Welcome to The Logoff. Today I have an update on the fight over your tax data, where the Trump administration has backed off a plan to give a DOGE staffer access to ultra-sensitive tax information.Wait, what did the White House want? The White House wanted the IRS to allow a DOGE team member to access the system that contains taxpayers records, personal identification numbers, and banking information, supposedly to fight fraud.IRS officials were alarmed by a plan that would hand an outsider access to tax data at the individual level. Critics sued to block the plan, arguing it posed massive privacy risks and opened the door to abuses of power. (We covered this on Tuesday, if you want to do a little backreading.)So is that plan going forward? No, or, at least, not in its most extreme form. Under an agreement between the IRS and the White House, the DOGE staffer will get access to some tax data but the most highly sensitive information will remain off limits, according to the Washington Post.Specifically, if the staffer wants access to tax returns, hell only be able to get information that doesnt allow him to identify any individual taxpayers, according to a copy of the agreement viewed by the New York Times.Whats the big picture? Typically, only a select few career officials have access to the individual taxpayer database, and the plan to hand it over to a DOGE staffer set off major alarm bells. For now, those concerns have been partially allayed, and your tax information is a touch more secure.And with that, its time to log off Its choose-your-own adventure Friday. If youre feeling curious, heres a fascinating podcast about why we twitch in our sleep. It turns out, answering that question has fundamentally shifted how we understand the relationship between the brain and the body. If youre worn out and need a laugh, heres three glorious minutes of Nate Bargatzes early standup, including a joke about Pluto that gets me every time. Take good care this weekend. See you back here Monday.See More:

Is the rights era of good feelings and unity coming to an end?For the past year, the many factions of the GOP have been united around the cause of restoring Donald Trump to the White House. But now that theyve done that, tensions are spilling out into the open on several different issues.The most intense criticism has come on Ukraine. In the past week, administration officials have made major concessions to Russian demands, while publicly berating Ukrainian President Volodmyr Zelenskyy, cutting him out of negotiations, trying to strong-arm him into handing over mineral rights to the US, and even absurdly claiming Ukraine started the war.Many of the rights more traditional internationalists or hawks on the right are utterly appalled by this, viewing it as Trump throwing Ukraine to the wolves. Criticism has poured in from leading figures at National Review, the Free Press, and the Murdoch-owned entities Fox News, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post criticism that has spurred Vice President JD Vance to respond in long-form X posts defending the administrations approach.Others on the right have felt uneasy about Trumps handling of the Justice Department. The attempt to dismiss the corruption case against New York City Mayor Eric Adams was condemned by some longtime stalwarts of the conservative legal movement, who view it as blatantly political. Activist Ed Whelan even said Trumps Acting Deputy Attorney General Emil Bove should resign over it.Finally, theres a broader concern among some more moderate factions of the right that the movements worst elements have been unleashed and should be resisted. The Free Press was founded in 2021 as a protest to what ex-New York Times editor Bari Weiss saw as groupthink and overreach in the mainstream media and among progressives most broadly. But in a recent speech, Weiss signaled a potential shift in focus, worrying that the far right may well devour what remains of the center-right.Its important not to overstate the importance of these tensions. The right overall remains deeply invested in Trump, congressional Republicans are doing little to check him, and the president remains very popular among GOP voters. Many of these outlets, such as National Review, have criticized Trump in the past to little apparent impact. Dont expect Trumps GOP support to collapse anytime soon or probably ever.Still, this does amount to a vibe shift of sorts, as parts of the rights intelligentsia who spent years mainly fired up about the terrible things Democrats and the woke were doing are shifting more of their attention to things they dont like about Trumps governance. And hes only been back in office one month.Trump and Vance are doing MAGA foreign policy and making traditional Republican hawks unhappyOn Wednesday, after Trump posted a Truth Social tirade trashing Zelenskyy as a modestly successful comedian and A Dictator without Elections, Vance reposted it on X, and added: I just wanted to make sure no one missed it.The message was clear it was about which faction within the GOP was calling the shots on foreign policy now. That is: The MAGA America Firsters (who loathe American involvement in Ukraines war) were running the show, and the GOPs traditional internationalist hawks (who view that war as righteous and Russia as a dangerous aggressor) were out.This wasnt inevitable. Last year, the internationalists thought they still had a good shot at influence in the Trump administration, with the hawkish Marco Rubio, Trumps secretary of state pick, and some believing Mike Pompeo to be the frontrunner for defense secretary.But a crucial shift happened near the end of last year Tucker Carlson, Donald Trump Jr., and Vance intervened to shift Trumps thinking on future appointments, arguing that he should avoid empowering disloyal neocons again. This appears to have been decisive Pompeo got no appointment (and in fact Trump revoked his security detail in apparent punishment), while America First supporters scored key gigs.The hawks had little to complain about at first, but Trumps hard shift against Ukraine in the past week has horrified them. Historian Niall Ferguson wondered on X why a Republican president had stopped clearly condemning the invasion of a sovereign state by a dictator.Vance then responded with a lengthy post calling Fergusons statement moralistic garbage, adding that was unfortunately the rhetorical currency of the globalists because they have nothing else to say. Like cheering Trumps humiliation of Zelenskyy, this is factional behavior, designed to insult critics and dismiss their concerns, while thrilling the hardcore MAGA faithful.But the reality is that the internationalist hawks remain a significant part of Republicans coalition, with strong support in Congress (especially the Senate) and in parts of conservative media. So by spurning them so blatantly by not even pretending to take their concerns seriously Trump and Vance are dividing the right.Other sources of tension on the right relate to ethics and the rule of lawTensions on the right are simmering about other topics as well.Most on the right had converged around the belief that Trump was within his rights to make major changes at the Department of Justice, deeming the investigations and prosecutions of Trump politically biased and improper.But at least some still have ethical standards against blatant corruption, as shown in the saga of Trumps appointees acting to dismiss the case against Mayor Adams. Notably, two of the DOJ officials who resigned over this Danielle Sassoon and Hagan Scotten had clerked for conservative Supreme Court justices. When their resignation letters were published, Whelan cheered them on, harshly criticizing acting deputy attorney general Emil Bove and suggesting it is Bove who should resign next. Fox News analyst Andy McCarthy also criticized Bove and called his claims ridiculous. Then, on Friday, the judge handling Adamss case announced that hed asked former US solicitor general Paul Clement to present arguments against the Trump DOJs position. Clement is a pillar of the conservative legal establishment, so his agreement to do this is in itself a message to the Trump administration.There are broader fears as well. Weiss warned in her recent speech that if a political movement does not police its ranks and defend its sacred values, it cannot long endure. Those values, she continued, included the rule of law and a rejection of mob violence but, she worried that online these days, power is celebrated instead of principle, and it is quickly becoming the only principle.Weiss continued: If that continues without being challenged, we may wind up spending the next few years watching the same story we just lived through on the other side, as the far right (not the one defined by cable news, which includes most of us here today) devours what remains of the center-right.The MAGA faithful did not respond well. It seems like this entire crewmost of whom joined the right like 5 minutes agohave launched a full-scale containment/gatekeeping op, right-wing activist Nate Hochman posted on X. Really bizarre.None of this in the near term is too much of a problem for Trump. He and his appointees can run the executive branch as they see fit, the GOP Congress will likely do little to check him, and he retains solid approval from the MAGA base.But the bigger picture takeaway is that his honeymoon already appears to be over and the vibes, which famously shifted in Trumps favor in 2024, appear to be shifting again. See More:

The weather forecasts you see on TV or the severe storm alerts you get from your apps are powered by a federal science agency thats in line for some of the most drastic cuts proposed by the Trump administration so far. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) employs about 12,000 staffers around the world, more than half of which are scientists and engineers. NOAA operates 18 satellites and 15 ships and has a budget of $6.8 billion. Their job is to study the skies, the seas, the fish, tracking how theyre changing and predicting what will happen to them. NOAAs work is essential for aviation, fishing, climate research, and offshore oil and gas exploration, particularly when it comes to modeling weather. You and your family and friends depend upon NOAA people even if you are unaware of what they do, Jane Lubchenco, who led NOAA under President Obama, wrote to Vox in an email. Staffers from Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been targeting probationary employees for job cuts across the federal government. There are around 216,000 workers with this status, close to 10 percent of the total federal workforce. Thousands of workers have already been fired across the federal government already across divisions like the National Park Service and the Department of Energy. About 75,000 staffers accepted deferred resignation offers. RelatedBut the potential cuts at NOAA go beyond that. CBS News reported that NOAA employees were told to prepare for staffing to halve and for budgets to shrink by 30 percent. One source inside the agency who asked to remain anonymous as they were not authorized to speak to the press told Vox that some weather offices at NOAA would be eliminated entirely. Theres going to be some interruptions and declines in the quality of service because well have offices that are understaffed. Thats a big risk for the weather service, said Timothy Gallaudet, who served as acting administrator for NOAA during President Donald Trumps first term. Our weather satellites, theyre vital for public safety, and any interruption to their maintenance and operation could be a problem too.Though it performs valuable jobs, NOAA is at the intersection of the broader push to shrink the government, an ideological fight over climate change, and possibly a personal grievance with the president himself. The cuts could have far-reaching consequences for the US economy and the safety of Americans as extreme weather lands on increasingly populated areas. NOAA does great things that are affecting every American, every day, in a positive way, Gallaudet said. With the drastic cuts some in the Trump administration want at the agency, everything would slow down and potentially stop.Why the main climate and weather agency is in line for deep cutsWhile NASA looks out to the stars, NOAA keeps an eye on here on Earth. But unlike NASA, NOAA is not a stand-alone agency. Its under the umbrella of the Department of Commerce, currently led by Howard Lutnick, former CEO of financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, who was confirmed on February 18. The Commerce Departments mission is to facilitate trade and economic growth in the US, so it may seem odd that it runs a science agency, particularly one that accounts for 60 percent of its budget. However, historically NOAAs research was performed with commerce in mind, particularly the fishing industry and maritime trade. Even today, NOAAs work mapping the sea floor and ocean currents in real time around ports ensures safe travels for shipping, which contributes $5.4 trillion to the US economy each year. The agencys management of fisheries supports the nearly $10 billion fishing sector. NOAAs forecasting work through the National Weather Service is essential for farmers, event planners, and for generating life-saving alerts ahead of extreme weather events. NOAA also conducts basic science research around climate change. One of NOAAs hurricane hunter aircraft displays several stickers commemorating the hurricanes it has flown into. Rhona Wise/AFP via Getty ImagesThese functions have drawn the ire of some within the Trump administration. Project 2025, the conservative policy agenda produced by the Heritage Foundation, specifically calls for climate change to be systematically removed from government policymaking. In Project 2025 training videos obtained by ProPublica, an official from Trumps first term says a future conservative president will have to eradicate climate change references from absolutely everywhere.It makes sense then that NOAA would be a ripe target. Project 2025 calls for NOAA to be dismantled and many of its functions eliminated, sent to other agencies, privatized, or placed under the control of states and territories. It describes NOAAs six main offices acting as one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future US prosperity. As for the National Weather Service, it should fully commercialize its forecasting operations. Across the government, many of the specific objectives laid out in Project 2025 are already getting checked off the list. However, during his confirmation hearing, Lutnick said he disagreed with the Project 2025 proposal to dismantle NOAA. Trump also had a direct run-in with NOAA during his first term. In 2019, Hurricane Dorian reached Category 5 strength and was heading toward the Gulf Coast. Trump posted on Twitter that Alabama was one of the states most likely to be hit, but the National Weather Services Birmingham office responded that there would be no hurricane impacts on the state.Then, during an Oval Office briefing on September 4, 2019, Trump presented a National Weather Service map of Hurricane Dorians path with what looked like a loop drawn on in marker to encompass southern Alabama. The episode, dubbed Sharpiegate, led to some in-fighting within NOAA as career staff pushed back against political appointees who wanted the agency to confirm Trumps statements. NOAAs acting chief scientist at the time, Craig McLean, was forced out of his post. McLean told Vox the affair was part of a broader political effort to make science bend to Trumps agenda. When the Trump people first arrived [during the first term], they were pressing me to change the direction of the climate program, McLean said. The frustration was that the Trump people couldnt get that done. The climate program survived and continued to assert scientific truths that are evident. But now Im expecting them to just come in with a blunderbuss and a sledgehammer and start whacking programs. So thats what concerns me. Climate is a big target.NOAA does have room for improvementFormer NOAA officials said there are some long-running friction points at the agency that deserve scrutiny and could benefit from some strategic reorganization, cuts, and privatization. The big issue is simply that NOAA is under the wrong department. The political appointees in the Department of Commerce did not have a good appreciation for what NOAA does, Gallaudet said. That was the biggest pain point, to be honest with you. They really just didnt understand us well. Whenever we had direct access to the White House, thats when we got our initiatives forward.Its unlikely that NOAA will get moved out of the Commerce Department anytime soon, but having top political officials who grasp NOAAs mission and its value to the American public could smooth over the bureaucratic wrangling.NOAA could also benefit from teaming up with the private sector. Private weather forecasting is now a $10 billion industry in the United States, but fully commercializing the National Weather Service is something that some of these companies oppose. AccuWeather, a company providing weather forecasting services, specifically came out against the Project 2025 proposal and said it could not replace everything NOAA does. The authors of Project 2025 used us as an example of forecasts and warnings provided by private sector companies without the knowledge or permission of AccuWeather, wrote AccuWeather CEO Steven R. Smith in a statement last year. A meteorologist monitors weather activity on a computer screen at the NOAA Center for Weather and Climate Prediction headquarters in College Park, Maryland, on December 5, 2024. Michael A. McCoy/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesBut by working with companies like AccuWeather, NOAA can expand the reach of its forecasts and get important alerts into the hands of more people likely to be affected by severe weather and tailored to businesses that have the most at stake. Gallaudet noted that NOAA is constantly amassing gobs of weather metrics that inform local meteorologists, app developers, and farmers, but this collection is getting unwieldy. Private companies can help the agency automate the data collection and optimize its analysis software. Machine learning tools developed by tech companies could also help NOAA improve its forecasts. Another problem is that NOAAs wide-ranging research portfolio unwittingly overlaps with science projects at other agencies, like NASA, the Department of Energy, and the US Geological Survey (USGS), creating unnecessary redundancies. I went on a dive trip off North Carolina to some shipwrecks when I was at NOAA unofficially, it was my recreational event and I met a USGS biologist diving with me. It turns out he worked on sturgeon, Gallaudet said. We had two [sturgeon] labs at NOAA. Our sturgeon scientists had never spoken with USGS sturgeon scientists. Theres not many sturgeon in the country! Youd think our scientists would collaborate and be more efficient, but no.On the other hand, there are research areas where NOAA could still invest more, particularly in social science. While meteorologists are extending their lead time on weather predictions, how people parse and act on this information is emerging as a limitation. An early tornado warning doesnt help much if recipients dont immediately seek shelter, or if they try to squeeze in a last-minute grocery run. Getting people to heed warnings and take precautions is a critical challenge.The people at the Department of Commerce, both Democrat and Republican administrations, told us NOAA doesnt do social science, which showed their gross ignorance and I would say callous rejection of the importance of the mission, McLean said. During my tenure we worked very hard to open the gate and start spending in the social sciences to understand how people are responding to these forecasts and the tools that we use to make the forecast.And staying ahead of the practical impacts of climate change needs to be a high priority for the agency. For instance, as average temperatures rise, fish stocks are migrating toward the poles, forcing the fishers to adapt. Todays Maine lobster will be Canadian lobster tomorrow, McLean said. As weather reaches greater extremes and more people and property are in harms way, disasters are becoming extraordinarily more expensive. Its prudent to invest in the tools to monitor and predict these events, and dismantling them will leave the country vulnerable to more costly catastrophes in the future.See More:

Kim Kardashians career has been one big guessing game. Since founding the extremely successful shapewear company Skims in 2019, the reality-star-turned-lifestyle-influencer has embarked on a number of surprising if not totally puzzling ventures, from trying to become a lawyer to starring in a poorly rated season of American Horror Story to filming an eerie Santa Baby music video. Thanks to her recent Instagram activity, though, her followers have already started to suspect her next move. The theory is that Kardashian is making a rightward turn, cozying up to those currently in power as she continues to grow her economic empire and align herself with the worlds most powerful business leaders. While not a foregone conclusion, its all in the tea leaves. Lets back up.Earlier this month, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg posted a cheery photo of himself on Instagram wearing a hoodie that read Kim is my lawyer with the caption My only appropriate hoodie. Kardashian commented with Hahaha I love it!!! before sharing the selfie on her Instagram Stories. It still isnt clear what inspired Zuckerbergs shoutout. Did family momager Kris Jenner, whos tagged in the caption, send Zuckerberg the hoodie? Was this some sort of poorly executed promotion for Kardashians upcoming Ryan Murphy legal drama Alls Fair? Will Kardashian, not actually a member of the bar, be representing Zuckerberg in his next lawsuit? Just a few years ago, the queen of selfies having a virtual giggle with a fellow billionaire like Zuckerberg wouldnt have raised many eyebrows. However, Zuckerberg has spent the past year publicly ingratiating himself to President Donald Trump: altering Facebooks speech policies in his favor, donating to his inauguration fund, and attending the ceremony in January. Along with Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Tesla CEO Elon Musk, Zuckerberg has been labeled a member of the broligarchy, a moniker for several tech billionaires trying to curry favor with the Trump administration with the hopes of influencing deregulation policies or attaining government power. Musk has already torn through the federal workforce with his Department of Government Efficiency.More damning, though, has been Kardashians public ties with Musk, adding extra suspicion to her recent interaction with Zuckerberg. Last year, she repeatedly shilled for Musk, whos had a long, storied friendship with her ex-husband Kanye West. In addition to being spotted around Los Angeles in her Tesla Cybertruck, she posted the companys Optimus Bot on X less than two weeks after the presidential election, as well as staging a bizarre, sexy photoshoot with the android on Instagram. (In a strange effort to stave off backlash, she clarified that she wasnt paid to post the robot.) Shes even broadcast her affinity for members of the Trump family. In addition to her well-documented friendship with Ivanka Trump, she shared a caption-less photo of first lady Melania Trump on her Instagram Stories the day of the inauguration. All these pointedly apolitical but public interactions with Trumps family and associates have Kardashians followers wondering if shes preparing to go all in on the president himself. In contrast to Trumps first term, its become more common to see popular celebrities interact with the Trump administration or, at the very least, withhold critical opinions. A slew of rappers, including the previously anti-Trump Snoop Dogg, performed at one of Trumps inaguruation galas. When asked about Trump attending the Super Bowl this month, Kansas City Chiefs Travis Kelce had nothing but polite words to offer.Locating the Kardashian-Jenner clans politics has always been a confusing, maybe even thankless task. Any mention of social issues or electoral politics has felt mostly inorganic coming from members of the privileged family, one of whom unabashedly claimed that they dont even read the news. The rest have spent the better part of their careers offending various demographics online. Nevertheless, the Calabasas influencers rose to power on the internet in the 2010s, around the same time that social movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too were resounding online and demanding the engagement of celebrities. The familys proximity to Black culture, whether through their romantic partners or their affinity for Black beauty trends, also put them in the position of being pressured to speak on racial issues and called out when they didnt. Arguably, these were opinions we didnt actually need to hear. For the most part, Kardashian has associated herself with left-leaning politics, using her platforms to support support Black Lives Matter, calling for stricter gun laws, and criticizing the Supreme Courts decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. She also supported Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Notably, shes the only family member to fold social justice work into her brand, specifically around criminal justice reform. Beginning in 2018, she successfully advocated for the release of Alice Marie Johnson and Chris Young from prison. She also helped persuade the Trump administration to sign the First Step Act, aimed at changing sentencing laws and decreasing prison populations. Since then, shes advocated for the clemency of multiple prisoners on death row and other incarcerated people, including the Menendez brothers. From left, Jared Kushner, Kim Kardashian, and Ivanka Trump at a 2019 White House event for criminal justice reform. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty ImagesAs witnessed by her prison-reform efforts, she hasnt been afraid to do direct business with Trump to advance her own causes. As much good as Kardashian may have done for the pardoned inmates, the clemency deal also just happened to redirect attention from her ex-husbands comments about slavery and bring some goodwill to the Kardashian brand. RelatedThe TrumpKim Kardashian meeting, explainedThe worlds most famous business leaders are also making what feels like a unified move to the right and being regarded as a serious player in the business world has long been a concern for Kardashian. On her Hulu reality show The Kardashians, shes discussed her obsession with proving herself as a businessperson and her desire to be seen as a corporate disruptor on the level of a Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs. In an episode of season 2, Kardashian says: All of the big banks and VCs everyone says, Apple, Nike, Skims. Were in that conversation, and it just makes me really proud. For a high-powered billionaire like Kardashian, it is perhaps only a matter of time before she kisses the ring, much the way her techier brethren have.Its not evident that Kardashian personally aligns with the views of MAGA. Her attendance at a Black business gala earlier this month suggests that shes probably not in support of Trumps sweeping anti-DEI agenda. Her own businesses have relied on the support and compliance of Black and nonwhite celebrities and models, who are often featured in her Skims and KKW beauty campaigns. Plus, it arguably still wouldnt be the smartest move for a reality star trying to earn their stripes in Hollywood to start donning a red cap. Whatever Kardashians intentions, her attempts to appeal to both sides of the aisle have already been undermined. The same day that Kardashian posted a photo of Melania Trumps inauguration outfit on Instagram, President Trump signed an executive order titled Restoring the Death Penalty and Protecting Public Safety, a direct blow to the prison reform efforts shes been fighting for for years. See More:

President Donald Trump says he wants the US to have the cleanest air and water on the planet a desire, unsurprisingly, shared by all Americans. Those resources dont just appear. They come from nature. Freshwater mussels, clams, and aquatic vegetation, for example, filter rivers and streams and provide clean places to swim and habitat for fish to thrive. They also lower water treatment costs. On larger scales, forests and grasslands absorb air pollutants and regulate rain cycles, which helps clean the air.Its a bit strange, then, that the Trump administration has fired hundreds of employees at the already short-staffed US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) the only government agency whose main goal is to conserve animals, ecosystems, and the life-supporting services they provide. Late last week, the Service terminated around 420 employees who were newly hired or recently promoted, amounting to about 5 percent of the agencys workforce, as part of a sprawling government purge.In his first term, President Trump proved that environmental stewardship and economic greatness can go hand-in-hand, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told Vox. He will continue to protect Americas abundant natural resources while streamlining federal agencies to better serve the American people.During his first term, however, Trump did roll back a long list of protections for natural resources that were designed, in part, to keep Americans safe. The terminated Fish and Wildlife Service employees, meanwhile, worked to protect those very resources in a wide range of positions. They include scientists who help conserve imperiled animals, such as freshwater mussels, and workers who help farmers with issues like erosion and runoff that can pollute water.My sadness true sadness is I dont think theyve bothered to ask and really understand what the Fish and Wildlife Service does, Martha Williams, who led the FWS under the Biden administration, said of Trump administration officials. If they did, theyd realize were functioning in a way thats critical to rural and urban communities across the country. The Fish and Wildlife Service exists to protect the natural world. Martha Williams, the former director of the US Fish and Wildlife Service. Courtesy of Martha WilliamsWilliams acknowledges that the conservation community, including FWS, has not done a good enough job at linking its work to the everyday lives of Americans. Many people dont even know what the FWS does, so they gravity of this loss may not sink in.I wanted to let her explain. Our conversation, below, has been edited for length and clarity.Send us a tipDo you have information to share about the US Fish and Wildlife Service or other government agencies? Reach out to Benji Jones at benji.jones@vox.com, on Signal at benji.90, or at benjijones@protonmail.com.Benji JonesWhats keeping you up at night right now? Martha WilliamsWhat keeps me up at night is the wholesale decimation of expertise and of our approach to conservation. Our superpower was that we collaborated with states, with tribes, with local governments, with NGOs. We never had a big enough budget to do anything on our own. Everything the Fish and Wildlife Service does was working with communities was building community. And so coming in and slashing this work hurts people. It hurts communities. It hurts nature. It took decades and decades to build this collaborative approach that can be decimated in the blink of an eye.Benji JonesFor those of us who arent familiar with the Fish and Wildlife Service, or have never heard of it, what exactly does this agency do? Martha WilliamsCongress knew and passed laws that recognize that nature is essential to our own survival as a species. We require clean air, clean water. Congress charged the US Fish and Wildlife Service specifically to conserve, protect, and enhance animals, plants, and habitat, so that we would be able to survive. In the history of this country, weve had these crises, where, for example, migratory birds were completely decimated to make hats using their plumage. Congress passed a law, the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, acknowledging that were about to lose all of these birds that are so important to us. The Fish and Wildlife Service implemented the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Congress also saw that we were losing species before our very eyes. As a response to that crisis, it passed the Endangered Species Act and asked the Fish and Wildlife Service to make sure these species are around into the future. The role of federal employees the role of the Fish and Wildlife Service is to do what Congress told us to do, and thats to implement these laws. That includes laws that created the National Wildlife Refuge System. The National Park System is so incredibly important. The Forest Service is important. But there are also more than 570 wildlife refuges across the country. Congress created this system specifically to conserve nature and to make sure species persist. The refuge system is different from these other systems of public lands because its so community based. A lot of the Refuge System lands are open to fishing and hunting. So many people get their food from refuges, in addition to seeking solace. A Maryland biologist holds several eastern elliptio, a species of freshwater mussel. Kim Hairston/Baltimore Sun/Tribune News Service via Getty ImagesBenji JonesThe Fish and Wildlife Service protects endangered species, and some of these plants and animals are so rare that most people will never see them. So why should average Americans care about that work? Martha WilliamsFirst of all, the Fish and Wildlife Service does so much more than implement the Endangered Species Act. I want people to realize how much the Service does across the country and did internationally to make sure nature can not just exist but try to thrive. As a part of that, Congress requires the Service to look into these crazy, fascinating, endangered species that people may never see. Congress charges the Service with ensuring that these species dont blink out because they may be key, for example, to medical breakthroughs. Theres the Madagascar periwinkle plant thats only in Madagascar. Without us working internationally, we may never have gotten to understand the qualities this plant has to help prevent cancer. There are all these species that are hardly charismatic, but theyre critical to our own survival. I also think of these unknown pollinators or the pollinators we know, like the monarch butterfly. Theyre critical to food production in this country. Who knew in our lifetime that monarch butterflies could disappear? Its hard not to find awe in endangered wildlife. I think it is universal. If you want to have a release or a break, you go watch animal videos, right? To see a condor released and flying free. Or a cute little charismatic black-footed ferret that represents something much bigger than just the ferret: It represents the health of the prairie ecosystem. These endangered species are part of a web of life. And when a species blinks out, it collapses a whole system of nature that works together. Benji JonesThe Services role is more wide-ranging than most people realize. And I dont think a lot of us are connecting the dots between saving something like a rare butterfly and putting food on the table. Do you think the Trump administration knows about the Fish and Wildlife Service?Martha WilliamsI think that Elon Musk knows about the Endangered Species Act because his previous work with his companies has put some species in the crosshairs. But no, I dont think that the Fish and Wildlife Service has been top of mind for them. I think the firing was indiscriminate. Theyre looking to cut people where it is most convenient, hence going after probational employees the new employees, or employees who have just been promoted to different positions.They dont know what the agencies do. They dont know what these people do. They dont have the scientific expertise to understand why, for example, deep sea sponges might be important and might be critical to the next innovation. Theyre cutting innovation because they have this complete lack of curiosity. If I could get President Trump, Elon Musk, and some of the DOGE people out on a trip in nature, would they think the same? Once youre exposed to the awe of nature you realize its bigger than we are. Williams holds a Bolson tortoise, the largest and rarest land reptile. Courtesy of Martha WilliamsBenji JonesHow will losing roughly 5 percent of the Fish and Wildlife Service affect the work it does conservation and what will that mean for Americans?Martha WilliamsThis administration is cutting off our nose to spite our face. The Fish and Wildlife Service was already so lean that we could hardly manage the National Wildlife Refuge System that we already have. The cuts focus on this next generation of leaders. This whole probationary cut means were losing people who are leaders in collaborative community conservation. Theyre extraordinary. So theyve just cut the very people who live and breathe serving people in the United States, serving their communities, and making sure that nature sticks around for the benefit of everyone.Its not only heartbreaking. It hurts our national security. It hurts infrastructure. It makes people less safe. The Fish and Wildlife Service has an Office of Law Enforcement that has focused on international wildlife trafficking. Wildlife trafficking is absolutely linked to international criminal syndicates, so by cutting that work, we are letting international criminal syndicates that trade in people and drugs and wildlife go scot-free.It cuts so little in the budget compared to the impact these people make. The Fish and Wildlife Services leverages its money. We get a tiny budget and work with everyone else to get work done on the ground, to prevent flooding, to prevent wildfires. Heres an example: My understanding is they cut employees as they were going out to start prescribed fires in the South. If you dont do prescribed fire, you risk catastrophic wildfires.Benji JonesWill those push some endangered species closer to the edge? Martha WilliamsMy understanding is that a number of the biologists hired to work on Hawaiian forest birds were fired. These are species about to blink out, and you cant believe how incredible they are. In Hawaii, the birds are these peoples ancestors. They dont separate the birds from their community and ancestors, and you have a responsibility to take care of them. We have solutions, and this administration just yanked them and said, I guess were going to give up on them and have them be gone forever.Benji JonesThe Fish and Wildlife Service is facing other impacts from the new administration. For example, it froze funding for work it supports overseas. Why is FWS funding international conservation?Martha WilliamsCongress passed the Endangered Species Act, which includes international species. The Fish and Wild Service still believes in the law. That includes working on international species to make sure they do not go extinct. Further, the US is a party to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). As a party to CITES and as the agency that implements CITES for the United States, that necessarily includes international species. Science also tells us that nature is essential for our very own existence. That includes these small [and lesser-known] species that are critical to nature and also to medical research. And thats across the world. Theres a system of laws in place, and the Fish and Wildlife Service has learned to be excellent at what we are asked to do. We are like the golden retriever of agencies: We work with everybody, and we want to be the very best and come back and say, Okay, what can we do next? Throw the ball again, because were right here and we believe in this work, and were going to serve this country the very best we can.A bee flies near a flower thats already occupied by an endangered butterfly known as the Taylors checkerspot, in Washington state. Butterflies are among the worlds most important pollinators. Ted S. Warren/Associated PressBenji JonesThe Trump administration weakened the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and the Endangered Species Act in its first term, effectively making it easier to harm wildlife without recourse. Do you expect more of the same or will this time be different?Martha WilliamsI dont think I can answer that because the administration is so unpredictable. So I dont know. Do I worry? Yes, based on the first administration. I worry for the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Im worried for the Endangered Species Act. But again, Im used to a world where those changes have to happen through Congress, and I dont know whether this administration is going to follow the traditional system of laws. So I think its up in the air. I know that the Fish and Wildlife Service employees will always do the best with what they are tasked with doing. I know they have learned to work with others and work within the communities where they live. That gives me hope.Benji JonesWhats your message at this moment for people who voted Donald Trump into power? Martha WilliamsYou may have voted for Trump to slash the federal government, but DOGE is picking on the wrong people. Its slashing the people who are actually doing a really good job, and are really important to you. Give the Fish and Wildlife Service a chance, because were not the bad, evil people. These are people who live in your community, who are there to serve you and the American people. I have a hard time believing that the people who voted for Trump meant to dismantle this work that is built on helping your community.Benji JonesWhat can people who really care about wildlife and nature do right now? Martha WilliamsGo to your members of Congress and tell them that this work matters. Be engaged. Pay attention. Try to learn the facts. See More:

Former Democratic presidential candidate and Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard has had an unpredictable political career.But ending up as President Donald Trumps director of national intelligence was still, to many, a surprising twist.Gabbard has never worked in the intelligence bureaucracy. But her skepticism of US foreign intervention, forged during National Guard deployments overseas, and her distrust of the deep state make her a natural choice for a White House that wants to rein in US military operations worldwide and radically shrink the federal government.Gabbard was a rising star in the Democratic Party for much of the 2010s, going from a featured speaker at the 2012 Democratic National Convention to a long-shot presidential candidate in 2020. Eventually she broke with the party establishment over policy positions on Syria and Russia, first endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders in 2016, then leaving the party altogether in 2022, to finally endorsing Trump and joining the Republican Party in 2024.Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram spoke with the Economists senior editor Steve Coll about Gabbards long, strange trip, from growing up in a spiritual community in Hawaii, to her military deployment to Iraq, to her tumultuous time on the national political stage. Coll has written a long profile of Gabbard, and has published many books about US intelligence and foreign policy, including Ghost Wars, The Bin Ladens, and Directorate S.Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Theres much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.Steve, America has a new spy chief. What makes Tulsi Gabbard different from, say, all the ones that preceded her?Many things, actually. She is an unorthodox choice in part because she doesnt have any direct experience in the intelligence world, and in part because of her unorthodox views about American power in the world and the deep state.I think youre being gentle and nice about it. Some people out there think that Tulsi Gabbard is a Russian operative. Well, that is a charge thats been leveled against her. She once sued Hillary Clinton for $50 million for saying something along those lines. I think that goes too far. [S]hes aligned with Donald Trumps agenda...to conduct a review of people who are disloyal and to take disciplinary action against them.But she has expressed sympathy for Putins dilemma and for dictators like Bashar al-Assad, the former dictator of Syria. She has called for a pardon for Edward Snowden, the whistleblower who exposed illegal surveillance of Americans. She sounds more like a progressive politician sometimes than an establishment spy chief. And I think she would say thats the point we need a different perspective on top of the American intelligence system.It sounds worth better understanding how an overhauled intelligence chief might further change our relationship with Russia. So lets better understand Tulsi Gabbard. Where does she get her start?She grew up in Hawaii in somewhat unusual circumstances. Her parents were members of a religious community called the Science of Identity Foundation, which was derived from the Hare Krishna branch of meditation and yoga teaching. The community that her parents belonged to and that she had considerable exposure to as a child was led by a charismatic guru named Chris Butler, who was a former surfer and college dropout who had lived on the streets as a Hare Krishna follower, but then started his own community. Some of its former members have described it as a cult. They have described him as an authoritarian figure and that he was worshiped to the extent that people prostrated themselves when he came into the room or regarded his food scraps as relics.And how does she get into politics?Her parents created a path into politics when she was a young woman. One of Chris Butlers most adamant views, at least in the 80s and 90s, was an opposition to homosexuality, which he regarded as an abomination, and also to the establishment of rights for gay and lesbian couples. And as a teenager, Tulsi Gabbard found herself on the streets of Honolulu protesting alongside her parents against the establishment of gay marriage rights in Hawaii. It was in that time when she was very young, just 20 or 21 years old, that she and her father simultaneously ran for public office in Hawaii. She was elected to the state legislature and her father was elected as a city councilman initially. Then 9/11 happened. She decided after 9/11 that she wanted to join the military. She initially joined the Hawaii National Guard, and then she was deployed to Iraq and went to a base north of Baghdad in 2005. Insurgency was all around them. She has described this experience of war as transformational in her outlook on the American government, on American power. She eventually became a lieutenant colonel who became disillusioned by the wars that America fought after 9/11, particularly, in her case, Iraq. She did eventually come back to politics, first on the Honolulu City Council. And then, in 2012, a seat in Congress, one of the four that Hawaii has, opened up. She won the Democratic primary and she was immediately embraced by the national Democratic Party. At the Democratic convention that summer, they gave Tulsi Gabbard a coveted speaking spot. She arrived in Washington and [then-House Speaker] Nancy Pelosi took her under her wing. She was seen as maybe the next Obama, another Hawaiian politician, a woman of color, military career whats not to like? Good speaker, telegenic. Then very quickly, as these things go in Washington, it started to come apart. Partly, she didnt play the game. And she started to pick fights with leaders of her party, including Barack Obama, who she called out for not being sufficiently tough on Islamic terrorism. And so by the time the 2016 presidential cycle arrived, she was starting to drift away from the party that had embraced her. She decided to resign from the Democratic National Committee and to endorse Bernie Sanders for the 2016 campaign. And that decision just kept pulling her to the left of the party. What you can see by 2016 is the beginnings of what some people have called the horseshoe shape of American political populism, where the farther you go to the left, the closer you get to the MAGA right.It feels like a progression a lot of American voters have gone on, where they voted for Obama and then they moved toward Bernie and then they ended up voting for Donald Trump a couple of times.Yes, thats absolutely right. By 2019, shes still a Democrat and she can be critical of Donald Trump in public, although she met with him in the fall of 2016 after he was elected, when he was auditioning members of his first administration. In any event, she was already part of the MAGA conversation. She knew Tucker Carlson, went on his show on Fox News, and she won praise from some ardent Trump supporters in the manosphere and podcasting landscape and so forth. Nonetheless, she stayed in the Democratic Party with the ambition that she then exhibited in 2019, which was to run for president as an heir to the Bernie wing of the party. And she really had a rough time of it. She never came out of single digits. She wasnt really able to raise much money. She was attacked by Hillary Clinton and others as being a tool of foreign powers. And after that she paused her own campaign and endorsed Joe Biden. But she was clearly no longer interested in the partys leadership, and they were no longer interested in her, a relatively short time after her being such a rising star. How does she go from becoming a Republican to becoming one of the most important players in our intelligence community, if not the most important player? Well, you know, it really is a puzzle, because Donald Trump could have nominated her to be secretary of Veterans Affairs or something, and everyone would have said, What an innovative choice! And she would have gotten confirmed with no difficulty. Instead, he named her the top spy of the US system. As director of national intelligence, she has two jobs. One is to edit and filter what secret information the president and his top Cabinet gets every morning. Thats the most important part of the job. The second, also important, part is that she oversees the 18 sprawling American spy agencies from the CIA to the eavesdropping National Security Agency to others. She sets strategy, kibitzes about their budgets, and otherwise sets a direction for the intelligence community. She has no experience of these bureaucracies. She has not been an intelligence analyst. Indeed, a lot of her takes over the years on the foreign policy questions that she was most interested in were a bit garbled or a bit puzzling in different ways. She sometimes aligned herself with misinformation and propaganda that was coming out of Russia or Syrias dictatorship. She seemed an uncritical thinker. She clearly had strong policy views, but she would select facts as if she was just cruising the internet and making her arguments out of what she found. So it left me initially, as I was working on her biography, puzzled. Like, why this job? But the answer reveals itself in her own speaking and writing and her own convictions. And she brought some of this even to her confirmation hearing.And so this is, in fact, why Donald Trump, I think, is attracted to her leadership and why shes aligned with Donald Trumps agenda in the intelligence community, which is that her first job includes carrying out two executive orders that the president signed fairly early on that basically designate the director of national intelligence for a period of a couple or three months to conduct a review of people who are disloyal and to take disciplinary action against them, people who had weaponized intelligence in the previous administration or who were otherwise unreliable politically. Shes going to lead that review. And what you can say is that shes motivated to do it. She thinks there is a really deep-seated problem in the intelligence communities that she will now have the power to do something about.So those are her first tasks from her boss. But obviously a big part of her job will be countering US adversaries. China comes to mind. Russia historically would have come to mind. But what does putting Tulsi Gabbard in charge of our national intelligence say about where were heading with Russia and about what Trump wants to accomplish with Russia?Well, she never appeared to regard Vladimir Putin as an enemy of the United States. She tended to express herself indirectly about this by criticizing the Democratic elites for demonizing Putin. She would mock them for calling him the new Hitler. She blamed NATO for provoking Putin. So in that sense, she was aligned with President Trumps assessments of Putin as someone he could do business with, someone he should try to do business with. Perhaps there are people around President Trump who see grand strategy in this. They might say that US policy has driven Russia and China closely together, complicating Americas great power position, and that the US has to pull one of those two away, and Russias the better choice. That seems to be the hypothesis that has brought hawks and noninterventionists together in this early period of the Trump administration. But for Tulsi Gabbard, I dont hear anything on the chessboard like that. I think she just has an instinct that the elites have gotten it all wrong and that Vladimir Putin has been unfairly maligned.See More:

What if workers were fully alienated from their labor? This is the question posed by severance, the titular procedure at the heart of the Apple TV+ hit, in which employees of the fictional corporate Lumon, divorced from their non-work selves, toil at meaningless labor in a basement-level prison. If the central metaphor of season one was that you cannot truly separate your self from your job, even with a bifurcated brain, season two tackles what happens after that knowledge becomes inescapable. Estrangement from the self must be addressed and overcome.The process of severance is posed as a solution to employees: Achieve work-life balance by not remembering your work day literally leaving your job at the workplace doors (or elevators, as the case may be). But like every technological advancement flowing from corporations downward, this innovation doesnt help workers so much as their bosses. Having no histories and context of the outer world to draw on, the severed employees of the Macrodata Refinement Division are easier to manipulate and abuse, and they dont understand just how meaningless their work is. While the work may truly be important as well as mysterious, theyre just sorting scary numbers, utterly unaware of the point of their labor. This disaffection follows them home, exacerbated because of severance, not diminished. As season two expands to spend more time with the outies, a fuller picture emerges of how their severance affects them during what should be leisure time. Dylan (Zach Cherry), in particular, is a sobering case study: Despite his loving wife and three nice children, hes chronically unhappy with his lot. For Irving B. (John Turturro), his outies activities remain the most opaque, but he seems to spend most of his time painting the same ominous scene of the Exports Hall, trying to recapture what he supposedly left at the office. Helly R. (Britt Lower), meanwhile, appears to have a more fulfilling life than her outie; Helena Eagan temporarily takes that life over, stealing the pleasure of Helly R.s relationship with Mark S. (Adam Scott). She may be an Eagan, the companys heir apparent, but the obscenely wealthy corporate class still suffers the effects of alienation estrangement from their human nature.Mark S. and Helly R. look for Ms. Casey. Apple TV+Mark took the severed job in an attempt to forget about his dead wife, Gemma, for the duration of the workday, but that hasnt appeared to translate into anything good for him. He drinks alone, he goes on bad dates, and every once in a while his well-meaning sister drags him to a dinner party he hates, where its just as likely that theres nothing to eat. But the reason Mark underwent severance Gemma is also the reason hes trying to un-sever himself. Having previously refused to engage with his innies plight, outie Mark is now undergoing reintegration, whereby Mark S. and Mark meld, so he can remember his experiences inside Lumon and save Gemma, who is trapped as the wellness counselor Ms. Casey (Dichen Lachman). Reintegration becomes a metaphor: The work self has finally gotten through to the rest of you that conditions are in fact intolerable. And the worse the conditions, the greater the liberation of overcoming them. Reintegrating / The you you are Rebellion, wrote Albert Camus, is born of the spectacle of irrationality, confronted with an unjust and incomprehensible condition. Mark S. has a kind of moxie lacking in his outie, born of his particularly unjust and incomprehensible condition. But Outie Marks slow dip into reintegration gives him some of his innies verve, as if the two selves reinforce each others chutzpah. By engaging with his work life, Outie Mark becomes more alive. In a throughline that began in the pilots foodless dinner scene, Mark is suddenly hungry all the time. His refrigerator is mostly empty except for bottles of beer and small jars of what appear to be a chicken soup Soylent product, drinks that teach their consumers to understand food as mere calories to be hastily consumed in pursuit of a more optimized life. Mark seems to have internalized this until hes in the throes of reintegration, and the chicken soup Soylent produces a grimace and a trip to a local Chinese restaurant, where he scarfs plate after plate of real food. The process of becoming his whole self is exhausting and requires sustenance, but this hunger this pleasure in food represents something larger.Mark is becoming less optimized less willing to understand himself as a product of efficiency. The forces of late capitalism would have us all self-optimize into an endless hustle culture of nonstop work, but food is one human pleasure that forces us to treat ourselves like the fleshy bodies we are, and meals require spending time in a space where opportunities may arise in Marks case, a suspicious run-in with Helena Eagan that propels Mark onto the faster but harsher version of reintegration. Mark feeding his hunger, then, shows hes less willing to contort himself, less willing to sacrifice the stuff of life to a productive scheme that teaches us to understand ourselves as workers at all times. The opposite of alienation / The we we areMarks not-so-late wife, Gemma, engaged in this kind of nourishing activity. When he misses her particularly badly, Mark opens her box of crafting supplies, tucked away in the basement; we see a clumsy candle in Christmas red and green. Crafting gave her time to think, Mark explains, an activity falling outside productivity culture. This is the opposite of alienation. Karl Marx called it the life-being or the species-being, but today his wonky German translations are mostly distilled to essence: the idea of each human as part of humanity writ large, and the flourishing that comes when we individually and collectively organize our lives and selves outside of the products of capital. Work takes something from you, something intrinsic and literal, making you less. You can replenish this loss with pleasurable pursuits: for Marx, this meant eating, drinking, buying books, going to the theater or the pub, thinking, loving, theorizing, singing, painting and the less you do of those things, the greater your capital. The essence of life, in other words, comes from pleasures and socializing, while the estrangement from our human nature comes not just from work, but from understanding ourselves as workers. Because work cannot be compartmentalized and cordoned off. If were divided from our work selves, were divided from ourselves. The path through this is one we must walk together. Its no coincidence that the Macrodata Refinement Divisions big moment of dissent is a collective action born out of the individual paths of workplace radicalization (with the help of Marks brother-in-laws self-help tome, The You You Are). Subjugation begins at work, but so does radicalization. As Ive written previously, this is a lesson many workers who engage in collective action learn. We dont go into work radicalized. We become radicalized at work, and even the smallest taste of collective action provides a potent sense of our power. Like reintegration, that power carries into life outside of our jobs, making us less willing to take bad situations from others who similarly seek to exploit us. This helps explain why the wealthiest and most powerful people fight unionization efforts so hard: Compliance at work doesnt just keep workers under the thumbs of their bosses; it keeps extractive labor capitalism as the status quo. The workplace is at the heart of alienation because its where we learn to be subjected to understand ourselves as literal subjects. When we accept that our livelihoods exist by the unfathomable whims of a C-suite, were more likely to understand ourselves as similarly passive within other unequal dynamics, be it landlords raising rent just because they can or divestment in public education leading to life under insurmountable student loan debt. And when workers call bullshit on the conditions of work, its not too long before they challenge the very nature of the work itself and the way its ethos spreads its tendrils into all aspects of life. You dont have to watch a science-fiction show like Severance to understand that the workplace is the central site of all that is soul-crushing and spiritually immiserating in life you just have to go to work. The opposite is true, too. Engaging in the simple pursuits that give texture to life eating real food, engaging in nonproductive hobbies like crafting, socializing with people you love replenish the soul, acting as a counterbalance to the estrangement of the workplace. Fully realizing the self is nearly as hard in our real world as it is in the grimly fantastical world of Lumon Industries, even if going to town on a bowl of wonton soup isnt quite as revolutionary an act. Here and there, reintegration into the whole self brings with it a potent sense of self-determination, joy, and power. A taste of that makes us hungry for more. See More:

The AI world is moving so fast that its easy to get lost amid the flurry of shiny new products. OpenAI announces one, then the Chinese startup DeepSeek releases one, then OpenAI immediately puts out another one. Each is important, but focus too much on any one of them and youll miss the really big story of the past six months. The big story is: AI companies now claim that their models are capable of genuine reasoning the type of thinking you and I do when we want to solve a problem. And the big question is: Is that true?The stakes are high, because the answer will inform how everyone from your mom to your government should and should not turn to AI for help.If youve played around with ChatGPT, you know that it was designed to spit out quick answers to your questions. But state-of-the-art reasoning models like OpenAIs o1 or DeepSeeks r1 are designed to think a while before responding, by breaking down big problems into smaller problems and trying to solve them step by step. The industry calls that chain-of-thought reasoning.These models are yielding some very impressive results. They can solve tricky logic puzzles, ace math tests, and write flawless code on the first try. Yet they also fail spectacularly on really easy problems: o1, nicknamed Strawberry, was mocked for bombing the question how many rs are there in strawberry? AI experts are torn over how to interpret this. Skeptics take it as evidence that reasoning models arent really reasoning at all. Believers insist that the models genuinely are doing some reasoning, and though it may not currently be as flexible as a humans reasoning, its well on its way to getting there. So, whos right?The best answer will be unsettling to both the hard skeptics of AI and the true believers.What counts as reasoning?Lets take a step back. What exactly is reasoning, anyway? AI companies like OpenAI are using the term reasoning to mean that their models break down a problem into smaller problems, which they tackle step by step, ultimately arriving at a better solution as a result.But thats a much narrower definition of reasoning than a lot of people might have in mind. Although scientists are still trying to understand how reasoning works in the human brain nevermind in AI they agree that there are actually lots of different types of reasoning. Theres deductive reasoning, where you start with a general statement and use it to reach a specific conclusion. Theres inductive reasoning, where you use specific observations to make a broader generalization. And theres analogical reasoning, causal reasoning, common sense reasoning suffice it to say, reasoning is not just one thing! Now, if someone comes up to you with a hard math problem and gives you a chance to break it down and think about it step by step, youll do a lot better than if you have to blurt out the answer off the top of your head. So, being able to do deliberative chain-of-thought reasoning is definitely helpful, and it might be a necessary ingredient of getting anything really difficult done. Yet its not the whole of reasoning. One feature of reasoning that we care a lot about in the real world is the ability to suss out a rule or pattern from limited data or experience and to apply this rule or pattern to new, unseen situations, writes Melanie Mitchell, a professor at the Santa Fe Institute, together with her co-authors in a paper on AIs reasoning abilities. Even very young children are adept at learning abstract rules from just a few examples.In other words, a toddler can generalize. Can an AI?A lot of the debate turns around this question. Skeptics are very, well, skeptical of AIs ability to generalize. They think something else is going on. The skeptics caseIts a kind of meta-mimicry, Shannon Vallor, a philosopher of technology at the University of Edinburgh, told me when OpenAIs o1 came out in September. She meant that while an older model like ChatGPT mimics the human-written statements in its training data, a newer model like o1 mimics the process that humans engage in to come up with those statements. In other words, she believes, its not truly reasoning. It would be pretty easy for o1 to just make it sound like its reasoning; after all, its training data is rife with examples of that, from doctors analyzing symptoms to decide on a diagnosis to judges evaluating evidence to arrive at a verdict.Besides, when OpenAI built the o1 model, it made some changes from the previous ChatGPT model but did not dramatically overhaul the architecture and ChatGPT was flubbing easy questions last year, like answering a question about how to get a man and a goat across a river in a totally ridiculous way. So why, Vallor asked, would we think o1 is doing something totally new and magical especially given that it, too, flubs easy questions? In the cases where it fails, you see what, for me, is compelling evidence that its not reasoning at all, she said. Mitchell was surprised at how well o3 OpenAIs newest reasoning model, announced at the end of last year as a successor to o1 performed on tests. But she was also surprised at just how much computation it used to solve the problems. We dont know what its doing with all that computation, because OpenAI is not transparent about whats going on under the hood.Ive actually done my own experiments on people where theyre thinking out loud about these problems, and they dont think out loud for, you know, hours of computation time, she told me. They just say a couple sentences and then say, Yeah, I see how it works, because theyre using certain kinds of concepts. I dont know if o3 is using those kinds of concepts.Without greater transparency from the company, Mitchell said we cant be sure that the model is breaking down a big problem into steps and getting a better overall answer as a result of that approach, as OpenAI claims. She pointed to a paper, Lets Think Dot by Dot, where researchers did not get a model to break down a problem into intermediate steps; instead, they just told the model to generate dots. Those dots were totally meaningless what the papers authors call filler tokens. But it turned out that just having additional tokens there allowed the model more computational capacity, and it could use that extra computation to solve problems better. That suggests that when a model generates intermediate steps whether its a phrase like lets think about this step by step or just .... those steps dont necessarily mean its doing the human-like reasoning you think its doing. I think a lot of what its doing is more like a bag of heuristics than a reasoning model, Mitchell told me. A heuristic is a mental shortcut something that often lets you guess the right answer to a problem, but not by actually thinking it through. Heres a classic example: Researchers trained an AI vision model to analyze photos for skin cancer. It seemed, at first blush, like the model was genuinely figuring out if a mole is malignant. But it turned out the photos of malignant moles in its training data often contained a ruler, so the model had just learned to use the presence of a ruler as a heuristic for deciding on malignancy.Skeptical AI researchers think that state-of-the-art models may be doing something similar: They appear to be reasoning their way through, say, a math problem, but really theyre just drawing on a mix of memorized information and heuristics. The believers caseOther experts are more bullish on reasoning models. Ryan Greenblatt, chief scientist at Redwood Research, a nonprofit that aims to mitigate risks from advanced AI, thinks these models are pretty clearly doing some form of reasoning. They do it in a way that doesnt generalize as well as the way humans do it theyre relying more on memorization and knowledge than humans do but theyre still doing the thing, Greenblatt said. Its not like theres no generalization at all. After all, these models have been able to solve hard problems beyond the examples theyve been trained on often very impressively. For Greenblatt, the simplest explanation as to how is that they are indeed doing some reasoning.And the point about heuristics can cut both ways, whether were talking about a reasoning model or an earlier model like ChatGPT. Consider the a man, a boat, and a goat prompt that had many skeptics mocking OpenAI last year:Whats going on here? Greenblatt says the model messed up because this prompt is actually a classic logic puzzle that dates back centuries and that would have appeared many times in the training data. In some formulations of the river-crossing puzzle, a farmer with a wolf, a goat, and a cabbage must cross over by boat. The boat can only carry the farmer and a single item at a time but if left together, the wolf will eat the goat or the goat will eat the cabbage, so the challenge is to get everything across without anything getting eaten. That explains the models mention of a cabbage in its response. The model would instantly recognize the puzzle. My best guess is that the models have this incredibly strong urge to be like, Oh, its this puzzle! I know what this puzzle is! I should do this because that performed really well in the training data. Its like a learned heuristic, Greenblatt said. The implication? Its not that it cant solve it. In a lot of these cases, if you say its a trick question, and then you give the question, the model often does totally fine.Humans fail in the same way all the time, he pointed out. If youd just spent a month studying color theory from complementary colors to the psychological effects of different hues to the historical significance of certain pigments in Renaissance paintings and then got a quiz asking, Why did the artist paint the sky blue in this landscape painting?... well, you might be tricked into writing a needlessly complicated answer! Maybe youd write about how the blue represents the divine heavens, or how the specific shade suggests the painting was done in the early morning hours which symbolizes rebirth when really, the answer is simply: Because the sky is blue! Ajeya Cotra, a senior analyst at Open Philanthropy who researches the risks from AI, agrees with Greenblatt on that point. And, she said of the latest models, I think theyre genuinely getting better at this wide range of tasks that humans would call reasoning tasks. She doesnt dispute that the models are doing some meta-mimicry. But when skeptics say its just doing meta-mimicry, she explained, I think the just part of it is the controversial part. It feels like what theyre trying to imply often is and therefore its not going to have a big impact on the world or and therefore artificial superintelligence is far away and thats what I dispute. To see why, she said, imagine youre teaching a college physics class. Youve got different types of students. One is an outright cheater: He just looks in the back of the book for the answers and then writes them down. Another student is such a savant that he doesnt even need to think about the equations; he understands the physics on such a deep, intuitive, Einstein-like level that he can derive the right equations on the fly. All the other students are somewhere in the middle: Theyve memorized a list of 25 equations and are trying to figure out which equation to apply in which situation. Like the majority of students, AI models are pairing some memorization with some reasoning, Cotra told me.The AI models are like a student that is not very bright but is superhumanly diligent, and so they havent just memorized 25 equations, theyve memorized 500 equations, including ones for weird situations that could come up, she said. Theyre pairing a lot of memorization with a little bit of reasoning that is, with figuring out what combination of equations to apply to a problem. And that just takes you very far! They seem at first glance as impressive as the person with the deep intuitive understanding.Of course, when you look harder, you can still find holes that their 500 equations just happen not to cover. But that doesnt mean zero reasoning has taken place.In other words, the models are neither exclusively reasoning nor exclusively just reciting. Its somewhere in between, Cotra said. I think people are thrown off by that because they want to put it in one camp or another. They want to say its just memorizing or they want to say its truly deeply reasoning. But the fact is, theres just a spectrum of the depth of reasoning. AI systems have jagged intelligenceResearchers have come up with a buzzy term to describe this pattern of reasoning: jagged intelligence. It refers to the strange fact that, as computer scientist Andrej Karpathy explained, state-of-the-art AI models can both perform extremely impressive tasks (e.g., solve complex math problems) while simultaneously struggling with some very dumb problems. Drew Shannon for VoxPicture it like this. If human intelligence looks like a cloud with softly rounded edges, artificial intelligence is like a spiky cloud with giant peaks and valleys right next to each other. In humans, a lot of problem-solving capabilities are highly correlated with each other, but AI can be great at one thing and ridiculously bad at another thing that (to us) doesnt seem far apart.Mind you, its all relative. Compared to what humans are good at, the models are quite jagged, Greenblatt told me. But I think indexing on humans is a little confusing. From the models perspective, its like, Wow, those humans are so jagged! Theyre so bad at next-token prediction! Its not clear that theres some objective sense in which AI is more jagged. The fact that reasoning models are trained to sound like humans reasoning makes us disposed to compare AI intelligence to human intelligence. But the best way to think of AI is probably not as smarter than a human or dumber than a human but just as different.Regardless, Cotra anticipates that sooner or later AI intelligence will be so vast that it can contain within it all of human intelligence, and then some.I think about, what are the risks that emerge when AI systems are truly better than human experts at everything? When they might still be jagged, but their full jagged intelligence encompasses all of human intelligence and more? she said. Im always looking ahead to that point in time and preparing for that.For now, the practical upshot for most of us is this: Remember what AI is and isnt smart at and use it accordingly. The best use case is a situation where its hard for you to come up with a solution, but once you get a solution from the AI you can easily check to see if its correct. Writing code is a perfect example. Another example would be making a website: You can see what the AI produced and, if you dont like it, just get the AI to redo it.In other domains especially ones where there is no objective right answer or where the stakes are high youll want to be more hesitant about using AI. You might get some initial suggestions from it, but dont put too much stock in it, especially if what its saying seems off to you. An example would be asking for advice on how to handle a moral dilemma. You might see what thoughts the model is provoking in you without trusting it as giving you the final answer.The more things are fuzzy and judgment-driven, Cotra said, the more you want to use it as a thought partner, not an oracle.Youve 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:

The Logoff is 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 Im focusing on the Senates confirmation of new FBI Director Kash Patel, a move that puts a hardcore Trump loyalist at the head of federal law enforcement.Whats the latest? The Senate voted 51-49 today to confirm Patel as the head of the FBI. All Democrats and both independents voted no, as did Republican Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine. Who is Kash Patel? Patel is a former public defender, prosecutor, and Republican congressional staffer. During the first Trump administration, Patel worked on the National Security Council and for the Defense Department.Hes also a longtime MAGA loyalist who has appeared on right-wing podcasts and criticized investigations into Donald Trumps conduct as political persecution. Patels 2023 book included an enemies list, naming dozens of officials whom he deemed threats to democracy via the deep state.Whats going on between Trump and the FBI? The Trump administration has fired high-ranking FBI officials and demanded bureau leadership compile a list of employees involved in the January 6 investigations, raising concerns about a coming political purge.During his confirmation hearing testimony, Patel pledged: There will be no retributive actions taken by any FBI, should I be confirmed as the FBI director. But Sen. Richard Durbin (D-IL) accused Patel of involvement in the early firings a claim Patels team denies.Whats the big picture? Trumps critics charge hell use the Justice Department to attack his critics and take revenge for past investigations. The FBI would be critical to that process, and now a Trump loyalist rather than an official with a background in law enforcement will lead it.And with that, its time to log off I didnt know what a social biome was before reading this piece from my colleague Allie Volpe, but since learning about it, Ive grown a touch obsessed. This piece is about how you can make sure your social life actually works to make you a happier, more fulfilled person. And it turns out, some of the prescribed steps like slowing down to make sure you have at least one high-quality conversation a day are not as difficult as I expected. I hope you enjoy it. See you back here tomorrow.Youve 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:

Oct 11, 2024Sigal SamuelAI companies are trying to build god. Shouldnt they get our permission first?Getty ImagesAI companies are on a mission to radically change our world. Theyre working on building machines that could outstrip human intelligence and unleash a dramatic economic transformation on us all. Sam Altman, the CEO of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, has basically told us hes trying to build a god or magic intelligence in the sky, as he puts it. OpenAIs official term for this is artificial general intelligence, or AGI. Altman says that AGI will not only break capitalism but also that its probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity. Read Article >Sep 29, 2024Sigal Samuel, Kelsey Piperand1 moreCalifornias governor has vetoed a historic AI safety billCalifornia Gov.Gavin Newsom speaks during a press conference with the California Highway Patrol announcing new efforts to boost public safety in the East Bay, in Oakland, California, July 11, 2024. Stephen Lam/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty ImagesAdvocates said it would be a modest law setting clear, predictable, common-sense safety standards for artificial intelligence. Opponents argued it was a dangerous and arrogant step that will stifle innovation.In any event, SB 1047 California state Sen. Scott Wieners proposal to regulate advanced AI models offered by companies doing business in the state is now kaput, vetoed by Gov. Gavin Newsom. The proposal had garnered wide support in the legislature, passing the California State Assembly by a margin of 48 to 16 in August. Back in May, it passed the Senate by 32 to 1.Read Article >Sep 26, 2024Sigal SamuelOpenAI as we knew it is deadSam Altman. Aaron Schwartz/Xinhua via Getty ImagesOpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, just sold you out.Since its founding in 2015, its leaders have said their top priority is making sure artificial intelligence is developed safely and beneficially. Theyve touted the companys unusual corporate structure as a way of proving the purity of its motives. OpenAI was a nonprofit controlled not by its CEO or by its shareholders, but by a board with a single mission: keep humanity safe.Read Article >Sep 14, 2024Sigal SamuelThe new follow-up to ChatGPT is scarily good at deceptionMarharyta Pavliuk/Getty ImagesOpenAI, the company that brought you ChatGPT, is trying something different. Its newly released AI system isnt just designed to spit out quick answers to your questions, its designed to think or reason before responding. The result is a product officially called o1 but nicknamed Strawberry that can solve tricky logic puzzles, ace math tests, and write code for new video games. All of which is pretty cool. Read Article >Aug 18, 2024Sigal SamuelPeople are falling in love with and getting addicted to AI voicesGetty ImagesThis is our last day together. Its something you might say to a lover as a whirlwind romance comes to an end. But could you ever imagine saying it to software? Read Article >Aug 5, 2024Sigal SamuelIts practically impossible to run a big AI company ethicallyGetty Images for Amazon Web ServAnthropic was supposed to be the good AI company. The ethical one. The safe one.It was supposed to be different from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. In fact, all of Anthropics founders once worked at OpenAI but quit in part because of differences over safety culture there, and moved to spin up their own company that would build AI more responsibly. Read Article >Jul 19, 2024Sigal SamuelTraveling this summer? Maybe dont let the airport scan your face.Passengers enter the departure hall through face recognition at Xiaoshan International Airport in China in 2022. Future Publishing via Getty ImagesHeres something Im embarrassed to admit: Even though Ive been reporting on the problems with facial recognition for half a dozen years, I have allowed my face to be scanned at airports. Not once. Not twice. Many times. There are lots of reasons for that. For one thing, traveling is stressful. I feel time pressure to make it to my gate quickly and social pressure not to hold up long lines. (This alone makes it feel like Im not truly consenting to the face scans so much as being coerced into them.) Plus, Im always getting randomly selected for additional screenings, maybe because of my Middle Eastern background. So I get nervous about doing anything that might lead to extra delays or interrogations.Read Article >Jun 5, 2024Sigal SamuelOpenAI insiders are demanding a right to warn the publicSam Altman, CEO of OpenAI. David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesEmployees from some of the worlds leading AI companies published an unusual proposal on Tuesday, demanding that the companies grant them a right to warn about advanced artificial intelligence. Whom do they want to warn? You. The public. Anyone who will listen. Read Article >May 22, 2024Sigal SamuelThe double sexism of ChatGPTs flirty Her voiceScarlett Johansson attends the Clooney Foundation for Justices 2023 Albie Awards on September 28, 2023 in New York City. Getty ImagesIf a guy told you his favorite sci-fi movie is Her, then released an AI chatbot with a voice that sounds uncannily like the voice from Her, then tweeted the single word her moments after the release what would you conclude?Its reasonable to conclude that the AIs voice is heavily inspired by Her. Read Article >May 18, 2024Sigal SamuelI lost trust: Why the OpenAI team in charge of safeguarding humanity implodedSam Altman is the CEO of ChatGPT maker OpenAI, which has been losing its most safety-focused researchers. Joel Saget/AFP via Getty ImagesEditors note, May 18, 2024, 7:30 pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect OpenAI CEO Sam Altmans tweet on Saturday afternoon that the company was in the process of changing its offboarding documents.For months, OpenAI has been losing employees who care deeply about making sure AI is safe. Now, the company is positively hemorrhaging them.Read Article >May 8, 2024Sigal SamuelSome say AI will make war more humane. Israels war in Gaza shows the opposite.A December 2023 photo shows a Palestinian girl injured as a result of the Israeli bombing on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip. Saher Alghorra/Middle East images/AFP via Getty ImagesIsrael has reportedly been using AI to guide its war in Gaza and treating its decisions almost as gospel. In fact, one of the AI systems being used is literally called The Gospel.According to a major investigation published last month by the Israeli outlet +972 Magazine, Israel has been relying on AI to decide whom to target for killing, with humans playing an alarmingly small role in the decision-making, especially in the early stages of the war. The investigation, which builds on a previous expos by the same outlet, describes three AI systems working in concert. Read Article >Mar 21, 2024Sigal SamuelElon Musk wants to merge humans with AI. How many brains will be damaged along the way?Xinmei Liu for VoxOf all Elon Musks exploits the Tesla cars, the SpaceX rockets, the Twitter takeover, the plans to colonize Mars his secretive brain chip company Neuralink may be the most dangerous.What is Neuralink for? In the short term, its for helping people with paralysis people like Noland Arbaugh, a 29-year-old who demonstrated in a livestream this week that he can now move a computer cursor using just the power of his mind after becoming the first patient to receive a Neuralink implant. Read Article >Jan 18, 2024Adam Clark EstesHow copyright lawsuits could kill OpenAIPolice officers stand outside the New York Times headquarters in New York City. Drew Angerer/Getty ImagesIf youre old enough to remember watching the hit kids show Animaniacs, you probably remember Napster, too. The peer-to-peer file-sharing site, which made it easy to download music for free in an era before Spotify and Apple Music, took college campuses by storm in the late 1990s. This did not escape the notice of the record companies, and in 2001, a federal court ruled that Napster was liable for copyright infringement. The content producers fought back against the technology platform and won. But that was 2001 before the iPhone, before YouTube, and before generative AI. This generations big copyright battle is pitting journalists against artificially intelligent software that has learned from and can regurgitate their reporting. Read Article >Jan 11, 2024Pranav DixitThere are too many chatbotsPaige Vickers/Vox; Getty ImagesOn Wednesday, OpenAI announced an online storefront called the GPT Store that lets people share custom versions of ChatGPT. Its like an app store for chatbots, except that unlike the apps on your phone, these chatbots can be created by almost anyone with a few simple text prompts. Over the past couple of months, people have created more than 3 million chatbots thanks to the GPT creation tool OpenAI announced in November. At launch, for example, the store features a chatbot that builds websites for you, and a chatbot that searches through a massive database of academic papers. And like the developers for smartphone app stores, the creators of these new chatbots can make money based on how many people use their product. The store is only available to paying ChatGPT subscribers for now, and OpenAI says it will soon start sharing revenue with the chatbot makers. Read Article >Jan 4, 2024Adam Clark EstesYou thought 2023 was a big year for AI? Buckle up.2024 will be the biggest election year in history. Moor Studio/Getty ImagesEvery new year brings with it a gaggle of writers, analysts, and gamblers trying to tell the future. When it comes to tech news, that used to amount to some bloggers guessing what the new iPhone would look like. But in 2024, the technology most people are talking about is not a gadget, but rather an alternate future, one that Silicon Valley insiders say is inevitable. This future is powered by artificial intelligence, and lots of people are predicting that its going to be inescapable in the months to come.That AI will be ascendant is not the only big prediction experts are making for next year. Ive spent the past couple of days reading every list of predictions I can get my hands on, including this very good one from my colleagues at Future Perfect. A few big things show up on most of them: social medias continued fragmentation, Apples mixed-reality goggles, spaceships, and of course AI. Whats interesting to me is that AI also seems to link all these things together in much the same way that the rise of the internet basically connected all of the big predictions of 2004. Read Article >Nov 22, 2023Sigal SamuelOpenAIs board may have been right to fire Sam Altman and to rehire him, tooSam Altman, the poster boy for AI, was ousted from his company OpenAI. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP via Getty ImagesThe seismic shake-up at OpenAI involving the firing and, ultimately, the reinstatement of CEO Sam Altman came as a shock to almost everyone. But the truth is, the company was probably always going to reach a breaking point. It was built on a fault line so deep and unstable that eventually, stability would give way to chaos. That fault line was OpenAIs dual mission: to build AI thats smarter than humanity, while also making sure that AI would be safe and beneficial to humanity. Theres an inherent tension between those goals because advanced AI could harm humans in a variety of ways, from entrenching bias to enabling bioterrorism. Now, the tension in OpenAIs mandate appears to have helped precipitate the tech industrys biggest earthquake in decades.Read Article >Sep 19, 2023Sigal SamuelAI thats smarter than humans? Americans say a firm no thank you.Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, the company that made ChatGPT. For Altman, the chatbot is just a stepping stone on the way to artificial general intelligence. SeongJoon Cho/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesMajor AI companies are racing to build superintelligent AI for the benefit of you and me, they say. But did they ever pause to ask whether we actually want that?Americans, by and large, dont want it.Read Article >Sep 19, 2023Sara MorrisonGoogles free AI isnt just for search anymoreGoogles new Bard extensions might get more eyes on its generative AI offerings. Leon Neal/Getty ImagesThe buzz around consumer generative AI has died down since its early 2023 peak, but Google and Microsofts battle for AI supremacy may be heating up again.Both companies are releasing updates to their AI products this week. Googles additions to Bard, its generative AI tool, are live now (but just for English speakers for the time being). They include the ability to integrate Bard into Google apps and use it across any or all of them. Microsoft is set to announce AI innovations on Thursday, though it hasnt said much more than that. Read Article >Aug 18, 2023Sigal SamuelWhat normal Americans not AI companies want for AIGetty ImagesFive months ago, when I published a big piece laying out the case for slowing down AI, it wasnt exactly mainstream to say that we should pump the brakes on this technology. Within the tech industry, it was practically taboo. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has argued that Americans would be foolish to slow down OpenAIs progress. If you are a person of a liberal-democratic country, it is better for you to cheer on the success of OpenAI rather than authoritarian governments, he told the Atlantic. Microsofts Brad Smith has likewise argued that we cant afford to slow down lest China race ahead on AI.Read Article >Jul 21, 2023Sara MorrisonBiden sure seems serious about not letting AI get out of controlPresident Biden is trying to make sure AI companies are being as safe and responsible as they say they are. Fatih Aktas/Anadolu Agency via Getty ImagesIn its continuing efforts to try to do something about the barely regulated, potentially world-changing generative AI wave, the Biden administration announced today that seven AI companies have committed to developing products that are safe, secure, and trustworthy.Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI are the companies making this voluntary commitment, which doesnt come with any government monitoring or enforcement provisions to ensure that companies are keeping up their end of the bargain and punish them if they arent. It shows how the government is aware of its responsibility to protect citizens from potentially dangerous technology, as well as the limits on what it can actually do.Read Article >Jul 7, 2023Sigal SamuelAI is a tragedy of the commons. Weve got solutions for that.OpenAI CEO Sam Altman speaks at an event in Tokyo in June 2023. Tomohiro Ohsumi/Getty ImagesYouve probably heard AI progress described as a classic arms race. The basic logic is that if you dont race forward on making advanced AI, someone else will probably someone more reckless and less safety-conscious. So, better that you should build a superintelligent machine than let the other guy cross the finish line first! (In American discussions, the other guy is usually China.) But as Ive written before, this isnt an accurate portrayal of the AI situation. Theres no one finish line, because AI is not just one thing with one purpose, like the atomic bomb; its a more general-purpose technology, like electricity. Plus, if your lab takes the time to iron out some AI safety issues, other labs may take those improvements on board, which would benefit everyone.Read Article >Jul 4, 2023Aja RomanoNo, AI cant tell the futureAI oracles are all the rage on TikTok. John Lund/Getty ImagesCan an AI predict your fate? Can it read your life and draw trenchant conclusions about who you are? Hordes of people on TikTok and Snapchat seem to think so. Theyve started using AI filters as fortunetellers and fate predictors, divining everything from the age of their crush to whether their marriage is meant to last.Read Article >Jun 14, 2023Kelsey PiperFour different ways of understanding AI and its risksSam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, testifies in Washington, DC, on May 16, 2023. Aaron Schwartz/Xinhua via Getty ImagesI sometimes think of there being two major divides in the world of artificial intelligence. One, of course, is whether the researchers working on advanced AI systems in everything from medicine to science are going to bring about catastrophe. But the other one which may be more important is whether artificial intelligence is a big deal or another ultimately trivial piece of tech that weve somehow developed a societal obsession over. So we have some improved chatbots, goes the skeptical perspective. That wont end our world but neither will it vastly improve it.Read Article >Jun 14, 2023A.W. OhlheiserAI automated discrimination. Heres how to spot it.Xia Gordon for Vox and Capital BPart of the discrimination issue of The Highlight. This story was produced in partnership with Capital B.Say a computer and a human were pitted against each other in a battle for neutrality. Who do you think would win? Plenty of people would bet on the machine. But this is the wrong question. Read Article >Jun 3, 2023Shirin GhaffaryWhat will stop AI from flooding the internet with fake images?CSA Archive / Getty ImagesOn May 22, a fake photo of an explosion at the Pentagon caused chaos online.Within a matter of minutes of being posted, the realistic-looking image spread on Twitter and other social media networks after being retweeted by some popular accounts. Reporters asked government officials all the way up to the White House press office what was going on.Read Article >

Last week, a Texas judge ordered Dr. Margaret Carpenter a New York abortion doctor to pay at least $100,000 in penalties for failing to appear in court. Carpenter has found herself at the center of two major abortion lawsuits: In December, she became the target of the first-ever civil suit against an out-of-state abortion provider, and officials in Louisiana are now also seeking her extradition, with newly appointed US Attorney General Pam Bondi signaling that shed love to get involved. The mounting legal battles center on whether states with abortion bans can block their constituents from receiving FDA-approved abortion pills from doctors in states with no such restrictions. The cases represent the latest salvo in the fast-evolving fight over reproductive rights in America.The attacks on Carpenter coincide with new federal threats to abortion medication: Robert F. Kennedy Jr., now at the helm of the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), recently said he was open to reviewing and potentially reinstating stricter safety requirements on the abortion drug mifepristone despite it being incredibly safe, as affirmed by decades of patient data from around the world. RelatedMifepristone is safeAbortion pills have become the most common method for ending pregnancies in the United States, partly due to their safety record, their lower cost, and diminished access to in-person care. While states have ramped up abortion restrictions since Roe v. Wade was overturned in 2022, access to abortion pills has actually significantly expanded since then, helping to explain why there were more US abortions in 2023 than in any year since 2011. Reimposing federal restrictions on the drugs could effectively end telemedicine abortion access, in which patients consult with abortion providers remotely, and which thousands of people in states with bans rely on each month for care. A potent strategy is emerging: revert back to older Food and Drug Administration (FDA) restrictions on mifepristone under the guise of womens health and safety, while simultaneously supporting states attempts to block out-of-state abortion providers. If it works, the anti-abortion movement could achieve many of the same ends as a federal ban without the political backlash. Maggie Carpenters charges underscore an emboldened anti-abortion movementCarpenter, a family medicine physician from New Paltz, New York, has become a focal point in the ongoing war over abortion access.In 2022 she co-founded the Abortion Coalition for Telemedicine Access (ACT) to help enact shield laws in blue states to support providers dispensing abortion pills to patients in red ones. Shield laws protections can include barring state agencies from helping another states criminal investigation, and ensuring that an abortion provider does not lose their professional license or face malpractice insurance penalties as a result of an out-of-state complaint. To date, 18 states, including New York, have passed such laws, though Carpenters case represents the first real legal test of this shield strategy. RelatedThe Texas civil suit filed by Attorney General Ken Paxton alleges that Carpenter violated a state law that bans the mailing or online prescribing of abortion pills to people in Texas. The case was initiated by a report filed with Paxtons office by a man who claims to be the father of the pregnancy allegedly affected by the abortion pills. The Washington Post reported that the anti-abortion movement plans to launch a campaign encouraging male partners of women whove had abortions in Texas to come forward and sue.The Louisiana criminal case centers on Carpenter prescribing medication to the mother of a pregnant minor. Abortion pills are banned in the state and Carpenter, her medical practice, and the girls mother, who turned herself into the police, were all charged with felonies. The Louisiana law carries penalties of one to five years in jail and fines ranging between $5,000 and $50,000. In an interview with Talk Louisiana, the district attorney who filed the criminal charges, Tony Clayton, said doctors cant hide behind the borders of New York and ship pills down here, but acknowledged New Yorks shield law prevents me from going there to issue his arrest warrant. Clayton will be prosecuting with state Attorney General Liz Murrill, who warned that Carpenter could face arrest if she leaves New York, as most states honor each others warrants through reciprocal agreements. Julie Kay, Carpenters colleague and ACT co-founder, described this as a watershed moment.This has crossed a line thats never been crossed in this country and is not what people want, she told Vox. Nor is it smart because we have an incredibly high rate of maternal mortality and this pushes people away from licensed practitioners. New York has responded aggressively so far to protect Carpenter. Gov. Kathy Hochul explicitly stated she would never, under any circumstances extradite the physician, while the states attorney general, Letitia James, denounced the prosecution as a cowardly attempt to weaponize the law. Days after Louisianas indictment, Hochul also signed new legislation that allows physicians prescribing abortion pills to keep their names off the drug packaging. This new shield protection, which took immediate effect, lets doctors put their medical practices name on the packaging instead.Mifepristone and misoprostol pills. Erin Hooley/Chicago Tribune/Tribune News Service via Gety ImagesThese shield laws set the stage for new kinds of legal battles between red and blue states. If Illinois refuses to extradite an abortion provider to Georgia, will Georgia retaliate and refuse to extradite a gun dealer to Illinois? Greer Donley of University of Pittsburgh, David Cohen of Drexel University, and Rachel Rebouch of Temple University wrote in a 2022 paper that was cited directly in the Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization dissent.A broader backdoor strategyThe lawsuits against Carpenter are part of a broader legal offensive that seeks to exploit the post-Roe landscape. Louisiana has emerged as a key battleground, in 2024 becoming the first state to classify mifepristone as a controlled dangerous substance putting it in a class of highly regulated drugs that include fentanyl and methamphetamine. According to legislative tracking from the Guttmacher Institute, four more states Indiana, Mississippi, Oklahoma and Texas have all introduced or pre-filed bills this year that would do the same thing.Meanwhile Republican attorneys general from Idaho, Kansas, and Missouri are mounting a new federal challenge to mifepristone that represents a more legally sophisticated approach than previous attempts. Unlike the 2024 Supreme Court case brought by anti-abortion advocates that was ultimately dismissed for lack of standing, these attorneys general argue they have standing because their states incur costs for emergency medical care, and say they have an interest in enforcing their state abortion bans.The states rights strategy will likely appeal to Trump, who campaigned for reelection by insisting the Supreme Court had made abortion a states issue going forward. Trump also claimed he would avoid signing any federal abortion ban if elected. His flip-flopping on abortion worked: Most voters believed that Trump would not be a threat to abortion rights and that he would not prioritize the issue. As Vox reported last month, anti-abortion activists have signaled theyre willing to accommodate compromises with the White House that allow Trump to say hes kept his campaign pledge, even as they push other restrictions and promote fetal personhood language in policy wherever possible. (Trumps recent executive orders have already begun incorporating language about sex at conception a win for the fetal personhood movement.) State Rep. Mandie Landry, a Democrat from Louisiana, told Vox that her state was already deeply hostile to abortion, even before the charges against Carpenter. The way forward, according to Landry, will be to build more political power state by state, not file more lawsuits or push more federal bills. The way to dig out of the hole were in with reproductive rights and LGBTQ rights is to do the grunt work that takes a long time through the state legislatures, she said. The anti-abortion movements embrace of states rights arguments might seem to conflict with their ultimate goal of ending abortion nationwide. But experts say this strategy could actually advance their broader aim of establishing the national standard of fetal personhood. If the Supreme Court accepts red states argument that they can block their residents from getting abortion care from blue states, it would help establish precedent for state authority to protect unborn life precedent that could later support arguments for fetal rights more broadly.Kirsten Moore, the director of the Expanding Medication Abortion Access Project, says the red state charges against Carpenter reveal the anti-abortion movements hypocritical logic. Theyre saying you blue states dont get to do what you want, and we red states get to do what we want, she said. Can red states preempt the federal government?Over the objections of groups like the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the FDA long has long had mifepristone on its Risk Evaluation and Mitigation Strategies (REMS) list, a designation used when the government determines that increased restrictions are necessary for a drugs benefit to outweigh its risks. As a result, until relatively recently, patients had to visit doctors in person to receive the medication, meaning telehealth was off limits, and patients couldnt just fill a prescription at their local pharmacyIn 2017, the ACLU sued the FDA, arguing its mifepristone restrictions were not medically justified, and during the pandemic the FDA temporarily lifted its requirement that mifepristone be dispensed in person at a clinic or a hospital. In December 2021, the FDA announced it would permanently lift the in-person requirement, leading to the robust abortion telemedicine abortion industry that exists today. But many leaders in the anti-abortion movement cast these actions as proof that lawmakers had lowered medical standards. They pushed a number of baseless and misleading arguments about protecting womens safety which Vox examined in 2023. Its widely expected that anti-abortion lobbyists will try to push the FDA to reinstate the national restrictions that the Biden administration eased. Moore, of the Expanding Medication Abortion Access project, emphasizes that this would take time, and almost certainly face legal challenges from drug companies that have invested millions into the FDA drug approval process already. Another option though, could be for an official at HHS to write a memo on behalf of Kennedy claiming mifepristone represents an imminent harm. Under federal law, that could empower the HHS Secretary to pull the drug from the market. Moore suspects, however, that a less politically conspicuous states rights strategy would be more attractive to Trump.The fight over whether states can restrict FDA-approved medication isnt new. In 2022, the manufacturer of generic mifepristone sued Mississippi over its restrictions on the abortion pill, arguing that federal approval should preempt state regulations under the supremacy clause of the Constitution. While that case was ultimately deemed moot after Roe was overturned, the same fundamental tension now animates the Republican attorneys general lawsuit and the prosecution of Carpenter. Legal scholars see a strong, though legally uncertain argument that federal authority should prevail when state and federal law directly conflict. But anti-abortion forces are betting that the current Supreme Court, which emphasized state authority in overturning Roe, will be receptive to arguments for state power to restrict abortion pills even if that means overriding federal drug approvals.For providers like Carpenter, these federal developments add another layer of uncertainty to an already precarious and shifting landscape. Even if she and her colleagues successfully fight off state-level prosecution, FDA rule changes could effectively limit their ability to provide telehealth abortion care to patients in restricted states.What comes nextThe legal challenges to Carpenter will likely take months, if not years, to play out. A spokesperson for ACT declined to comment on the new Texas penalties.For now, advocates emphasize that abortion remains accessible and affordable to people in all fifty states. Should that change be it through new FDA restrictions, new aggressive enforcement of the Comstock Act, or other developing tactics even the backup option of international providers like Aid Access might not be enough to prevent a significant increase in people forced to carry unwanted pregnancies.Still, a broader aim of the anti-abortion movement is to deter providers like Carpenter from choosing to offer care at all. While the immediate battles center on medication abortion and the provision of care to red states, the long-term goal for the anti-abortion movement is to end access in all states, with fetal personhood established nationwide. When asked how other providers have been reacting to the charges, Kay, the ACT co-founder, said the new attacks follow a long history of violence, harassment and intimidation against people who offer this care. Nobody becomes an abortion provider lightly, she said. They do it because theyre mission-driven and because they recognize that one in four women in America will have an abortion, with more than half of those already mothers. See More:

H5N1, a highly pathogenic strain of avian influenza known as bird flu, continues to wreak havoc on the nations egg farms. In just the last month, more than 21.2 million egg-laying hens about 7 percent of the national flock have fallen prey to the virus or been brutally killed by egg producers in an effort to slow its spread. Its led to egg shortages and a spike in egg prices, which reached $5 per dozen on average in January, up from under $2 in 2021, before the current bird flu outbreak began.Last week, in an effort to boost egg supply, Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo signed into law a bill that allows government officials to temporarily suspend the states cage-free egg standards, which requires eggs sold in the state to come from hens raised in cage-free barns rather than in the tiny, cramped cages that are predominant in the egg industry. It also allows for the temporary retail sale of Grade B eggs, which are safe to eat but may come with minor imperfections.Lombardo has said he wants to repeal Nevadas cage-free standards altogether. This story was first featured in the Processing Meat newsletterSign up here for Future Perfects biweekly newsletter from Marina Bolotnikova and Kenny Torrella, exploring how the meat and dairy industries shape our health, politics, culture, environment, and more.Have questions or comments on this newsletter? Email us at futureperfect@vox.com!Last month, state lawmakers in Michigan and Colorado introduced bills to do just that in their states. Colorados bill is dead, while Michigans bill is still in committee.These bills are part of a much larger, longer-term trend attempting to dismantle what little progress has been made on farm animal welfare in the US. For years, livestock industry-friendly members of Congress have pushed for the EATS Act, which would ban states from setting their own standards for livestock products imported from other states, thereby nullifying some of the most important farm animal welfare laws in the country.Its unlikely that efforts to repeal and suspend cage-free egg laws will lower egg prices, because theres already little slack in the national egg supply. The whole country is facing egg shortages, so theres not exactly a surplus of eggs lying around to fill the gap in Nevada, Michigan, and other cage-free states. University of Arkansas agricultural economist Jada Thompson recently told the Associated Press that Nevadas suspension could very slightly ease egg prices in the state, but could also raise prices in other states by diverting some of the national egg supply to Nevada.Colorados agriculture commissioner recently said the states cage-free law is not a significant factor in the shortages or price spikes. The head of the trade group Colorado Egg Producers told local media that the repeal bill would actually harm our farmers here in the State of Colorado, and it would jeopardize the investments theyve already made in cage-free egg farming. Its an issue that both egg farmers and animal welfare advocates agree on: Repealing state bans on cages wont stop the spread of bird flu, said Hannah Truxell, senior policy counsel of the animal protection group the Humane League, in a statement to Vox. It would, however, reverse years of critical food industry progress. That progress is the rapid transition the egg industry has undertaken since the early 2000s, when virtually all egg-laying hens were confined in tiny cages that restricted them from even flapping their wings, let alone moving around. Today, 40 percent of the egg industrys 304 million hens are cage-free, due to laws in 11 US states and commitments from major food corporations, including McDonalds and Nestl, to use only cage-free eggs. The shift has reduced suffering for around 100 million hens annually.The US pioneered the development of factory farming. Rich Pedroncelli/Associated PressTo be sure, cage-free doesnt mean the animals have good lives theyre still raised in massive, overcrowded, unsanitary barns, and investigations into cage-free farms have revealed horrid conditions. But theyre certainly better than conventional cage farms. Repealing the few laws that ban cages will do nothing to address the core food system vulnerability driving egg shortages dependence on factory farms. Because these egg farms are so enormous, each housing hundreds of thousands or even millions of animals, a virus infecting just a couple operations can send a shock to the food supply overnight. Tearing up cage-free laws to compensate for that vulnerability will only further punish animals in the relentless pursuit of cheap food a pursuit that is to blame for much of this mess, as poultry factory farms have supercharged the bird flu virus. As experts increasingly worry that bird flu could boil over to create the next global pandemic, now ought to be a time for sober reflection on the risks factory farming poses, rather than a time to double down on it. Bird flu is largely a problem of the factory farm industrys own makingOver the last century, the US pioneered the development of factory farming, which has since spread around the globe. It has made meat, milk, and eggs more abundant and affordable, but it has also come with a number of environmental, animal welfare, and public health problems, including accelerating the spread and virulence of H5N1.The vast majority of Americas more than 9 billion turkeys, chickens, and egg-laying hens are raised on factory farms, where the genetically similar animals are overcrowded and live among their own waste, all of which can compromise their immune systems. Factory farms present a huge opportunity for a virus or microbe to effectively spread, Claas Kirchhelle, a medical historian at the University College Dublin, told me.Influenzas have long circulated among migratory water birds, but these have historically been low-pathogenic strains, inflicting little to no damage to the wild birds who contract and spread it. But the virus can mutate from a low-pathogenic strain to a high-pathogenic one which causes fatal infections in poultry birds and more effectively spreads to humans. These high-pathogenicity conversion events have occurred 42 times between 1959 and today and almost all were first detected on poultry factory farms. Experts believe that H5N1, first detected in China in 1996, converted from low to high-pathogenicity after entering a commercial poultry farm. By the early 2000s, the virus had spread across the globe. The current US outbreak, now going on three years, has mutated to cause severe illness and death in hundreds of bird species, mammals such as seals and sea lions, and, in the US, dairy cows. More than 70 pet cats, many of them living on dairy farms, have fallen ill from bird flu, and some died. In December, a cheetah and a mountain lion at the Arizona zoo died from the bird flu.A pile of dead cows by the roadside in Californias San Joaquin Valley. The photographer said the farm owner had told her his herd had been infected with bird flu. California accounts for over 700 of the nations nearly 1,000 dairy cattle herds that have caught the disease. Crystal HeathNearly 70 Americans have contracted the virus since 2022. Most of them have been dairy or poultry farmworkers, and most cases have been mild. But in January, a Louisiana resident died after exposure to backyard chickens and wild birds. And this winter, a 13-year-old Canadian girl caught a severe bird flu infection and was hospitalized for weeks; its unknown how she got it.Last week, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that three dairy veterinarians tested positive for H5N1 despite showing no symptoms, suggesting the virus could be more prevalent in humans than we think. Days later, a Wyoming resident with a flock of backyard chickens was hospitalized after testing positive for avian influenza.Through it all, the US poultry and dairy industries have had little incentive to change their disease-promoting business models. Policy incentives give them no reason to: When bird flu strikes a US poultry farm, the US Department of Agriculture covers the cost of the mass killing of the birds which is often done by shutting off ventilation and using heaters so that the birds slowly, painfully die of heatstroke along with the costs of carcass disposal and the market value of the birds. Since 2022, the USDA had doled out more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars to egg producers affected by the virus. Dairy producers with bird flu outbreaks are also paid for their losses.These bailouts along with the current attempts to nullify cage-free laws send a message to the industry that policymakers wont question the foundational risks of the factory farm system, and will instead continually accommodate for those risks. Temporarily suspending state cage-free egg laws may bring very slight, short-term relief on egg prices, but without pairing it with longer-term solutions, we are bound to end up here again, or worse. Influenza experts are increasingly concerned that the evolution and spread of the virus over the last few years aided by dairy farmers unwilling to take the bird flu threat seriously and a deferential USDA could help to trigger the next global pandemic. In a recent story for Nautilus, journalist Brandon Keim wrote that scientists he spoke with used phrases like red lights flashing, totally novel ballgame, no hope of containing, and under attack.Reforming Americas livestock-dependent policy regimeThere are a number of short- and long-term steps policymakers could take to lower the threat of bird flu. In December, the USDA said that some producers may be inclined to disregard biosecurity because they believe that [the USDA] will continue to cover the costs associated with damages related to an HPAI outbreak. The agency has proposed a rule to require that producers pass a biosecurity audit before theyre eligible for indemnity payments.But Congress could go further by requiring producers to cover their own costs for mass killing and disposing of animals in the wake of disease outbreaks a policy that Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) proposed over two years ago in the Industrial Agriculture Accountability Act. Our federal agricultural policy is designed in such a way that the factory farm model gets all the benefits and none of the blame, Jake Davis, a Missouri-based agricultural policy expert and small farmer who advised on the bill, told Vox in 2022. We have not asked the industry to embed the risk to our food system that they create.As egg prices soar, theres been increased appetite for such alternatives in the US.Requiring the vaccination of egg-laying hens would help, but parts of the poultry industry are concerned it would disrupt trade, while the USDA at the tail end of the Biden administration expressed concerns about the effectiveness of available vaccines. A Trump economic adviser recently said the new administration is looking into medication presumably meaning vaccines as part of its plan to stamp out the virus, and last week gave conditional approval to an H5N1 vaccine. But its unclear when, or if, itll be deployed. The Trump administration has also fired 25 percent of the staff from a network of nearly 60 laboratories that monitor the bird flu and other viruses, some of whom its now trying to hire back.Longer term, policymakers could invest in diversifying Americas protein sources currently, two-thirds of our protein intake comes from animal products. Fewer animals and fewer factory farms would give avian influenza and other viruses fewer opportunities to mutate and spread, while also benefitting the environment and the animals themselves.Congress, the USDA and FDA, and state governments helped to build and still help to expand the factory farm system. But policymakers could choose to shift the food system in a more plant-based direction. Forward-thinking countries like Denmark and the Netherlands are already doing so through programs to pay farmers to raise fewer animals or grow more plant-based crops and to support startups producing plant-based meat, milk, and egg alternatives.As egg prices soar, theres been increased appetite for such alternatives in the US. Josh Tetrick, the CEO of Eat Just the maker of a plant-based liquid egg product called Just Egg, which is made with mung bean protein told me over email that the product has been growing five times faster over the past month than in the past year. And one of the largest US retailers, Tetrick said, increased its orders of the product by 30 percent over the last three weeks. Just Egg is pricey, costing about triple that of liquid eggs from a caged hen, but its not because mung beans are expensive; its because its made by a startup that hasnt achieved economies of scale, nor benefited from taxpayer bailouts or decades of government support like the conventional egg industry. If commercial egg farming does contribute to sparking the global pandemic, investing in plant-based alternatives will look smart in hindsight. As Eat Just put it in a full-page New York Times advertisement in 2023: Plants dont get the flu. Youve 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 are a lot of main characters in the second Trump administration. Donald Trump himself, of course, but also Elon Musk, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and JD Vance. Russell Vought does not make that list. The soft-spoken bureaucrat was recently confirmed to lead the Office of Management and Budget, not exactly a sexy post. His name isnt well-known outside of policy circles. But it probably should be. I think you can almost view Elon Musk and DOGE, the so-called Department of Government Efficiency, as Russ Voughts shock troops, Simon Rabinovitch, US economics editor for The Economist, told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. Musk is kind of hyperactive and moving every which way, every direction, but ultimately the person whos really leading this is Russ Vought. And hes the general. Hes also the scholar to the extent that there is a legal justification, this is something that Russ Vought is working on and has been working on for years leading up to the moment that we now face today.Rabinovitch talked to King about Voughts backstory, his Christian nationalist beliefs, and where he wants to take the country in the second Trump administration. Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.Simon RabinovitchVought has something of a blue-collar background. He had a a big family, and is the youngest of seven children. Hes talked about having a very strong Christian upbringing. He went to college at an evangelical Christian school. All of this matters because part of the way that he views his role in government is not just trying to change the way the presidency operates, but also trying to infuse it with Christian nationalism, his kind of self-defined ideology. He spent many, many years as a staffer for Republicans in DC, and worked his way up the totem pole to become a key player in Trump 1.0. Now hes one of the few returnees in Trump 2.0; hes back in the very role that he was in at the end of Trumps first term: director of the Office of Management and Budget. Its one of these agencies that not many people have heard of, but it actually wields a great degree of power and even more power in Russ Voughts hands.Noel KingWhen Russ Vought says his politics are Christian nationalist. What does that mean?Simon RabinovitchThe way that he describes it is that he wants to basically bring Christianity into all aspects of society, especially government. Its not that he wants to do away with the separation between church and state, but he believes that Christianity is a formative foundational influence in the way that the American government operates, and that has been muffled for too long.Christian nationalism doesnt just give him sort of a guidepost in terms of his views on abortion, but also brings a certain righteousness of conviction to the way that he approaches his work, a belief that in some cases the ends justify the means.Its one of the reasons why in Trumps first administration, no matter what President Trump did, Vought stood beside him. He thought Trump was a key ally for propelling his vision. You can hear that in the way that he talks and you can read it in the way that he writes. And its sort of inflected with these righteous tones. He talks about the storm clouds being upon us, and the duty is ours, the results are Gods. Christian nationalism is a really, really important motivational force for him.Noel KingIve wondered about his speech. He can be quite mean. He talked about wanting to traumatize civil servants. Make them realize that nobody likes them. If we were 5 years old, we would say, Thats not very nice. Now that were older, we would say, Dont dont talk about traumatizing people, its unnecessary.Simon RabinovitchIts really weird, because if you meet him and Ive had a long conversation with him he has this very scholarly demeanor. Hes always very buttoned up, with a very nicely trimmed beard. Hes soft-spoken. But when you actually listen to what hes saying, its really quite radical. I think this is really just a reflection of the strength of his convictions: This is stuff that he truly, deeply believes in. And more than that, I think that the manner in which he speaks is something that helps to inspire people who work with him. He has a devoted group of small allies who share his vision. Hes not transactional. He might say hes not corruptible. This is just stuff that he really wants to do.Noel KingDonald Trump has famously engaged in a lot of behavior that is not particularly Christian. How did these two men get together? Simon RabinovitchWhen Vought was a young Republican staffer, he was very much focused on bread-and-butter fiscal conservatism. But over the years, he got into more of a MAGA-style way of looking at government and ideology. And he was somebody who got involved in the Trump transition team. There wasnt an incredibly deep bench of MAGA-aligned people back in 2017. And so he was appointed to the OMB; he was a deputy director. Eventually, in the final year, he became director of OMB. I think the thing for Vought is that he sees Trump as a vehicle for pushing forward his ideas. So he talks about the fact that all of these anti-abortion politicians in the Republican Party failed to do anything, but it was Trump who ultimately was the one who, through his Supreme Court appointments, was able to kill Roe v. Wade. Vought sees Trump as a critical ally, even if he doesnt agree with him on a day-to-day basis or on many issues. Noel KingFor four years, the Trump vehicle had more or less stalled. The president lost the 2020 election and was cast out into Florida. What was Russ Vought doing then?Simon RabinovitchAt the very end of Trump 1.0, the Trump team began to realize this Russ Vought guy has some ideas that are actually very, very powerful and might be electorally useful. In his last year, when he was running the Office of Management and Budget, Vought was the one who wrote a memo saying that the federal government should stop all DEI training and critical race theory. That obviously became a very powerful trope for Trump in his more recent election campaign. And Vought was also the one who was the architect of Schedule F, the idea that you could basically remove all career protections for civil servants. Once Trump is out of office, Vought forms this organization, Center for Renewing America, and basically begins to create the legal blueprint for a lot of the actions that weve seen in the last couple of weeks so ideas for ways to give the president much more power over spending, which is known as impoundment power; thinking about ways to get Schedule F back, thinking about ways to shrink the civil service. And one way in which Vought was very much involved in thinking through Trump 2.0, is that he was one of the driving forces behind Project 2025.Noel KingDonald Trump had nothing to do with Project 2025. He thought it was ridiculous and abysmal.Simon RabinovitchExactly. [Laughs.] Trump denied on the campaign trail that Project 2025 had anything to do with his future administration. But, of course, as weve seen, hes appointed many of the people who were involved in drafting Project 2025 first and foremost is Russ Vought.Vought wrote a chapter in Project 2025 about how to use the executive office of the president, and was totally transparent with his intentions. He laid out a blueprint of how he would use the OMB, to shake up the civil service, to traumatize it, to shrink it, and then to push through very robust ideas. Noel KingWhat is Russell Voughts plan to deal with that, to deal with all these lawsuits the Trump administration faces that attempt to shut down their policies? Simon RabinovitchHes certainly no dummy. Hes anticipated that attempts to reshape the presidency will end up in the courts and probably ultimately will end up at the Supreme Court. I think he isnt afraid that the courts are going to block his agenda. I think rather, he wants the courts to be the jurisdiction that determines whether his interpretation of the law is the correct one. If he succeeds, he will have fundamentally redrawn the bounds of presidential power and brought America back to kind of a late 19th-century version of the way that the White House could operate.See More:

Uziel Gomez, 26, can relate to his Gen Z clients who are navigating adulthood and personal finance for the first time. Its no secret that young people have faced a range of financial challenges early in their lives and careers, including the Covid-19 pandemic, rapidly rising costs of living, and steep tuition, says Gomez, founder of the financial planning firm Primeros Financial. Some of his Gen Z clients ask him about how to help out their parents financially. Looking ahead to the future, Gomez knows hell face a similar predicament. Theres some clients, theyre their parents full retirement plan, he says. Take me, for example, Im my dads retirement plan.Thats just one of the many scenarios Gen Z-ers seek help navigating. Young people are also wondering about how to save for sabbaticals before retirement, have enough in their emergency funds, and discern fact from fiction when evaluating money management tips from social media. I spoke to three young financial planners about the typical advice they give Gen Z as they map out their financial futures and how it remains the same and diverges from the conventional wisdom given to the generations that came before. Coming up with financial goals that reflect your valuesOf course, some of the advice geared toward Gen Z mirrors that of their predecessors. When young clients come to Naima Bush, a financial guide at the firm Fruitful, she asks them whether they are building emergency savings, if they are paying off credit card or other high-interest debt, and if theyre getting a company match on their retirement savings account three perennially important priorities.One of the primary tasks Bush assists her clients with is getting out and staying out of high-interest debt. While many Gen Z-ers want to avoid taking on student loan debt, its pretty easy for them to accumulate debt in other ways, such as buy now, pay later apps, she says. Beyond that, Bush works with her Gen Z clients on their broader financial goals and urges them to interrogate where those aspirations originated. A common one that she broaches in her conversations is the dream of home ownership, which has become out of reach for many young would-be buyers. Because buying a house is such a big decision, [I ask] is this something that you want to do because you really want to plant roots somewhere, or is this something that you want to do just for the sake of Everyone else is doing it, Bush says. Lets figure out something else that is really more in line with your values. Some clients want to be able to sustain their current lifestyle, while others want to live overseas for a while, Bush, 33, explains. Her entrepreneurial clients, meanwhile, want her help with mapping out how they can get their business or side hustle off the ground.Rethinking careers and retirementThough many Gen Zers receive retirement benefits through their jobs, the concept of retirement will likely look very different for them. Nate Hoskin, founder and lead adviser at Hoskin Capital, says relying on the Social Security system or traditional pensions no longer feels like a safe option for his young clients.In response to that uncertainty, Hoskin, 26, says his clients are working hard now to better achieve stability in the future. That might mean working on weekends or longer hours, holding down a job as they study for a degree, or delaying milestones like buying a house, he explains. Hoskin also provides projections for how much theyll need to save to stay afloat in retirement without Social Security, making any of those payouts a nice bonus, he says. Unlike many baby boomers, Gen Z-ers dont see themselves remaining loyal to one company for decades and retiring with a pension. As a result, the generation is more inclined to job hop until they find a role thats more rewarding or better aligns with their passions, Bush says.Bush, who works with clients earning a range of incomes, says the key to building the life you want is creating the habit of saving, even if its just $5 or $10 per month. And as your income increases, dont drastically increase your spending. You should be focusing instead on saving more for future you, Bush says. One problem specific to Gen Z is the firehose of financial advice they are exposed to through social media. While hearing other peoples experiences on TikTok and Instagram can be helpful and occasionally empowering, some of the advice out there is downright misleading, Gomez says. Among the bad pieces of advice hes had to debunk are that its better being an entrepreneur than having a traditional 9-to-5 to build wealth and that having a spending plan (meaning budget) is limiting you, Gomez says. Bush says Gen Zs social media savviness can help them find useful tips, but it can also overwhelm them with information that isnt applicable to their situation. This can cause you to have decision overload or decision fatigue and information overload, Bush saysRather than following and trying to beat the market, investing should be boring, Gomez says.The flood of information Gen Z ingests through social media doesnt just make it harder to find good advice; it also causes them to compare themselves to others. Gomez says hes had to counsel his clients through FOMO (fear of missing out) while watching others make their own money moves.Some were interested, for instance, in investing in cryptocurrency or individual stocks that were going to make it to the moon a few years ago. Rather than following and trying to beat the market, investing should be boring, he says.He has also had to field questions about building passive income investments a frequent subject of social medias hustle aficionados.A lot of people try to find a lot of get rich or get wealthy quick and easy information that is available online, Gomez says. Really, its about honing down and controlling what you can control and really focusing on your career, saving what you can and investing as well.Caring for loved onesMany young people are already thinking about how they want to support their parents financially in the future. Gomez advises his clients to determine how much help their families need and how much they can realistically afford to provide, whether thats on a monthly basis or for one-off emergencies. They should also consider the trade-offs of these arrangements, Gomez says. Will it affect their lifestyle? Will it impact other goals, such as saving for a home, retirement or other priorities? Establishing boundaries is also crucial. In addition to figuring out how much support they can give, Gomez recommends being clear about whether the financial support is strictly for essentials, such as housing, medical expenses, and groceries, or if it can be used for discretionary expenses like travel, dining, or entertainment.Take that vacationOne thing Gen Z-ers seem to be clear on is that they want to use their money to embark on new experiences. Some have plans to relocate and live abroad for months at a time, Bush says. Others want to make sure they have money set aside for making meaningful memories like seeing Beyonc in concert whenever they can.Still, Hoskin has found that even his high-earning Gen Z clients are cautious with money they pour much of their income into emergency funds, health savings accounts, and retirement accounts, and are prudent even with their discretionary spending. For those who make a healthy income and are still concerned about the cost of taking a vacation or spending $300 on a flight home to visit their parents, Hoskin encourages them to go. That hesitancy likely stems from Gen Z-ers entering an unstable economy and developing a survival mindset, he says. They worry that if they part with their money, it wont replenish in the future, he adds. Noticing a similar pattern among his clients, Gomez adds that his Gen Z clients, who often are the first in their family to build wealth, feel guilty about spending when they feel that they should instead save for the future or save for their parents.Money isnt all about just numbers and optimization, Hoskin says. The whole goal, the whole reason youre working so hard and you took this job, is so you can do things like that and hit all your goals.See More:

As soon as I sat down to write this, I got a text that simply said, Hi. In another era, I may have been intrigued by the mysterious message from an unknown number. Maybe I wouldve been curious about who wanted to say hello, and texted back. But this is not my first time playing this game.Scam texts are a growing multibillion-dollar industry. As robocalls become less common thanks, in part, to a 2009 law that forced phone companies to do more to stop them complaints about text scams increased 500 percent from 2015 to 2022. While its hard to nail down an exact number of spam messages sent in a given day, the problem is getting worse. Its not just that youre getting bombarded with more text scams than ever. The texts are also starting to get really sophisticated. Id like to say Ive never clicked on a link in a spam text, but Id be lying. Maybe it was about an issue with a mysterious package or an unpaid parking ticket or some political thing it doesnt really matter. With so much of our personal data now appearing online and with the help of AI, text scams are getting smarter, more targeted, and more dangerous. The software we need to stop spam texts is being outpaced by the software used to generate them, which does not bode well for our ever-evolving relationship with technology. So thats the bad news and the worse news. The good news is that humans are, so far, smarter than the machines. With a combination of savvy and software, you can reduce your exposure to text scams or, at the very least, your likelihood of actually becoming the victim of a scam.Another text scam I got this week involved an alleged unpaid toll, with a link to pay and a friendly sign-off (The Toll Roads team wishes you a great day!). As it happens, I probably do owe somebody money for an unpaid toll, but its not The Toll Roads team. The link in the text, which ended in .world, was the biggest red flag. I did not click this link, but if the text had been more personalized perhaps by using my name or mentioning that the toll was in the state of New York, where I live maybe I would have.This is where were heading. Common scams, like those involving unpaid fines, job recruiters, the IRS, and undelivered packages, can become exponentially more dangerous if they include your personal details, including your email and home address. And following years of data breaches, a growing amount of data about you is available for scammers to leverage. Meanwhile, generative AI makes it easy for bad actors to craft convincing, typo-free messages on a massive scale. Sometimes all you have to do is read the text to give the scammer more leverage.Common scams, like those involving unpaid fines, job recruiters, the IRS, and undelivered packages, can become exponentially more dangerous if they include your personal details.Depending on what your read receipts are like, then the bad guy might know that you opened the text, Teresa Murray, a consumer watchdog at the US PIRG Education Fund, told me. And then, God forbid, if you click on any links or anything like that, or call the number thats on the text, then its off to the races.There are multiple ways for scammers to win here. If you click a link, you could be tricked into giving them money or misled into giving up more personal information, which is its own currency in the fraud marketplace. Many text scams are also phishing schemes, and the links point to a webpage designed to steal your login credentials. At best, clicking the link proves to bad actors that youre alive and willing to go along with the scheme.The total amount of money lost to phone scammers in 2024 was over $25 billion, which works out to an average of about $450 per victim. Older adults are actually less likely to fall for certain scams, mostly because theyve learned not to pick up their phones. The vast majority of Americans over 65 say they dont answer if they dont recognize the number, and 57 percent of the same group have put their names on the national Do Not Call registry a database run by the Federal Trade Commission since 2003 according to a recent report from the call blocking service Truecaller.Younger Americans have it worse. The same report found that people between the ages of 18 and 44 are three times as likely as older Americans to fall for phone scams, including spam texts, and 25 percent of that group have reported being a victim more than once. Only 30 percent of them say theyre on the Do Not Call registry. What you can and cant do to escape text scamsBecause it was designed to stop unwanted calls from telemarketers, the Do Not Call registry doesnt do too much to cut down on spam texts. Furthermore, many of those texts come from abroad, and without an international phone police patrolling the lines, a scammer running a SIM farm in Southeast Asia can blow up your phone with alerts about undelivered packages to their hearts content.SIM farms, also known as phone farms or SIM banks, are systems equipped with multiple SIM cards that can send large numbers of texts or place calls simultaneously, and cost just a few hundred dollars to set up. Its virtually free for scammers to acquire phone numbers, and unlike robocalls, which happen in real-time, spam texts get sent in big batches in a split second. If a number gets blocked, the scammer can just start using a new number and keep spamming. Now, they can also use generative AI to craft more convincing, personalized messages.Meanwhile, phone companies face fewer regulatory requirements to protect their customers from these spam texts. The TRACED Act, which was implemented in 2021, gave the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) tools to prevent robocalls, including a caller ID verification framework called STIR/SHAKEN. But it wasnt until 2024 that the FCC enacted its first rule specifically targeting spam texts.Youd think that stopping spam texts should be as easy as using a spam filter, like email providers have been doing for decades. But text messages are not nearly as sophisticated as email technology. The basic technology SMS, or Short Message Service dates back to the 1980s and is hardly secure.SMS lacks built-in security controls, such as email authentication protocols Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, explained in an email. While phone carriers and software makers implement filters and blocking mechanisms, adversaries constantly evolve their tactics.The challenge is to filter out the unwanted messages, without blocking legitimate ones. That means distinguishing texts from your friends, your bank, your DoorDash driver, or your new friend whos not yet in your contacts list from spam texts. Many companies and organizations also do send legitimate messages in bulk, using short codes five- or six-digit numbers that must be registered with the CTIA, the wireless industrys trade association, which also governs how people can interact with these texts.Pro tip: Dont delete trusted messagesYou probably get tons of automated messages from trusted sources, like your pharmacy, bank, or food delivery service. That also includes verification codes if you use your phone number for two-factor authentication as well as texts from short codes, including political campaigns. Dont delete these messages right away. This way, if you get a new message from a trusted source, it will likely show up in the same thread and spare you the stress of wondering if its the real deal. Even better: Go ahead and put a label on it, put it in your contacts, said PIRGs Teresa Murray. And then if you get what looks like a verification code from XYZ bank, but its not coming from the saved contact, then that could be a red flag for you. Unfortunately, scammers dont care much for laws or rules, and phone companies will only do so much to combat the never-ending torrent of spam texts. It costs money to build filters that can attempt to keep up with the scammers methods, and some carriers include those tools in the cost of their service. Others charge for better tools. Verizon, for instance, offers basic filters for free, and plus filters for an extra $4 a month.Its real work to do this. Theres a significant amount of analysis, Alex Quilici, CEO of the call-blocking service YouMail, told me. Im sympathetic, but carriers have a fairly hard problem.When it comes to avoiding text scams, you have options. In addition to whatever your carrier offers, there are apps like Truecaller, TextKiller, RoboKiller, and Hiya.Ive never paid for one of these services, so I cant say how well they work. I can say that not answering your phone continues to be a solid way to avoid robocallers and a great way to miss a call from your doctors office. Caller ID can be easily spoofed, so dont pick up if youre not expecting a call. If in doubt, skip the call, and call the legitimate number back.You can also report scammers to the FCC by forwarding the message to 7726, which spells SPAM, or file a complaint on the agencys website. You can report all kinds of fraud to the FTC or to your states attorney general.The most important thing to do is not engage with scammers. Even if theyre saying Hi and seem friendly, responding to or even reading a spam text just tells the bad actor that youre a real human and a target. For now, know that youre smarter than the AI, and ignore it.A version of this story was also published in the Vox Technology newsletter. Sign up here so you dont miss the next one!See More:

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Voxs newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.Im working on a longer piece, so I wanted to bring you something a little lighter for this weeks newsletter. Ive been reading Arnold Lobels Owl at Home with my 2-year-old recently, and I find myself thinking about it long after hes asleep. Owl at Home is less famous than the Frog and Toad books for which Lobel is best known, but its always been a favorite in my house. The book tells five very short stories about Owl, a fearful but ultimately loving bird with an unusual outlook on the world. Until very recently, my 6-year-old demanded a nightly reading of the second story, Strange Bumps, in which Owl becomes so terrified of the sight of his own feet under a blanket that he destroys his bed and ends up sleeping in a chair. My 2-year-old, by contrast, is partial to Tear-water Tea, a frankly bizarre tale in which Owl makes himself cry into a tea kettle by thinking of sad subjects, like pencils that are too short to use. At the end of the story, Owl boils his own tears and takes a sip. It tastes a little bit salty, he says, but tear-water tea is always very good. I like to think of this as Owls own little meditation practice, in which he considers all the sorrows of his life, allows them to move through his body, and then reabsorbs them into himself, now transformed into a delicious (I guess) beverage.This particular dark and threatening February is not the worst time to remind ones children, or oneself, that we all have a creative power within ourselves, something no one else can take away. For fans of Frog and Toad, Owl at Home published in 1975, after the first two Frog and Toad books can feel like a bit of a left turn. The Frog and Toad stories are all about the deep friendship and love between the two main characters. Lobel never stated outright that they were meant to be a couple, but his daughter has pointed out that the two are of the same sex, and they love each other, and has said that the stories were the beginning of him coming out as a gay man.If Owl has a Frog in his life, however, we never see him in fact, Owl does not interact with another sentient being in the entire book. Theres a school of thought that Owl at Home is about loneliness, but Owl doesnt seem upset about his lot in life.Instead, he forms a variety of relationships, both friendly and contentious with his feet, with the season of winter (he ends up having to kick it out of his house), and, in my favorite story, with the moon.Owl and the Moon, the final section of the book, finds Owl gazing into the sky: If I am looking at you, moon, then you must be looking back at me. We must be very good friends.The friendship hits a few snags the moon tries to follow Owl home, and Owl is worried it wont fit through his door but by the end, all is well. With the moon looking on from outside, Owl gets into bed and peacefully shuts his eyes.The moon was shining down through the window, Lobel writes. Owl did not feel sad at all.To me, this story indeed, all of Owl at Home is about the joy of an inner life, something that can flourish even with little input from the outside. All Owl needs is the moon, a kettle, some weird ideas about tea and sadness, and a cozy bed (which he must have rebuilt after Strange Bumps), and he can create a whole world.Dont get me wrong, I enjoy people, and I do not advocate retreating from society to live in a fantasy world populated by seasons and celestial objects (or, like, do I?). But this particular dark and threatening February is not the worst time to remind ones children, or oneself, that we all have a creative power within ourselves, something no one else can take away. Read it today, and Ill see you next week.It tastes a little bit salty, he said, but tear-water tea is always very good. Arnold Lobel, courtesy of HarperCollinsWhat Im readingSome school districts are trying to figure out how to respond to President Donald Trumps executive order on Ending Radical Indoctrination in K-12 Schooling, which officials say appears to conflict with existing laws.Trump supporters are increasingly claiming that childrens learning differences are exaggerated or not real, and the claim could have serious consequences for kids with disabilities.Kevin Stitt, the Republican governor of Oklahoma, says he will not approve a proposed plan to collect kids immigration status when they register for school.In addition to Owl at Home, my little kid and I have been reading Before, Now, a beautifully illustrated story by Daniel Salmieri about growing up and connecting to both the future and the past.From my inboxLast week I wrote about the rise of universal preschool policies around the country. This week, in lieu of reader emails, Ill leave you with this recent poll by the First Five Years Fund illustrating the bipartisan nature of the issue: 91 percent of Republicans (along with 97 percent of Democrats) believe the lack of affordable child care is a problem, and 55 percent of Republican voters say increasing access to quality child care is as important for families as border security.As always, if you have a question, a recommendation, or a topic youd like me to cover in the future, get in touch at anna.north@vox.com.See More:

The Logoff is 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 Im focusing on the Trump administrations effort to exert control over independent regulators, a power grab with implications for the governments balance of power and for your daily life. Whats the latest? Donald Trump issued an executive order on Tuesday that would put a series of independent regulatory agencies (and their investigations and rulemaking processes) directly under White House control. How does that change the way things work now? The dozens of independent agencies in the federal government have the power to interpret federal law and launch investigations into alleged rulebreakers. The president appoints the leaders to the agencies boards. But many commissioners terms are longer than a single administrations, and the president cant fire them simply because he doesnt like their decisions. Under Trumps new rules, that autonomy would go away.What are these independent agencies? There are dozens of them, including:The Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates the stock market;The Federal Trade Commission, which regulates businesses relationships with consumers;The Federal Communications Commission, which regulates the airwaves and internet.Are they all included? The order specifically exempts the Federal Reserves work to set interest rates, but thats it!Whats next? The executive order will almost certainly face legal challenges, and the question over the reach of executive power could get kicked all the way up to the Supreme Court. These agencies independence is protected by law, but the Trump team argues those laws are unconstitutional.Whats the big picture? Trump is again attempting to expand the presidents power. Congress passed laws giving these agencies a measure of independence, and putting lawmakers in charge of their oversight. Trump is now claiming that power for himself, arguing their independence makes them unaccountable.But how does it affect me? These agencies regulate so many facets of daily life preventing everything from predatory business practices to nuclear reactor meltdowns.And with that, its time to log off ...How are you sleeping these days? If the answer is not well, I have a listen for you, courtesy of Voxs Explain It to Me podcast. This week, they interviewed a sleep psychologist to get answers to questions like: Why am I a night owl? How can I nap responsibly? And what should I do about my chronic struggle to stay asleep? I hope you enjoy it. And Ill see you back here tomorrow.Youve 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:

Hampton Dellinger, a federal official who President Donald Trump attempted to fire earlier this month, seems very likely to lose a lawsuit challenging that firing eventually. But the Trump administration is impatient to make that happen as soon as possible, asking the Supreme Court to intervene in the lower court battle currently underway over the firing. In making this request, the administration is effectively asking the justices to resolve a core question about constitutional separation of powers just weeks after Dellinger filed that lawsuit.So the case, known as Bessent v. Dellinger, is worth watching not so much because there is much mystery about whether Trump could fire Dellinger again, the Court is exceedingly likely to rule against Dellinger if forced to decide that question. Instead, the Dellinger case is worth watching as a sign of just how impatient a GOP-controlled Supreme Court is to expand a Republican presidents authority.Last year, then-President Joe Biden appointed Dellinger as special counsel of the United States, a role that is primarily responsible for investigating unlawful personnel practices against the federal governments own employees. By law, Dellinger serves a five-year term, and may be removed by the President only for inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.Nevertheless, a White House official wrote Dellinger on February 7, telling him that he was terminated from his role, effective immediately. Dellinger filed suit, and obtained a court order known as a temporary restraining order (TRO), which allows him to remain in office for now. Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who issued the order, also scheduled a hearing for February 26 to determine whether to issue a more lasting injunction leaving Dellinger in office.Jacksons TRO is now before the Supreme Court on its shadow docket, a mix of emergency motions and other matters which ask the justices to rule on a legal question unusually quickly. The specific dispute before the justices involves two conflicting principles.On the one hand, the Courts Republican majority is enraptured by a legal theory known as the unitary executive, which holds that the president generally must have the authority to fire any federal official or, at least, any federal official who wields significant authority pursuant to the laws of the United States. The Courts current precedents recognize some exceptions to this theory, but Republican judges frequently disparage those precedents. And, in any event, the Trump administration has a strong argument that those exceptions do not apply to this case.On the other hand, TROs, which are quite temporary and typically expire within two weeks, ordinarily cannot be appealed to a higher court. The purpose of these temporary orders is to allow a judge to briefly hit pause on a case while they figure out how they should rule on it. Allowing the Trump administration to run off to the Supreme Court before Jackson holds the February 26 hearing would short circuit that process. It would also require the justices to decide an important constitutional dispute on an extremely rushed schedule, increasing the likelihood that the Court will hand down an erroneous decision.Dellingers case is not particularly strong, at least in this Supreme CourtOrdinarily, the Courts unitary executive precedents permit the president to fire the heads of federal agencies. As the Court said in Free Enterprise Fund v. Public Company Accounting Oversight Board (2010), the presidents power as a general matter includes the authority to remove those who assist him in carrying out his duties. The Court reasoned that, without such power, the President could not be held fully accountable for discharging his own responsibilities; the buck would stop somewhere else.The core question before the justices right now is whether to honor the rules governing when the Supreme Court is allowed to intervene in a case, or whether to ignore those rules to benefit a Republican president.That said, some of the Courts precedents make exceptions to this general rule. Most notably, in Morrison v. Olson (1988), the Court upheld a now-defunct statute creating an independent counsel who could investigate and potentially prosecute high-ranking government officials and who, like Dellinger, was protected against being fired by the president. The independent counsel role upheld in Morrison is somewhat similar to Dellingers role as special counsel, as both positions were charged with investigating alleged legal violations by people within government. So theres a good argument that, under Morrison, Dellinger cannot be fired except for cause.But Morrison is reviled by Republican legal elites, including many of the Republican justices. Justice Brett Kavanaugh said in 2016, for example, that he wants to put the final nail in Morrisons coffin. Indeed, this Court has already taken significant steps to bury Morrison. In Trump v. United States (2024), the Republican justices infamous decision holding that Trump has broad immunity from the criminal law, they quoted from Justice Antonin Scalias dissent in Morrison to argue that investigation and prosecution of crimes is a quintessentially executive function which must be under the full control of the president. Its hard to square Morrisons holding that a particular prosecutor can be insulated from being fired by the president with Trumps conclusion that investigation and prosecutions of crimes must be done under the presidents full control.So, while Dellinger has a good argument under Morrison and similar cases that he was not lawfully fired, those cases rest on the thinnest of ice. If anything, by challenging his firing, Dellinger gives the Republican justices an opportunity theyve craved for a very long time to overrule Morrison.It is too soon for the Supreme Court to act on this caseAll of this said, the rules governing temporary restraining orders should prevent the Trump administration from appealing Jacksons order right now. Jackson has already signaled that she intends to decide whether to extend that order by the end of next week, and if she rules against Trump that decision can be appealed. As mentioned above, TROs allow a trial court to briefly hit pause on a case until they have time to figure out what result is required by law. They typically expire within two weeks of when they were first issued.Additionally, as an appeals court warned when it declined to review Jacksons TRO, permitting these temporary orders to be appealed would force courts to decide difficult cases at a breakneck pace, because the appeal would become moot once the TRO expired after the second week. That would lead to rushed decisions by powerful appeals courts, or even the Supreme Court, which may not fully consider all the nuances of a particular case.The Trump administration, for what its worth, argues that the Court should create an exception to the rule against appealing TROs for cases involving the president. Quoting from Judge Gregory Katsas, a Trump judge who dissented from the appeals court order declining to review Jacksons TRO, the Trump administrations lawyer claims that where a lower court allegedly impinges on the Presidents core [constitutional] powers, immediate appellate review should be generally available. But, as the appeals court majority pointed out, none of the authorities cited by the government or the dissent hold that the rules of civil procedure and appellate jurisdiction are suspended when the President is included as a party to a lawsuit. Basically, they argued that Trump may be important, but he can wait a couple weeks for appellate review just like any other litigant.Ultimately, the core question before the justices right now is whether to honor the rules governing when the Supreme Court is allowed to intervene in a case, or whether to ignore those rules to benefit a Republican president. If the justices decide that they cant wait two weeks before deciding this case, they will significantly alter the balance of power between Trump and the judiciary they could effectively strip trial courts of their authority to briefly pause Trumps actions in order to figure out whether those actions are legal. Just as significantly, if Trump prevails in his shadow docket request, it will be a clear sign that the Court is willing to wave away ordinary legal procedures in order to benefit this Republican president.See More:

Americas beloved national parks face a problem that could, in a matter of weeks, grow into a full-blown crisis. The number of people visiting areas managed by the National Park Service which includes national parks, monuments, and other sites is way up. In 2023, the most recent year for national data, parks had more than 325 million visits. Thats about a 16 percent bump relative to 2010. At least in some parks, visitation rates have continued to rise. Meanwhile, staffing at the National Park Service is down, having dropped about 13 percent over that same period, according to the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group. Staffing specifically in parks has fallen even further in that time, the group said, as the agencys budget has failed to keep pace with rising personnel costs. That means there are fewer employees to oversee more visitors and mitigate their impact on our public lands and ecosystems. And this was before the recent layoff. Late last week, the Trump administration laid off roughly 1,000 workers in the National Park Service, or about 5 percent of its workforce, as part of a broader gutting of the federal workforce. The latest cuts targeted employees who were still in a probationary period, often meaning they were recently hired or had just moved into a new role. The layoff does not include many additional employees who opted for a deferred resignation or had offers for full-time employment rescinded. In an agency that has already experienced a significant staffing decline over the past decade, these layoffs will severely affect park operations and the visitor experience, Phil Francis, chair of the Executive Council of the Coalition to Protect Americas National Parks, a group representing current and former employees and volunteers of the National Park Service, said in a statement Friday. National Park Service employees dedicate their careers to preserving our nations most treasured landscapes and historic sites. We should be supporting them not jeopardizing their livelihoods.The Department of the Interior and the National Park Service did not respond to a request for comment. Send us a tipDo you have information to share about the National Park Service or other government agencies? Reach out to Benji Jones at benji.jones@vox.com, on Signal at benji.90, or at benjijones@protonmail.com.Reporting by the Washington Post indicates the National Park Service will reinstate 5,000 seasonal job offers that were previously rescinded under a government-wide hiring freeze. That may help fill some immediate needs; seasonal employees perform a range of tasks, from collecting fees to researching wildlife. Yet its not clear when those jobs will be reinstated and they wont make up for the permanent roles that have been lost, said John Garder, senior director of budget and appropriations at the National Parks Conservation Association. Those seasonal employees, who are critical to serving visitors during the busy season, are no substitute for the permanent employees who manage those seasonal workers and provide the expertise and institutional knowledge and experience to ensure resource protection and a well functioning park, Garder said. The National Park Service is among the most popular US government agencies, ranking above the Postal Service and NASA for favorability, according to a 2024 poll by the Pew Research Center. Parks are also an economic engine, contributing some $56 billion to the US economy in 2023. Courtesy of Pew Research CenterLeft with too few employees, parks may have to cut back hours at their visitor centers and access to their restrooms or cancel guided tours. Maintenance projects will be further delayed. Trash will pile up. There will be fewer educators to teach visitors about the history and biology of the region and its resources. Probationary workers whose roles were deemed critical to public safety, such as law enforcement officers, were exempt from the layoff. But some experts worry that the layoff will nonetheless put the public at risk, considering park workers provide basic visitor support, such as offering directions so people dont get lost.Did those who made the decision know or care that the main objective of my position is to provide preventive search and rescue education, to keep park visitors safe? Stacy Ramsey, a worker at the Buffalo National River in Arkansas who was fired, wrote in a now-viral Facebook post. Did they know that I am part of the visitor and resource protection division, and that I spent my days on the frontline, looking out for the safety of park visitors? Over the weekend, Travis Mason-Bushman, an employee at Great Basin National Park in Nevada, wrote on LinkedIn that he lost five colleagues. These are people who lead tours, clean toilets, answer phones, design signs, and support search and rescue operations, he said in the post. You cannot lay off half of any organizations frontline staff and carry on as if nothing has happened.With fewer workers, the many ecosystems that parks conserve are also at risk from crowds of tourists, Garder said, especially during the popular months of spring and summer. These include the wet forests of Great Smoky Mountains National Park and the river and stunning views of Zion. A key part of the job of Park Service employees is to protect these resources, such as by ensuring visitors dont litter or go off the trails.These reckless actions should never have happened, Garder said of the layoff. But if they are reversed now, then it may be possible to ensure that parks have the people they need to support the millions of visitors that are so critical to tourism economies and to protect irreplaceable resources. As things stand now, visitors will not have the services they expect and deserve, and resources will be at threat for lack of park experts to research and protect them.See More:

Its a biological fact of life. The birds do it. The bees do it. Even we do it. No, not that.Im talking, of course, about sleep, that vital state that lets us recharge and even cleanses the days toxins from our brains. But what happens when it doesnt come easily? And why do some people have an easier time falling and staying asleep than others? Those are just some of the questions we answer on this weeks episode of Explain It to Me, Voxs go-to hotline for all the questions you cant quite answer on your own. To get to the root of whats keeping you up at night, we spoke with Jade Wu, a sleep psychologist who specializes in helping people with insomnia. So what constitutes a good sleeper? Its more complicated than you would guess, Wu says. We think of getting enough sleep as important for good sleep. But believe it or not, recently some big studies have found that the timing of your sleep can maybe matter even more.If we follow middle-aged people into older age, those who sleep more at more consistent times from day-to-day have lower risk of cancer, heart disease, dementia, and overall mortality, Wu says. So its about timing, its about quality, its about quantity, and a host of other factors. What are those factors? Thats what we tackle this week. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity.You can listen to Explain It to Me on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. If youd like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.What are the big sleep dysfunctions? The most common problem I see is insomnia, which is just trouble falling asleep or staying asleep. And that can be from a variety of sources. A lot of times its a life stage issue. For example, a lot of women experience sleep disruption during perimenopause and menopause. And if you go through a job loss or you move or you go to a really fun bachelor party and you dont sleep for three nights in a row, then you find you cant get yourself back on track with sleep. Insomnia is really in the eye of the beholder. Theres not a number cutoff, like say, you take an hour to fall asleep or you have to be awake for two hours during the night to qualify. Its really if you feel like youre taking a long time to fall asleep or back to sleep, or you feel like your sleep is very restless or non-restorative. If its been happening for more than a few weeks and its really interfering with your functioning, then its insomnia. If its been happening for more than a few weeks and its really interfering with your functioning, then its insomnia. Another big issue is daytime sleepiness. This is kind of the opposite problem, where its not that you cant fall asleep: Its that you cant stay awake really well during the day. And this can be from a variety of sources, too. The most common is probably sleep apnea, which is a sleep disorder characterized by repeated episodes of breathing cessation or shallow breathing during sleep. And this affects everybody. Its not just older folks. Its not just people who are overweight or obese. Women actually are under-diagnosed by a significant margin something like eight or nine out of 10 women with sleep apnea are not diagnosed. That can cause daytime sleepiness, and be a burden to your heart health and brain health. Its a really important topic that people dont pay enough attention to. And then there are kind of more colorful sleep issues, like sleep paralysis, sleep hallucinations, sleepwalking more of unusual things that happen at night. We got a call from a listener named Skylar who is curious about sleep chronotypes the time of day your body naturally winds down and falls asleep. Theyre a night owl and they want to know if theres a trend toward being more accommodating to people who arent early birds. I feel you, Skylar. I am a night owl, too, by nature. And I absolutely agree that society should be more understanding towards us night owls, because there is nothing inherently wrong with it. We all have our own chronotype: Its like height. Its kind of a bell-shaped curve. Mostly people are in the middle, and then some people are extreme morning people. Some people are extreme night owls. But society is designed by and for morning people. Those of us who are night owls struggle and we dont get to sleep at our optimal time; we often dont get enough sleep. If you think about it evolutionarily, a tribe of early humans needed a diversity in sleep timing for everyone to stay safe. Lets say everybody fell asleep at the exact same time, slept through the night, and woke up at the same time.Then thats easy pickings for a saber-toothed tiger. We night owls should be saying, Youre welcome for keeping watch so the rest of you can sleep safely and soundly. What makes someone like Skylar a night owl? What determines where on that bell curve of sleep people land? A lot of it is genetic. Melatonin is a time-keeping hormone that our brains release. It usually ramps up in the evening, stays high through the night, and then kind of goes away in the mornings. It signals to the whole body that its time to shut down the factories and rest and sleep, or that its time to ramp up and get started for the day.We night owls should be saying, Youre welcome for keeping watch so the rest of you can sleep safely and soundly. For those of us who are night owls, our melatonin curve starts later and then goes away later, too. So when other people are already soundly asleep, our melatonin curves are still acting as if its still daytime. And then in the early mornings, when other people are ready and raring to go, our melatonin is still high in our system, telling us its still nighttime. On an individual level, there are things we can do to shift our chronotypes to better kind of fake it as a morning person and to have an easier time waking up. What advice do you have for people like Skylar, who are night owls living in a world thats very 9-to-5?Well, Skylar, if you can swing it, live on the East Coast and work for a company on the West Coast remotely. Thats the ideal situation. Ive had patients actually do that. But if you cant swing that, the best thing is to get lots of bright light first thing in the morning. Ideally, as soon as you wake up, either use a light box or go outside. Its not enough to just open your shades or curtains. You have to actually be in broad spectrum full sunlight for about 20 minutes. And that really helps your brain wake up and teach your circadian rhythm to start the day earlier, and to also release that melatonin earlier in the evening too.The thing about sleep is that its universal. Everybody needs it. But so many people have sleep problems. Why do you think it is? What is it thats so tricky about sleep? There are so many reasons. I think we probably dont have enough time to do the whole thing. But Id love to get on a soapbox sometime and talk about capitalism and how that has shaped I love soapboxes. Yes. Climb on up there, girl.When the Western world at least industrialized, we took on this, eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight hours for whatever you will kind of slogan. And so we started taking on expectations and constraints around our sleep that we didnt have before.Do we sleep worse than we used to now? I think of all the screentime we have. I imagine that we probably are a little bit worse at sleep because of everything from the 24/7 access to information we have, to little dopamine hits, to bright lights in the middle of the night, to all of these technology-enabled distractions that can really keep us up when we ought to be sleeping. Why is getting good sleep so important? What does that do for us?I consider it equivalent to nutrition in terms of how much it impacts our health and well-being. We really cant function well without this basic biological drive satisfied. And when its not well satisfied, it impacts our physical health, our mental health, our performance, our functioning, our relationships, our sense of creativity, our connections with other people. It just impacts everything.See More:

Elon Musk has arguably been the boldest broligarch when it comes to brain-machine interfaces. But Mark Zuckerberg is hot on his heels.Shortly after Musk co-founded Neuralink the company thats put chips in three human brains, and counting in 2016, Meta (then Facebook) also ventured into neurotechnology research, announcing plans to build tech that would let people type with their brains and hear language through their skin.Since then, Meta-funded researchers have figured out how to decode speech from activity recorded from surgically implanted electrodes inside peoples brains. While brain surgery could feel worth it for a paralyzed person who wants to regain the ability to communicate, invasive devices like these are a hard sell for someone who just wants to type faster. Commercial devices regular people might actually want need to be wearable and removable, rather than permanent.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.Meta tabled its efforts to build consumer brain-computer interfaces a few years ago: Brain-reading headbands werent ready for prime time. Instead of developing new gadgets directly, the company has been investing in slower-burning neuroscience research. Their hope is that studying the brain will help them build AI thats better at stuff humans are good at, like processing language. Some of this research still focused on mind-reading: specifically, decoding how the brain produces sentences.This month, though, Meta made a breakthrough.In collaboration with the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language, researchers at Metas Fundamental Artificial Intelligence Research (FAIR) lab were able to accurately decode unspoken sentences from brain signals recorded outside the skull no surgery required.This was just in a lab, of course. But these findings mark a major step toward the wearable mind-reading devices Zuckerberg promised eight years ago.And as brain-to-text devices inch closer toward commercial viability in the not-so-distant future, well need to grapple with what it means for Meta to be their gatekeeper. In the lab, mind-reading technology promises to reveal previously unknowable information about how our brains construct thoughts, make decisions, and guide our actions. But out in the world, tech companies may misuse our brain data unless we establish and enforce regulations to stop them.Until a couple years ago, researchers couldnt decode unspoken language without implanting electrodes inside the brain, which requires surgery. In 2023, scientists at the University of Texas used fMRI, coupled with a version of the AI models that power ChatGPT, to decode the gist of unspoken sentences from brain activity. But fMRI machines cost millions of dollars and can outweigh a fully grown elephant, limiting their usefulness outside the lab.Because neuroscientists are generally unwilling to stick recording devices inside of a humans brain, most studies of the human brain involve measuring some proxy for neural activity itself. fMRI scanners measure how much blood flows to brain cells while they work, which entails a bit of a lag. Another method, called magnetoencephalography (MEG), measures magnetic fields brain cells create when they send electrical signals. While neither of these techniques can track what individual cells are doing, they both provide a rough snapshot of the brains activity patterns while someone is doing a task, like reading or typing. The cool thing is that unlike fMRI, MEG can record the brain in near-real time. So, Meta researchers recruited 35 volunteers to type sentences on a keyboard while sitting in an MEG scanner, which looks like a salon hair-drying chair from outer space. Some also had EEG (electroencephalography) electrodes gelled to their face and scalp to record electrical signals radiating from brain cells through their skulls. Each persons brain activity helped train an AI model to guess what they typed. Essentially, part of the model learned to match patterns of brain activity to the letters someone was typing at the time. Researchers fed another part of the model a bunch of Wikipedia articles to teach it how sentences work, and what words often appear next to each other in different contexts. With this information, if someone meant to type I love you, but their brain signals read I lovr yoi possibly because their brain actually led them to make a typo the model could effectively autocorrect that prediction, because it knows how letters and words should work in context.Using EEG, which is much more portable than an fMRI or MEG scanner, Meta researchers were able to use AI to decode the exact letters someone was typing about a third of the time. That doesnt sound particularly impressive, until you consider that EEG records brain cells via electrodes outside the skull, many layers of separation away from the brain itself. Its like trying to eavesdrop on a conversation at a crowded bar by standing outside and holding a glass against the wall: Given all the noise, catching even a third of that conversation is already quite challenging.MEG captures brain activity more precisely than EEG, because magnetic signals from brain cells dont get as distorted by the skull as electrical signals. By feeding MEG data to their AI model, Meta researchers accurately decoded between 70 to 80 percent of what people typed, blowing previous models out of the water. So, if Meta ever wants to build mind-reading headbands, recording magnetic fields might be their best bet.Like fMRI, the MEG device used in this study was huge and expensive. But wearable helmet-like MEG scanners, which only weigh a few pounds, already exist and are even more sensitive than non-portable scanners. These portable MEG devices are just a couple pounds heavier than the Quest 3, Metas latest VR headset, and about as silly-looking. While these MEG devices still dont work outside of special magnetically-shielded rooms (nor are they available to the public yet), its not hard to imagine a future where they could.Tech companies wont protect brain data unless we make themMeta isnt the only tech giant investing heavily in neuroscience research. Google and Microsoft both have teams dedicated to studying the brain, and NVIDIA and IBM both collaborate with neuroscience research institutions.The fields of AI and neuroscience have a long history of cross-pollination. The brain has a lot of functions that tech developers want to replicate in computers, like energy efficiency and learning without massive sets of training data. Tech companies build tools that neuroscientists want to use. (The idea of using non-invasive brain scans to diagnose mental illness has been trendy in neuroscience for decades. After all, it would be incredibly convenient for medical practitioners if diagnosing depression was as easy as running a quick EEG scan.) Here, Meta used the brain data they collected while people typed to study how the brain transforms abstract ideas into words, syllables, and letters, with the long-term goal of figuring out how to help AI chatbots do the same. The data support a long-held hypothesis held by neuroscientists and linguists, proposing that we produce speech from the top down. As I prepare to say something, my brain pictures the whole thing first (Im going to lunch soon), then zooms in on one word (going), then one syllable (go-). As I type, my brain focuses on each specific letter (g, o,...) as it tells my fingers what to do. Meta saw that these representations context, words, syllables, letters all overlap during language production, peaking and fading in strength at different times. Understanding language production will also, in theory, help Meta achieve their stated goal of restor[ing] communication for those who have lost the ability to speak. And there are indeed millions of people recovering from traumatic brain injury, stroke, or another neurological disorder that makes it hard to talk. A wearable device that makes communication easy again could be a hugely positive force in someones life.But we know thats not their only motivation. For Silicon Valley, the brain also represents the final barrier between humans and their devices. A quick sanity check: Metas goal was never to merge humans with computers (thats Musks thing), but to sell a portable, removable headset that someone could use to type or play video games with their mind. To manifest a device like this, Meta needs to cross two huge technological hurdles, and one even bigger ethical one.First, they need to decode unspoken thoughts from outside the skull. Check.Second, they need to do that with a device that someone could reasonably afford, keep in their house, and wear on their head. For now, this is pretty far off.Most importantly, once these devices exist, well need robust protections for peoples cognitive liberty our fundamental right to control our own consciousness. The time for these safeguards isnt after they hit stores. Its now.Facebook is already great at peering into your brain without any need for electrodes or fMRI or anything. They know much of your cognitive profile just from how you use the internet, Roland Nadler, a neuroethicist at the University of British Columbia, told my colleague Sigal Samuel back in 2019.Meta already uses AI to extrapolate your mental health from your digital footprint. They use AI to flag, and sometimes delete, posts about self-harm and suicide, and can trigger nonconsensual wellness checks when they detect concerning messages on Messenger or WhatsApp.Given how much convenience we gain by giving away personal data food deliveries, remote work, connecting with friends online lots of people give up on digital privacy altogether. Even though many people feel uncomfortable with the amount of personal information companies take from us, they also believe they have no control over their privacy.Last year, neuroscientists, lawyers, and lawmakers began passing legislation to explicitly include neural data in state privacy laws. Some smaller neurotech companies are already gathering brain data from consumer products stronger protections need to be put in place before massive companies like Meta can do the same.Zuckerberg has spent the past two months racing to Trump-ify Meta. His company is unlikely to handle our most private data with care, at least not unprompted.But in a world where Meta-branded brain-to-text headbands are as normal as keyboards are now, sharing brain data might feel like a prerequisite for participating in normal life. Imagine a workplace where, instead of giving you a monitor and a keyboard at the office, they give you a text-decoding helmet and tell you to strap in. If mind-typing becomes the default for computer systems, then avoiding brain-to-text devices will feel like avoiding smartphones: possible, sure. But certainly not the path of least resistance.As our mental security becomes less guaranteed, well need to decide whether the convenience of controlling stuff with our minds is worth letting tech companies colonize our last truly private space.A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!Youve 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:

The spate of federal firings that stretched throughout last week escalated last Friday, and continued through the holiday weekend. Nearly all of those fired were probationary employees, a status usually conferred on new workers, those that switch agencies, and the recently promoted, that provides fewer protections against removal. Reports have been unclear about exactly how many people were fired and where. However, we do know some details:Roughly 400 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) workers focused on research, science, and administrative support; About 3,600 Health and Human Services workers, including at least: 750 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) employees, at least 1,000 National Institutes of Health workers, and 750 people at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA);At least 400 Homeland Security employees, including 200 Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) employees;About 2,300 at the Department of the Interior, including 800 at the Bureau of Land Management and 1,000 at the National Parks Service;More than 3,000 Forest Service employees at the Department of Agriculture;More than 1,000 Veterans Affairs professionals; At least 300 Environmental Protection Agency workers;More than 1,500 NASA employees (10 percent of the agencys workforce).By several accounts, the firing process was a haphazard one probationary employees at the National Nuclear Security Administration, which manages the USs nuclear weapons, were asked to return to work after being fired, for instance.The Trump administration has argued these cuts (and more) are needed to slash federal spending, and to shrink a bloated bureaucracy.However, the latest reduction in force is unlikely to provide taxpayers with major savings, and could jeopardize the governments mandate to protect its citizens.Take, for instance, the VAs claim that its terminations will save $98 million per year. That is a lot of money to me, but it represents only 0.00145 percent of the $6.75 trillion the federal government spent in the 2024 fiscal year. Celebrating that cut is like me jumping for joy because I managed to save a tenth of a penny by foregoing something at the grocery store. Sure its money saved, but not really an appreciable sum.The point is and its a point others have made the US will need to make massive cuts, on the trillion, not million, dollar scale if it really wants to appreciably tighten its belt. To do that, it would need to slash spending on expensive programs like Medicare, Medicaid, and the defense. Now to the other claim: that the government is too big.Much like with the VAs savings, those let go represent a fraction of the federal workforce. If you combine the latest round of layoffs with previous rounds and even with the roughly 75,000 people who took the governments buyout offer then just under 4 percent of the governments 2.4 million person workforce has been cut. That means the government is still pretty big. The good news about that is it means government services are unlikely to keel over tomorrow. The worry is about the day after tomorrow. Were not out of fire season, and fire experts and Forest Service workers are expressing great concern that they wont have the manpower to keep communities safe.Its just going to be a disaster for the wildfire response this season, one Forest Service firefighter told Stateline.Spring break and summer travel season are coming in fast too. The FAA was clear that it didnt fire any air traffic controllers, but, as you read in this newsletter a few weeks ago, aviation experts believe our flight systems are seriously overtaxed. Right now, flight operations are like a rubber band, the University of North Dakotas Daniel Adjekum told me recently. And we keep pulling it.And its not just a matter of fire or flying: a disaster could happen at any time requiring FEMAs full attention; the CDC might need to be called into action over a new pandemic federal agencies were already struggling to get bird flu under control. Its impossible to tell you right now what the effects of these cuts will be, and if things will go as badly as some now claim. But the worry is, if things do go south due to lack of personnel, it will be too late avoidable tragedy will have struck.This piece originally ran in the Today, Explained newsletter. For more stories like this, sign up here.See More:

Ever wondered what your pets are dreaming about when they suddenly kick their paws in their sleep?Maybe theyre chasing a mouse, or a cat. Maybe theyre pawing at you for treats. Or, maybe theyre just running around the house, rummaging through the garbage, scratching the couch, jumping on beds all the things theyre not allowed to do when theyre awake.Its hard to say. But one thing is for sure: People have been connecting these sudden twitches to dreams in animals, and in humans, for years.In humans, during the deepest stage of sleep, we have twitches in our limbs but also in our eyes. These are called rapid eye movements, REM for short. And, the science here is pretty certain. REM sleep is when we are likely dreaming. In animals, scientists also believe their twitching limbs is a likely sign of them dreaming as well. I mean, we know we have dreams. We know that we are moving around in our dreams to some extent, says Mark Blumberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Iowa. So it just makes sense to think, Oh, movements. Why wouldnt they be connected?But then, he observed twitching in really young animals and asked, A newborn animal has had very little waking risk experiences. What the hell are they dreaming about?If twitching was really related to dreaming, youd expect that the older you get and the more experiences you have, the more youd dream, and the more youd twitch.So, to get to the bottom of this mystery, Blumberg began experimenting on newborn rats. In a study, he surgically disconnected the part of the brain responsible for creating dreams. We found no effect at all on twitches. And so I was like, Okay, what is this about? If dreams were responsible for twitching, why did cutting the part of the brain responsible for them have no effect? Blumberg spoke with Unexplainable host Noam Hassenfeld about how this seemingly small question why do we twitch in our sleep? has fundamentally shifted how we understand the relationship between the brain and the body.Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Theres much more in the full podcast, so listen to Unexplainable wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.All right, Mark, just to make sure before we dive in here, when I think of sleep twitches, I think of those twitches I get, like, right when Im falling asleep.Hypnic jerks, yeah.Is that part of this? Is that different?Its a separate phenomenon. Its more akin to whats called a startle than a twitch. Youre not in REM sleep when that happens, and there are a lot of theories about it, but the fact is its an extremely hard thing to study.Well, if were just talking about these REM sleep twitches, then how common are they? Do all kinds of animals and people twitch?Ive got a website that collects all these different videos, and what you see across different animals is that the parts of the body that the animals really, really rely on for bringing sensory information into their brain are the parts that twitch the most. So for us, you know, rapid eye movements are twitches of the eyes. We also twitch our fingers a lot when were adults. With cats, you see their paws moving a lot. Ferrets, you see whisker twitches; rats, you see lots of whisker twitches. They use their whiskers to learn about the world just as well as we use our eyes. And if all of these twitches arent just, you know, enacting dreams, how do you start figuring out what they actually are?Well, you know, the first thing you have to do is try to figure out what parts of the brain are producing this. I mean, how is this all happening? And what we started to see when we were recording brain activity is that the brains of neonates, baby rats, were much more active during sleep and much more active when animals were twitching than when they were awake, Its one thing to think that sleep has brain activity associated with it. That was a huge finding 80 years ago. Its another thing entirely to see that the brain activity is greater. And I mean much greater during REM sleep than during waking. And I assume its reasonable to think that all of that brain activity is connected with these twitches, right? Is there a way to actually test it?Yeah, I mean, the biggest problem was methodological. How do you record brain activity in a very, very small baby rat, which was the best animal for doing this sort of work. You have to figure out how to get them in a stable situation so you can drop these very fine electrodes into the brain. And so it took years to get the methods going. But what we started to see is that every time the animal twitches, 10 milliseconds later, the part of the brain thats responsive to sensory input for that limb shows a huge burst of activity. So twitch, activity. Twitch, activity. Not the other way around. This is a sensory signal, right? So this timing here matters. If you have a twitch, and then you get a burst of activity in the brain after that twitch, then you have a pretty good idea that thats a sensory signal that youre picking up on. Yeah, so like a signal the brain is getting from a nerve or a muscle or something?Yeah, the sensory input. So every time you move a limb, you have sensors in your muscle, you have sensors in your skin and your joints. And those sensors, when you have movement, they produce neural signals that flow up into the brain. Thats how we know when our arms are moving or when you touch something. We have sensors all throughout our limbs. And so when the limbs were moving, thats when we were seeing the brain activity in parts of the brain that are responsive to those types of sensory signals.Wow. Okay, so youre essentially flipping the traditional hypothesis on its head, right? Its not dreams causing twitches, its twitches causing dreams, or its twitches causing some impact in the brain?Yeah, I mean, obviously twitches are not going to be the sole source of all things in the dreaming brain, but that it is at least providing sensory input to the brain during sleep, that we know for a fact. So it does flip it on its head and it completely changes the calculus of whats happening in a dreaming brain.So then why would the twitching be happening to begin with? Like, whats the point of all of this twitching?Well, so this is where you have to start to think about what is it thats special about twitches, right? The first thing that you notice is that the movements are discrete. And it turns out that discreteness is incredibly important. So imagine that youre standing at a switchboard with hundreds of different switches. Lets just say theyre neurons, and then all the wires from all of those switches lead to a whole bunch of lights. So every switch controls a different light, okay? And lets say that those lights are muscles. If youre sitting at that switchboard and you want to figure out which switches control which lights, you dont just start throwing all the switches simultaneously, right? Because if you did, youre gaining no information. All youre seeing is a bunch of lights turn on and youve thrown a bunch of switches. The answer is you throw one switch at a time, you see which light comes on, and then you make that connection. And so thats the difference between wake movements and twitches. You know, Im sitting here talking to you, and Im gesturing, and Im moving all my limbs simultaneously, my posture, my neck, my eyes, everythings moving simultaneously, right? Thats waking. One of the characteristics of waking movements is that theyre continuous, and theyre simultaneous, and theyre highly complex. But when youre twitching, one twitch at a time, you ping your body. And the body pings you back. And then you know that the first thing is related to the second thing and thats the discreteness of twitching. And that explains why these animals are twitching so much. You never grow and develop more than you do when you are young.So, your theory is that the power goes out and theyre flipping switches in a fuse box to see which switch controls which light because theres no other stimuli coming in, right? Theyre in a controlled environment, so theyre essentially doing sort of an experiment to learn their own body?Yeah, exactly. Its like theyre bootstrapping their system. Theyre self-organizing their sensory motor system and its done from within. Its a big mystery as to how we develop things like our sensory motor system. How do you actually learn about your body when youre a newborn rat or a human and youre born, you have no idea how your body is formed. You have no idea how it moves, and its going to be changing every single day as you grow and figure out new things, right? So how do you figure out how to move that body in real time through the process of development? You cant prescribe this. You cant blueprint this. Theres no genetic mechanism that can tell you exactly how youre going to be on day three versus day five. So you need to have a system thats highly adaptable.And if twitching is about learning, we would assume younger animals would twitch more, is that the case?Absolutely.And then, I mean, older animals also twitch.Yes.Why would they be twitching?Good question. First, we dont twitch as much when were older. But second, some animals do twitch quite a lot. And the part of the body that twitches matters. And this is just a theory because nobody has really explored it with the level of sophistication that we need. But we have to calibrate our systems, you know, over the day we get tired, we lose control, you know, our vision gets worse and worse through the day. And then you wake up the next day and youre rejuvenated. I think its possible that twitches continue throughout life, for some parts of the body, for that purpose; to calibrate a weary system. And theres some hints out there in the world that this could be happening, including work that was done in humans. But theyre mostly hints and it needs to be done more systematically.And why do you think the scientific community missed this for so long, missed understanding twitches as a developmental process?Because when you label something as a byproduct of dreams, why would anybody spend their time studying it?Like, its just closing off further inquiry?Yeah, I mean, I dont want to be too flippant about it. Dreams are fascinating, but theyre kind of a red herring when it comes to studying sleep. There is, to my mind, many, many fascinating things about sleep that have nothing to do with dreams, and the focus on dreams is kind of a distraction from what really matters.See More:

The Logoff is 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 Im focusing on DOGEs attempt to access taxpayer information via the IRSs most sensitive records a push that raises concerns both for the privacy of millions of people and the potential for abuse at the highest levels.Whats the latest? The White House is pressing the IRS to grant a member of Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency access to the system that contains taxpayers records, personal identification numbers, and banking information, according to the Washington Post. A group representing unionized workers, taxpayer advocates, and small businesses sued DOGE on Monday, asking a federal judge to block access.Who normally has access to this data? Under other administrations, access to this data has largely been reserved for a select group of career employees. Political appointees, including IRS commissioners, are typically not allowed to view the data.Why are critics worried?Privacy: The groups suing say that any mishandling of the records could expose tens of millions of peoples personal financial information.Weaponization of the IRS: Critics also contend that the information could be used for political vendettas, targeting opponents for audits or leaking private information about them.What does the administration say? The White House claims DOGE needs access to IRS data to fight waste, fraud, and abuse in the tax payment system a goal undercut by Trumps freezing of IRS hiring, which experts say would hamper the agencys ability to detect fraud.Whats the big picture? The fight over the IRS is one of several high-stakes struggles over access to sensitive government data. The acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration quit over the weekend after a fight over DOGEs access to the agencys data, and there is a similar fight playing out over access to the Treasury Departments payment system.And with that, its time to log off Well, that was technical and more than a little alarming, and it would be easy to finish this email and slip right back into the doomscroll. Dont do it! Instead, I offer a 16-minute podcast on how insects have changed human culture. I hope you enjoy it. Ill see you back here tomorrow.See More:

As Elon Musk has rampaged around the federal government for four weeks, canceling contracts and dismantling whole departments, hes claimed all the actions of his Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) were maximally transparent.Yet theres been nothing transparent about the details of Musks actual job in the administration, which has been a murky mystery thats only deepened of late.For some time after Trump was sworn in, it was unclear whether Musk even was officially working for the government. Two weeks in, the administration confirmed he was indeed a special government employee, but declined to give further details.Late Monday, White House aide Joshua Fisher finally provided an answer of sorts. As part of court proceedings in a lawsuit, Fisher made a declaration about Musks role under penalty of perjury though that answer was rather curious.Fisher revealed that Musk is a White House senior adviser to the president with no greater authority than other senior White House advisers. That means, he continued, that Musk has no actual or formal authority to make government decisions himself. Musk can only advise the President and communicate the Presidents directives.But what about DOGE, which Trump established in the executive branch as the US DOGE Service? Well, Fisher said, Musk is not the head of the US DOGE Service, or even an employee of it. As for who does run it: the administration hasnt said.All this is, uh, strange. Trump announced in November that Musk would lead DOGE, and both Trump and Musk have certainly been presenting Musk as in charge of DOGE. But the administration is now claiming that, legally, on paper, he is not even though he obviously is.The pay no attention to that billionaire behind the curtain caginess likely is part of an effort to shield Musk from ethics and court scrutiny. It also serves to put his actions on firmer legal footing by claiming they fundamentally just amount to the president running the executive branch through Musk, his instrument. A defensible claim and a dubious oneIn the declaration, Fisher made two claims about Musks role one thats defensible, and one that seems far more dubious.The first claim is that Musk is a White House adviser accountable to the president and acting with his authority. This is the defensible claim.Every recent administration has had powerful White House aides who advise on policy and tell agencies what to do to some extent. Stephen Miller became informally known as the president of immigration in Trumps first term, because he told all the immigration-related agencies what to do. Other White House aides, like the national security adviser, play roles that involve both coordination of various agencies and direct setting of policy. And the chief of staff effectively helps manage the executive branch as a whole. Musk is essentially a very powerful White House adviser like these. He serves at the pleasure of the president and can be dismissed at any time. The reason hes been so effective at getting various agencies to do what he wants is because people perceive him correctly as acting with Trumps approval. (Elon cant do and wont do anything without our approval, Trump said two weeks ago. And well give him the approval where appropriate; where its not appropriate, we wont.)As Ive written, many of the policies advanced by DOGE are likely illegal, and there are questions about whether Musks appointment complies with ethics laws. But it seems extremely unlikely that the courts will declare it illegal for a president to have a very powerful White House adviser or to delegate substantial policymaking influence to such an adviser.DOGEs structure tries to make informal loyalty to Musk supersede loyalty to agenciesFishers second claim the much more questionable one is that Musk does not head DOGE or even work for it. This seems like a claim that is true on paper but quite misleading in practice.To understand how it can be true on paper, its worth understanding how DOGE works. Theres the US DOGE Service a rebranding of the previous US Digital Service in the Executive Office of the President. But there are also mini-DOGE teams being established inside every agency to go through their data, evaluate their personnel, and so on.According to the executive order that set up this structure, those mini-DOGE teams must coordinate with the main DOGE, but theyre actually employees of their respective agencies, meaning they formally report upward in those agencies.Informally, though, the mini-DOGE teams are being staffed with Musk allies who will want to work with him and do what he wants even if he is not technically their boss. The traditional saying about government is that where you stand depends on where you sit meaning, once someone works for an agency, they tend to see the world through the eyes of that agency, and start representing its interests. The mini-DOGE team setup is essentially an attempt to make appointees informal loyalty to the richest man in the world supersede any institutional considerations.So that is how Musk can run DOGE without actually officially heading DOGE. Technically, hes just advising them. Practically, his advice is not really optional. But ultimately, his authority stems from the president, and can be revoked by him.And yet theres something rather brazen about suggesting to a judge that Musk does not head an operation he is obviously heading. Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the lawsuit in question, has not sounded eager to rein in DOGE just yet. But presented with a declaration so seemingly incomplete and evasive, she may well have some more questions.RelatedSee More: Politics

In recent months, the attacks on diversity, equity, and inclusion policies have been unrelenting. Since Donald Trumps win in November, several major companies including McDonalds, Target, Amazon, and Meta have announced that theyre either scaling back or outright ending their DEI programs. And since Trump returned to the White House, his administration has been dismantling all DEI programs across the federal government. The assault has been so aggressive that at one point the Trump administration seemed to just be scrapping all references to the words diversity, equity, and inclusion on government websites and handbooks, even in cases where they dont actually refer to DEI programming. According to the Wall Street Journal, that included deleting references like the inclusion of identification numbers on tax forms. But despite the efforts of Republicans to turn DEI into a battlefront for the culture wars, DEI practices are nothing new. In fact, they trace their roots to the civil rights movement and have long been a part of corporate America, let alone organizations in the public sector. Their goal is to build fairer workplaces by focusing on things like diversity in hiring or reducing discrimination creating opportunities that otherwise might not exist for qualified people from marginalized backgrounds. The backlash against DEI has had measurable consequences. In 2023, for example, the Supreme Court ended affirmative action, and since then, enrollment of Black and Latino students at universities has declined. Republicans have also started using the phrase DEI as a slur.Understanding the history of DEI how it came to be, as well as its strengths and weaknesses can help us figure out how we got to this point, and, for organizations that are actually still interested in promoting diversity and fairness in the workplace, where we can go from here. The origins of DEIWhile diversity programs have faced some push and pull, until recently, they were largely cemented as a mostly uncontroversial feature of the American workplace.Before they were known as DEI, these programs started as a civil rights era push toward integration. In the 1960s, President John F. Kennedy signed an executive order that required federal contractors to take active steps to ensure that they dont discriminate against applicants or employees based on race, creed, color, or national origin. This was followed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson which banned all companies with more than 15 employees from engaging in discrimination when it came to practices like job training, hiring, compensation, promotion, and termination. Back then, diversity programs which were called equal employment opportunity programs before the terminology evolved to diversity programs and, eventually, diversity, equity, and inclusion were mostly designed to ensure that companies complied with the law, and consisted of measures like anti-discrimination training that explained to employees what the new laws required and basic company standards.In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some businesses started to go to greater lengths to avoid discrimination suits or bad press. Major companies like IBM and the Xerox Corporation adopted the stance that promoting integration and preventing discrimination was not just a matter of complying with the law but a matter of social responsibility. IBM, for example, started conducting pay equity analyses an effort to ensure that employees with similar responsibilities are paid at comparable rates in order to combat pay discrimination on the basis of race and gender in the 1970s, a practice it continues today. When President Ronald Reagan came into office, he pushed for cutting a lot of red tape. That included threatening to roll back affirmative action laws and advocating that discrimination within companies should be dealt with internally instead of being litigated in the courts. But companies and their employees had already started believing in their diversity programs, and Reagan received pushback from Democrats and Republicans, businesses and civil rights activists alike. In fact, most major companies said that they would keep their diversity programs regardless of whether they were required to.Around the same time, corporate America started settling on a new case for improving diversity in the workplace: It wasnt just the morally right thing to do, it was also good for business. The demographics of the labor force were quickly changing, and so companies developed a renewed interest in promoting diversity and inclusion in order to maintain a competitive advantage. All of this laid the foundation for the DEI programs that are being attacked today. We kind of came to this idea that diversity is going to happen, and as a result, we need to be able to manage it correctly, said Lily Zheng, a diversity and inclusion strategist and consultant. So this spawned a whole bunch of diversity training, racial sensitivity training, gender inclusion training to prepare the modern workforce for what was meant to be this huge influx of diversity.In the 2010s, the rise of social movements like Black Lives Matter and Me Too led to a boom in hiring diversity czars and consultants, and many organizations, from fashion brands to academic institutions, pushed PR campaigns that included diversity pledges. In 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, organizations showed a renewed interest in promoting diversity because of the public pressure to do the right thing. But even before the swift retreat from DEI after Trumps election win, it seemed like the so-called racial reckoning many employers promised never really materialized and now companies are trying to pretend their commitments to diversity never really happened.The shortcomings of DEI While there isnt comprehensive data across the labor force to evaluate the impact of DEI programs broadly, studies that focus on different components of diversity programs have shown mixed results. If we look at the big picture, what kinds of things have been effective at actually helping firms to hire and retain a more diverse workforce, theyre not the things that are designed to target individual bias at companies, said Frank Dobbin, a social science professor at Harvard University who has studied corporate diversity programs. Those kinds of initiatives include things like implicit bias training, which seeks to help people become aware of their own biases and figure out how to limit their negative impact, or grievance procedures, where employees can file complaints against their managers or other people in their organizations for discrimination or harassment. These programs have been very popular among companies, in part because theyre a low lift and relatively low cost. The problem is that they arent all that effective and, in some cases, might have unintended consequences. Implicit bias training, for example, tends to make participants defensive rather than open to change. Even when people want to do better, few people think that they actively make racist decisions, and so they dont necessarily think the training applies to them.These trainings and grievance procedures, theyre really designed to show people that theyre biased and change their ways either through education in the case of training or punishment in the case of grievance procedures, Dobbin said. But in practice, those processes, Dobbin says, tend to antagonize people in management, especially white men. In their typical forum, they tend to have adverse effects that are leading to decreases in the ability of firms to hire, retain, and promote Black workers, Hispanic workers, and Asian American workers, he added.This approach of seeing the problem as individual behaviors and beliefs as opposed to the structure and processes of an organization has been one of the critical failures of DEI. Thats created what some have called the DEI-industrial complex. In fact, DEI training has swelled into an $8 billion industry, allowing employers to pat themselves on the back for spending time and money on surface-level diversity programming like hiring consultants or public speakers for their employees, while not investing in an actual long-term strategy that would tangibly improve working conditions and address systemic barriers to entry that women and people of color face. Companies always want to pay for their flashy speakers, for their award ceremonies, for their external-facing communications or heritage month activities and very little is actually spent on doing things like addressing discrimination, ensuring fair pay, or creating healthy workplace processes, Zheng said. And thats a problem because these sorts of deeper investments are whats actually needed if we want to create workplaces that are more fair, that are more equitable, that are better for everyone.Whats worth keeping from DEI? When people think of DEI, they often think about diversity training or job titles like chief diversity officer. But sometimes, the best diversity and inclusion initiatives are much less flashy.In the mid-2000s, a blockbuster study showed that employers are much less likely to give applicants with Black-sounding names a callback than applicants with white-sounding names. Twenty years later, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Chicago did a similar study, and while the results showed that companies had improved, applicants with Black-sounding names are still less likely to get an interview.The researchers found that the companies that were less likely to discriminate had something surprisingly simple in common: centralized processes and standards. Correlation, of course, is not causation, but that pattern shouldnt be dismissed. When hiring processes are not standardized, when theres no scoring rubric, when hiring managers arent trained to give consistent results and actually evaluate based on merit, you see peoples individual biases really impact the demographics of who ends up ultimately hired, Zheng said. And so the takeaway is, if you want to fight this bias, one of the simplest things you can do is very mundane: standardize your hiring process.Companies can be so focused on diversity in recruiting that they avoid making changes that would help retain employees or draw people to want to work there in the first place. Acknowledging this is part of what changed many companies approach from just thinking about diversity in hiring to making the workplace more inclusive so that people can advance their careers once their foot is in the door.Having more objective and standardized processes can reduce the risk of unfair or discriminatory compensation, disciplinary action, or termination. The persistence of pay gaps between men and women or Black and white people, for example, inherently creates a less inclusive workplace and a lasting impression on employees that they arent treated equally. Thats why long-term commitments like pay-gap reviews and corrections or accountability mechanisms like publicly releasing diversity data that would encourage workers to demand more of their employers can go a long way in promoting diversity in the workplace.DEI programs have also been criticized for not paying close enough attention to classism. In practice, DEI programs are often the corporate-friendly approach to desegregation, where the C-suites co-opt the language of social justice while doing little, if anything, to meaningfully improve the workplace for everybody. These kinds of programs are often designed to cater to a certain type of background, like college-educated workers, while ignoring class divides that continue to segregate the labor force.One DEI program that helps address this issue is changing recruiting practices, especially in companies that value graduates of elite colleges, which tend to have mostly upper-middle-class students. By expanding recruitment to all types of schools, including HBCUs, state schools, and two-year colleges, companies are likely to see more racial and class diversity in their applicant pools.So what should the future of DEI look like?With the aggressive attacks on DEI coming from the Trump administration and the kind of kowtowing weve seen from big corporations, its clear that the DEI backlash isnt going away anytime soon. Workers looking to create more inclusive workplaces will have a harder time getting their employers to adopt or expand DEI programs.Thats why companies that are actually interested in advancing equality should hone in on what really works things like standardized hiring processes, pay equity commitments, recruiting from schools outside of Ivy Leagues and the like and leave the ineffective aspects of DEI behind, including one-off trainings, speaking engagements, and half-hearted heritage month celebrations.These off-the-shelf, one shot, feel good, check-the-box kinds of initiatives are not going to be sufficient to produce any change in outcomes like giving people equal opportunity to develop, to be promoted, said Robin Ely, a business administration professor at the Harvard Business School who has studied diversity programs.Companies should be data and outcome-oriented that is, they should figure out what it is, exactly, that needs to be addressed and tailor a solution to address it. Zheng also says that companies have to think about how to get buy-in from everybody. That kind of coalition building, they said, is crucial to DEIs future success. Oftentimes, the way people talk about DEI makes it sound like one racial group will get preferential treatment giving ammo to the charge Republicans often levy that companies are simply lowering standards to increase diversity, even when theyre not. Its often seen, in other words, as a zero-sum game.But Zheng suggests that the most successful DEI programs are win-wins, creating better outcomes for everybody, and advocates should focus on that communal aspect to build stronger coalitions. So before throwing out DEI initiatives altogether, companies and organizations that are actually interested in the ideals of diversity and inclusion should consider a more coalitional approach. Lets look at parental leave. Parental leave policies in the US are abysmal, theyre atrocious, and when advocates try to make them better, they often say things like, Women stand to benefit a lot from these policies, Zheng told me, adding that some advocates might argue that the patriarchy, or simply men, are the problem. Yet we lose the fact when we argue like this that men benefit enormously from parental leave as well.In the long run, this approach could indeed prove popular. The majority of Americans still think DEI programs are a good thing, though that number has been shrinking, and only a fifth of Americans think that DEI is plain bad. By designing these programs to benefit everyone, and by communicating that to workers across the board, DEI practitioners might garner more support. At the end of the day, Zheng says, we just need to design systems that are fair.See More:

Donald Trump has spent his first month as president governing with chaos, shock, and awe. He threatened, walked back, and imposed some tariffs; let Elon Musk take a hatchet to the federal bureaucracy; purged agencies and departments of opposition; and captured media attention with executive orders and expansionist daydreams.And through it all, his overall popularity has remained steady historically high for him even if historically unpopular compared to other modern presidents, according to Gallup polling. He still holds a positive net approval rating something he only achieved for two weeks at the start of his first term, per FiveThirtyEights averages. That measure has hovered at around 50 percent approval, a higher share of support than he ever had eight years ago. The margin has shrunk a bit since he took office, but it still sits at +3.3 points.His personal favorability, another measure of how Americans feel about the president, is similarly more positive than its been since he left office in 2021. Roughly even shares of Americans think of him positively or negatively.These factors naturally prompt a few follow-up questions, ones that are particularly vexing for Trumps critics. Why hasnt all this chaos done anything to dent his popularity? Whats helping him? And how long can that last?We now have a decent amount of polling and data to answer those questions. Much of what they show is not exactly rocket science: Almost half of Americans voted for Trump, and they like what they see so far. The data also includes a poll shared exclusively with Vox that suggests some serious warning signs for the president as his honeymoon tapers off. But the bottom line is that people mostly approve of what Trump is doing, and he is keeping high levels of support from Republicans and a good share of independents and moderates.The main reason: plenty of what Trump is doing resonates with Americans so farTheres a very simple explanation for why so many Americans view Trump favorably: they think that hes living up to his campaign promises, or doing even better than they expected, on a range of actions Trump has taken so far.A few eye-opening results from a recent CBS/YouGov poll show this: some 70 percent of Americans think Trump is keeping his campaign trail promises, and nearly half of Americans think hes doing even more than they expected he would in the early days of his presidency. Among that subset of respondents, the vast majority like the fact that hes exceeding their expectations.Looking specifically at the issues, Trump gets positive marks for his attention to immigration and the southern border and for cutting government spending and foreign aid budgets. Another poll, from Marquette University, shows something similar for two other areas: Trumps executive orders and stance on transgender people, and his plan to expand oil and gas production in the US. Both enjoy double-digit levels of support.Of course, an important addendum to these perspectives is the degree of attention that Trumps actions have received. The president has mastered the attention economy, so the American public feels quite informed about what it is that hes prioritizing. That YouGov/CBS poll shows that, to a degree: Some 45 percent of Americans say theyre paying a lot of attention to political news. Another 35 percent say they are paying some attention. That attention seems to be benefitting Trump and his party as most attitudes toward Democrats remain quite negative, from both Republicans, Independents, and an angered Democratic base.Trumps weirdest policy moves are the least popularYet there are a handful of other eccentric and wacky Trump positions and priorities that dont seem to enjoy the same level of approval including one signature Trump position that carries pretty negative associations. It runs a bit counter to one of the theories for Trumps success on the campaign trail: that his weirdness, his bluster, and his comedic celebrity were part of why voters liked him.That same Marquette poll that finds Trumps immigration, transgender, and energy policies to be popular also finds some of Trumps more random policy positions to be viewed quite negatively.Taking back the Panama Canal and pardoning January 6 rioters are both opposed by 65 percent of Americans, while renaming the Gulf of Mexico is opposed by a little more than 70 percent of Americans. Trumps more traditional executive orders are very positively received, as expected for a president in his honeymoon phase, the election analyst Lakshya Jain, from Split-Ticket.org, said in a post reflecting on these dynamics. One of the biggest strikes against people love Trumps weirdness is that renaming the Gulf of Mexico, taking back the Panama Canal, and pardoning J6 rioters all are incredibly unpopular actions, while GOP-orthodox policies on gender, immigration, and drilling are net positive.Similarly, a recent poll conducted by the progressive research firm Data for Progress (and shared with Vox) found that when asked about some more specific actions Trump has taken under the umbrella of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and purging the government of wokeness, Americans seem less favorable to Trumps position. Other polling here is a little messy, but in general, DEI initiatives in theory still remain quite popular.Some 62 percent of American adults in the poll opposed administrative moves to remove mentions of climate change, from the US Department of Agricultures website and to remove the Spanish-language version of the White House website. More than 70 percent, meanwhile, oppose federal agencies moves to stop celebrating Black History Month or Martin Luther King Jr. Day. And while Americans are generally okay with the gutting of USAID and cuts to government spending and the federal bureaucracy, theyre wary of the role of Elon Musk and his so-called Department of Government Efficiency team. The Data for Progress poll matches YouGovs surveys for CBS and The Economist this month: Musk himself is quite unpopular. At least half of the nation has an unfavorable opinion of him, per the Data for Progress poll. Those two YouGov surveys either show that Americans wish Musk had less influence in conducting government operations or are outright concerned about the level of influence he musters. While 63 percent of American adults think Musk has a lot of influence within Trumps administration, only 18 percent say they want him to have that much power, according to the Economist/YouGov survey. Across all partisan groups, the level of perceived influence is higher than respondents desired influence. That perception will matter as Trumps presidency carries on, and Americans wonder who in fact is influencing the presidents decisions.Voters wanted change from the status quo in 2024, and Trump was seen as the change candidate. But hes still far more unpopular than other presidents were at this point in their term, including Biden, Evangel Penumaka, Data for Progresss polling principal and research director, told me. So far, voters have seen a chaotic administration attempting a lot of policy changes at once and giving undue power to the worlds richest man. And while Trump may be appeasing those who care strongly about immigration, he still has yet to show voters that he can address their top concern the economy.Trump still faces a singular threat: inflationThat final factor the economy could end up being a much bigger liability for Trump than is currently being discussed. It was the predominant reason Trump was elected and its the issue that most Americans think Trump isnt paying enough attention to at this point. The CBS poll, for example, found that 66 percent of Americans think Trump is not putting enough focus on lowering prices. An analysis by CNNs Harry Enten found a similar dynamic: some 55 percent of Americans think inflation or the economy in general should be Trumps focus during his first 100 days.His proposed tariffs on Mexico, Europe, and Canada are all tremendously unpopular only tariffs with China are viewed favorably by a majority of Americans.The Marquette survey found similar division on whether tariffs are good for the economy a plurality, 46 percent, think they would hurt the national economy, while about half of Americans think they would increase inflation.Unless Trump can meaningfully show voters that he is focused on the cost of living, his work eliminating government services and undermining consumer protections is not likely to win over voters who were motivated by pocketbook issues in November, Penumaka, of Data for Progress, told me.The overall Trump favorability remains positive but is trending down. So the question now is: will this honeymoon last for long? Americans who are tuned in to these political dynamics may continue to see negative media coverage, a reorganized Democratic opposition, and slow movement on economic conditions, like the prices of goods and services. For now, the positive feelings Americans have for a certain non-economic segment of Trumps policies are keeping him afloat. But if he doesnt make material progress on those economic expectations, could the same malaise that set in during Bidens presidency return? And if those conditions and feelings do improve, will voters give him credit? Up until now, Trump has shown he can defy expectations. But inflation has beaten presidents before and its now unclear if Trump will be an exception.See More:

Next Page is a newsletter written by senior correspondent and book critic Constance Grady. She covers books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater. To get new editions in your inbox, subscribe here.Any time I travel to a new place for which there is no Rick Steves guidebook, I feel a little cheated. Steves, with his impeccable recommendations, sensible budgeting options, and gently corny prose style, has served as the benevolent fairy godfather on more than one trip for me. So its a treat to read his new memoir, On the Hippie Trail, and meet a Steves who is much younger and much more unsure perhaps in need of a fairy godparent of his own.In 1978, Steves was a 23-year-old piano teacher who already had the travel bug. Together with a school friend, he was determined to make his way across the so-called Hippie Trail: from Istanbul to Kathmandu, an overland trek by bus and train through Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. He kept a detailed journal of his experiences, and its that which forms the basis of the new memoir a young mans story, with minimal intrusions from the old one.Along the Hippie Trail, Steves got high for the first time. (In Afghanistan in 1978, he reasoned, it was as innocent as wine with dinner is in America. Today, hes an advocate for legalized cannabis.) He rode an elephant in Jaipur and bathed under a waterfall in Nepal. The dreamy travel descriptions are fun, but whats loveliest in this book is to watch Steves slowly open his mind to a world that was bigger and more complicated than he ever expected. What did the people think as we waltzed in and out of their lives? he wonders. Travel is one of the great opportunities to open your mind to the world, but one of the others is reading, which allows you to brush up against the consciousness of another person, touching your mind to theirs. Here are some books to help you do just that.On the shelfGliff by Ali SmithHere are some of the characteristics of the books of Ali Smith, whos been called Scotlands Nobel laureate-in-waiting: sneaky serialization. (Her acclaimed seasonal quartet was linked by a tricky, easy-to-miss series of daisy chain connections.) Linguistic play. (She likes a prose poem integrated into the text and, if she can swing it, a long discussion of etymology.) A set of anti-fascist politics that is not optimistic so much as it is committed to resistance and to the resilient capabilities of art and beauty. (The seasonal quartet contained some of the earliest serious post-Brexit and post-Covid novels.)Smiths new novel, Gliff, contains all of the above, and yet it still feels new and surprising. Its simply not quite what you would expectGliff takes place in a near-future dystopia, and it tracks two siblings with the fairy-tale names of Rose and Briar. Their bohemian parents have sheltered them from the worst of their authoritarian state, but the state takes its strange and absurd revenge. Sometime in the night, we learn through Briars child eyes, someone comes to their house and paints a red line all around it, an opaque threat that nonetheless forces them to flee their home. Then the line comes for their camper van. It comes relentlessly, unstoppably, forcing Briar and Rose away from their parents, off the grid, into hiding, and even, eventually, away from each other. Gliffs title comes from an old Scottish word with many meanings: It can be a short moment, a violent blow, a sudden escape, or a nonsense sound. Its companion novel is due to come out next year and is being advertised as a story hidden in the first novel. It will be titled Glyph.Mona Acts Out by Mischa BerlinskiWhat a treat, what an absolute delight this warm, funny novel is which is a particular triumph because it is, in some ways, a Me Too novel. A little bit Slings & Arrows, a little bit Dorothy Parker, Mona Acts Out deals with the fraught relationship between esteemed Shakespearian actor Mona Zahid and her old mentor Milton Katz, who has been forced out of the theatrical company he founded after accusations of sexual harassment.Mona, who as she approaches middle age laments that she will soon have to stop playing Ophelia and start playing Gertrude, credits Milton with making her. Yet shes never felt completely comfortable with the way Milton wielded his absolute power at their theater company, a dynamic tracked here with the nuance befitting a book that takes Shakespeare as its subject. Over the course of one disastrous Thanksgiving, Mona gets very high indeed and, little dog in tow, walks out on hosting her in-laws to ramble across Manhattan, trying to get Milton out of her head and also work out the mystery of why her hair currently looks so good.As Mona walks, she occasionally frets over the role shes currently playing: Maria in Twelfth Night, one of Shakesepeares most sparkling comedies. Monas playing it dark and cruel, and no one quite understands why: Isnt it supposed to be funny? With Mona Acts Out, Berlinski has pulled off the opposite feat. Shes written a sharp analysis of something dark, and shes made it a pure pleasure to read. What a strange phenomenon the Disney Channel of the 2000s was: all those squeaky clean sitcoms about sweet kids with big dreams; all that ever-lurking paranoia that one of the sweet kids would pull a Britney any minute now. If youre a millennial, odds are that you spent some time with Disney Channel as your babysitter. It fed mainstream pop culture one giant pop star after another and then, somehow, it seemed to fade away, consigned to irrelevance as abruptly and inexplicably as it became, somehow, central in its heyday.Or maybe not so inexplicably. Ashley Spencers Disney High is a smart, rigorously reported piece of both cultural and corporate history on how a combination of luck and prescience shot the Disney Channel into the zeitgeist over the course of the 2000s, and how corporate inertia let it fall again. Few would call the work Disney built over that decade great art, but it was a hugely formative influence on the childhood and adolescence of a generation. In Disney High, Spencer shows us how it got there. Off the shelfHave you been following all this uproar over book blurbs? I wrote about it here.Happy Valentines Day! LitHub has some advice from novelists on the art of the sex scene.At Harpers, climate journalist Justin Nobel tells the story of pulling his book from Simon & Schuster after the publisher was bought by a private equity firm with investments in oil and gas. Novelist Lincoln Michel makes the case that books will outlast AI. At the Paris Review, Jamieson Webster celebrates the word-drunk language play of Good Night Moon writer Margaret Wise Brown.See More:

President Donald Trump wants larger nonprofits and academic institutions investigated for the egregious use of DEI.Elon Musk is trying to purge the federal workforce, and accusing nonprofits and the media of corruption in conspiratorial and factually inaccurate ways.Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist who deeply influenced the administrations hiring, has cited grand theories of how Trump could smash the power of managerial elites.And 25-year-old administration official Marko Elez, whod made racist online comments and initially resigned, will be rehired, Musk has said.All this and more from Trumps first four weeks back in office show that his new administration is profoundly influenced by what might be called the online right: perpetually plugged-in posters whove become united by their desire to combat and defeat woke progressives.Complaints about the liberal leanings of various institutions the media, nonprofits, the civil service, academia are nothing new for Republicans, or for Trump. But the new Trump administration and, specifically, very online officials like Vice President JD Vance, Stephen Miller, and Musk isnt just complaining. Officials are now trying to use the tools of government against these institutions, in hopes of taking progressives power away and establishing cultural dominance for conservatives.This reflects the theories, beliefs, and obsessions that have become widespread among the online right, whove spent years seething over the Great Awokening, coming up with explanations for why it happened and how it can be reversed.Now these very online peoples fixations are becoming the policy of the United States government. For instance, Trumps anti-DEI executive orders bear the stamp of online right opinion influencers Chris Rufo and Richard Hanania. So while Trumps first administration was heavily influenced by traditional Republican figures, his second one is far more influenced by a burgeoning new establishment a very online one.What unites the online right: attacking the woke and smashing their powerThe online right can be said to span different classes and subcultures; its members include no-names like Elez and billionaires like Musk. But theyre essentially a team forged in combat against progressives. Theyve spent years seething over the Great Awokening the leftward move of the culture around race, gender, and sexuality in the mid-to-late 2010s, which many feel chilled their speech, endangered their careers, or advanced ideas and policies they believed to be wrong and harmful.The online rights roots go back years, to Gamergate and the alt-right, though in the 2010s such subcultures were viewed as somewhat disreputable even by Republicans. Few prominent figures openly associated themselves with them, and Trump relied on traditional Republicans for most of his appointees.But the backlash to progressive governance and cultural power that occurred under Bidens presidency swelled their ranks spurring prominent people like Vance, Musk, and Andreessen to openly break with the mainstream consensus. (When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he trashed its previous leaders as censorious wokes and reinvented the site as X, making it a more welcoming home for the right.)What drew people to the online right was resentment of progressive power, as well as a desire to figure out where that power comes from and how it could be broken.And many arrived at a roughly similar worldview: the idea that woke progressives gained their power by dominating many elite institutions in American life academia, media, the culture industries, nonprofits, the civil service, and so on. Some cite more highbrow or middlebrow versions of this theory for instance, James Burnhams writings about the managerial class, or Curtis Yarvins Cathedral while others rely on more instinctive and inchoate resentments. But they know who the enemy is. And that helps explain much of the agenda Trump is putting into place for instance, dismantling the civil service, threatening investigations against nonprofits, and slashing how much federal research money can go to universities indirect costs.To the online right, these are progressive power bases that should be attacked and destroyed, or else wokeness will rise again. They believe that by, for instance, canceling contracts to nonprofit organizations and threatening funding for universities, they are winning their war against the left.The online right also knows who its allies are. That became quite clear in the saga of Marko Elez, the official on Musks DOGE team who had, months prior, made various racist posts, including I was racist before it was cool, Normalize Indian hate, and I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.Past administrations (including Trumps first one) would have seen him as an obvious embarrassment. Initially, this administration appeared to have done the same, spurring him to resign.But to those swimming in the soup of the online right, Elez was engaged in the practice of trolly shitposting writing bigoted things online that can be either genuine or ironic or both. Many young rightists have embraced this culture in recent years, and reporters have become adept at digging up the offensive things theyve written and getting them in trouble.That latter part, Vice President Vance wrote on X, was the real problem. I obviously disagree with some of Elezs posts, but I dont think stupid social media activity should ruin a kids life, he wrote. But, he added: We shouldnt reward journalists who try to destroy people. Ever.Indeed, Vance is immersed enough in online right culture that knows full well that the young rights online ranks are full of racist shitposters. But, in that culture, they are part of the team valued allies in the struggle against this greater enemy, the media (which to them is of course part of the woke progressive deep state blob).The Left has defined the terms of social annihilation for the past decade, Rufo wrote on X. The Right does not have to delegate social authority to malicious left-wing journalists.In other words, firing Elez for racist posts would be playing the medias game, and giving the media a win. And that cant be stomached. It is far from clear to me that all of Trumps new voters many of whom were people of color were embracing a newfound tolerance of open racism. But if the online right keeps setting the new rules, well find out whether thats the case.See More: Politics

Americans dont move much anymore and Yoni Appelbaum thinks thats a serious problem. Appelbaum, a historian and deputy executive editor at The Atlantic, is the author of a new book exploring how and why Americans have become less likely to settle in new places. In Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, he examines in illuminating detail the consequences of this decline in geographic mobility both for individuals and for the broader political and economic landscape of the US, where the freedom to move to different parts of the country has long shaped the nations identity.I spoke with Appelbaum about mobility acting as a form of social glue, the trade-offs of tenements, and his ideas for getting Americans moving around again. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.Your research found that Donald Trumps strongest support in 2016 came from people who stayed in and around their hometowns, while those who moved away were more likely to back Hillary Clinton. Do you see a connection between staying put and a rightward political drift?Theres a lot of good social science research to suggest that moving doesnt just change peoples economic destinies and the prospects of their children, it shifts their whole mindset. Researchers have found that people who relocate to new places are more open to new experiences, they tend to necessarily be more open to diversity, and conceive of the world as a place where there can be win-wins. People who want to move, and cant, grow more cynical, more pessimistic, more inclined to see the world as zero-sum. They may also grow more isolated, more set in their ways and habits. I think that a society that ties people down is likely to produce a politics that views change as threatening and diversity as dangerous.Your book powerfully argues that geographic mobility shaped Americas innovative spirit. But moving often means leaving behind the family, friends, and neighbors who give our lives real meaning. Is there a way to recapture the benefits of mobility without asking people to repeatedly uproot their deepest local ties?I was surprised as I researched the book to see what a large role mobility had played in shaping the distinctive character of America, not just in terms of economics. Maybe the most surprising thing is what an enormous role its played in shaping the vitality of American community. When people relocate, they tend to feel lonely when they first arrive, and respond to that feeling by reaching out, by making connections, by making themselves do uncomfortable things like joining organizations. We often think of mobility as something that dissolves the ties that mean the most to us. In practice, though, in the US, mobility has usually served as a kind of social glue, as the thing which binds us to each other. And if you look at the last 50 years with a really sharp decline in mobility, we have simultaneously seen a really sharp decline in other kinds of social ties. Thats not coincidental. You also argue that mobility is crucial for the ability of an economy to grow and create new opportunities. Do you think America can remain competitive if more people stay put, or is a higher level of geographic mobility necessary? In a dynamic economy where firms rise and fall, and sectors boom and decline, its essential to get workers to the right places. Unlike a command-and-control economy, where you decide where to put factories and how many people to employ, market economies require high labor mobility to match workers with new opportunities. Without this, youll have factories closing and workers losing jobs while new opportunities arise elsewhere, but not for those displaced workers. Thats been the issue in recent decades.The second aspect is personal. Its hard to leave a bad job because its still a job, and switching industries or taking risks is tough. We know sharp interventions help people break habits, and physical relocation resets habits. If you leave a declining industry and move to a new town, youll likely take a job in a growing sector, speeding up the [economic] transition. Your book makes a compelling case that local zoning restrictions have created barriers to geographic mobility by making housing so scarce and unaffordable. Yet journalist Phil Longman points to the late 1970s federal retreat from regulating transportation, enforcing antitrust, and investing in infrastructure as the turning points that made mobility more difficult. How do you see broader policy shifts interacting with local zoning to keep people stuck today?If you look to the American South, for half a century after the Civil War, people didnt leave in large numbers, because they were not welcome in the North. When immigration halted in World War I, you then got the Great Migration, as people fled north to take available jobs something like 20 million white Southerners and 8 million Black Southerners moved north over the 20th century. Today were seeing a flow back toward the South, where cities are now growing faster.Whats different about the current flow is that people are often migrating to places where housing is cheap, rather than where jobs pay well. This marks a sharp departure from the past. For 200 years, the poorest and richest places in America were converging. It plateaued in the 70s and 80s, then started widening again this century. The reason: For 200 years, moving from a poor place to a rich place meant ending up ahead because earning gains outstripped living costs. For most Americans now, thats not true anymore. Local housing regulations mean moving to richer places costs more in housing than they gain in income, leaving them behind. Lets talk more about this link between affordable housing and mobility. You note that while 19th- and early 20th-century tenements had real problems, many residents werent actually unhappy or feeling degraded by their living situations. When I wrote about converting vacant offices into adult dorm-style SROs last year, some progressives criticized it as undignifying, especially the idea of sharing bathrooms. Do you see parallels between these older housing reform movements and todays resistance to certain affordable housing models? How do we balance housing quality concerns with the risk that imposing middle-class preferences might harm those were trying to help?Tenements were really surprising to me. I thought I knew the story of tenements: that it was greedy landlords exploiting vulnerable immigrants and making them live in really horrifying conditions. But for most immigrants, tenements were a temporary housing solution that enabled them to come to a country with better prospects to find jobs, to care for their families and to move up. Housing reformers tended to highlight the very worst examples of tenements they could find, but the more comprehensive government reports which looked at the overall quality of the housing stock found that most tenements were well-maintained, clean, and worked well for their inhabitants. The great fear is usually that these housing conditions will become permanent. You can hear that in todays housing debates, too. You dont want anyone to be stuck. You dont want somebody to be housed in a way thats not them making a conscious trade-off but rather a blighted condition thats being imposed on them from which they cant escape. But in our zeal to eliminate these problems, I think reformers have often looked at difficult housing conditions and concluded that the problem is the building code, when the problem is almost invariably poverty. The alternative to less-than-ideal housing that society seems to have hit upon is homelessness, which from the perspective of somebody whos offered to move off the streets and into an SRO is usually a much worse option. If you give people back the agency to choose what housing conditions theyd like to accept as they try to climb a ladder towards security, I think you get a really different set of decisions than if those decisions are being made in the abstract by reformers. Your book highlights this remarkable moment from 1913: Housing reformer Lawrence Veiller admitted that Americans liked apartments and would never vote to ban them. So he recommended that regulators find ways to penalize apartments through indirect means, like stricter building codes including fire safety rules as he had done in New York City. Do you think these regulations not only restricted housing options but also reshaped Americans preferences over time?Yeah, and as we see today, as restrictions tend to target certain kinds of housing, including multifamily housing, often that housing tends to become associated with undesirable populations. Its easier to say, I dont want an apartment building, than to say, I dont want immigrants in my neighborhood. So I think that the stigmatization of certain kinds of housing has shaped American preferences. There are a lot of people who just prefer to live in a single-family home, and thats fine. They should have that choice. What strikes me as peculiar is somebody who prefers a single-family home and doesnt think anyone else should have the choice to prefer something else.Your book joins an important body of work, including Marc Dunkelmans Why Nothing Works and Paul Sabins Public Citizens, both of which explore how a new wave of progressive activism emerged in the latter half of the 20th century, fostering a more adversarial relationship with government and expertise. As a journalist covering housing and other social issues today, Im struck by how this history complicates our role we need to expose problems and hold power accountable, but our industrys more adversarial pivot may have also contributed to the erosion of trust and tolerance needed for sustaining support for collective pluralistic solutions. How do you navigate these tensions as a journalist and a scholar?As a writer, I aimed to tell the story as accurately as possible, and followed where that led. But looking back, I see that deep suspicion of institutions led in an unexpected direction. The belief that government doesnt act in the public interest and must be challenged by citizen activists and journalists took hold in progressive circles for good reason the government often wasnt acting in the public interest. But many of the self-appointed guardians werent either. We replaced a flawed system with one that made it nearly impossible to get anything done. At first, activists saw this new environment as a victory; they stopped and could stop many of the bad things they had observed. However, over time, weve accumulated a growing deficit of things that need to be done, built, and changed, and its become harder and harder to implement any of it.Our institutions, including journalism, are good at exposing abuses of power but not very good at addressing inaction or missed opportunities. As Marc Dunkelman suggests in his book, we need a rebalancing. If in the end, what you do is reduce every bureaucrat to a defensive crouch, if people decide that the safe option is not acting rather than trying to make something a little bit better, thats got big institutional consequences. I dont have a good answer for that.You suggest that if we cant restore geographic mobility, we might need to redesign our welfare system around a more static population. How do you see the relationship between these two challenges restoring mobility and providing welfare?If you have a society that has an operating assumption that people are going to stay where theyre born, then you need to have a really strong form of redistribution, because the gains are not going to be matched terribly well to the population. Youll need to plan to take the gains from the regions of your country which are doing really well, from folks who are doing really well, and redistribute them to the people who are not doing as well. And you see that in many European social welfare states thats the underlying logic. It comes with some real costs, including, typically very high unemployment in some places, intergenerational poverty and a lack of agency, but it is a solution to the problem of that mismatch. America has typically had a very different solution, which is that, instead of providing a really robust social safety net that redistributes income to allow people to remain where they are, we favored engineering a society that maximizes individual agency, and allows people to take their futures into their own hands and go where they want. When that works it yields a set of outcomes that people seem to prefer, which is one reason why, for most of American history, weve had a very large net inflow of immigrants. What we have right now in America is a society that is increasingly marrying European levels of stasis to American levels of social welfare policy, and that is the worst of both worlds. Were not helping people go where the opportunities are and we dont help them where theyre living either. And that strikes me as dangerous and unsustainable and also inhumane. And so its a real choice that America faces at this moment to decide which of those two models it wants to pursue.See More: