Monday, it’s an opportunity to delve deeper into what’s happening at school on Mondays that might be stressing them out.If requests for a day off are very frequent, or if feelings around them are intense, it could be a sign that “you’re getting avoidance of a problem that most likely is going to be there in two days” when the kid goes back to school, Spannagel said.Meanwhile, if symptoms like stress or sadness are going on for more than two weeks, or parents see major changes to behavior like eating or sleeping, it could be time to reach out to a child’s primary care doctor to have them evaluated for mental health conditions, Rothman said.Kids with ADHD, autism, or learning differences might need the reset of a mental health day more than the average kid, to help them recover from sensory overload or fatigue, Spannagel said. At the same time, a kid frequently feeling too exhausted or overwhelmed to go to school could mean they need additional help with executive functioning or social skills, or that the accommodations they have at school aren’t meeting their needs. When it comes to concerns about absenteeism and academics, families and teachers can have a conversation about making up any work a child misses on an occasional day out, Spannagel said. And while some fear that allowing mental health days could encourage kids to skip school, that concern is “giving me like, if we talk about sex with them, they’re going to want to have more sex,” Childs said. “I think the question is more complex, which is: What about the current environment has lent itself to kids not feeling engaged in school?” Mental health support goes beyond a single dayA few mental health days aren’t going to fix problems with the school environment, not least because giving a kid a day off in the middle of the school year just isn’t possible for every family. Experts don’t recommend leaving kids home alone if they’re struggling mentally, and many parents don’t have the job flexibility to take extra time off with their kids. But schools can help by building aspects of a mental health day into the school week, adding time to shift the focus “away from academics and performance into exploration of self,” Childs said.Having resources in the classroom, like a quiet corner where kids can take a moment to themselves, can also help support kids’ mental health day-to-day, Rothman said. (My older kid’s teacher brought this calming dog stuffie to their classroom in the fall, and I honestly would like one for myself.) Talking about mental health in school is also crucial, whether that’s part of a formal program or just a teacher “being open about the things that they’re feeling,” Rothman said. “It fights the stigma around it.”What I’m readingSeventy-four percent of teens say social media helps them feel more connected to their friends, but 48 percent also say the platforms harm people their age, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.The Trump administration is reportedly seeking to eliminate Head Start, the federal program that provides early education to more than half a million kids from low-income families. One graduate calls the program “one of the few times in my early life where I felt truly loved, seen and supported in a place of learning.”Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remarks about children with autism who “will never pay taxes” recall the dark history of eugenics, writes Jessica Grose at the New York Times.My older kid and I are reading the Aster series of graphic novels, about a little girl who moves to the countryside so her mom can pursue her career as a robot-bird scientist, leading to friendships with an 800-year-old woman, a sheep wearing a tie, and three chestnuts who are also knights, among other colorful characters.From my inboxTwo weeks ago, I wrote about how tariffs could drive up the cost of items like strollers and car seats, making it harder to have a kid in America. Reader Diana Braley responded, “As a mom in 2025, I’ve realized raising kids doesn’t have to be as expensive as society makes it seem.”“Raising children has always required commitment, support, and resilience — not consumerism,” Braley wrote. “Big companies sell us the idea that spending more makes us better parents. But the truth is, our instincts and community matter more than any fancy product.”Thanks to Braley, and a reminder that you can always reach me at anna.north@vox.com!See More:

Almost immediately after he began his second term, President Donald Trump ordered the military to ban transgender people from serving in the US military. Under the Defense Department’s policy implementing this order, the military was supposed to start firing trans service members on March 26, although those firings were halted by a court order.That court order, in a case known as United States v. Shilling, is now before the Supreme Court. The Trump administration’s primary argument — that it’s not banning trans military personnel, but merely banning service by people with gender dysphoria — is nonsensical, and the Court has repeatedly rejected similar arguments in the past. According to the American Psychiatric Association, gender dysphoria refers to the “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity” that is commonly experienced by transgender people. The government may no more recharacterize a ban on trans service as a ban on gender dysphoria than it could defend Jim Crow by recharacterizing it as a series of laws targeting people with high levels of melanin.Nevertheless, so long as the Court follows its long history of showing extreme deference to the military, it seems exceedingly likely that the Trump administration will prevail in this case.It is well-established that the government cannot evade a ban on discrimination by claiming that it is merely discriminating based on a trait that closely correlates with a particular identity. As the Supreme Court said in Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic (1993), “a tax on wearing yarmulkes is a tax on Jews.”Yet, while the Trump administration’s brief in the Shilling case is poorly argued, the Court is almost certain to reinstate the trans military ban, in part because the case is little more than a sequel to a fight that already played out in the first Trump administration.During his first term, Trump’s government issued a similar ban on transgender military service — although the first-term ban did contain some exceptions that are not part of the second-term ban. Lower courts halted the first-term ban, but the Supreme Court voted 5-4, along party lines, to reinstate that ban in 2019. The Court has only moved further to the right since 2019, and Republicans now have a 6-3 supermajority among the justices.The Supreme Court has long held that judges should defer to the militaryIt’s not clear that the first-term decisions reinstating the ban were wrongly decided under the Supreme Court’s precedents. The Court has long permitted the military to engage in activity that would clearly violate the Constitution in a civilian context.As Judge Benjamin Settle, the district judge who blocked Trump’s second-term ban, explained in his opinion, this ban is likely to do considerable harm to the United States.In Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), for example, the Court held that the military could ban Jewish service members from wearing yarmulkes while in uniform. As the Court explained, its “review of military regulations challenged on First Amendment grounds is far more deferential than constitutional review of similar laws or regulations designed for civilian society.” The military, Goldman reasoned, “must foster instinctive obedience, unity, commitment, and esprit de corps,” and that justifies imposing restrictions on service members that would normally violate the Constitution.The Court has even held that the military may engage in explicit sex discrimination — a fact that is highly relevant to the Shilling case because the Court held in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that discrimination against transgender workers is a form of illegal sex discrimination. In Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), the Court upheld the federal law that requires men, but not women, to register for the draft. While this kind of explicit sex discrimination would be unconstitutional in virtually any other context, Rostker explained that the courts owe extraordinary deference to Congress in matters of “national defense and military affairs.”Given these precedents, the plaintiffs challenging Trump’s transgender service ban always faced an uphill climb. And that’s doubly true because the Court’s current majority has not been particularly sympathetic to constitutional claims brought by trans litigants.As Judge Benjamin Settle, the district judge who blocked Trump’s second-term ban, explained in his opinion, this ban is likely to do considerable harm to the United States. The named plaintiff in the Shilling case is Commander Emily Shilling, a pilot with 19 years of military service who has flown 60 combat missions. Shilling alleges, without any contradiction from the government, that the Navy spent $20 million to train her. All of that expertise will now be lost to the US military.But the Constitution does not forbid the government from self-harm. And the Supreme Court’s precedents permit the military to discriminate in ways that other institutions cannot, which is bad news for people targeted by Trump’s transgender service ban.See More:

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. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that takes aim at a longtime core principle of civil rights law known as disparate impact. And though he can’t get rid of it entirely on his own, he may be hoping conservative justices on the Supreme Court will.What is disparate impact? It’s the legal concept that certain practices can violate federal civil rights law because they affect certain demographics differently — even if no explicit or intentional discrimination is proven. For instance: Everyone knows it would be illegal for an employer to say they won’t hire people of a certain race. But what if an employer screens out applicants who’d previously been arrested? Under disparate impact analysis, if doing that ends up disproportionately hurting applicants of one demographic, it could be an illegal violation of civil rights law. Disparate impact is a cornerstone of civil rights enforcement, but activists on the right have pushed back against it, arguing progressives have taken the idea too far, and that standards that affect different demographics differently should not necessarily be presumed illegal.What did Trump do? Trump’s order declares it US policy “to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.” It starts the rollback of some regulations, while deprioritizing the enforcement of others. Pending federal actions that rely on disparate impact analysis, such as civil rights lawsuits or investigations, must be assessed for compliance with this order, Trump says. He also broaches the possibility that state laws or policies relying on disparate impact could be illegal.Can he do this? Trump can try to roll back enforcement, but disparate impact was codified in a 1971 Supreme Court ruling that he can’t get rid of on his own. But activists on the right are hoping that the Court’s conservative majority is ready to throw out that long-held precedent.And with that, it’s time to log off…Bonobos are one of the rare mammal species with female-dominated societies. How do they pull it off? A new study explores their strategy — and, one researcher told the New York Times, it suggests that male dominance isn’t inevitable for humans either.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape of not just AI companies but huge companies in general.OpenAI’s board of directors is bound not to the mission of providing value for shareholders, like most companies, but to the mission of ensuring that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” as the company’s website says. (Still private, OpenAI is currently valued at more than $300 billion after completing a record $40 billion funding round earlier this year.)That situation is a bit unusual, to put it mildly, and one that is increasingly buckling under the weight of its own contradictions.For a long time, investors were happy enough to pour money into OpenAI despite a structure that didn’t put their interests first, but in 2023, the board of the nonprofit that controls the company — yep, that’s how confusing it is — fired Sam Altman for lying to them. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.It was a move that definitely didn’t maximize shareholder value, was at best very clumsily handled, and made it clear that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit could potentially have huge implications — especially for its partner Microsoft, which has poured billions into OpenAI.Altman’s firing didn’t stick — he returned a week later after an outcry, with much of the board resigning. But ever since the firing, OpenAI has been considering a restructuring into, well, more of a normal company. RelatedUnder this plan, the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI would sell its control of the company and the assets that it owns. OpenAI would then become a for-profit company — specifically a public benefit corporation, like its rivals Anthropic and X.ai — and the nonprofit would walk away with a hotly disputed but definitely large sum of money in the tens of billions, presumably to spend on improving the world with AI.There’s just one problem, argues a new open letter by legal scholars, several Nobel-prize winners, and a number of former OpenAI employees: The whole thing is illegal (and a terrible idea). Their argument is simple: The thing the nonprofit board currently controls — governance of the world’s leading AI lab — makes no sense for the nonprofit to sell at any price. The nonprofit is supposed to act in pursuit of a highly specific mission: making AI go well for all of humanity. But having the power to make rules for OpenAI is worth more than even a mind-bogglingly large sum of money for that mission. “Nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed is so important to OpenAI’s mission that removing control would violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries,” the letter argues. Those beneficiaries are all of us, and the argument is that a big foundation has nothing on “a role guiding OpenAI.” And it’s not just saying that the move is a bad thing. It’s saying that the board would be illegally breaching their duties if they went forward with it and the attorneys general of California and Delaware — to whom the letter is addressed because OpenAI is incorporated in Delaware and operates in California — should step in to stop it. I’ve previously covered the wrangling over OpenAI’s potential change of structure. I wrote about the challenge of pricing the assets owned by the nonprofit, and we reported on Elon Musk’s claim that his own donations early in OpenAI’s history were misappropriated to make the for-profit. This is a different argument. It’s not a claim that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit ought to produce a higher sale price. It’s an argument that OpenAI, and what it may create, is literally priceless. OpenAI’s mission “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence is safe and benefits all of humanity,” Tyler Whitmer, a nonprofit lawyer and one of the letter’s authors, told me. “Talking about the value of that in dollars and cents doesn’t make sense.”Are they right on the merits? Will it matter? That’s substantially up to two people: California Attorney General Robert Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings. But it’s a serious argument that deserves a serious hearing. Here’s my attempt to digest it.How OpenAI became OpenAIWhen OpenAI was founded in 2015, its mission sounded absurd: to work towards the safe development of artificial general intelligence — which, it clarifies now, means artificial intelligence that can do nearly all economically valuable work — and ensure that it benefited all of humanity. Many people thought such a future was a hundred years away or more. But many of the few people who wanted to start planning for it were at OpenAI. They founded it as a nonprofit, saying that was the only way to ensure that all of humanity maintained a claim to humanity’s future. “We don’t ever want to be making decisions to benefit shareholders,” Altman promised in 2017. “The only people we want to be accountable to is humanity as a whole.” Worries about existential risk, too, loomed large. If it was going to be possible to build extremely intelligent AIs, it was going to be possible — even if it were accidental — to build ones that had no interest in cooperating with human goals and laws. “Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” Altman said in 2015.Thus the nonprofit. The idea was that OpenAI would be shielded from the relentless incentive to make more money for shareholders — the kind of incentive that could drive it to underplay AI safety — and that it would have a governance structure that left it positioned to do the right thing. That would be true even if that meant shutting down the company, merging with a competitor, or taking a major (dangerous) product off the market. “A for-profit company’s obligation is to make money for shareholders,” Michael Dorff, a professor of business law at the University of California Los Angeles, told me. “For a nonprofit, those same fiduciary duties run to a different purpose, whatever their charitable purpose is. And in this case, the charitable purpose of the nonprofit is twofold: One is to develop artificial intelligence safely, and two is to make sure that artificial intelligence is developed for the benefit of all humanity.”“OpenAI’s founders believed the public would be harmed if AGI was developed by a commercial entity with proprietary profit motives,” the letter argues. In fact, the letter documents that OpenAI was founded precisely because many people were worried that AI would otherwise be developed within Google, which was and is a massive commercial entity with a profit motive.Even in 2019, when OpenAI created a “capped for-profit” structure that would let them raise money from investors and pay the investors back up to a 100x return, they emphasized that the nonprofit was still in control. The mission was still not to build AGI and get rich but to ensure its development benefited all of humanity. “We’ve designed OpenAI LP to put our overall mission — ensuring the creation and adoption of safe and beneficial AGI — ahead of generating returns for investors. … Regardless of how the world evolves, we are committed — legally and personally — to our mission,” the company declared in an announcement adopting the new structure. OpenAI made further commitments: To avoid an AI “arms race” where two companies cut corners on safety to beat each other to the finish line, they built into their governing documents a “merge and assist” clause where they’d instead join the other lab and work together to make the AI safe. And thanks to the cap, if OpenAI did become unfathomably wealthy, all of the wealth above the 100x cap for investors would be distributed to humanity. The nonprofit board — meant to be composed of a majority of members who had no financial stake in the company — would have ultimate control.In many ways the company was deliberately restraining its future self, trying to ensure that as the siren call of enormous profits grew louder and louder, OpenAI was tied to the mast of its original mission. And when the original board made the decision to fire Altman, they were acting to carry out that mission as they saw it.Now, argues the new open letter, OpenAI wants to be unleashed. But the company’s own arguments over the last 10 years are pretty convincing: The mission that they set forth is not one that a fully commercial company is likely to pursue. Therefore, the attorneys general should tell them no and instead work to ensure the board is resourced to do what 2019-era OpenAI intended the board to be resourced to do.OpenAI, of course, doesn’t intend to become a fully commercial company. The proposal I’ve seen floated is to become a public benefit corporation. “Public benefit corporations are what we call hybrid entities,” Dorff told me. “In a traditional for-profit, the board’s primary duty is to make money for shareholders. In a public benefit corporation, their job is to balance making money with public duties: They have to take into account the impact of the company’s activities on everyone who is affected by them.”The problem is that the obligations of public benefit corporations are, for all practical purposes, unenforceable. In theory, if a public benefit corporation isn’t benefitting the public, you — a member of the public — are being wronged. But you have no right to challenge it in court. “Only shareholders can launch those suits,” Dorff told me. Take a public benefit corporation with a mission to help end homelessness. “If a homeless advocacy organization says they’re not benefitting the homeless, they have no grounds to sue.” Only OpenAI’s shareholders could try to hold it accountable if it weren’t benefitting humanity. And “it’s very hard for shareholders to win a duty-of-care suit unless the directors acted in bad faith or were engaging in some kind of conflict of interest,” Dorff said. “Courts understandably are very deferential to the board in terms of how they choose to run the business.”That means, in theory, a public benefit corporation is still a way to balance profit and the good of humanity. In practice, it’s one with the thumb hard on the scales of profit, which is probably a significant part of why OpenAI didn’t choose to restructure to a public benefit corporation back in 2019. “Now they’re saying we didn’t foresee that,” Sunny Gandhi of Encode Justice, one of the letter’s signatories, told me. “And that is a deliberate lie to avoid the truth of — they originally were founded in this way because they were worried about this happening.”But, I challenged Gandhi, OpenAI’s major competitors Anthropic and X.ai are both public benefit corporations. Shouldn’t that make a difference?“That’s kind of asking why a conservation nonprofit can’t convert to being a logging company just because there are other logging companies out there,” he told me. In this view, yes, Anthropic and X both have inadequate governance that can’t and won’t hold them accountable for ensuring humanity benefits from their AI work. That might be a reason to shun them, protest them or demand reforms from them, but why is it a reason to let OpenAI abandon its mission?Reading through the letter — and speaking to its authors and other nonprofit law and corporate law experts — I couldn’t help but feel badly for OpenAI’s board. (I have reached out to OpenAI board members for comment several times over the last few months as I’ve reported on the nonprofit transition. They have not returned any of those requests for comment.)The very impressive suite of people responsible for OpenAI’s governance have all the usual challenges of being on the board of a fast-growing tech company with enormous potential and very serious risks, and then they have a whole bunch of puzzles unique to OpenAI’s situation. Their fiduciary duty, as Altman has testified before Congress, is to the mission of ensuring AGI is developed safely and to the benefit of all humanity. But most of them were selected after Altman’s brief firing with, I would argue, another implicit assignment: Don’t screw it up. Don’t fire Sam Altman. Don’t terrify investors. Don’t get in the way of some of the most exciting research happening anywhere on Earth. What, I asked Dorff, are the people on the board supposed to do, if they have a fiduciary duty to humanity that is very hard to live up to? Do they have the nerve to vote against Altman? He was less impressed than me with the difficulty of this plight. “That’s still their duty,” he said. “And sometimes duty is hard.”That’s where the letter lands, too. OpenAI’s nonprofit has no right to cede its control over OpenAI. Its obligation is to humanity. Humanity deserves a say in how AGI goes. Therefore, it shouldn’t sell that control at any price. It shouldn’t sell that control even if it makes fundraising much more convenient. It shouldn’t sell that control even though its current structure is kludgy, awkward, and not meant for handling a challenge of this scale. Because it’s much, much better suited to the challenge than becoming yet another public benefit corporation would be. OpenAI has come further than anyone imagined toward the epic destiny it envisioned for itself in 2015. But if we want the development of AGI to benefit humanity, the nonprofit will have to stick to its guns, even in the face of overwhelming incentive not to. Or the state attorneys general will have to step in.Update, April 24, 2:50 pm ET: This story has been updated to include a disclosure about Vox Media’s relationship to OpenAI.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

Since being deported to El Salvador last month, Kilmar Abrego Garcia has had very little contact with the outside world — something that Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen tried to change. Last week, Van Hollen flew to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who the Trump administration has admitted was deported from Maryland in error. But the White House has since doubled down on claims that he is a member of the MS-13 gang, with Stephen Miller, a top Trump domestic policy adviser, saying, “This was the right person sent to the right place.”Van Hollen was initially denied access to Abrego Garcia. But officials in El Salvador eventually relented, and arranged a meeting at the senator’s hotel. Abrego Garcia told Van Hollen about his experience at El Salvador’s notorious Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), a massive prison, and his traumatic isolation from the outside world. Abrego Garcia’s detention has pushed the United States to the brink of a constitutional showdown. The Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that the administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the US — an order that the White House has shown little intention of heeding. “This goes to the heart of protecting people’s rights and what bullies do and what authoritarian leaders do,” Van Hollen told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “And what Donald Trump is doing is beginning by picking on the most vulnerable and refusing to bring his case in the courts, and when the courts rule, ignoring them.” Van Hollen talked to Today, Explained about what he heard from Abrego Garcia, and why he believes this case has pushed the United States into a constitutional crisis. Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Make sure to listen to the whole thing. Why was it so important to you to go down to El Salvador to meet with this one man?I wanted to let him know, number one, that I was bringing greetings from his family who haven’t heard from him since he disappeared. He was locked away. No one was able to reach him — not his wife, not his mom, not his lawyers. In fact, until this moment, I’m the only one who’s communicated with him before or since. So I wanted to, number one, see if he was alive.But I also wanted him to know that his case was something that was meaningful to every American who cares about the Constitution. And I wanted to ask the government of El Salvador to stop being complicit with the Trump administration in this illegal scheme. So it was to defend the rights of this person because if we don’t defend the right of this individual, we do threaten rights for everybody who lives here.The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has allied himself with President Donald Trump, has called Abrego Garcia a terrorist, and said he would never return him. How hard did that make it for you to actually sit down with him?My view is this: The courts of the United States have said that he was illegally taken away. When I met with the vice president of El Salvador, I asked him if they had any evidence that he had committed any criminal acts. And his answer was, “No. We’ve got him in our jail” — and he was originally at CECOT, which is one of the most notorious prisons in Latin America — “we’ve got him there because the United States is paying us to do it.” That was his answer. And I said, “Do you really want to be part of this illegal scheme with Donald Trump in violation of constitutional rights in the United States?” His answer was, “We got to deal with them, they’re paying us and if the Trump administration tells us, we’ll let them go. But we’re being paid, we got a contract. And so we’re gonna keep them locked up.”And so how did you end up getting to meet him?Well, I asked the vice president. He said no. I said, “If I come back next week, can I meet with him?” No. “Well, maybe I could get him on the phone?” No. So the next day, I decided not to give up. I drove towards CECOT prison, about three kilometers out, and I was waved to the side of the road by soldiers. I said, “Why are you stopping me?” They said, “You can’t go to see Abrego Garcia.” And I said, “Do you know how he’s doing?” They said no. And I say, “Why can’t I go?” They said, “We have orders.” So then we had some events in El Salvador with local press. And they did relent. And I think that even Bukele recognized that it was a bad look for El Salvador to not allow anybody to meet or talk with this guy, to even know whether he was alive. As I was sort of getting ready to go to the airport on the way home, we got a call and I ended up meeting with him. What did he tell you? First and foremost, he told me he missed his family and I told him how much his family missed him. And he said that thinking of them is what gave him strength every day. He said he had had a traumatic experience — that was his word, “traumatic.” He said he tried to make a phone call from the Baltimore Detention Center. They wouldn’t let him do it. And then of course he landed in this really awful CECOT prison. So he was traumatized. He said he hurt, he felt he was in pain, and said he hadn’t committed any crimes. And he asked me to pass his message of love back to his family. I informed him — because he’d been in a total news blackout — his case was now representative of the fight for constitutional rights and due process for everybody who lives in America, and that a lot of people were working to get him out of prison in accordance with the Supreme Court order to facilitate his return.What was the prison like?The first place he went was CECOT and he said he was not in fear for safety from the prisoners in his cell. He said, if I recall right, there were about 25 prisoners in his cell. He said he was scared and traumatized by other prisoners in other cells, and these cells are packed. I mean, they sometimes have more than 100 prisoners, and he says that they would call out to him and taunt him and that did make him feel very much at risk. He told me that he’d been moved to this other prison and detention center in Santa Ana. He told me he’d been there about eight days. This is when I met with them, which were sort of better conditions, but still, and I wanna stress this, still no ability to communicate with anybody in the outside world and to learn anything about what’s happening. That’s a violation of international law to deny somebody the ability to talk to their lawyer or family. So that’s where he is sitting as we speak.When you guys met up, there were some photos released and it looks like you had margarita glasses or something in front of you. Where did that come from? Where exactly was this meeting?They brought him to my hotel. At first they wanted to stage the meeting by the pool, to create this impression, to deceive people, thinking that he was in some tropical paradise when he’d been in one of the worst prisons in El Salvador.During our conversation, the government folks from Bukele instructed the waiters to set two taller-looking glasses on our table, making it look like margaritas. I have no idea what’s in them because neither of us touched them, but they had a little cherry on top and they had either salt or sugar on the rim. I think it shows the lengths that Bukele and Trump will go to deceive the American people about what’s happening, right? Here’s a guy, illegally abducted, ends up in the worst prison — and they want to create this impression that, “Hey, he’s just in paradise.” Republicans are leaning into this message that Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang. What do you make of that?You know, my point on all of this, Sean, is that they should bring those facts before the court and Trump should not just be spending all his time on social media. Put up or shut up in federal court. And I wanna quote the federal judge in this case: She said that the Trump administration had presented, quote, “no evidence linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or to any terrorist activity.” Period. Put up or shut up in court. I’m not vouching for the man. I’m standing up for his rights because all of our rights are at risk if we don’t.You’re not only saying we have to focus on constitutional rights. You’re saying this situation with Abrego Garcia is a constitutional crisis. You say constitutional crisis, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom says distraction. How do we reconcile those two assessments of this very serious situation?This is a fundamental constitutional issue, and it is a crisis because the Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration has to help facilitate his return to the United States. I also do just want to briefly quote what the Fourth Circuit said. This is a three-judge panel, and the chief judge who wrote it is a guy called Judge Wilkinson — he was appointed by Reagan. Here’s what he says: “It is difficult in some cases to get to the heart of the matter. But in this case, it’s not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.” So this is not a distraction. This goes to the heart of protecting people’s rights and what bullies do and what authoritarian leaders do. And what Donald Trump is doing is beginning by picking on the most vulnerable and refusing to bring his case in the courts, and when the courts rule, ignoring them. So this is a very important moment to protect everyone’s constitutional rights. It’s not about one person. It’s about all of us.See More:

We’re only midway through spring, yet searing summer temperatures have already started baking some parts of the world. Cities like Phoenix and Palm Springs, California, closed in on triple digits in March; Phoenix usually doesn’t reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit until May. This month, hundreds of millions of people across India and Pakistan experienced temperatures as high as 120 degrees Fahrenheit, triggering power outages and protests. The heat has also created conditions for thousands of wildfires in the region. It’s part of a pattern. Last year, heat waves coursed through Africa and Europe during the spring, setting new temperature records in more than a dozen countries. Mexico experienced a series of heat waves beginning in April. A heatwave in Texas in May sent power demand to a record high for the month. Heat waves are a distinct weather phenomenon where high temperatures linger for days at a time. As global average temperatures climb higher, the frequency and duration of periods of extreme heat are also growing, which is already hurting people around the world. But the human impacts of heat waves also vary depending on their timing. Climate change is leading to shorter winters, earlier springs, and earlier arrivals of extreme temperatures. Heat waves that occur early in the warm season, well before summer sets in, tend to cause greater harm to health.“These early events can cause more heat-related illnesses and fatalities than later heat waves in June or July, even if temperatures are similar,” Davide Faranda, a climate scientist at the French National Center for Scientific Research studying extreme weather, wrote in an email. There are several factors behind this. One is acclimatization. When winter ends, people are less used to high temperatures at a physiological level. When ambient temperatures are higher than body temperatures, individuals absorb more heat, which can lead to heart and lung problems, first in vulnerable people — the very young, the very old, and those with underlying health concerns — then in everyone. In regions like South Asia, spring is when millions of farmers head outdoors to plant crops, where they can face dangerous temperatures while doing intense physical labor. Gradual exposure to heat over time can help people better withstand it, but without this familiarity, an early season heat wave can pack an unexpectedly strong punch. Heat has a cumulative and compounding effect on the body too when it doesn’t let up.Humans acclimatize through infrastructure and behavior as well. Drinking water helps limit the dangers of high temperatures, but someone might not be in the habit of staying adequately hydrated in the spring. A person may not recognize that heavy sweating, light headedness, and severe fatigue are symptoms of heat illness. Many buildings may still be set to heat rather than cooling when the first heat wave of the year sets in. The low availability of air conditioning in the Pacific Northwest contributed to the death toll of a severe heat wave in 2021 that killed at least 868 people. That’s not to say that mid- or late summer heat waves aren’t dangerous, too. Heat has a cumulative and compounding effect on the body too when it doesn’t let up. Spells of high temperatures that last weeks and persist long after the sun has set have proven deadly.To reduce the dangers of springtime heat, it’s important to pay attention to weather forecasts and prepare accordingly. That means avoiding direct sunlight, proactively staying hydrated, and taking breaks during high temperatures. Ease into the warm weather. It’s also essential to recognize the warning signs of heat-related complications and not to try to push past your limits.South Asia is a window into the future of extreme heatThe region spanning Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iran, and Pakistan is home to more than a quarter of the world’s population. It’s also where scientists can see some of the strongest effects of human activity on temperature. “South Asia is one of the regions where the climate change signal in heat waves is particularly strong,” Faranda said.Along with an international team of researchers, Faranda analyzed the factors behind the recent heat wave across India and Pakistan. The group found that events like the severe heat wave in April 2025 are 4 degrees Celsius warmer over the past three decades than they were in the period between 1950 and 1986. The team controlled for other factors that influence temperatures like urban air pollution and changes in land use. The recent scorching temperatures also took place at a time when the El Niño-Southern Oscillation, a major driver of global weather variability, was in its neutral phase. In its warm phase, it tends to drive up global temperatures, so seeing this heat wave without this additional boost adds to the evidence that climate change is a major contributor. Humidity is another important driver of heat risk. It can get pretty muggy in South Asia. One of the ways scientists track this is with the wet-bulb globe temperature, a metric that accounts for heat, humidity, and sunlight exposure. For a healthy, young person, the upper survival limit for wet-bulb globe temperature is 95 degrees Fahrenheit. Cities in Iran, India, and Pakistan now regularly cross that threshold. Precipitation also appears to be shifting in the region, with more spells of severe rainfall followed by drought. And as the planet continues to heat up, these trends will continue. “Future projections indicate that heat waves in South Asia are likely to start earlier in the year, last longer, and reach even higher peak temperatures,” Faranda said. While many factors are unique about South Asia, other regions of the world are on the same course. The same pattern of more frequent heat waves earlier in the season is also playing out in countries like Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam, leading to similar problems.“These impacts include increased mortality rate, and heat-related illnesses, disruption to local food supply and agriculture, and potential overload of power grids due to increased electricity demands,” Gianmarco Mengaldo, a professor at the National University of Singapore who co-authored the India-Pakistan heat wave analysis. The US is also facing an increase in the number of heat waves, with warming starting earlier in the year. The US is seeing an increase in the frequency, duration, and timing of extreme heat. Environmental Protection AgencyIt’s leading to more complications from extreme heat as well as leading to longer, more intense pollen allergy seasons. Communities can take steps to mitigate the impacts of heat with design elements like green spaces and cool roofs that reflect sunlight rather than absorbing it. It’s also critical to limit greenhouse gas emissions to slow the warming of the planet as a whole.See More:

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. To submit a question, email Sigal at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form. Either way, if we choose your question, it’ll be anonymized. Here’s this week’s question, condensed and edited for clarity:I work for the federal government in a policy role. I took the job before President Trump won the election and I didn’t expect that he would triumph. Since he’s come into power, I’ve been wrestling with the question of whether to quit or stay. I strongly disagree with this administration’s politics and don’t want to be complicit in them. But I think I’m doing good and valuable work in my particular lane — work that could improve things for people in this country and abroad. How do you decide whether to participate in an admin you disagree with or whether to walk away in protest?Dear Concerned About Complicity,Why did you choose this career to begin with? It sounds like it was because you — like lots of other people who go into government — sincerely care about doing good. So let’s use that as our lodestar here.If your goal is to do good, the most obvious potential reason to stay in your job is that you believe it still gives you a unique opportunity to do just that. Even though you disagree with this administration’s politics, it’s possible that you can still do more good by staying put than you could do by leaving government and avoiding the taint of politics.There are a number of ways that could be true. One is if your particular role is relatively removed from the administration’s more controversial moves: if you work for the Environmental Protection Agency, say, not the Justice Department. Another is if you believe you can create positive impact from within — for example, by making the case for better policies at critical moments — in a way that wouldn’t happen if you resigned and got replaced. And then there’s the simple fact that, well, this is how the system of liberal democracy works. When a president is democratically elected, it’s the job of government employees to heed the president’s decisions, and not just the ones they personally agree with. There are really good reasons to want to uphold that system. One of liberal democracy’s great defenders, the British philosopher Isaiah Berlin, argued in his essay “Two Concepts of Liberty” that human values are inherently diverse, sometimes incompatible, and impossible to rank on a single scale. That means no single political arrangement can satisfy all legitimate human values simultaneously. So, he reasoned, we need to embrace political pluralism and respect competing perspectives. However.All of the above assumes that staying in your job would allow you to achieve the overarching goal. Remember, that goal is to do good. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column?Feel free to email me at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here!So, what if you find that you cannot actually create any positive impact from within? What if your arguments are suppressed at every turn? What if there’s so much intimidation that it leaves you both powerless and traumatized? What if you are pressured to do harm?For that matter, what if your boss tells you to carry out a policy that’s actually illegal? What if the administration, despite being elected through the machinery of democracy, goes on to hack away at democracy itself — the system you’re committed to upholding?Well, then, Hannah Arendt might have a thing or two to say to you. Arendt, a German-Jewish philosopher known for her post-Holocaust theorizing on the banality of evil, published a short essay in 1964 called “Personal Responsibility Under Dictatorship.” Writing from firsthand experience (she lived in Germany during the rise of Nazism until fleeing in 1933), she notes that a lot of Germans who collaborated with the Nazis later said they’d “stayed on the job in order to prevent worse things from happening; only those who remained inside had a chance to mitigate things and to help at least some people … whereas those who did nothing shirked all responsibilities and thought only of themselves, of the salvation of their precious souls.”Arendt is not impressed by this argument. She cautions against people’s tendency to convince themselves that, if they continue to serve power, they’ll be doing more good on net — or choosing the lesser of two evils:Politically, the weakness of the argument has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil … Moreover, if we look at the techniques of totalitarian government, it is obvious that the argument of “the lesser evil” — far from being raised only from the outside by those who do not belong to the ruling elite — is one of the mechanisms built into the machinery of terror and criminality. Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such. Arendt’s point is that if you choose the “acceptance of lesser evils” route, you’re playing a game in which the deck is stacked against you. You’re incentivized to stay, because quitting can be socially, professionally, or financially ruinous, and bit by bit — like the frog in the boiling pot — you can become acclimated to worse and worse policies. “The extermination of Jews,” Arendt writes, “was preceded by a very gradual sequence of anti-Jewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse — until a stage was reached where nothing worse could possibly have happened.” So, if you’re going to play this game, you need a way to make sure that you won’t fall into the traps. You might think the best way to do this is to get very clear on your own personal rules — to establish in advance, ideally in writing, at what point you’ll just say, “I’m out.” There’s some merit to that idea, because the mind has a way of shifting the goalposts as things progress, saying, “But that’s not really so bad, right? I’ll wait just a little bit more…” The law can be a useful heuristic device here — you want to keep following it, even if people start pressuring you to do something illegal. Moral rules can also be a powerful heuristic device — think “thou shalt not kill,” for starters. But Arendt emphasizes that legality and morality can fall short in extreme political situations. That’s because the illegal can become legalized overnight. The whole state machinery can start enforcing what were previously considered crimes, and moral norms can be changed along with them. The public can be swayed into accepting the new reality.So how do you safeguard your integrity? Arendt observes that what was special about those who refused to collaborate with the Nazis wasn’t that classic rules about right and wrong were firmly established in their conscience, but that their conscience didn’t work by automatically applying any pre-learned rules. She writes:Much more reliable will be the doubters and skeptics, not because skepticism is good or doubting wholesome, but because they are used to examine things and to make up their own minds. In other words, it’s about daring to think and judge for yourself at every turn. It’s about continuing to ask yourself tough questions. Arendt had a great hack for achieving this: She surrounded herself with people she disagreed with, both in the legendary cocktail-fueled salons she hosted and in her one-on-one friendships. She and her friends challenged and sharpened each other’s thoughts through intellectual debate. Though it was sometimes painful, Arendt insisted that this type of friendship has a radical political power: It teaches you the all-important skill of thinking. So, over the coming weeks, keep your eyes trained on what the administration does. Each week, return to your lodestar and ask yourself anew: What would my challengers say to me now? Are there concrete indications that I’m succeeding in my overarching goal? Am I still doing good here? Bonus: What I’m readingOver the past week, I’ve become completely obsessed with the novel Babel by R.F. Kuang. It imagines an alternative history where Oxford scholars use the power of translation to expand the British empire — and their students launch an anti-colonialist secret society to bring the empire down. It raises questions about complicity in an unusually thoughtful and totally un-put-down-able way. In Foreign Affairs, two democracy experts make this prediction: “US democracy will likely break down during the second Trump administration, in the sense that it will cease to meet standard criteria for liberal democracy,” they write. “What lies ahead is not fascist or single-party dictatorship but competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition.”The biologist Michael Levin is a proponent of panpsychism, the idea that everything — from plants to cells to atoms — has consciousness. He’s got a new piece out in Noema Magazine with this fantastic headline: “Living Things Are Not Machines (Also, They Totally Are).” He writes that almost everyone thinks there’s some secret sauce that separates life from mere machines, but when pressed, nobody can articulate what it is. What if there’s actually no clear, bright line?This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

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: President Donald Trump and his administration have spent much of the past two days signaling a desire to deescalate the trade war with China that they started. But every time investors get excited a breakthrough might be imminent, Trump officials have thrown some cold water on their enthusiasm — likely because they’re afraid of looking like they’re climbing down.What did they say, exactly? On Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told investors at a closed-door event that the current status quo of 145 percent tariffs on China is “unsustainable.” He added: “I would posit that over the very near future, there will be a deescalation.”Later that day, Trump signaled he agreed. “145 percent is very high and it won’t be that high,” he told reporters, adding: “It’ll come down substantially. But it won’t be zero.” Then, today, the Wall Street Journal reported that Trump’s team “is considering” slashing his China tariff levels by more than half “in a bid to deescalate tensions with Beijing” — though their sources stressed that Trump had not yet made a final decision.Stocks initially soared this morning, but gave back some of their gains after Bessent and other White House aides cautioned that no change in the tariffs was imminent, and that Trump was not making a “unilateral” offer.So what’s going on here? Trump started this trade war impulsively, slapping ridiculously large tariffs on China because they’d dared to retaliate against new tariffs he’d placed on them. He did this without any larger strategic planning or advance notice for businesses — and it’s becoming undeniable that without change, the US economy is going to start facing very serious problems quite soon.Chinese leaders have so far refused to give into Trump’s threats, deeming them disrespectful bullying. Per the Wall Street Journal’s sources, Trump’s comments “were viewed as a sign of him folding” in China’s policymaking circles. The hashtag “Trump chickened out” trended on the Chinese social media platform Weibo.Now, facing imminent economic disaster, Trump appears to be looking for a way to climb down, without looking too much like he’s climbing down. Will he actually go through with it? We don’t yet know, but no rush — it’s only the global economy hanging on his decision.And with that, it’s time to log off…A big change is coming to the Oscars — voters will now be required to actually watch all the films that have been nominated, if they want to vote in a category. Imagine that! Variety has details on exactly how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences plans to enforce this new requirement — and what the loophole might be.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

Twenty years ago, few people would have been able to imagine the energy landscape of today. In 2005, US oil production, after a long decline, had fallen to its lowest levels in decades, and few experts thought that would change. The US invasion of Iraq had sent gasoline prices skyward. Solar and wind power provided a tiny fraction of overall electricity, showing moderate growth every year. With domestic natural gas running short, coastal states were preparing to build import terminals to bring gas from abroad. Americans were beginning to rethink their love of giant cars as the 7,000-pound Ford Excursion SUV entered its final year of production. In short, the US was preparing for a world with a rising demand for ever scarcer, more expensive fossil fuels, most of which would have to come from abroad. That was then. Today, the energy picture couldn’t be more different. In the mid-2000s, the fracking revolution took off, making the US the largest oil and natural gas producer in the world. But clean energy began surging as well. Congress passed the Energy Policy Act of 2005, which created new incentives to deploy wind and solar power. Batteries became better and cheaper. Just about every carmaker now has an electric vehicle for sale. These weren’t just the product of steady advances but breakthroughs — new inventions, policies, and expanding economies of scale that aligned prices and performance to push energy technologies to unexpected heights. So what will come next? That’s the challenge for those charged with building tomorrow’s energy infrastructure. And right now, the world is especially uncertain about what’s to come, with overall energy demand experiencing major growth for the first time in decades, in part due to power-hungry data centers behind AI. The policy chaos from the Trump administration and looming threats of tariffs are making it even harder for the global energy sector to invest and build for the future.If you’re running a utility, building a factory, or designing power transmission routes, how do you even begin to plan? To think through this conundrum, I spoke to Erin Baker. She is a professor of engineering and the faculty director of the Energy Transition Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She has studied technology and policy changes in the energy sector for decades, with an eye toward how to make big decisions under uncertain circumstances. I asked her about whether there are any other big step changes on the horizon for technologies that can help us contain climate change, and what we can do to stack the deck in their favor. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. Can you define “breakthrough” or explain how it’s different from an incremental advance? A lot of really important innovation has been incremental. We’ve had amazing “breakthroughs” in a way with batteries, with wind energy, but it has happened over time. An example of a kind of a breakthrough was fracking, because that was a revolution, but for a long time, everybody ignored the importance of all the various technologies horizontal drilling, shale fracture fluid, subsurface mapping] developing in the background, or didn’t think it was going to happen. That one was a big step change when the price, performance, and shale gas field discoveries converged. Whereas with solar, it just kept getting cheaper consistently faster than we expected. One way you can define “breakthrough” is you can look at what everyone’s expecting and see when you do better than that. So breakthroughs are kind of surprises. So perhaps it’s better to think of a breakthrough not necessarily as an invention, but rather a point at which a technology becomes viable?Right. Then can you put the recent clean tech advances we’ve seen into context? Have we seen anything like this before? I think that we’ve always had a lot of technological change. I don’t think it’s just around clean energy. If there is some kind of incentive, then energy developers will be very clever at finding solutions. As we realize that renewable energy has a lot of benefits to it, the more we focused on it, the more we were like, “Whoa, this is 10 times better than anybody thought it was going to be.” With clean energy, a big part of the rationale is its environmental and climate benefits, rather than simply profit. There’s sort of a moral motivation baked in. Does that motivation matter? For many technologies, there are always true believers. Most people who get really excited about an invention are not just trying to make a profit. I think they’re almost always really into the technology itself. So with renewable energy, people have been excited for a very, very long time. That excitement tided people over for many years when those sources weren’t all that profitable. Solar took a long time for it to become great. The reason people focused on it was because of their vision that this has such potential for energy and the environment. So I think that the moral dimension does play a role.With a trade war kicking off, a lot of the raw materials and finished products in clean energy are likely to get more expensive. Is there a chance of backsliding in clean energy progress? I don’t think we’re going to lose the technology advances. [Development] can slow down. We saw that for offshore wind, with the COVID-induced inflation and higher interest rates slowing the industry down. We’re not losing any benefits of the technology though, and in fact it will probably induce new technological change. To me those kinds of things are temporary. Trade wars and stuff like that, they’re bad. They will slow things down, but they won’t stop innovation.There’s also competition against clean energy. You talked about fracking and how that was an unexpected breakthrough. I remember in the 1990s people were talking about peak oil, and then that discussion went away because we just kept finding more oil and more exploitable resources. It seems like those same price and performance pressures on clean tech to improve also apply on the fossil side, and there’s still a ton of money and innovation there.Are there any breakthroughs in fossil energy that could counteract progress in clean tech?That is a good point. Yeah, that peak oil thing used to drive me crazy. When it was a big thing, what I kept trying to explain to people that the industry will just innovate. The higher the price of oil gets, the more we’re going to figure out how to get oil out of the ground. There could be more innovations in fossil fuels, but where we are in the US, climate change is a very real problem and it’s hitting people today. It’s not going away. I think that the majority of focus on innovation is going to be things that can help us deal with climate change while living high-quality lives. Being at a university, I see that the young bright students are not dying to get into fossil fuels. Most of them want to build a world that’s going to be liveable for them, for their children. That gets back to what you were saying: Does it matter what the underlying reason is for innovating? And I guess when I think of it that way, it does matter. Young people want to make a better world. And so they are excited to go into clean energy, not into dirty energy.How do we start planning for another step change in clean energy? How do we prepare for stuff that we haven’t invented yet?Investing in science and engineering is obviously a good idea if we want to have more kinds of scientific breakthroughs. But yeah, given that we don’t know what the technology of tomorrow is going to look like, we really want to focus on flexibility and adaptability in the near term. Something that I think is important but not always very sexy or appealing is to streamline the grid interconnection process. Every time a new energy project wants to connect to the power grid they have to get into this interconnection queue. The grid operators have to do a study and see how it’s going to affect the rest of the grid. That process is really slow and inefficient; it can take years and years for things to get on the grid. Speeding that up is something that’s going to be useful broadly. You don’t need to predict if it’s going to be enhanced geothermal or if it’s going to be new versions of solar that will win out to get that queue working better. Similarly, we need to build new transmission where and when it’s needed. It would be independent of where we end up on the energy supply side. Some of these battery technologies are facilitating distributed resources like rooftop solar and microgrids. Thinking about just how to integrate them on the main power grid would be useful. What do you see as the government’s role in facilitating this?Certainly investing in science and engineering. A lot of it is also setting goals for specific technologies. It’s important because it coordinates the supply chain. That’s something that state or federal governments could do if they really have a vision. It doesn’t even cost very much money. A lot of it is reviewing and streamlining regulatory processes to make sure that regulation is doing what it should do. What about things like investing in companies or offering financing to startups? One thing that I think is really interesting is the idea of green bonds so that you can borrow money at a lower interest rate when what you’re doing is good for the environment. I don’t think that involves the government exactly picking companies; it just means you’re making this money available if you follow certain guidelines. Permitting risk is a kind of a bureaucratic risk, and the government could reduce that by understanding if there’s going to be a huge public pushback in building a certain area rather than every developer going out to do all their own individual work. One example is offshore wind in Europe. There, the state does a lot of work before the developers get there in understanding the specific sites. By the time they allocate the regions to build, they’ve done a lot of the work that takes a lot of the risk out of it, and then they put it up for bids to private companies. Mechanisms like that can be really useful.For energy project developers, how do you decide whether to use what you can get off the shelf now versus waiting a few years, maybe another decade, for something better?A friend of mine many years ago did some research on that, and basically she found that if things are improving at a pretty fast rate, it’s almost always worth it to go ahead and invest in what you have now because you’re going to get a lot of value out of it. Yes, it’s possible that 10 years from now, it’ll be something even better, but you’re already getting a lot of value from what you’re doing.I don’t see many developers waiting around for a better technology. I think we have a lot of good options.See More:

History has been disappearing from government websites. First, it was Stonewall. The word “transgender” was removed from the National Park Service page commemorating the 1969 Stonewall Uprising, at which trans activists Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera played a central role. The acronym LGBTQ was also changed to just “LGB.” Then, Harriet Tubman was erased from a page about the Underground Railroad, and the language changed to highlight “Black/white cooperation.” A page about Jackie Robinson’s Army service was taken down from the Pentagon’s website. (Both pages were later restored after public criticism.) A Washington Post investigation also found that at least half a dozen pages referencing the Little Rock Nine, the Black students who integrated an Arkansas high school in the 1950s, previously said the students had “opened doors” for those seeking “equality and education.” Now, the pages say the students were just seeking “education.” The edits come amid the Trump administration’s push to end DEI and “restore truth and sanity” to American history, an effort causing alarm among historians like Yale professor David W. Blight. In an interview with Noel King on Today, Explained, Blight says the changes amount to a brazen attempt to rewrite our past — but that America is no stranger to revisionist history. The country has rewritten and re-saved and re-pushed its narrative of events so many times that it might as well look like the filename of a high schooler’s final project. 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, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.Reporters will often say, “Donald Trump is unprecedented. The things that he does are unprecedented.” But I imagine you would tell me that the United States has tried to rewrite its own history, at certain points. Many times, yes. Give me some examples of the times we’ve tried to do this. During World War II, the United States created a massive propaganda machine called the Office of War Information. That’s what governments do during wartime. That organization did indeed engage in a lot of propaganda, selling stories to keep Americans patriotic. Moving ahead from that to McCarthyism: Anti-communism was a very deep phenomenon in America — and not without some reason in the ’30s and ’40s. But McCarthyism caused a wave of attempts of trying to control what writers wrote, what historians could teach, who could teach anything. Let’s take the Civil War. In 1865 to 1870, there was an organization in the South called the Southern Historical Society. That was originally made up mostly of former Confederate officers who were determined to try to control the story of what the war had been about, what they had actually fought for, what their crusade meant, what the Confederacy actually was.What was the story they were trying to sell? They told a story that we’ve come to know as the “Confederate Lost Cause.” Namely, they were arguing early on that they did not really lose the war on the battlefield, they only lost to superior numbers and resources. They said they lost only to “the leviathan of northern industrialization.” There’s some truth in that, but that’s not the full explanation. They also argued that the war was not really about slavery. It was really about state sovereignty and states’ rights. It was really about resisting the federal interference with their lives and their civilization and their morays and folkways…Can I jump in and tell you something?Sure. I’m from central New York. I went to public school. That was what I learned. Wow. Why did I learn something that wasn’t true in public school? Because over time, in culture, schooling, politics, and rituals from the 1870s and ’80s well on into the 20th century — and still surviving in a textbook you were learning from in the 1990s, I am sorry to hear — was this idea that the United States divided had this all-out horrific war. But it had to put itself back together again. How do you put back together something so horrifically divided? You’re going to have to find mutuality. You’re going to have to find some kind of unified narrative. Well, one of the unified narratives they did develop in the 19th century — and there’s reality to this — is that you unify around the valor of soldiers. But if we admire valor without ever looking at the cause for which they fought, it’s of course limited. “Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power.”Now, the typical and powerful belief was that everybody in that war fought for the cause they believed in. And if you fought for the cause you believed in with great valor, you fought for the right [reasons]. Everybody was equal in valor. The causes had to be muted, put aside. Well, you know, that’s a part of human relations as well: How do you keep a family together? Well, there’s some things you don’t talk about.But for nations and whole peoples and cultures, the danger in this is that the stories you take on, the stories that you develop that define the identity of your nation — the identity of your past and now your future — is going to leave somebody out. In fact, it may end up allowing you to reconcile on the backs of those who most suffered from the conflict you are trying to reconcile. Obviously, in America, that meant Black Americans. It meant their civil and political rights, which were created and then slowly but surely abandoned and then crushed in the Jim Crow system of the South. Now, the point of all of this is that the Confederate Lost Cause, which said the South fought for noble ends, they fought for their homes, they fought for their sovereignty, they fought for their integrity. … It eventually becomes, though, not a story of loss at all. It becomes, by the 1890s and into the 20th century, a victory narrative. This was an age of a lot of sentimental literature. Americans came to love stories of the Old South. Of course, it’s there in Gone With the Wind, still, maybe the most famous movie ever made. So the Lost Cause was both a political movement and it was a literary movement. But it was at its core a racial ideology, and it lasted a very long time. Let’s compare to what we’re seeing today. What you’re talking about with these popular books and Gone With the Wind, that seems to me more subtle than the president saying, “You delete that information about Jackie Robinson’s military service from the website.” Will what Trump is doing succeed because it is so unsubtle? That’s a very good question and my instinctive answer — and it’s partly my wishful answer — is that no he won’t. It is not subtle, you’re right: They’re wiping out websites. They are explicitly saying, “Professional history, whether it’s in our greatest museums or our greatest university, has been teaching us all the wrong ways. They’ve been dividing us.” This is the word they love to use: The history we write has been divisive, divisive, divisive. Well, no, it’s not. It’s simply informative. Sometimes it gets people riled up and sometimes it gets them arguing and sometimes fighting. But what the Trumpists are doing is telling us that they know better — policy people at the Heritage Foundation or pseudo-historians who think that studying all this stuff about race, gender, all the ethnicities that make us up, all this pluralism, is just taking away from “American greatness.” They use that term a lot: “We’re no longer teaching our youth about American greatness.” Yes we are! We’re teaching our youth that our greatness is in the pluralism. Our greatness is in the amazing strivings and triumphs of all kinds of people in the past who challenged power. What will you know about World War I if you try to find nothing but greatness? What will you know about the history of imperialism and expansion if all you wanna know is about greatness? What will you actually know about Native American history if all you look for is greatness? It defies the intelligence of anyone with an education, and a whole lot of people who don’t have a lot of formal education. I’m not very optimistic right now about what’s going on, but I do have a certain faith that people just aren’t going to buy this.See More:

If anything is safe from the economic chaos caused by President Donald Trump’s tariffs, it’s probably gold — or at least that’s what investors seem to think.The price of gold has increased rapidly in the months since Trump took office, surging particularly since his March 2 announcement of a baseline 10 percent tariff on all US imports. This week, it briefly climbed to a record high of more than $3,500 per ounce during day trading, before closing slightly lower than that.The uncertainty and projected losses caused by those tariffs have sent the stock market spiraling downward, with the S&P 500 falling more than 8 percent in the last month. The tariffs have also scrambled the markets for other traditionally safe investments linked to the US, like Treasury bonds and the US dollar.US Treasury bonds have seen a major selloff in recent weeks, with yields climbing to alarmingly high levels. (High yields are typically a sign that investors are losing confidence in the US economy.) They spiked again after Trump called Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell a “major loser” in a Truth Social post on Monday. The president has been threatening to fire Powell if he does not lower interest rates, something Powell’s Federal Reserve can’t do without risking higher inflation. Investors who once stocked up on cash are rethinking that as well. The value of the US dollar hit a three-year low on Monday after Trump’s Truth Social post about Powell, as international fears begin to mount that the president’s haphazard tariff policies could force banks to choose something other than the dollar as the world’s global reserve currency. (Since the post-World War II era, central banks around the world have stashed their financial reserves in US dollars, seeing it as a safe, dependable asset.)All of that has meant that investors are now flocking to gold, the value of which is not tied to the US economy, because it is a tangible, scarce resource that has value in and of itself. It has historically retained that value, even amid economic crises or periods of high inflation, making it more reliable than bonds, stocks, or dollars. And because the supply of gold is limited, increased demand has meant skyrocketing prices. The price did come down somewhat to under $3,400 on Tuesday afternoon after Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in a closed-door investor meeting that the US would have to de-escalate its trade war with China. But it’s still higher than it was even a few weeks ago.The price doesn’t seem likely to come down significantly further in the near future. Goldman Sachs projects that by the end of 2025, the price will increase to $3,700 or even higher if central banks worldwide purchase an average of 100 tons of gold per month. Central banks had already been on a gold-buying spree coming into 2025, buying more than 1,000 tons of gold annually in recent years, and that pace is expected to pick up in light of recent economic uncertainty. This isn’t the first time gold prices have seen a major spike. Throughout periods of economic turbulence in recent history, gold has been seen as a tangible safe haven investment that maintains its value. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic, the price of gold jumped from $1,575 in January 2020 to over $2,000 by that summer. Amid concerns about the stability of the European economy from 2010 to 2012, the price reached a new high of $1,825.The Great Recession saw the price rise from about $730 in October 2008 to $1,300 two years later.This time, we’ve seen an even starker increase. And unless Trump and Bessent articulate a drastic shift in their economic vision, gold seems unlikely to lose its luster anytime soon. See More:

In his free time, while working as a clerk at a local Australian railway, James Harrison saved millions of lives — with his blood.Harrison had particularly special plasma: It had a rare antibody that doctors used to make a medication for pregnant mothers with different blood types from their newborns. When this happens, it can lead to the mother’s immune system attacking the still-developing red blood cells of the fetus.But it’s not like the doctors drew blood one time, found this special antibody, and made a cure that they could end up reusing. Harrison had to keep donating his blood. Almost 1,200 times. He was terrified of needles, he had to travel an hour each way to the lab, and still, he kept donating over and over, every two weeks or so. For 64 consecutive years, until he died in his sleep in March, having saved almost 2.5 million babies in Australia.But the reason he had to do all this in the first place is because scientists still don’t really understand blood.Nicola Twilley, the host of Vox Media’s Gastropod podcast, wrote a piece for the New Yorker earlier this year about blood and the scientists trying to understand how it does what it does. On the latest episode of the Unexplainable podcast, she spoke with host Noam Hassenfeld about the quest for artificial blood on the latest. Listen to their conversation below, or in the feed of your favorite podcast app. This podcast is presented by Roomba. Roomba doesn’t have a say in our editorial decisions, but they make episodes like this possibleYou’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

On Tuesday, a pair of documentaries landed on Amazon Prime that put forth a rather bold claim: By simply making a few tweaks to how we farm, humanity can reverse climate change and all but eliminate a host of other problems stemming from our modern food system. The two films — Kiss the Ground, which first came out on Netflix in 2020, and its follow-up, Common Ground, which premiered on streaming this week — are the most high-profile documentaries advocating for a widespread shift to “regenerative agriculture.” This organic-adjacent approach to agriculture focuses on using a few farming methods to improve soil health, which has been degraded over the last century in large part due to the industrialization of agriculture, with its bevy of synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Deployed at scale, the films argue, regenerative agriculture would improve soil health so greatly that farmers around the globe could draw down massive amounts of climate-warming greenhouse gases from the atmosphere and store them in soil, largely solving the climate crisis.“By converting our farmland to regenerative agriculture, the soil could sequester all of the carbon dioxide that humanity emits each year,” actor Jason Momoa claims in Common Ground. “That would bring our carbon emissions to net zero. In other words, our planet’s soil could help stabilize our climate.” Regenerative agriculture, according to the films, could also boost biodiversity, enrich struggling farmers, clean up polluted waterways, and end the “human health crisis.” (It’s unclear which human health crisis they mean.)Common Ground director (left) poses with two of the documentary’s actor-narrators — Ian Somerhalder and Jason Momoa — at a Los Angeles screening in early 2024. Gregg DeGuire/Variety via Getty ImagesThis straightforward, all-encompassing plan to fix some of the world’s most wicked problems has been embraced by an eclectic set of US policymakers, A-list actors, celebrity doctors, and leading environmental organizations. (The films collectively also feature Rosario Dawson, Tom Brady, Laura Dern, and Donald Glover, among others.)When Kiss the Ground was released, its sweeping claims drew criticism as overly simplistic and scientifically dubious — a kind of “magical thinking,” as one environmental scientist put it in a review of Kiss the Ground in the journal Biogeochemistry. The films feature no critics or skeptics, only fervent supporters.Regenerative agriculture practices certainly have some environmental and social benefits. But the films engage in a kind of nostalgic utopianism, asserting that if it weren’t for greedy corporations and subservient lawmakers, we could go back to the old ways of farming, which would heal our broken relationship with nature and usher in a healthier future with a stable climate. In Kiss the Ground, actor-narrator Ian Somerhalder goes so far as to say that regenerative agriculture would “get the Earth back to the Garden of Eden that it once was.” Unfortunately, it’s not so simple. The benefits — and limits — of regenerative agricultureOur food and farming system is, no doubt, in need of significant reform. It’s America’s largest source of water pollution and animal suffering and accounts for more than 10 percent of our carbon footprint. Many farmers overapply synthetic fertilizer to their crops, and federal regulators have been captured by corporations that wield enormous power in politics. Many large farmers turn a handsome profit thanks to nonsensical subsidies while small and midsized operations struggle to stay afloat in US agriculture’s “get big or get out” model. Farmworkers are treated as invisible cogs in a machine that pumps out unhealthy food.The documentaries do a fine enough job cataloguing these problems, though at times they can be misleading and alarmist. For example, there’s no proof that the world has only 60 harvests remaining, as actor Woody Harrelson narrates in Kiss the Ground. Interview subjects, including supermodel Gisele Bündchen, repeatedly claim that healthier soils lead to healthier food, and thus healthier humans, though the science isn’t clear on how much soil health affects food’s nutrient content.So, what exactly is regenerative agriculture? There’s no universal definition, but it boils down to a few key practices and goals:Drastically reduce or eliminate synthetic chemicals: Modern farmers routinely douse crops in synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides. Significantly reducing or eliminating these chemicals can improve soil health, boost biodiversity, and reduce water pollution.Eliminate tillage: Most farmers till, or disturb, their soil to get rid of weeds and make the soil more porous, among other things. But tillage can also release carbon dioxide stored in the soil and harm overall soil health, so regenerative farmers swear against it.Plant cover crops: Regenerative farmers plant “cover crops,” like clover and rye, around fall harvest time, which improves soil health in a number of ways.Rotational grazing: “When cattle are left to their own devices on pasture, they overgraze — trampling on and eroding the soil, and destroying vegetation,” as I wrote last year. “But regenerative ranchers use rotational grazing…which entails periodically moving cattle between plots of land. This can help prevent overgrazing because vegetation is given time to regrow, resulting in healthier soil that [regenerative] advocates say can sequester large amounts of carbon.”All of these practices have proven ecological benefits, and US regulators would be wise to incentivize more farmers to take them up. But agriculture, like other environmentally sensitive industries, is rife with tradeoffs, which Kiss the Ground and Common Ground entirely ignore.For example, while chemical-laden agriculture has many drawbacks, it typically produces more food per acre, which means it requires less land. The same goes for conventionally raised cattle: grass-finished, regeneratively raised cattle require between two and two-and-a-half times more land than those finished on feedlots.A nationwide shift to regenerative agriculture would massively increase demand for land — a critical downside to this style of farming. Agriculture is already extremely land-intensive, using up some 40 percent of US land, and each acre that can be spared from farming is an acre that can remain as habitat for wildlife.Then there is the claim that healthier soil can draw down enormous amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it in farmland. Done on a large scale, the films say, regenerative agriculture could even draw down all the carbon dioxide humans emit each year. But this is highly improbable, as scientists don’t even have accurate and affordable tools to measure how much carbon regenerative farms can sequester. No-till farming likely doesn’t sequester much carbon, and if a farmer decides to eventually till that soil, a lot of the carbon they’d stored up would be released. The rate at which farmland can sequester carbon also diminishes over time. Ranchers at a regenerative cattle grazing training event in New Mexico. Mario Tama/Getty ImagesAnd while rotationally grazing cattle has the potential to sequester some of the enormous amounts of greenhouse gases emitted by cattle, it’s far from all of a beef cattle’s emissions, as one source in Kiss the Ground suggests. Beef, whether produced regeneratively or not, is still the world’s most carbon-intensive food.Meanwhile, the films fail to acknowledge the most effective approach to slashing greenhouse gas emissions from agriculture, which accounts for up to one-third of global emissions. According to a survey of more than 200 climate and agriculture experts, the best way to do that is to reduce meat and dairy production. (These same experts rated carbon sequestration as one of the least effective approaches.) Reducing meat and milk intake in rich countries like the US would also reduce land demand, water pollution, and animal suffering, and likely improve human health. Despite the undisputed benefits of regenerative agriculture, Kiss the Ground and Common Ground misleadingly promote it as one weird trick that farmers everywhere can deploy to heal the planet and humanity. It uses a cast of celebrities, advocate-experts, and farmers who employ simplistic arguments and visuals to avoid the nuanced and difficult tradeoffs of agricultural production. Yet the grandiose claims made in these films have managed to gain serious traction in environmental and agricultural policy circles, often crowding out more evidence-based solutions.You’ll find a decent analysis of what’s wrong with our food system, and plenty of hope on how to fix it, in these films. But when the solution to problems as complex as climate change, diet-related chronic disease, farmer debt, mass pollution, and biodiversity collapse is as simple as a few changes to how we farm, whoever’s promoting it is probably standing on shaky ground.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More: Future Perfect

Consider the transistor, the basic unit of computer processors. Transistors can be tiny, down to single-digit nanometers in size. Billions can fit on a computer chip. Though they have no moving parts, they devour electricity as they store and modify bits of information. “Ones and zeros are encoded as these high and low voltages,” said Timothy Sherwood, a computer science professor at the University of California Santa Barbara. “When you do any computation, what’s happening inside the microprocessor is that there’s some one that transitions to a zero, or a zero that transitions to one. Every time that happens, a little bit of energy is used.”This story was first featured in the Future Perfect newsletter.Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.When you add that up — across the billions of transistors on chips and then the billions of these chips in computers and server farms — they form a significant and growing share of humanity’s energy appetite.According to the International Energy Agency, computing and storing data accounts for somewhere between 1 and 1.5 percent of global electricity demand at the moment.With the growth of artificial intelligence and cryptocurrencies that rely on industrial-scale data centers, that share is poised to grow. For instance, a typical Google search uses about 0.3 watt-hours while a ChatGPT query consumes 2.9 watt-hours. In 2024, the amount of data center capacity under construction in the US jumped 70 percent compared to 2023. Some of the tech companies leaning into AI have seen their greenhouse gas emissions surge and are finding it harder to meet their own environmental goals.How much more electricity will this computation need in the years ahead, and will it put our climate change goals out of reach?AI is injecting chaos into energy demand forecastsThe IEA estimates that data center energy demand will double by 2030. McKinsey estimates somewhere between a tripling and a quintupling. As a result, major tech players are desperately trying to shore up their power supplies. Over the past year, they’ve been some of the largest purchasers of energy sources that produce few greenhouse gas emissions. Amazon is the largest corporate buyer of renewable energy in the world. Companies like Microsoft are even reviving old nuclear plants while also investing in the next generation of nuclear technology.But some of these companies aren’t picky about where their power is coming from. “What we need from you,” former Google CEO Eric Schmidt told the House Energy and Commerce committee earlier this month, is “energy in all forms, renewable, non-renewable, whatever. It needs to be there, and it needs to be there quickly.”Already, energy demand from data centers is extending a lifeline to old coal power plants and is creating a market for new natural gas plants. The IEA estimates that over the next five years, renewables will meet half of the additional electricity demand from data centers, followed by natural gas, coal, and nuclear power.However, a lot of these energy demand forecasts are projections based on current trends, and well, a lot of things are changing very quickly. “The first thing I’ll say is that there’s just a lot of uncertainty about how data center energy demand will grow,” said Jessika Trancik, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology studying the tech sector and energy. Here is some context to keep in mind: Remember that data centers are less than 2 percent of overall electricity demand now and even doubling, tripling, or quintupling would still keep their share in the single digits. A larger portion of global electricity demand growth is poised to come from developing countries industrializing and climbing up the income ladder. Energy use is also linked to the economy; in a recession, for example, power demand tends to fall. Climate change could play a role as well. One of the biggest drivers of electricity demand last year was simply that it was so hot out, leading more people to switch on air conditioners. So while AI is an important, growing energy user, it’s not the only thing altering the future of energy demand. We’re also in the Cambrian explosion era of crypto and AI companies, meaning there are a lot of different firms trying out a variety of approaches. All of this experimentation is spiking energy use in the near term, but not all of these approaches are going to make it. As these sectors mature and their players consolidate, that could drive down energy demand too. How to do more with lessThe good news is that computers are getting more efficient. AI and crypto harness graphical processing units, chips optimized for the kinds of calculations behind these technologies. GPUs have made massive performance leaps, particularly when it comes to the ability of AI to take in new information and generate conclusions. “In the past 10 years, our platform has become 100,000 times more energy efficient for the exact same inference workload,” said Joshua Parker, who leads corporate sustainability efforts at Nvidia, one of the largest GPU producers in the world. “In the past two years — one generation of our product — we’ve become 25 times more energy efficient.”Nvidia has now established a commanding lead in the AI race, making it one of the most valuable companies in history. However, as computer processors get more efficient, they cost less to run, which can lead people to use them more, offsetting some of the energy savings. “It’s easier to make the business case to deploy AI, which means that the footprint is growing, so it’s a real paradox,” Parker said. “Ultimately, that kind of exponential growth only continues if you actually reach zero incremental costs. There’s still costs to the energy and there’s still cost to the computation. As much as we’re driving towards efficiency, there will be a balance in the end because it’s not free.”Another factor to consider is that AI tools can have their own environmental benefits. Using AI to perform simulations can avoid some of the need for expensive, slow, energy-intensive real-world testing when designing aircraft, for example. Grid operators are using AI to optimize electricity distribution to integrate renewables, increase reliability, and reduce waste. AI has already helped design better batteries and better solar cells. Amid all this uncertainty about the future, there are still paths that could keep AI’s expansion aligned with efforts to limit climate change. Tech companies need to continue pulling on the efficiency lever. These sectors also have big opportunities to reduce carbon emissions in the supply chains for these devices, and in the infrastructure for data centers. Deploying vastly more clean energy is essential. We’ve already seen a number of countries grow their economies while cutting greenhouse gases. While AI is slowing some of that progress right now, it doesn’t have to worsen climate change over the long term, and it could accelerate efforts to keep it in check. But it won’t happen by chance, and will require deliberate action to get on track. “It’s easy to write the headline that says AI is going to break the grid, it’s going to lead to more emissions,” Parker said. “I’m personally very optimistic — I think this is credible optimism — that AI over time will be the best tool for sustainability the world has ever seen.”You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

There’s a bodega on the corner where I live in Brooklyn with a massive TikTok following and a thick cable almost always stretched out the front door and plugged into a Tesla. In a tiny parking lot around the corner, the local grocery store has a fast charger that looks like a mini gas pump. The parking garage down the hill has a line of public chargers.Brooklyn looks different than the rest of America, but this mix of solutions for fueling up our battery-powered cars highlights an increasingly obvious fact about the future. As we continue to transition to electric vehicles, the gas station of the future won’t just be those big pavilions on the roadside with 20-foot-tall signs bearing an oil company’s logo. You’ll probably be able to buy fossil fuels at gas stations for decades, but you’ll also be able to charge your EV very quickly. And those familiar fueling destinations won’t be the only place you can charge.The future of EV charging is already here. It’s everywhere and sometimes not where you’d expect it. There are already hundreds of thousands of chargers in people’s garages, in supermarket parking lots, in national parks, and yes, even in old-fashioned gas stations. In the near future, if you drive an EV, you won’t worry about finding a place to charge your car. You’ll get to choose between multiple experiences, based on your needs and desires, and you won’t even need to open an app or get out a credit card to charge up and get on your way.This forecast probably sounds a little bit fantastic in light of recent developments. The Trump administration suspended the rollout of the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) Formula Program, which was established by the 2021 Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and apportioned $5 billion for states to build public EV chargers. The goal was to ensure there were charging stations at least every 50 miles on certain corridors, especially those in rural or low-income areas. It’s unclear how long Trump’s NEVI halt will last. Democrats in Congress were quick to call the administration’s actions illegal, and some states were allowed to keep spending the program’s previously approved dollars to build chargers. The Trump administration has asked states to submit new plans for approval, although it’s not clear if or when they will be approved. Meanwhile, the funding freeze is being challenged in court. So for now, the future of that massive federally funded EV infrastructure project is in chaos. Several people in the EV charging industry told me that, with or without federal funds, progress in the charger space can’t be stopped. That should be good news to EV owners or potential EV owners who worry that they might end up stranded on the side of the road because they couldn’t find a charger before their battery dies — a condition commonly known as “range anxiety.”“Every single day that goes by, there’s more and more public charging infrastructure that goes in the ground, literally every single day,” Mike Battaglia, CEO of Blink Charging, told me. “So each day that goes by, there is less and less range anxiety.”There are currently over 210,000 EV charging stations in the United States, and that number was growing by about 1,000 per week towards the end of the Biden administration. (Those numbers still pale in comparison to the 1 million-plus gas pumps currently in operation.) The NEVI program aimed to get 500,000 public chargers online by 2030. Of course, exactly where those chargers are and how easy it is to use them matter a lot. The infrastructure buildout has historically focused on getting EV chargers built in affluent suburbs and along highways, leaving city centers and rural areas largely unserved. This inequality is worsening over time, according to a recent study led by the Department of Energy. That said, the vast majority of EV owners — 80 percent — have the ability to charge their vehicles at home, which complicates the question of how to build out America’s EV charging infrastructure.If you own an EV or are thinking about getting one, the main thing you need to know is that you’ll probably do most of your charging at home. The gas station of the future is effectively your garage or your driveway. The cost per mile of range will vary depending on your local utility rates, but it’s safe to say charging at home is cheaper than charging on the go and, for most people, much cheaper than buying gas. EV chargers fall into three categories: level 1, level 2, and level 3. A level 1 charger plugs into a regular 120-volt wall outlet and charges slowly, like two to five miles of range per hour. A level 2 charger requires a 240-volt outlet, like the kind a washer-dryer uses, and provides 20 to 30 miles of range per hour. On average, a one-vehicle household drives about 50 miles per day, so charging overnight with either a level 1 or level 2 charger is probably sufficient.“It’s way easier than actually going to a gas station,” said Ingrid Malmgren, senior policy director at Plug In America, an EV advocacy group. “People who charge it at home very rarely charge publicly, usually just on road trips.”When you do go on road trips, you’ll probably encounter level 3 chargers, also known as DC fast chargers. These beasts use higher voltages, usually 400 or 800 volts, to pump EV batteries from a 10 percent charge up to 90 percent in about half an hour. This is as close as it gets to the present-day gas station solution, where you can pull off the road, plug in your car, grab a sandwich, and then get on your way with plenty of charge. Fully charging an EV with a DC fast-charger should still be a fraction of the cost of filling a car with gasoline — although you might end up spending more in the convenience store while you wait.There are a couple of other variables you’ll encounter when venturing out into the world to charge an EV. First of all, not all EVs use the same kind of plug. The North American Charging Standard (NACS) plug, originally designed by Tesla, is quickly becoming, as the name suggests, the standard in North America as more and more carmakers adopt the style. Otherwise, most non-Teslas in the US will use Combined Charging System (CCS) plugs that can be made compatible with NACS charging stations thanks to an adapter. This standardization is simplifying the search for a compatible charging station. With NACS becoming the primary plug-in use, more and more drivers can use not only Tesla Superchargers but also growing networks of chargers made by companies like ChargePoint, Blink, Electrify America, and EV Connect. Even paying for a charge is getting streamlined thanks to software updates that are popularizing an international encrypted communication standard colloquially known as Plug and Charge. As the name implies, at stations with this feature, you simply plug in your EV, and the station recognizes your car and charges your payment option of choice. There’s no need to download an app or tap a credit card.It’s very likely you will have this fast charging experience at a place that also sells gas and diesel. Many fossil fuel companies see the writing on the wall and are investing in EV charging infrastructure for all your energy needs. Shell has its Shell Recharge Brand, BP has BP Pulse, Pilot and Flying J have GM Energy co-branded stations. This is just good business sense. If people are already used to going to the gas station, why not provide their fuel of choice when they switch to an EV? And this year, EVs will account for 10 percent of all new vehicles sold in the US this year, according to Cox Automotive. Things could get even more interesting as the EV market grows and the need to keep giant tanks of explosive fossil fuels underground fades away. Those big holes in the ground could be filled with battery storage, and those familiar pavilions that keep drivers dry as they fill up their vehicles could be covered in solar panels. This type of design could turn EV charging stations into their own little power plants, where solar energy fills up those batteries, which contribute to grid stability as EVs draw large amounts of power. Electrify America has already opened one hub with this concept in mind and has ambitious plans to deploy more than 150 onsite battery systems nationwide.As exciting as these futuristic gas stations sound, however, your best bet is almost certainly to find a way to charge your car at home and probably overnight. Then try to remember that you’re probably going to drive less than you thought the next day. Range anxiety is real, but it’s also irrational. “The mindset of ‘I need a vehicle that can do 400 miles and be recharged in 10 minutes.’ That has to change,” John Eichberger, executive director of the Transportation Energy Institute, told me. After all, most people don’t drive 400 miles in a week, much less a day. And once you start driving an EV, you’ll also start spotting charging stations everywhere. The parking garage down the hill, the local grocery store, the bodega on the corner — everywhere I turn in my Brooklyn neighborhood, there’s a place to plug in. Now if I only had an EV.See More:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.Less than a week after becoming vice president, JD Vance, only the second Catholic to hold the office, had a very public break with the leadership of the Roman Catholic Church in America. Without evidence, the second-in-command accused the US Conference of Catholic Bishops of settling “illegal immigrants” in order to access federal funds. Though largely used as fodder for internet “gotchas,” the scuffle pointed to a wider trend — one that could remake the country’s religious landscape and the fundamental way Americans think about how they believe and where they belong.Vance is not just a Catholic. He’s a very specific type of Catholic, part of a group of young white men who, over the past decade, have found their way (often online) into both increasingly conservative politics and traditional religion — primarily Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, rather than the Protestantism that has been a common cultural feature in America. (For the uninitiated, Eastern Orthodoxy, sometimes called “Greek Orthodox” or “Russian Orthodoxy,” is essentially the Eastern equivalent of the Catholic Church, though significant differences have arisen). One recent study from the Orthodox Studies Institute suggests that conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy has increased 24 percent since 2021. These recent converts tend to be under 40 and single, and the majority are men. There is not a similarly comprehensive study of Catholic conversions, but dioceses are reporting increases in the number of converts anywhere between 30 percent to 70 percent since 2020. The absolute number of converts isn’t large, but as Vance shows, they can be influential. These people are entering religious communities that have not had many converts in the United States and have historically been associated with specific immigrant ethnic groups, the Irish in the case of Catholicism and the Greeks in the case of Orthodoxy. In fact, American anti-Catholicism has historically been buoyed not only by the centuries-old prejudice of a Protestant society, but also by a bias against foreignness. And — in part because of this “foreignness” and the ways it has insulated these groups — these ethnic and religious communities have remained politically moderate, or, more accurately, largely defiant of the usual political categorizations. For example, the majority of American Catholics now vote Republican, but a majority also support abortion rights in all or nearly all cases. Similarly, only a slight minority of American Orthodox Christians are Democrats, but a majority support marriage equality and access to legal abortions.To understand this, consider that the conventional understanding of America’s contemporary religious and political landscape centers two other demographic groups for whom religion and politics are more neatly aligned. White evangelical Protestants are reliably conservative across a broad range of issues, both social and economic, and loyally Republican. Meanwhile, white secular atheists/agnostics are reliably progressive and loyally Democrats. This alignment is (at least in part) because they are both the descendants (ideologically and in some cases quite literally) of America’s English, Dutch, and German Protestant founding stock. These traditions are about believing correctly more than they are about belonging. And, in fact, fundamentally committed to separating out the elect from the community. On the other hand, traditionally Catholic and Orthodox communities represent different strands of American history, histories that sideline political identity in the name of big-tent community belonging. Catholicism and Orthodoxy are simply more embedded in their cultural contexts — part and parcel with an ethnic identity — and less ideologically driven than the Enlightenment era-born faith traditions of the US. Within these communities, belonging has been more important than believing correctly. This is not to say that the Pope doesn’t care about theological concerns. It means that your average Catholic grandmother in Spain is less likely to be a Catholic because she feels strongly about the Treasury of Merit than because Catholicism is simply part of who she is.So how did someone like Vance, previously most famous for being “an Appalachian,” find his way into a tradition like that?The online-to-convert pipelineThese converts are characterized by a simultaneous search for community and for answers. Nearly everyone recognizes that young men are in crisis. There is widespread disagreement as to why this crisis is happening, but it is difficult not to suspect that a lack of belonging, or rather a pervasive sense of loneliness, is at least part of the problem. Loneliness, and the desire to solve it, seems likely to be part of what drives these men into communities defined by nearly unconditional belonging. But belonging is clearly not enough. A lot of young men are looking for answers as well as community. And like lost generations before them, they are finding it in “ideology.” The new converts want their community and their ideology to fit.What does this ideology look like? Many are disillusioned with what they see as the products of “modernity,” specifically the fruits of feminism and, in many cases, the civil rights movement. To their minds, feminism and racial equality have rendered white men — particularly working- and lower-middle-class white men — less socially and economically powerful. As a result, they have turned to “traditionalism,” a worldview that combines conservative views of gender and sexuality with fear of immigration and increasing multiculturalism, often overlaid with back-to-the-land living and large families. Their ideal is a white, English-speaking, Christian, American straight couple living on a homestead, raising a dozen children. Its public face online is largely female: the “trad wife” influencers. But make no mistake: Despite its TikTok and Instagram aesthetics, this is primarily a men’s movement. It frames the personal and social crises facing white American men as part of an imagined broader crisis of “Western civilization,” a crisis that, in their view, inevitably includes a “crisis of Christianity” — an idea pushed by no less than the likes of right-wing celebrity Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist turned media pundit. But not a crisis of just any Christianity. For many of these young men, the perceived crisis of Christianity and of Western civilization itself has led them to question Protestantism as a whole, from far-right evangelicals to liberal mainline beliefs. If Christendom is in decline, they reason, how can its dominant tradition in American society not be to blame? This is shown by the fact that a lot of “trad” content is dedicated to how masculine the respective traditions are. For instance, the Russian Orthodox Church website ran (on its English channel, notably) a piece titled “Why Orthodox Men Love Church.” The piece makes liberal use of the work of Leon Podles, whose work includes The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity and Losing the Good Portion: Why Men Are Alienated from Christianity. And even the relatively liberal, Jesuit-run Catholic magazine America has run an article titled “Men and boys are lost. The Catholic Church can give them a better model of manliness.”The “crisis of Protestantism” is a reality that evangelicals themselves have been most apt to acknowledge. There is also the example of Rod Dreher, the Protestant-turned-Catholic-turned-Orthodox convert and American Conservative editor whose book The Benedict Option is premised on the idea that society has devolved so completely that the only choice Christians have is to flee from it. This reasoning, combined with what one must imagine is not a little bit of video game and fantasy movie-inspired nostalgia for an imagined Middle Ages, has led many of these young men to Catholicism and others to Eastern Orthodoxy. By converting to these faith traditions, they wrongly think they are converting not only to a liturgically and theologically conservative tradition, but also to an explicitly politically conservative one in the American tradition.And like the rest of the culture surrounding the Lost Young Men of Postmodernity, this religious dimension has taken place largely online, with many of these converts encountering the academic theology of these faith traditions on YouTube, TikTok, and forums, long before they become connected to any living communities. This is very evident this time of year in online Orthodox circles, as converts gather on Facebook and Reddit to discuss the nuances of how to apply medieval fasting rules in a way that would never occur to those from traditionally Orthodox backgrounds. There is also Matt Fradd’s YouTube series Pints With Aquinas that regularly brings obscure Catholic theology to upward of half a million viewers or Rev. Chad Ripperger’s channel Sensus Fidelium, where medieval theology meets anti-vax modernity. The mix of obscure academic theology and very modern politics doesn’t stay online. Vance, for example, has cited the influence of the French Catholic philosopher René Girard as an impetus for his own conversion. Vance has also referenced St. Augustine as a major source of his personal theology. And it was to Augustine that he turned to in his spat with the bishops, telling his X followers to “google ‘ordo amoris.’” A request one can only imagine most cradle Catholics (ones born into the faith) responded to with a resounding, “Huh?”To save you the internet search, “ordo amoris” is a concept first attributed to Augustine and picked up by St. Thomas Aquinas, who laid out a list of the order in which we should love people and things, starting with God. But Aquinas doesn’t stop there. As the Pope — I know how absurd this sounds — explained in a letter to the American bishops following the clash with Vance, while there is an order in which we should direct our affections, any person’s pressing need should take precedence, so it is not a violation of Catholic teaching to help refugees and the poor. This is the way most cradle Catholics probably learned this (perhaps these days sans Latin). Whether Vance was personally aware of the normal way the ordo amoris is taught is irrelevant, because the entire incident demonstrates an important point about these new ideological converts: They have encountered largely medieval theological traditions in a vacuum devoid of community and when they do encounter these living communities, made up of people for whom community is usually much more important than the medieval theology, they are frequently surprised. The converts have encountered medieval theological traditions in a vacuum devoid of community and when they do encounter these living communities […] they are frequently surprised. And when this happens the response has not been to change their views — Vance expressed “surprise” at the pushback from the Pope and then doubled down on his position. This is not the “done” thing. It is, in fact, a very Protestant way of viewing church hierarchy, whereas one might argue that since the Reformation, Catholicism and Orthodoxy have been defined by a refusal to break from the powers that be. The vice president of the United States and many of his fellow new converts have nonetheless sought to change the views of the hierarchs of institutions they have joined in no small part because of their hierarchical nature — and in doing so remake these organic communities in their own idealized, ideological image.This dynamic won’t stay in the churchWhile many are not yet ready to put it in this stark of terms, the “cradle” vs. “convert” divide in Catholicism and Orthodoxy is very real and it can become a problem for those outside the traditions as well as inside. These emerging, highly politicized conflicts inside what were once communities largely bound together by family and cultural ties are only accelerating the political division of American religion. This is not a good development for civil society, because houses of worship were places where people once regularly and peacefully encountered those with different political views. Slavery and prohibition did cause schisms but, for the most part, until the middle of the 20th century, American churches were politically diverse. (While Protestantism was about believing correctly, the beliefs in question were nearly always about one’s theological beliefs. Over time, the requirement extended to political beliefs too.) This possibility has already largely vanished within most Protestant circles as evangelicals moved ever more right and mainline Protestants more left over the past 50 years, simply breaking apart (as in the case of the United Methodist Church) when their culture war differences became too grave. Now, largely as a result of these new converts, Catholicism and Orthodoxy are also becoming more polarized.Laypeople attacking their hierarchs is about the least “trad” thing one can do. It reveals just how little these conversions have to do with anything organic to these traditions, but are instead an act of rebellion against the American mainstream, with a dose of cultural appropriation thrown in.But perhaps even more important is the dangerous lesson these converts are learning from their challenges to the hierarchy and cultural traditions of their new faiths: Namely, that even some of the most ancient existent authorities do not have real control over them and that, with enough noise and obfuscation and with enough requests to “Google that,” they can create a version of reality where a recent convert’s opinion of Catholic theology is as valuable as the Pope’s. Thus, when the Pope declares a more kind approach to LGBTQ Catholics, online influencers like Taylor Marshall feel comfortable simply saying the Pope is wrong, that the successor of St. Peter “persecutes the good and promotes evildoers.” Or the pseudo-anonymous writers of the Orthodox Reflections blog can attack the decision of the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America to march with Black Lives Matter. It’s why Michael Warren Davis, another Orthodox convert at the American Conservative, could directly call the Greek Orthodox Archbishop of America a CIA asset without any evidence. Laypeople attacking their hierarchs is about the least “trad” thing one can do. It reveals just how little these conversions have to do with anything organic to these traditions, but are instead an act of rebellion against the American mainstream, with a dose of cultural appropriation thrown in.This is not just a challenge to the institutional power of the Catholic Church but a reminder of the ways this milieu of young men seeks to challenge authority and to remake our institutions in the image of their ideological aims — the ecclesiastical wing of DOGE’s engineers if you will. It is not a great jump between Vance challenging the Pope on the meaning of St. Augustine to Vance challenging the Constitution on the meaning of citizenship. It can be difficult for many secular progressives to care much about the inner workings of religious — particularly Christian — institutions. “It’s all bad,” is a common refrain. But considering the central role religion continues to play in our politics, wishing it would just not is not a helpful way to approach the problem. This religious conflict between “cradle” and “convert” is shaping America’s political institutional authority, as religious identity becomes yet another front in the battle over America’s political future — at a moment when that war could probably do without another front.See More:

Three years ago, Montgomery County, Maryland, approved several books with LGBTQ characters for use in public school classrooms. Not much else is known about these books, how they have been used, when they were used in lessons, or how teachers plan to use them in the future.These questions have come before lower courts, but the Supreme Court decided to hear a case — Mahmoud v. Taylor, brought by conservative Muslim and Christian parents who find these books objectionable — before these lower courts had a chance to sort out whether anyone’s constitutional rights have actually been violated.Despite all this uncertainty, all six of the Supreme Court’s Republicans appeared absolutely convinced, during an oral argument on Tuesday, that the Montgomery County school district violated the Constitution, and that it must do more to protect parents who object to these books on religious grounds. Based on Tuesday’s argument in Mahmoud, it seems all but certain the Court will rule that parents who object to these books must be allowed to remove their children from any classes where the books are featured. What is less clear is whether the Court will do so in a way that could endanger every public school in the country’s ability to function.Eric Baxter, the lawyer representing the parents who oppose these books, seemed quite emboldened during Tuesday’s argument, and advocated for a result that would be extraordinarily disruptive. In his brief, Baxter suggested that parents who object to any form of classroom instruction on religious grounds must be notified in advance about that instruction and be permitted to opt their child out of the class. The implications of this argument are breathtaking. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor pointed out, past cases involve parents who object to lessons touching on topics like divorce, interfaith couples, and “immodest dress.” Parents have brought federal lawsuits objecting, on religious grounds, to the government using unique numbers to identify people in its own internal records. They’ve objected to lessons exposing children to ideas about evolution, pacifism, magic, women achieving things outside of the home, and “false views of death” — among other things. Under Baxter’s proposed rule, to avoid these lawsuits, school districts would have an obligation to notify parents in advance if they will teach any book where magic exists, any book where divorce exists, any book where women have accomplishments, or any book about famous pacifists such as Martin Luther King, Jr. — among many other things. It is hard to imagine how any public school could comply with such an obligation.That said, while all six of the Republican justices appeared highly likely to rule against the school district in Mahmoud, some of them did appear to be looking for a way to decide this case more narrowly than Baxter suggested. Justice Samuel Alito, for example, suggested at one point that Baxter’s rule might only apply to very young students, or to lessons that touch upon sexuality. Justice Neil Gorsuch pointed to an alleged statement by a school board member, which Gorsuch claims showed animus against certain religious beliefs. Following Gorsuch’s line of thinking to its conclusion would allow the Court to rule that Montgomery County’s policies must be changed because they are rooted in animus, but that another school district might be allowed to enact similar policies so long as they did not display similar hostility toward religion.So, while there seems to be little doubt that the school district will lose the Mahmoud case, it is possible that it will lose in a way that doesn’t endanger public school instruction throughout the United States.The Court appeared to divide into four campsBroadly speaking, the justices floated four different approaches to this case.All three of the Court’s Democrats — Sotomayor, and Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson — focused on the “line-drawing” problems presented by this case. Kagan said she understood how even non-religious parents might object to “young kids” being taught “on matters concerning sexuality,” but she added that there wasn’t anything in Baxter’s argument that would allow the Court to limit claims by parents who want to micromanage a school’s lessons.Similarly, Jackson was troubled that Baxter’s arguments seemed so broad that they could prevent a gay teacher from displaying a picture of their own wedding, or even prevent a teacher from referring to a transgender child by that child’s preferred pronouns in the presence of another student whose parents object to trans people on religious grounds.But these concerns were largely limited to the Court’s Democratic minority. The other six justices appeared to be hunting for a way to rule against the school district.The most extreme of these six Republicans was Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who at one point said that he is “mystified, as a longtime resident” of Montgomery County, that this case exists. As the Supreme Court said in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery (1988), the First Amendment only prohibits government action that tends “to coerce individuals into acting contrary to their religious beliefs.” But Kavanaugh at one point seemed to propose overruling Lyng and holding that a parent with religious objections to a lesson must only show a “burden” on their faith — however Kavanaugh would define that term.Both Alito and Chief Justice John Roberts, meanwhile, appeared to think that there is something particularly noxious about exposing young people to books with gay characters. Alito, for example, argued that older students will understand that their teacher isn’t always correct — so it’s okay if those students are exposed to lessons that are in tension with their parents’ religious beliefs. But a different rule should apply to younger students.Similarly, Roberts argued that it would be “dangerous” to expose kindergarten-age children to lessons their parents might object to, because that might cause those children to question whether they should obey their teacher.Gorsuch, meanwhile, latched onto several lines in Baxter’s brief, which claim that a school board member compared parents who object to LGBTQ-inclusive literature to “white supremacists” and “xenophobes.” This matters because, in Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission (2018), the Court ruled in favor of a baker who refused to bake wedding cakes for same-sex couples because a state civil rights commissioner made similarly disparaging comments about the baker.Under Gorsuch’s approach, in other words, the Court could decide the Mahmoud case very narrowly, ruling in favor of the parents because of this school board member’s alleged comments, without handing down a broader rule that would impose unworkable disclosure rules on every public school in the country.So it is possible that the Court will hand down a good-for-this-ride-only decision that gives these specific Montgomery County parents the result they want, without harming public education elsewhere. It is also possible that the Court will impose a kind of “Don’t Say Gay” rule on elementary school teachers, while allowing high school teachers to reveal that some people form romantic attachments to people of the same sex.One surprising omission in Tuesday’s argument is that no one mentioned the Court’s decision in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), a free speech case brought by students who wore black armbands to class in order to protest the Vietnam War.In Tinker, the Court held that these students had a right to wear the black armbands, but it did so because the students merely engaged in a “silent, passive expression of opinion, unaccompanied by any disorder or disturbance on the part of petitioners.” Tinker held that public school students retain free speech rights, but not when their speech “materially disrupts classwork or involves substantial disorder or invasion of the rights of others.”The Court, in other words, recognized that public schools could not function if students could engage in speech that disrupts lessons, and it crafted a careful rule which respects those students’ First Amendment rights without undercutting the school’s ability to educate them and their classmates.The Court could take a similar approach in Mahmoud. Because the full facts of this case are not yet known, it may, in fact, turn out that a teacher tried to coerce a student into rejecting their religious beliefs, or otherwise behaved in a manner that violates the Constitution’s protections for religious people. If that turns out to be true, then the courts absolutely should provide appropriate relief to that student and their parents.But, instead of waiting until they know all the facts of the Mahmoud case and crafting an appropriately tailored rule like the one announced in Tinker, many of the justices seemed inclined to a more ham-handed approach. Based on Tuesday’s argument, it is difficult to guess whether Kavanaugh’s, Alito’s, Gorsuch’s, or some other approach will prevail. But, if the justices choose to accept Baxter’s arguments in full, they could easily impose unworkable obligations on public schools that will prevent them from functioning.See More:

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.Welcome to The Logoff: Today I’m focusing on the controversy surrounding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, as reports of mismanagement and dysfunction in his office suggest he’s unfit for one of the administration’s most important jobs.What’s going on with Hegseth? He has been under scrutiny since before his confirmation, when Senators and others raised concerns about his treatment of women and issues with alcohol. Last month, Hegseth shared sensitive information about an upcoming military strike on a non-secure group chat. (The world found out about it because a staffer accidentally included the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic in the chat.)Things haven’t gotten any better over the past week, in which:Multiple outlets reported that Hegseth had shared sensitive information about the strike in a second chat, one that included his brother and lawyer (who both have Pentagon jobs) and his wife (who does not).Three top officials Hegseth brought to the Defense Department have been suspended in connection with a Pentagon investigation into leaks.A fourth member of his team quit and wrote an op-ed for Politico accusing Hegseth of presiding over dysfunction, calling on Donald Trump to fire him.The New York Times this morning reported that Hegseth “had been unable to establish a process to ensure that basic, but essential, matters move swiftly” through his office.Is Hegseth going to get fired? NPR reported yesterday that the White House had begun the process of looking for Hegseth’s replacement, but White House officials, including Trump, have repeatedly denied any plans to oust him.Why does this matter outside the Pentagon? The defense secretary is the civilian official tasked with overseeing the world’s most powerful military and with reacting quickly to major geopolitical crises. If Hegseth isn’t up to the task of managing his own office — and if he’s continually sloppy with sensitive information — his presence in the role poses a risk to national security.And with that, it’s time to log off…It’s Earth Day, and I have more good news today from Vox’s Escape Velocity project, a package of stories demonstrating how progress on climate change can and will continue under the current administration. One of today’s pieces is about developments in home battery technology, and how it can help avoid blackouts and diminish demand for dirty energy. Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you back here tomorrow.You’ve read 1 article in the last monthHere at Vox, we're unwavering in our commitment to covering the issues that matter most to you — threats to democracy, immigration, reproductive rights, the environment, and the rising polarization across this country.Our mission is to provide clear, accessible journalism that empowers you to stay informed and engaged in shaping our world. By becoming a Vox Member, you directly strengthen our ability to deliver in-depth, independent reporting that drives meaningful change.We rely on readers like you — join us.Swati SharmaVox Editor-in-ChiefSee More:

If you drive across Iowa, you’ll probably notice two things aside from the many farms: Trump signs and wind turbines.Iowa is Trump country. While the state was once considered politically purple, it decisively supported President Donald Trump in 2016, in 2020, and in 2024, when Trump won in 94 of Iowa’s 99 counties. Iowa’s governor and two senators are also Republicans, and, after some early friction, have fallen in line with Trump. Iowa is also a wind energy powerhouse. A remarkable 59 percent of the state’s energy in 2023 came from wind turbines, a larger share than any other state in the country. Texas is the only state that produces more wind energy than Iowa, though wind power makes up a much smaller portion of the Lone Star State’s energy mix. Wind turbines are now so common in Iowa that they appear on the state’s regular license plates. Related404 Not Found | VoxAt face value, wind energy and Trump don’t mix. Many of his supporters downplay or disregard climate science showing that fossil fuels are warming the planet far faster than it would naturally — a key fact underlying the value of wind energy and other power sources that don’t have significant carbon emissions. In some cases, Trump supporters, including Robert F. Kennedy Jr., also help elevate unproven claims that offshore wind turbines are killing whales.Annick Sjobakken for VoxTrump himself, meanwhile, is the most anti-wind-energy president in history. He’s been bad-mouthing wind power for over a decade, often relying on similarly spurious claims. “We’re not going to do the wind thing,” Trump said in a speech on Inauguration Day. “Big, ugly wind mills. They ruin your neighborhood.” And Trump has already made policy moves intended to slow growth in the sector — causing some developers to halt or totally abandon projects.On one hand, Iowa is a test case for the staying power of renewable energy. Wind farms have expanded in the state not because of climate concerns but because of economics. Wind energy is cheap in Iowa.But Iowa also highlights an important disconnect that exists across the country — between the anti-climate, “drill, baby, drill” rhetoric that helped get Trump elected and the reality facing much of his base living in states that benefit from renewable energy. The economics of wind energy are incredibly strong, experts told me, so the industry won’t just disappear. But Trump’s energy policies, if successful, could have harmful consequences for Republican strongholds like Iowa. A question now is if conservatives who rely on wind energy push back, will Trump soften his anti-wind stance? How wind took over Iowa, a Republican strongholdIf you want to learn about wind energy in Iowa, the person to talk to is Tom Wind. (Yes, his name is literally Tom Wind, and yes, people point it out a lot to him.) He’s a crop farmer and electrical engineer in Iowa who’s been working in the sector — first at a utility, then as a consultant, and now as a wind-farm manager — for decades.There are several reasons for Iowa’s ascendency to wind dominance, Wind told me. The simplest reason is that Iowa is windy. And while some Great Plains states like Nebraska and Kansas are technically windier, Iowa is closer to big population centers, like Chicago, that need lots of power.Annick Sjobakken for VoxIowa was also quick to adopt policies that benefited wind and other renewables. In fact, Iowa was the first state in the country to establish what’s called a renewable portfolio standard (RPS), in 1983. It required the state’s investor-owned utilities to contract out or own at least 105 megawatts of renewable energy, which is enough to power tens of thousands of homes. Iowa reached that goal by 1999, Wind said. When the RPS was enacted, the state legislature was run by Democrats, though it still wasn’t that controversial: Iowa lawmakers, including Republican Gov. Terry Branstad, saw an opportunity to make Iowa more energy independent in the wake of the 1970s energy crisis (an actual crisis, by the way, not the manufactured energy emergency Trump has conjured). The state has also never had a large fossil-fuel industry to lobby against pro-renewable legislation, Wind said.Later, state and especially federal tax incentives for renewable energy further propelled wind to dominance in Iowa. In the ’90s, Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley, a Republican, helped establish a federal tax credit for building wind farms. That ultimately helped earn Grassley the title of “father” of Iowa wind energy.MidAmerican Energy Company, the largest electric utility in Iowa and a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway Energy, was especially hungry for tax credits, Wind said, and has since built out an enormous amount of wind energy. (In reporting this story, Vox reached out to several Republican politicians and energy authorities in the state. Branstad, Grassley’s office, MidAmerican, and Berkshire Hathaway Energy all declined interview requests. Sen. Joni Ernst and Gov. Kim Reynolds did not respond to interview requests.)The state’s many farmers — a core section of Iowa’s economy that maintains a lot of political power — have also helped the wind industry take off. Farmers across Iowa have put turbines on their land as a way to earn more income. While crop prices and yields are volatile and at the whims of natural disasters, wind turbines offer a relatively stable source of revenue, on the scale of thousands of dollars per year, per turbine.Dave Johnson, a farmer who earns money from the turbine located on his property in Riceville, Iowa. Annick Sjobakken for Vox“It’s a real blessing for us,” said Dave Johnson, a livestock farmer in northern Iowa who leases his land to a utility that installed four turbines on his property. He earns about $30,000 a year from the four turbines combined, he told Vox. Johnson’s son also has turbines on his farm. Johnson, a Republican who says he voted for Trump, had the turbines installed primarily because he wanted his farm — where he raises cattle and hogs — to generate more value. “I never had a 401(k),” he said. “I farmed and stuck everything back into the farm. This is the 401(k) that I never had.” Fred Koschmeder, a corn and soybean farmer near Johnson’s farm, also has turbines on his land. “I don’t even look at it as a political thing,” Koschmeder, who also says he voted for Trump, said of wind energy. “It is economic development. If you’ve got a chance to participate in something that brings value, I think you’re kind of foolish not to do it. … It adds a lot of value to your farm and extra income, too.”Farming in Iowa has become more economically challenging in recent years, as the price of some crops like soybeans have dipped, and farm costs, such as tractor repairs, have spiked due to inflation. Climate change is also raising the risk of drought and flooding, according to government and academic researchers. Wind energy “is allowing farmers to stay on the farm,” Johnson said. “That helps rural America.”Annick Sjobakken for VoxAnnick Sjobakken for VoxBut even if you’re not a farmer, you likely benefit from wind turbines if you live in Iowa, said Steve Guyer, senior energy policy counsel at Iowa Environmental Council, a nonprofit green group. The state has stable energy bills that tend to be well below the national average in cost. Onshore wind is the cheapest source of energy with or without tax credits, as of 2024, according to the financial firm Lazard.“All customers benefit from it,” said Guyer, who formerly worked for utilities in Iowa. “Although other costs may rise over time, the cost of the wind actually remains stable or lowers. When we factor that into the overall utility bill, it at least stabilizes the bill.”The wind industry also employs roughly 4,000 people across the state and draws billions of dollars in capital investments. Plus, it’s the No. 1 taxpayer in a third of Iowa counties, according to Mak Heddens, who runs a group called Power Up Iowa, a coalition of clean energy companies in Iowa.While wind energy projects have faced fierce opposition in several counties — anti-wind advocates often rely on misinformation to argue that turbines harm wildlife and threaten human health — the industry is popular on the whole. This likely has little to do with politics or concerns about climate change. People across the political spectrum like wind energy because it’s cheap, local, and generates money for the state’s economy. These are things Republicans really care about, said James McCalley, an electrical engineer and wind energy expert at Iowa State University. (McCalley identifies as Republican.)“We’re a red state, and we’ve embraced it, and I’m proud of that,” said Brent Siegrist, a Republican state representative in the western Iowa’s Pottawattamie County, where a large wind farm produces enough electricity to power up to 122,000 homes. “Maybe it’s the commonsense approach of Iowans: We need energy, and if we can do it renewably — and it’s not costing us a fortune — why wouldn’t we do it?”Are Iowa Republicans worried?There’s no doubt that wind energy is a massive part of Iowa’s economy — powering the bulk of homes and businesses in the state — and a boon to residents. Yet people who support Trump often don’t see his anti-wind position as much of a threat or expect it to shift. Johnson, the livestock farmer, says he doesn’t pay close attention to Trump’s comments on wind energy. “I know he just shoots his mouth off,” Johnson said. When asked about real policies Trump has put in place, including an executive order that pauses new approvals for wind projects, Johnson said he’s not worried because wind energy has a lot of support, even among Republicans. Siegrist, meanwhile, downplayed how much Iowa depends on wind energy, mentioning that the state still uses coal. And while Siegrist doesn’t think the federal government should be controlling what happens to wind development within states, he’s not worried about Trump’s anti-wind statements. “I’ve got enough things to do in Iowa to worry about Washington, DC,” he told me. Annick Sjobakken for VoxPaul Roeder, a Republican who owns a handful of wind turbines in Iowa, is similarly untroubled by the administration’s position. “I’m not so much worried about politics as I am about some of the other external factors that drive the price of energy,” Roeder told me. “The president doesn’t drive the price of energy.” Roeder says he voted for Trump but not because of the president’s stance on renewable energy. This raises a key point: Many Republicans support renewable energy, and they may even worry about carbon emissions, but energy simply isn’t as salient for them as other issues, such as immigration. That helps explain how someone like Grassley — the father of Iowa wind energy, remember — is a Trump ally, even though he’s previously called Trump’s comments about wind energy “idiotic.” Annick Sjobakken for VoxIt’s also worth pointing out that, more generally, people don’t often think about where their energy comes, as long as their lights turn on and their bills aren’t surging. I grew up in Iowa and have visited at least once a year since. But it wasn’t until recently — through my environmental reporting — that I realized how important wind energy is to the state. So it’s not shocking that Iowan’s don’t connect their energy to Trump. “They don’t necessarily make the connection to what the president is saying,” said Bob Keefe, executive director of E2, an association of business leaders, many of whom work in the clean energy industry.But there is real cause for concern. The strong economics of wind energy — what allowed turbines to proliferate in a conservative state — persist today, and so it’s reasonable to expect that the sector will still grow. Yet policies from the Trump administration could seriously dent the industry across the country, including in Iowa. On his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order that aimed to curtail growth of the wind-energy industry. Among other things, it directed agencies to pause new and renewed federal approvals and leases for both onshore and offshore wind projects. Since Trump’s executive order from January 20, the administration has put in place or threatened additional tariffs on countries, such as China, that would substantially raise the cost of onshore turbines, some of which are manufactured in Iowa. Even turbines that are manufactured locally are typically built with at least some foreign parts.“There is a certain level of nervousness in the market,” Manav Sharma, North America division CEO for Nordex Group, a wind turbine manufacturer that has a production facility in Iowa, told KCRG.In a statement, Alliant Energy, the third-largest utility owner and operator of regulated wind energy in the US, according to the company, said it will “continue to monitor the Trump Administration executive orders on national energy policy.” TPI Composites, a global company that manufactures wind turbine blades in Iowa, declined an interview request. Some wind advocates and lawmakers — including some conservatives — are also worried that the Republican-controlled Congress may stamp out tax incentives for clean energy that are part of former President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). Those incentives have largely benefitted Republican districts but are at risk of getting cut as Trump has vowed to repeal the IRA. “I think the subsidies are the biggest issue,” Ernie Goss, an economist at Creighton University who specializes in the Midwest, told Vox. “If they are reduced, will wind energy survive?” Annick Sjobakken for VoxAnnick Sjobakken for VoxEven if tax credits remain, the Trump administration may still weaken incentives, such as through efforts to shrink the IRS. “What could also happen is they cut the IRS workforce,” Wind said, adding that applications to get tax credits have to go through the agency. “If you start losing employees, things start slowing down. It just gets harder to do business with the IRS.”These concerns are especially pressing today as Iowa becomes a hot spot for energy-intensive data centers in step with the AI boom. It will need more energy quickly. Google, Meta, and Microsoft are all building out or operating data centers in the state, in part, because the state has affordable energy.Policies from the administration that harm renewable energy stand to harm Iowa, said Keefe of E2. This is true whether or not you care about climate change. “You don’t do this kind of damage to an industry, you don’t spin off this kind of market uncertainty, and things will be okay,” Keefe said. “The only way they’re going to be okay is if businesses and consumers stand up and demand that their lawmakers not take an energy source away from them that happens to be the cheapest energy we can develop right now.”“If I was one of those thousands of Iowans that work in the wind industry, or if I had family that worked in the industry, I would be calling my lawmaker today and saying, ‘Hey, recognize the risks that you are putting my community at — my family, these jobs, our economy,’” he said.See More:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.When Michelle Obama announced in March that she and her brother were starting a podcast, it dug up a familiar feeling for Democrats: yearning.If only the uber-popular former first lady would just return to politics. She could just run for president, if she wanted.It’s a recurring wish, for an Obama to save the Democratic Party. And like every time that chatter comes up, the dreamers were quickly let down. The podcast has avoided the political, and Obama herself has remained mostly out of the public eye, skipping high-profile public events and not commenting on news. She’s not alone. The party’s leaders of the past have also mostly remained silent as Donald Trump and Elon Musk challenge the law, remake the federal government, and implement the Trump 2.0 agenda.This pining for Obama’s return isn’t new, but particularly during the second Trump term, it reflects something special about this moment: The Democratic Party still doesn’t have a clear leader, doesn’t have a clear direction of where to go, and keeps looking to the past for leadership.RelatedSome of that identity crisis is being fought out in public. Various governors are vying for the attention of voters pissed off at Trump and Republicans. They’re on podcasts and TV shows, at town halls and listening sessions. In Congress, they’re slowly figuring out how their constituents want them to resist Trump. And most notably, Sen. Bernie Sanders is wrapping up a multistate run of rallies against “oligarchy,” essentially anointing US Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York his movement’s successor in front of huge crowds.Still, none of these individuals seem to be uniting the party in the way the most loyal Democrats might wish for.But that might be okay. If history can show us anything about what Democrats do now, it’s that opposition parties need this time without a clear leader to debate their identities, rebuild grassroots energy, and prepare for midterm elections. The Democrats’ savior isn’t coming any time soon. But that may be a feature, not a bug, of losing elections.Democrats keep looking to the past for saviorsThe hope for a great savior — either a veteran voice who can right the ship or an outsider who can rock it — might actually be an impediment as the Democrats figure themselves out. While a new guard of politicians and voices are still getting their footing or pushing for more influence, the “hero” they’re looking for won’t come around for a while — meaning the party should be using this time to rebuild and have these debates.“The very fact that Democrats are looking for a savior, seeking the man or woman on the white or black horse, is a sign that they’re not really doing what good political parties do, which is work at the grassroots, recruit people to run and make the case about why what Trump and Musk are doing is horrible,” Michael Kazin, the Georgetown University political historian who’s written an extensive history of the Democratic Party, told me.Asking for a Biden or Harris return is probably not the answer.There are some trying to make this case. Some of the loudest remaining voices on the Democratic side remain members of the old guard — Sanders, for example, or Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who led many protests against Trump and the so-called Department of Government Efficiency’s attempts to downsize the federal government in the first few weeks of the Trump presidency. Neither are positioning themselves as the next leaders of the party, but Sanders, at least, seems to be setting the stage for a younger voice. He remains the most popular national figure, but the younger voices who could succeed him or chart out a new chapter for the party are not nearly as popular.Those younger voices — like California Gov. Gavin Newsom, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg, Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy, or Ocasio-Cortez — are polarizing or still relatively unknown. They all represent different paths forward for the party. And they’re all trying out different approaches to tap into the anger that the average Democratic voter is feeling. And these divisions may actually end up being helpful: They’re setting the ground for a lively Democratic presidential primary contest in two to three years, they’re offering voters an idea of what the party could still become, and all represent a new vision for the party — even if the noise right now is about the party’s disunity. They also serve a midterm purpose as well: There not being a unified Democratic leader or agenda allows individual candidates to run their own, localized races without being pegged to one figure, as they tend to be during presidential election years, like when Biden was running. So embracing that chaos and disunity might actually be a good thing.“It’s a mistake to think you just have your preexisting set of people who’ve done it before, that one of them must be a savior. And frankly, right now, as opposed to in four years, the savior isn’t going to come from one single person. I’m not convinced that’s really how it works,” Julian Zelizer, a political history professor at Princeton University, told me. “The savior might be the congressional caucuses in the House and Senate acting effectively. The saviors might be independent groups, ACLU-type groups challenging [Trump] in court. But I think it’s more an organizational moment, and in a few years, you turn to the single individual. But I don’t think there’s a superhero who’s gonna fly in right now and just totally stop this. And thinking that way is probably not constructive for Democrats.”Of course, Democrats will still be pining for a hero, a new JFK or Obama to take on the mantle of the new Democratic Party. But there’s no easy way out of the current moment of crisis. The Obamas certainly won’t be the ones to resolve it. And wanting the figures of the past to return might actually be counterproductive.This clamor has apparently made its way to the Bidens, who reportedly have offered to fundraise, campaign, and boost Democratic candidates this year and next. Kamala Harris, meanwhile, has remained quiet, while her more popular former running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, has instead embarked on an “I told you so” tour as he tests the waters for a third term as governor.But asking for a Biden or Harris return is probably not the answer. “What good is it going to do? Is it going to convince anybody [for a former president or vice president to speak up]?” Kazin said. “It’s pretty common after the party who loses the election and obviously has no clear leader, for there to be a period where it’s not clear who the leaders are going to be. That happened in some ways, after 2004 as well. Going back in history, it happened in the 1920s a lot with Democrats not winning elections, it happened after losses in 1980 and 1984 and 1988 as well. So it takes a while for that to shake out. That’s not surprising.”See More:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.In just a few hours, the world I’m walking into will disappear beneath the waves. I’m at Pillar Point Harbor, a 40-minute drive from San Francisco, near low tide. And because this is one of the lowest tides this August, the water has drawn back like a curtain to expose an ecosystem that’s normally hidden away — a place called the rocky intertidal, or, because the receding water leaves little pools behind in the rocks, “the tidepools.”Dawn has just broken, pods of pelicans fly overhead, and sea lions bark from the nearby harbor. But I’m more focused on following my guide, a zoologist named Rebecca Johnson, as she picks her way out into these seaweed-covered rocks, pointing out species as she goes. These smooth green strands are surfgrass. Those fat bladders of air that look kind of like puffed-up gloves are called “seasack.” This dark brown frond Johnson is draping over her shoulders is the aptly named “feather boa kelp.” “ They’re like wildflowers,” Johnson says, “But it’s seaweed.”Rebecca Johnson wears a feather boa kelp like a feather boa. Byrd Pinkerton/VoxAs we make our way deeper, she points out odd creatures that only the ocean could dream up. A boring clam (which is far from boring, but does bore into rock) puffs itself up like a fierce fleshy ball before squirting a jet of water directly into the air to fend off our threatening vibes. A pale white brittle star, like a flexible daddy longlegs, dances for us across some algae. And rows of fat green anemones wear bits of shells like tiny hats. “ The theory is that…they’re protecting themselves from the sun, like a sunscreen,” Johnson tells me.We crouch together at the edge of a deep pool and see first one, then two — then three, four, five, six! — species of nudibranchs, the sea slugs that Johnson specializes in. One is hot pink and spiky. Another is an aggressive shade of orange. There’s a pale lemon one, a ghostly white one. Johnson even finds one covered in orange polka dots, like a marine clown. Some of these species, she tells me, bubbling with enthusiasm, eat anemones and steal their stinging cells, repurposing them as their own defenses.An orange polka-dotted nudibranch, known as a “sea clown.” Byrd Pinkerton/VoxThis kind of diversity is wild to witness, but it isn’t unusual for these tidepools. “It’s one of the places in the world that you can see species of invertebrates all really, really concentrated,” Johnson told me.We wander farther out, exploring this alien landscape together, until the tide begins to come back in and cover it over, bit by bit, hiding this weird world away again in a slow disappearing act.“ It’s extra magical that you can only see it at certain times,” Johnson told me before we came out here. “You get this little peek, this little window. And that’s one of the things I love the most about it.”Johnson has been coming to this exact spot off Pillar Point for almost three decades now, and in her role as director for the Center for Biodiversity and Community Science for the California Academy of Sciences, she spends time with volunteers monitoring tidepools up and down the California coasts. But she’s still enchanted with them. I’m not surprised. I fell in love with tidepools myself 20 years ago, when I first got to explore them as a kid at a summer camp in Mendocino. The odd, colorful creatures in them made me feel like magic was a little bit real, that science could feel like fantasy. It’s part of the reason I’m a science reporter today. But Johnson is worried about the future of these tidepools she loves so much. She’s worried that, like so many ecosystems around the world, they may be heading toward a much more dramatic, much more permanent disappearing act. So she, along with many, many collaborators all across the state of California and beyond, is doing what many scientists are trying to do for the ecosystems they study: to figure out — first, what’s actually happening to them, and second, what, if anything, we can do to save them. The sun rises over tide pools in Fort Bragg, California. Byrd Pinkerton/VoxHow did we get here? For Rebecca Johnson, the troubles really began around the arrival of “The Blob”: a marine heatwave. By 2014, it had warmed waters significantly along the West Coast of the United States. Johnson was hearing concerning things from participants in the programs she organized through Cal Academy to get people to go into the tidepools and make observations.“They started seeing an increase in this really beautiful pink nudibranch called the Hopkins Rose nudibranch,” she says. Ruby Ash for VoxHistorically, the Hopkins Rose nudibranch has lived in Southern California — and ventured up to Johnson’s more northern tidepools mostly during El Niño years. But as the temperatures shifted for the Blob, the spiky pink balls were showing up in huge numbers.“It became the most common thing,” Johnson remembers. She was also hearing disturbing reports about another animal — the sea star, known more colloquially as the starfish.As early as 2013, before The Blob really hit, divers and researchers had started noticing that sea stars were, quite literally, wasting away. “They were seeing white lesions on starfishes. And they were seeing the starfish kind of disintegrate in front of them,” she says. “[They would] see it one day with these lesions. They’d come back the next day and it was like almost dissolved and then almost gone.” Sea star wasting also isn’t unheard of, but in this instance, the wasting hit species after species of sea stars — at least 20 species in all. Also, as an evolutionary ecologist who studied this outbreak, Lauren Schiebelhut, told me, wasting normally happens on a more local scale — isolated to a single bay, for example.“For it to spread across the entire West Coast here, that was something we had not seen before,” Schiebelhut says. Scientists have been trying to work out what caused this massive shift for over a decade. Some theorized that it was a virus, and people have investigated the possibility of a bacterial issue. One researcher told me that her team is close to publishing a paper that should provide some more answers about an infectious agent here. But whatever the exact cause — and even though the wasting started before The Blob set in — scientists studying one species of sea star found that the biggest declines coincided with the warmer temperatures. Huge numbers of sea stars wasted away — with some locations losing over 90 percent of their stars. The Blob “certainly seemed to exacerbate it,” Schiebelhut says.At one point, Johnson went down to her favorite tidepooling spot, Pillar Point, with a colleague, just to “see what they could see,” and they saw almost no sea stars. “It was just like the most bizarre feeling,” she says. “I was still at this place that was spectacularly beautiful, covered with algae. All these other invertebrates are there. But there’s just something kind of off about it.”Byrd Pinkerton/VoxShe says it was like going into your room, only to realize that someone has moved all your stuff very slightly. “And you’re like, ‘What’s wrong with this room?’ It had that disconcerting, unsettling feeling.”This place Johnson knew so well — had been documenting and sharing with people for decades — suddenly felt unfamiliar. And at that moment, she felt a deep, deep uncertainty about its future. “Like, there might not be starfish, like ever,” she remembers thinking, “What does that mean?”What it would mean to lose so many sea starsThe reason that Johnson was so worried about sea stars was not just that the tidepools at Pillar Point looked different. She was worried about the role sea stars play in the tidepools ecosystem. To us, they might seem like pretty creatures that come in a fun shape, but to many of the ocean animals they interact with, they are voracious predators that help keep their ecosystems in balance — chowing down on everything from mussels and barnacles to snails. To understand why this is so important, let’s journey a little beyond the tidepools, a little farther offshore, into the California kelp forests. These are underwater forests of algae that are home to a huge diversity of animals, from fish and octopi to abalone. Kelp forests also provide a buffer for the coast against erosion, and they absorb and store large amounts of carbon dioxide, which benefits all of us as we try to stave off climate change. So they’re amazing ecosystems.But, like any forest, California’s coastal kelp forest has grazers — basically the marine equivalent of deer. In this case, these are animals like the purple sea urchin, a spiky purple pincushion that chows down enthusiastically on kelp. Ruby Ash for VoxNormally, Peter Roopnarine, a paleontologist at the California Academy of Sciences who has studied kelp forests tells me, sea urchins are content to eat the bits of detritus that the kelp shed naturally. But if there isn’t enough kelp detritus to go around, urchins can start feeding on the living kelp itself. “ That will happen if, for example, there are not enough predators around to keep their population in control, to keep them hiding,” Roopnarine says. “ Pretty soon they kill the kelp, and what you’re left with is what we call an urchin barren, which are these stretches of seafloor that are covered with urchins. And nothing else.” Sea otters are one of the predators — one of the wolves, to continue the metaphor, to our urchin deer — keeping urchins in check along some parts of the coast. Sea otters were hunted aggressively by European settlers, and have not returned along the northern part of the coast, but have made a comeback in central California. Another important wolf for these kelp forests, though, is a sea star known as pycnopodia helianthoides, or the “sunflower sea star.” Sunflower sea stars are beautiful, often purple or pink, and kind of squishy. But they are also, at least as sea stars go, big. They can have 20 arms, and grow to the size of a dinner plate or larger. (As a kid, when we found them in the tidepools, we used to have to hold them in two hands.) And researchers have increasingly found that they, too, did a lot of work to keep urchins in check. This is why it was such a big deal when the sea star wasting syndrome hit and wiped out so many sea stars, sunflower sea stars very much included. After the sickness, a lot of sea star species did start to come back. You can find sea stars like ochre stars, leather stars, and bat stars in California tidepools, for example. But while sunflower sea stars can still be found in the wild further north, in places like Washington state, they have not bounced back along the coast of California. And that, scientists suggest, may have contributed to the issues they’re now seeing in kelp forests. Satellite surveys from a few years ago showed that the kelp forests off of Northern California have shrunk by 95 percent. Once again, this is probably due to a combination of factors. High water temperatures may have weakened the kelp, for example. But another factor was the explosion of urchin populations. “This lack of the sunflower star in the kelp forest, especially in Northern California,” Johnson says, “led to the increase of urchins. And the urchins then ate all the kelp.”What does this mean for the future of these tidepools? The tidepools haven’t been hit as hard as the kelp forests. Clearly, as our visit in August showed, a place like Pillar Point has not turned into the equivalent of an urchin barren and is instead still home to a diversity of creatures. Still, Johnson says, they have been affected. She has, anecdotally, noticed grazing species like abalone that normally spend more of their time in the kelp forests moving over to tidepools, probably in search of kelp to eat. And as temperatures continue warming over time, tidepool ecosystems are changing in other ways. A recent paper showed that a species of nudibranch range has moved northward. Another study showed that a whole bunch of different marine species, including nudibranchs, but also species of snail, lobster, and crab were spotted farther north than their usual range during a heat wave. Some of these species are predators that might shake up the dynamics and the ecosystems they’re coming into. “We don’t actually know what happens when they move north,” Johnson says. “ We don’t really know the impact.” And then, as Schiebelhut, the geneticist who studies sea stars, told me, there are other stressors like pollution and runoff from wildfires. In January, more than 57,000 acres burned from a series of wildfires in Greater Los Angeles — a disaster whose scope of damage on intertidal ecosystems is not yet clear, researchers told me. “The disturbances are becoming more frequent, more intense,” Schiebelhut says. “It is a challenge to the system.” Johnson admits that it’s hard to know exactly how to interpret all these changes and stressors and use them to predict the future of the tidepools. After all, the California coastal ecosystems have survived the loss of important species before, and survived big natural disasters too. A brittle star dances across the algae. Byrd PinkertonByrd PinkertonMy favorite sea slug: an opalescent nudibranch. Byrd Pinkerton/VoxSo I turned to Roopnarine, the paleontologist. He studies how ancient ecosystems weathered — or didn’t weather — things like climate change, and what we might learn from them to apply to ecosystems facing challenges today. I hoped he would have a sense of how the current moment fits into the bigger patterns of history. “If you look in the fossil record,” he told me, “one of the things that’s really remarkable is that ecosystems can last a very long time. Millions of years. Species will come and go in those ecosystems, but what they do, who they do it to, and so on? That doesn’t change.”Ecosystems are a little like, say, a baseball team. You’ll always need certain players in certain roles — pitchers and catchers and shortstops and outfielders. Different players can retire and be replaced by other players — if one predator disappears, another predator might be able to take over some of the role that it plays, for example. But Roopnarine’s research into the fossil record also shows that no ecosystem baseball team is endlessly flexible.“They do eventually come to an end,” he says. Usually, that’s when really extreme changes occur. And when he looks at the moments in the past when the climate changed dramatically, and he looks at forecasts for our future, he’s very worried. “We have to be realistic that if we do nothing, the future is extremely grim,” he tells me, “There is no sugarcoating it.”What can we do? When it comes to safeguarding the future health of California’s coastal ecosystems, there are lots of people doing lots of things.Johnson is working with colleagues on a system that uses the community science app iNaturalist to better monitor the health of coastal tidepools. The Steinhart Aquarium is one of several institutions where researchers are raising and studying baby sunflower stars. This tiny star has two new arms growing. Byrd PinkertonAnyone who goes to the tide pools can upload photos of all the species that they see. Those photos, geotagged with locations and timestamps, will hopefully help researchers figure out how populations are changing, to model the future of this ecosystem. They could also potentially serve as a warning system if there are big die-offs again, so scientists can try and intervene earlier. Schiebelhut has studied the genomes of sea stars that did recover, to see what can be learned about what made them so resilient to wasting. The California state government has partnered with nonprofits and commercial fishermen to clear urchins and restore kelp. And then there’s the consortium of institutions up and down the coast, all working on an initiative to try to breed sunflower sea stars in captivity so that they might, eventually, be released back into the wild and resume their role as key predators.“ There is no one person that can do all the things,” says Ashley Kidd, a project manager at the Sunflower Star Lab, one of the many groups working together to bring sunflower sea stars back. What gives her hope is that so many different people, from so many institutions, are working together toward solutions. “ You can’t have all the knowledge of disease ecology, behavioral ecology, aquaculture by yourself,” Kidd says. “It is a much bigger, wonderful group of people that you get to work with and then be connected with. … You’re not alone.”When I first heard that these tidepools might be in trouble, I felt an overwhelming sense of loss. This ecosystem made me believe that the real world had its own magic — because sure, fairies might not be real, but opalescent nudibranchs come pretty close. It hurts to think that that magic might dim, or even disappear. But walking through these pools with Johnson and watching her walk over to a mother and her daughter to show them nudibranchs, eagerly sharing this world with strangers, I felt delight, and a wonderful sense of present-ness. I felt part of that community. A sense that, whatever the future of these tidepools might look like, they were here, now, and as magical as ever. “In the midst of climate change and a future that is going to be hotter and harder and more difficult for people, you have to have joy,” Johnson says. “I struggle with it. I feel like marine systems especially are pretty complicated to think about restoring. What do you actually do out here? How do you protect things?…But you can’t stop doing it, because then you’ve kind of lost everything.”See More:

Over the last few months, the Trump administration has intensified its attacks on elite, Ivy League institutions like Columbia and Harvard, enacting sweeping funding cuts and even threatening to revoke their tax-exempt status.But what’s happening on the campuses of state schools is much less covered. Take for example the public university system in Florida. For years, Gov. Ron DeSantis has used public schools at all levels as the battleground for what he calls a war on “woke” — and punched his ticket to national prominence.And it’s Florida where journalist Josh Moody found his most recent exposé for Inside Higher Ed. Though elite universities in the Northeast have largely fought deportation efforts spearheaded by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, DeSantis has openly cooperated with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, even appointing university presidents who are friendly to this mission.Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Moody about his findings, which uncovered formal cooperation agreements between many of Florida’s public universities and ICE that has led to revoked visas, alarmed faculties, and student protests.Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.What’s going on here with the Florida state schools? Is this a rebrand to ICE-U? What are they doing here? You’ve probably not heard of some of these schools because it’s the Florida State University system, which has 12 members, ranging from large schools with tens of thousands of students to New College of Florida, which has about 800 students. At least 10 of those institutions have signed agreements with ICE, which essentially would give their campus police departments immigration enforcement powers, allowing them to question, arrest, and prepare charges for those they suspect of immigration violations.These agreements, as one expert explained to me, are “force multipliers for ICE.”And basically these agreements, as one expert explained to me, are “force multipliers for ICE.” So if you wanted to have more immigration enforcement, you would sign an agreement with ICE to delegate that power locally. This is just a way for Florida to expand its immigration enforcement capabilities. The governor, as I mentioned before, has taken a hard line on immigration. He ran for president previously. I wouldn’t be surprised if he does so again, and that could be part of his long-term strategy. In this way, he’s sort of outflanking Trump on immigration. And this is just a fun question I love to ask while we’re talking about this stuff. Where did Ron DeSantis go to school again? Yale, right? Or was it Harvard? It was both! Anyway, have any students been detained or deported yet at these Florida state schools like we’ve seen at Columbia? Eighteen students at Florida International University and eight students at the University of Florida have had their visas revoked.What does that mean? Were they deported?They would have to leave the country. It doesn’t necessarily mean that ICE is going to come scoop them up in a van and facilitate that process, but they would essentially have to begin the process of leaving the country. And do we know what specifically these students have had their visas revoked for? We do not, but that is not uncommon. That has been the case across the US. Some students have been targeted for their speech. You look at the situation at Tufts and Columbia where students were active in pro-Palestinian protests and the Trump administration has claimed they’re antisemitic and pro-Hamas, but has not provided any evidence that they have done anything illegal. In other cases, they’ve had visas revoked for crimes committed years ago.And these institutions themselves have often been given no explanation when student statuses were changed — and sometimes they’ve discovered it by looking in their own systems and seeing that those statuses had been revoked.We don’t know how many international students have been caught up in this, but one of my fellow reporters at Inside Higher Ed is keeping a nationwide database and we have counted at least 1,680 students at 250 colleges who have lost visas. [Editor’s note: These figures reflect the latest numbers and have been updated since this Today, Explained episode first aired.] Does that mean there are other university systems around the country that are signing these kinds of agreements with ICE, that are cooperating with ICE at this level? Florida institutions are the only ones to have signed agreements with ICE. The professors that I spoke with, the legal experts for this piece, believe this is unprecedented. Neither were aware of another university ever signing into what is known as a 287(g) agreement with ICE. It’s sort of a new frontier in immigration enforcement on college campuses.Are students on the campuses of these universities upset to hear that they’re signing into agreements with ICE? Yes. There were protests at Florida International University today, which had a board meeting. The students that I hear from are often upset about what is happening in the state, not just around immigration, but what has been a broader effort by Florida Republicans to control all aspects of the university, whether that is hiring politicians and lawmakers into the presidencies or overhauling general education requirements to minimize certain disciplines — like sociology — that Florida state officials have deemed liberal.How do you feel what’s going on at ICE-U down in Florida fits into this other fight that we’re seeing in the Northeast, with Trump going to war with the elite universities?In Florida, this is being done by the state dictating to these universities: “You need to do this to basically carry out state goals around immigration enforcement.” Whereas the other examples at places like Harvard and Columbia is the Trump administration more or less trying to bring higher education to heel, by making an example of some of the most visible universities, where there have been the most visible pro-Palestinian campus protests over the last year.If they crumble, it seems only likely that your local institution is going to crumble when faced with the same threats.People are really freaked out. Professors are worried about academic freedom. But also nationally, people are worried too. They see Harvard and Columbia being at the forefront of this fight, and even though they’re not at all representative of higher education broadly, these are very visible universities that everyone pays attention to. If they crumble, it seems only likely that your local institution is going to crumble when faced with the same threats.On the show today, we’ve been talking about these two extremes in this culture war right now. On one end, you’ve got the oldest and most prestigious universities in the country. Then, over here, we’ve got this pocket of Florida state schools that are just throwing up their hands and complying with ICE. Where does that leave in your estimation, everyone in between those two extremes?A lot of that comes down to public or private control. If you are a public university in a dark red state, you should expect that this is coming. If you are at a public university in Texas, you might not be that far behind Florida in terms of an action like this and that’s what I’m hearing from experts too. If you’re in a blue state, you are a little bit more isolated if you’re a public institution there. Private institutions in both will have a lot more latitude.I don’t like to speculate, but I think it is entirely possible that the Trump administration looks at something like this and says, “Why don’t we do this nationwide?”What a time.Absolutely.See More: