Earlier this month, Thomas Edsall published a column in the New York Times titled, Even if the Democrats can move to the center, it may not help. In it, the eminent political analyst argued that there is evidence that the process of moderation has the potential to result in unintended adverse consequences.Edsall was referring to a new working paper from Stanford University political scientist Adam Bonica and two co-authors. As Bonica explained in an interview with the Times, his research points toward a clear conclusion: There appears to be very little electoral advantage from running to the center in contemporary congressional elections.According to Bonica, although moderate candidates were a little better at persuading voters to support them, this advantage was tiny and potentially outweighed by moderations negative impact on turnout.Democrats have achieved their greatest electoral successes precisely in cycles (2008 and 2018) when they did not moderate relative to Republicans, Bonica told the Times, while in cycles where Democrats ran more moderate candidates (like 2010 and 2014), their electoral performance was notably weaker. He also reiterated these claims in a viral Bluesky thread.This story was first featured in The Rebuild.Sign up here for more stories on the lessons liberals should take away from their election defeat and a closer look at where they should go next. From senior correspondent Eric Levitz. All this has triggered a lively debate about how Democrats should weigh Bonicas evidence against the many studies showing that moderation is electorally beneficial on net. The election analysis site SplitTicket noted that Bonicas finding cuts against everything weve modeled.But this debate proceeds from a false premise: Bonicas data doesnt actually cut against the idea that moderation is beneficial. On the contrary, his study indicates that moderation can significantly increase Democrats support with swing voters, especially in high-profile races. He and his co-authors note it is theoretically possible that this benefit is outweighed by moderations negative impact on Democratic turnout. But, by their own admission, they possess no strong evidence that such a negative impact exists.Judging by Bonicas data, a conservative Democrat probably would have beaten Donald Trump in 2016The bulk of Bonicas paper aims to calculate how candidates ideological positioning impacts their electoral performance. The study argues that previous attempts to gauge this relationship have been distorted by a failure to control for voter turnout. As the authors note, a candidates ability to shift overall turnout is limited, since voter participation is influenced by many factors external to their campaigns. For example, if a state has a high-profile abortion referendum on the ballot, then Democratic candidates in that state could enjoy elevated base turnout, even if their own stances did little to mobilize voters. Meanwhile, Democrats in a state with no such referenda might see lower turnout through no fault of their own. To account for this, Bonica and his co-authors look at how ideologically distinct candidates on the ballot at the same time performed within the same precincts. Specifically, for each race on the ballot, they calculate the ideological midpoint basically, the point on a left-to-right axis that is halfway between the Democratic and Republican candidates respective ideological position and then measure how vote-share changes as this midpoint shifts rightward or leftward.The idea here is: When the midpoint lies to the right, the Republican candidate is more conservative than the Democratic candidate is progressive. When the midpoint lies to the left, the opposite is true. They find that the farther right this midpoint moves in a given race, the better Democrats do. Now, on its face, this could just mean that Democrats do better when they run against far-right Republicans the more conservative the GOP candidate in a race is, the farther right the midpoint will be, no matter the ideology of their Democratic opponent. But the study shows that it doesnt really matter why the ideological midpoint shifts right: Democrats becoming more moderate increases the partys vote share by about as much as Republican candidates becoming more conservative. From this, they extrapolate that, on average, centrist Democrats (e.g., Sen. Joe Manchin types) enjoy a roughly 0.6 percentage point advantage over mainstream ones (e.g., Sen. Amy Klobuchar types) across all races, when turnout is held constant.The Times presented this tiny fraction as evidence that moderations benefits might be negligible. And yet, according to Bonicas study, the impact of ideology on electoral outcomes varies widely by office: In high-profile races where voters are more likely to receive information about the candidates positions centrists enjoy a bigger advantage over their more left-wing counterparts. In governors races, the former outperform the latter by 1.9 percentage points; in presidential and Senate races, they outperform by about 1 point. These are not insignificant margins: Had Hillary Clintons share of the vote been 1 point higher in 2016, she likely would have won the presidency.By contrast, ideology has almost no impact on state-level races for judicial positions and other minor state-level offices, likely because voters do not pay close attention to candidates positions in such races. The negligible impact of ideology in these low-profile races drags down the average benefit of moderation in the paper. That said, moderates advantage in House races specifically is barely higher than their average advantage across all offices, at just 0.65 points.Importantly, all of these figures are measuring conservative Democrats advantage over mainstream Democrats. The study implies that the performance gap between conservative Democrats and progressive Democrats would be larger.Bonicas case for questioning moderations efficacy hinges on a speculative premise: that centrism might do more to demobilize base voters than to persuade swing voters. But his paper does not even attempt to prove this. The study does provide evidence for two claims about the relationship between turnout, ideology, and election outcomes: When turnout among Democrats goes up relative to turnout among Republicans Democrats win more elections. And the benefits of turning out a higher percentage of your voters than the other party did are quite large far larger than the benefits of moderation. Between 2008 and 2022, Democrats tended to see stronger turnout and better outcomes when the average ideological midpoint of all House races was more left-wing. They illustrate these two points with a pair of charts:But I think the evidence here is weaker than Bonicas Bluesky posts or Edsalls write-up in the Times would lead one to believe. For one thing, we are looking at only eight data points the eight federal election cycles from 2008 through 2022. And not all eight conform to Bonicas trend lines. Within his data set, Democrats suffered their second-worst election loss and turnout showing in 2014. And yet, the ideological midpoint that year was unusually left-wing (only in 2008 and 2018 did the ideological midpoint of House races lie farther to the left). In 2016, meanwhile, the ideological midpoint of all House races was more left-wing than it had been in 2012. And yet Democrats saw better turnout during the earlier election cycle.Indeed, its not clear that there is any relationship between ideological positioning and turnout in Bonicas data. When the Democratic pollster Charlotte Swasey tried to chart out this relationship, using Bonicas findings for the years 2008 through 2020, she found no clear trend:Courtesy of Charlotte Swasey.And Bonicas proposed correlation breaks down even further when one looks directly at changes in Democratic ideology. Remember: Shifts in the ideological midpoint are influenced by both Republican and Democratic positioning. So to isolate the impact of Democratic moderation on turnout, we should really look at how the average Democratic candidates ideology changes from year to year, rather than at how the ideological midpoint changes.Such figures arent reported in Bonicas paper. But he provided me with the relevant numbers. And several of them cut against the idea that moderation leads to lower turnout: Democrats were more moderate in 2008 than in 2014, yet the party saw much better turnout in the former year. Democrats were more moderate in 2018 than in 2020, yet the party saw better turnout (relative to the GOP) in 2018. Democratic candidates were more moderate in 2012 than in 2016, yet the party had better turnout in 2012. Democratic candidates were more moderate in 2018 than in 2022, yet saw better turnout in 2018. Democratic candidates were more moderate in 2016 than in 2020, and yet according to Bonicas data the party actually had slightly better turnout (relative to Republicans) the year that Hillary Clinton lost than in the year that Biden won.In short, Bonicas numbers dont actually show that moderation even systematically correlates with worse Democratic turnout, much less that the former causes the latter. Rather, his data suggests that the Democratic Party has grown increasingly progressive since 2008, and that this leftward drift has had no predictable impact on Democratic turnout from year to year.And there are simpler explanations for why Democrats saw strong turnout in 2008 and 2018, but weak turnout in 2010, 2014, and 2022.In 2008, Democrats ran an extraordinarily charismatic, historically significant presidential candidate against a GOP that was presiding over a financial crisis. Meanwhile, the party that doesnt hold the presidency almost always has an advantage in midterm elections, in part because their oppositions base grows complacent with power. This dynamic explains why Democrats saw relatively high turnout in 2018 (when a Republican held the White House) but relatively weak turnout in 2010, 2014, and 2022 (when a Democrat held the presidency). In an interview, Bonica told me that he has tried to make clear that his proposed trade-off between moderation and turnout is a potential one that hasnt been causally established. What we do learn from the paper is that the overall gains from moderation are just quite small, Bonica said. Nevertheless, his findings offer more cause for thinking that moderation increases Democratic vote-share than for thinking that it reduces the partys turnout.And other research gives us reasons to doubt the latter premise. According to many political scientists and pollsters, very liberal Democrats are the partys most reliable voters. It is Democrats with more moderate or heterodox views who waffle the most about whether to cast a ballot. And these less politically engaged Democrats often resemble swing voters ideologically and demographically. For this reason, the forces that push swing voters to the right and those that nudge unreliable Democratic voters toward staying home are sometimes one and the same.Progressives should not jump to ideologically convenient conclusions on the basis of weak evidenceIt doesnt necessarily follow that Democrats should move to the right. There are strong substantive arguments for many progressive policies. And the political benefits of moderation in Bonicas paper arent terribly large. Regardless, its more productive to debate how the party should position itself on discrete issues than whether it should move right or move left. Some policies associated with the left are popular, some associated with the center are not. So, its helpful to get specific.Nevertheless, its important to be clear-eyed when analyzing the relationship between ideological positioning and electoral outcomes. In progressive circles, empirical claims about the efficacy of moderation are often imbued with moral weight: To say that Democrats would benefit from moderating on any issue is to betray vulnerable minority groups, while denying the efficacy of moderation is to defend those groups.But this is misguided. Refusing to consider ideologically inconvenient data makes it harder to win elections. And as the current administration is making clear, the most vulnerable have a strong interest in Democrats winning elections. According to some estimates, Donald Trumps defunding of USAID alone has cost more than 10,000 human beings their lives. The election of literally any Democrat last November would have averted those deaths. On a wide variety of fronts, a Joe Manchin presidency would have meant less needless cruelty and suffering than a Trump one. If there is evidence that a Manchin-esque Democrat would have done better than Kamala Harris, we have a responsibility to take that information into account.People will inevitably disagree about how Democrats should balance policy idealism with political expediency. But any rational answer to that question must be premised on an accurate understanding of the relevant tradeoffs. Bonicas research could help advance such an understanding. But the discourse around it has done the opposite.See More: Politics

Perhaps the biggest common theme of Donald Trumps second term is that his administration has aggressively used federal power to punish those deemed to be its or his enemies.Some foreign students who criticized Israel have had their visas revoked and have been whisked into ICE detention. Venezuelan nationals with tattoos some likely members of a foreign gang, some likely not have been deported to El Salvador and imprisoned there.Major law firms that displeased Trump have been hit with executive orders aimed at driving their clients away and destroying their businesses.Elite universities that were the site of protests or had policies the administration dislikes have seen hundreds of millions of dollars in research funding revoked.Its a frightening turn for American governance. Trump and the hard-right appointees who staff this new administration seem intent on ruining the lives of the people theyve deemed enemies of the state, punishing them with state power.Trump officials are punishing enemies first with no process or fairness beforehandWhat sets much of this apart is that there is no semblance of process or fairness before any of these decisions are made.Detentions, executive orders, and funding revocations come first as do deportations, if the administration can get away with them. After that, powerful institutions can possibly, with sufficient bowing and scraping, get these harsh actions rolled back (as the law firm Paul Weiss did and as Columbia University is trying to do). Less powerful people can only hope to sue in court and hope a judge will help them.This lack of process beforehand makes it more likely that innocent people are wrongly swept up. But Trump officials dont seem to mind.In their rush to deport Tren de Aragua members to El Salvador before the courts could stop them, they dont seem to care that they scooped up a gay Venezuelan makeup artist. In their zeal to revoke visas of antisemitic, Hamas-supporting foreign students, they dont seem to care that they may have detained a PhD student for co-writing op-eds in a campus newspaper.Trump set the tone, but his appointees are enthusiastically participatingTrump and his MAGA true-believer appointees are clearly personally responsible for many of these policies aimed at their purported enemies. But more broadly, hes set an ethic thats pervaded the administration, even those who are less overtly allied with his movement.Secretary of State Marco Rubio, for instance, bragged Thursday that he was personally responsible for revoking visas of hundreds of anti-Israel protestors. We do it every day. Every time I find one of these lunatics, I take away their visas, he said.Another telling anecdote came out of the Social Security Administration, currently run by acting appointee Leland Dudek a career SSA official who decided to work with Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency team and was then promoted to head the agency.Earlier this month, the agency canceled a contract that allowed parents of newborns in Maine to get Social Security numbers for their new babies at the hospital. After criticism, the decision was reversed, but a mystery remained about why it happened at all. Was it a screw-up? Or was it deliberate punishment of Maines people because of a frosty public exchange between Trump and the states Democratic governor, Janet Mills? (Trump had threatened Mills with revoking federal funding over the states policies on trans athletes, to which Mills responded, See you in court.)It was indeed payback aimed at Mills, Dudek admitted to the New York Times last week. I was ticked at the governor of Maine for not being real cordial to the president, he said, while acknowledging, I screwed up.Dudek wasnt even a longtime Trump crony (as seen in his willingness to actually admit screwing up). And if his account is correct, no one ordered him to target Maine. He just felt it was the appropriate thing to do when someone was rude to Donald Trump.Theres likely more to comeThough US citizens cant be summarily deported or ordered to leave the country, they can be retaliated against in other ways. For instance, Trump has long been clear about his desire to target his critics or political enemies with criminal prosecutions but, unlike in his first term, hes appointed people like FBI director Kash Patel and interim US Attorney for the District of Columbia Ed Martin, who seem eager to actually make that happen.An attempt by Martin to have Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer criminally investigated for comments he made in a speech flopped, but Martin has moved on to new targets. One of those targets is Andrew Weissmann, who was a top prosecutor in special counsel Robert Muellers investigation of Trumps ties to Russia, before becoming an MSNBC commentator. Earlier this month, Martin sent a threatening letter to Weissmann, demanding information about a decade-old matter hed worked on at the Justice Department and alluding to impropriety. This seems like an obvious pretext for targeting Weissmann because he is an enemy of Trump.Further targeting of blue states through withholding of federal funds is likely coming too, as seen in, for instance, Trumps executive order on elections this week. Legal experts have said that Trumps revocation of funds in some cases like the $400 million in grants to Columbia University he canceled seems flatly illegal. But many targeted institutions have been reluctant to sue in court, fearing even worse retribution. The problem is, though, that if this tactic keeps working for Trump, hell just keep using it, in even more dubious or unlawful ways. Indeed, its been startling how many institutions corporations, elite law firms, and universities have caved to Trumps pressure already. When will it stop? Will it stop?See More: Politics

This story was produced in collaboration with The Dodo.One morning this week, Hanna Koch was snorkeling in the Florida Keys when she came across a brown beer bottle on the sea floor. Koch, a marine biologist for Floridas Monroe County, picked up the bottle, planning to carry it with her and later toss it out. Through her dive mask, Koch peered inside to make sure it was empty. Thats when she saw an eyeball. There was something staring back at me, Koch told me. It wasnt just one eyeball, actually but dozens. Inside the bottle was an octopus mom with a brood of babies.You could see their eyes, you could see their tentacles, Koch said in a recent interview with Vox and The Dodo. They were fully formed.Instead of taking the bottle with her and throwing it away like she initially intended, Koch handed it to her colleague, another marine biologist, who carefully placed it back on the sandy sea floor. Based on the images and video, Chelsea Bennice, a marine biologist at Florida Atlantic University, said the animal was likely a species of pygmy octopus making this whole encounter even cuter. Courtesy of Hanna KochOn one hand, its hopeful to find life an octopus family! living in rubbish. One mans trash is another octopuses nursery, as University of Miami environmental scientist Jennifer Jacquet told me when I showed her the photos. Her graduate student, Janelle Kaz, said its actually not uncommon for octopuses to take up residence in beer bottles. They are highly curious and opportunistic, Jacquet said. But its also a reminder that, as Florida ecosystems decline, there are fewer and fewer places for wildlife to live. Overfishing, pollution, and climate change have devastated near-shore habitats in the Keys and especially coral reefs in the last few decades. Hanna KochThe irony, Koch told me, is that she runs a state-funded project in Monroe County to create artificial reefs: structures, often made of concrete, to enhance the habitat for fish, lobsters, and other sea creatures. And she was actually snorkeling that morning to figure out where to put some of the structures. This octopus found artificial habitat to make its home, Koch said. I was just like, Wait momma, because Im going to put out some better habitat for you something that someone cant pick up and throw away.See More:

The buzzword of the past couple of weeks is Abundance, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompsons new book about why we stopped being able to build things in America and how thats destroying our country. (Klein is a co-founder of Vox and now a columnist for the New York Times; Thompson writes for the Atlantic.)Abundances core thesis is almost impossible to dispute: it costs mind-boggling amounts of money and time to build bridges or trains in the United States; this isnt true elsewhere in the world so its clearly not inevitable; and their inability to build keeps progressives from providing the safety net, climate action, and affordable housing that they say they want. Since the central thesis is hard to argue with, most of the arguing about the book has been about the authors. (Are they secret libertarians just trying to sneak deregulation into the Democratic platform? Should they be willing to speak to New Right personalities? Are they too agreeable to take on the many parts of the Democratic coalition that stand to lose if we try to build things more cheaply?) As for me, I enjoy the book and agree with 90 percent of it, which shouldnt be surprising from my own body of work. But I have one serious concern that I havent seen anyone else raise.Learning to love small governmentIve been finding myself grateful in the last few years and especially in the last few months for the existence of federalism. Here in the US it is states, not the national government, that run elections, which makes it much harder for an authoritarian in the White House to rig an election in their favor. It is states, not the national government, that run schools, so to change school policies the national government has to persuade the locals or at least bribe them, as Trump is attempting to do with threats to withhold federal funds from any state that allows trans children to compete in girls sports. The government doesnt directly control health care providers, so it has fewer avenues to interfere with insurance coverage of procedures it disagrees with, like transition or abortion. State and federal governments effectively no longer have the power to order neighborhoods bulldozed for highways, and I consider that a very good thing. Its far from all upside, of course. Federalism also allows for injustices to persist past when thered be sufficient national support to abolish them; I expect many states still wouldnt have legalized gay marriage if itd been left up to the states. Part of why the word has such a bad reputation on the left is the frequency with which it was leveraged to keep the horrifying racial segregation of the pre-Civil Rights Act South from becoming a national concern. And as Abundance explores in detail, the devolution of systems to local control produces policies that can be locally popular but nationally disastrous. Few people want more housing next door, but few people are happy about the state that Americas largest cities are currently in, either. There are very serious downsides. But the upside of our sometimes kludgy federal system is a backstop against tyranny that I, for one, have recently become very grateful for. A government that has more power is a good thing if the government will only, or at least mostly, do good things. But if you think that the governments power will frequently be wielded to hurt you and people like you, you will rediscover a fondness for low state capacity, devolution to local control, and a system with lots and lots of veto points.Is a weak state worse than a strong one?Or maybe not. Because there is an argument that in fact, if you add too many veto points to the system, you actually end up empowering autocrats, rather than putting up barriers to them. You could argue that people are sympathetic to actions like DOGEs smashing and hacking through the federal bureaucracy because they feel on an intuitive level that the rules make it impossible to get anything done, so anyone who wants to act must go around the rules. And at that point, why quibble over which exact rules got broken? In this view state capacity and the rule of law reinforce each other; paralysis is unsustainable, and the ways it ruptures will usually be ugly, as we may be seeing now. I might end up finding myself persuaded by that argument, but I want to see it made. You wont really find it in Abundance, one of the ways that makes it clear that it was initially written chiefly to influence a potential Democratic administration. Indeed, the book was originally meant to be published in the summer of 2024, right in the middle of the presidential election. But it came out instead in March 2025, a couple of months into a second Trump administration that seems even darker than many peoples worst fears. Abundance is a vision of the future of big government, and right now every bit of news I see out of the White House makes me grateful for limits on government. I think that if the Trump administration had more state capacity, things would be worse and I think that any progressive administration rebuilding in the aftermath of Trump should count among the failures that brought us to this stage the unwillingness to limit state power as well as the unwillingness to effectively use it. Lets figure out how to build, absolutely. But lets only give the state power well be glad it has when our enemies are wielding it.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:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Voxs member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.In almost all ways, the Liberty Hotel in Boston is like any other swanky hotel. It hosts galas, weddings, and New Years Eve parties. It has weekly events like Fashionably LATE Thursdays a show in the lobby that features a whos who of Bostons fashion elite and beat weekends, where local DJs perform on Friday and Saturday nights. Its a hotel, in other words, that strives to be a place where local residents can go to see and be seen.But theres one thing about the Liberty Hotel thats markedly different from its peers: Not too long ago, it was a prison. Until 1990, when it was still operating as the Charles Street Jail, it was a building that most people wanted to avoid. It was in disrepair and overcrowded, so much so that a US district court once declared that it violated peoples constitutional rights.The hotel leans into that history sometimes uncomfortably so. The place that once jailed suffragists and civil rights activists now boasts restaurants with names like Clink and Alibi. It relishes playful nods to [its] infamous past with decorations that include old keys. Dont worry, these days, the doors lock from the inside only, its website reads. But with rooms this luxurious, we cant guarantee that youll ever want to leave.That transformation from jailhouse to hotel fundamentally changed how people interacted with the building. It also uncovered an uncomfortable truth: Prisons and jails dont fit into their surrounding neighborhoods. As a hotel, the former Charles Street Jail draws in crowds; as a jail, it repelled passersby, who probably tried their best to ignore its existence.What our prisons look like says a lot about how we think about crime and punishment, what we think about prisoners, and how we like to think of our own society.Thats never going to change. Prisons will always be a place that people would rather not think about, and residents will likely protest anytime one gets built in their neighborhood. So, as long as prisons and jails continue to exist, architects and urban planners must face the question of what a prison should look like. Should it be tucked away or built on an island like Rikers or Alcatraz? If its in an urban neighborhood, should it be made invisible by blending into its surroundings, or should it stand out to send a message about criminal justice?These questions arent just hypothetical. A few months ago, city officials in Washington, DC, released renderings for a new jail thats meant to replace the citys current, crumbling correctional facility. A senior vice president of the design firm hired by the city was frank with their intent. The community doesnt want to see a jail, she said in a public meeting in November. With that in mind, they put together a design that would fit into the surrounding neighborhood. The proposal which included steel panels obscuring a glass exterior drew mixed reactions, according to the Washington Post. Some noted that its clear the designers were trying to create a welcoming environment that offered, at the very least, a dignified experience for those unfortunate enough to go through its doors. Others pointed out that, despite the designers efforts, it still looked somewhat menacing. It presents as a cage, said one member of the US Commission of Fine Arts, one of the bodies responsible for approving the project.Ultimately, what a prison looks like on the outside has seemingly little to do with the conditions on the inside. But questions of design get at something deeper: What our prisons look like says a lot about how we think about crime and punishment, what we think about prisoners, and how we like to think of our own society. The prison architects dilemmaMany factors contribute to what a prison ends up looking like including city planning, community input, and stakeholder needs but who designs it has the biggest say. The problem for many architects, though, is that while they can influence what a prison looks like inside and out, their job ends there. What happens afterward, within the walls they helped erect, is out of their control. And because the criminal justice system is riddled with injustice from racial bias to harsh prison conditions some architects believe that they shouldnt participate in the system at all.In 2020, the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects (AIA) issued a statement discouraging its members from designing places of incarceration until the American justice system is reformed so that the law can be applied without racial bias. We instead urge our members to shift their efforts towards supporting the creation of new systems, processes, and typologies based on prison reform, alternatives to imprisonment, and restorative justice, the statement said.Between 1980 and 2010, the prison and jail population in the United States grew from roughly 500,000 people to nearly 2.3 million. The number of correctional facilities also grew by 43 percent between 1990 and 2005, from 1,277 to 1,821. So by participating in the process of building more prisons, architects have a hand in maintaining a system of mass incarceration. That means that were building more prisons to lock more people up. You cant tell me thats not an architectural issue, Bryan C. Lee Jr., an architect and founder of the nonprofit firm Colloqate Design, told Architect Magazine in 2021. For nearly every injustice in this world, theres an architecture, a plan, a design that has been built to sustain it.But without architects providing thoughtful or compassionate design ideas, prisons can become the worst version of themselves a concrete box that offers nothing but the bare minimum.Its often the case, for instance, that older prisons arent just in disrepair, but also lack basic facilities that could make the inside a more suitable environment for preparing people for life after theyre released. A lot of people that I work with, or work for, have a lot of great ideas of the way they would like to have programs and so forth, and their old buildings are the biggest hurdle, said Jeff Goodale, director of the global civic and justice group at the architecture firm HOK, referring to rehabilitative programs like one-on-one counseling or group therapy. Some prisons, for example, dont have enough rooms that are conducive to that kind of programming. Putting them in a new facility that actually is designed to enable those programs weve seen it make a big difference, Goodale added.As a result, architects like Goodale hope that their role in designing prisons will help create a more just and humane system.My viewpoint is that the role that the facility plays is not meant to exert additional punitive measures, he said. The goal, from my perspective, is that whatever has landed somebody in this position, that theres an opportunity here in this facility then to actually start a road to recovery, whether thats addressing addiction or mental health issues, that we want to create an atmosphere where dedicated professionals can interact with them and start that process. Thats why Im in it.The case for better prison designIt is undeniable that the way prisons are designed has a major impact on how theyre run. The popular 18th century-era panopticon design, for example, emphasized surveillance and control, pointing all prison cells towards a central rotunda from where they could be easily observed. The Charles Street Jail, a cruciform structure that gave the warden a central view of the cells and the ability to isolate prisoners from one another, also influenced a lot of prison design across the United States since it was built in 1851, according to the Boston Landmark Commission.Those models, seen as signs of prison reform at the time they were popularized, are still sometimes perceived to be good architectural examples. Most architects think that the panopticon is still an active and legitimate model, which is just absurd because on day one it was wrong and it produced a lot of harm, said Frank Greene, vice president and architecture chief at STV, an architecture, engineering and construction management firm. Those radial plan buildings, theyre not safe because people are locked in their cells all day, which is incredibly damaging. All the bad things that have been going on in prisons for a very long time are very much a result of the architecture.Theres a stark contrast between how old prisons were designed and newer urban facilities. Old School jails, particularly 19th-century jails and prisons, were designed to be intimidating, to be symbols of authority, using heavy masonry, fortress-like windows, little slit windows, to communicate this sense of being impregnable. You cant break in, you cant break out, Greene said. A modern jail, one thats humane, sustainable, [with] trauma-informed design and all of that, should present as a normal building no little slit windows, no razor ribbon, no harsh lighting on the outside something that presents with an environment around it that are public spaces that normal people can use, that become assets to the community.So while opting out of participating in an unfair criminal justice system is certainly a valid position for architects to take, its also hard to ignore the fact that the role they play can have consequentially positive impacts on the people inside. So long as we still have prisons, without architects thinking through how a prisons design can lead to better outcomes for mental health, programming, and overall conditions, then the criminal justice system as a whole would be demonstrably worse: It would not only be unfair in the sense of who it churns in and out, but it would also be more punishing for the people under its supervision.How to build a good prisonTheres no definitive manual for designing decent prisons, but its clear what elements make for a better, more humane design. The first factor to consider is location. As uncomfortable as the presence of prisons and jails can be for some residents, its important to keep them close to the community. The further they are, the more intimidating they are, the more likely people are to think of prisoners as people who are unworthy of dignity or respect. The prison complex on Rikers Island in New York City, for example, literally removes incarcerated people from the city and places them out of sight on an island in the East River. For decades, the prison had been rife with controversies of abuse, neglect, and poor conditions. So in 2019, the city approved a plan to finally shut down that sprawling, remote facility and replace it with several smaller and more integrated prisons in the citys four most populous boroughs. New prisons and jails should consider design principles that would make living in them, however temporarily, as bearable and undisruptive as possible by focusing on creating rehabilitative conditions. They should adhere to the same principles that would make apartment buildings or, say, assisted living facilities more appealing. Prisons, in other words, should look normal. More natural lighting and big windows with views of nature, for example, can positively affect peoples moods. And where the facility sits, and how it interacts with the outside community, can give people in detention greater access to the outside world. It should be welcoming, Greene said, adding that it could promote more visits from family, friends, and other support networks.The welcoming piece really applies to volunteers and social service providers, Greene added. I was just astounded at the number of volunteers that go all the way out to Rikers Island, with all the time it takes to just simply get on the island. He mentioned how one yoga instructor travels three hours to get to Rikers Island to give classes to inmates something that would be much more doable if prisons and jails were more integrated into our neighborhoods instead of being shunned to hard-to-reach (or hard-to-see) places.Incarcerated people shouldnt be othered. They shouldnt lose the right to vote. They shouldnt lose the right to be able to live in public housing or to be able to get a barber license, and all the silly things that we do to felons. We really should give them second chances and embrace them, Greene said. Theyre still one of us, theyre still family, literally or figuratively, and we need to help people when they come out and give them that second chance.Lastly, when it comes to the exterior, the more ominous and opaque prisons are, the more likely you are to suspect they are purely a place of torment and punishment as though the government is telling you to look away. Goodale has spent decades planning and designing correctional facilities. From the outside we really want to portray a better sense of transparency. When you think about some of the older facilities, theyre very opaque, people have a sense they dont know whats going on behind the walls sometimes. We want to really turn that inside out, Goodale said. Even though were not making everything transparent necessarily, we want to at least move more in that direction that the building is transparent, and therefore that transparency makes the activities and so forth less shrouded in secrecy.Its true that what matters most about prisons and jails is how good the conditions and services they provide are. But how theyre designed, how they look to the outside world, isnt immaterial. These buildings not only reflect how the public feels about prisoners, but can help inform those opinions as well. A remote or intimidating structure might reinforce the idea that prisoners should not be considered part of our society, whereas a more integrated and welcoming building promotes the opposite message. Ultimately, there might not be a clear answer to what, exactly, a prison should look like on the outside. While legislative buildings, town squares, and libraries can embody our societys greatest ideals of democracy, openness, and education, prisons represent an uglier reality. Prisons are, at the end of the day, inherently complicated structures. For some, theyre a reminder of horrible crimes that have been committed. For others, they represent a deeply flawed, discriminatory criminal justice system that harms more people than it helps. Perhaps the most enticing ideal we should strive for is to create a society in which prisons no longer exist. But so long as they do, its best to reform them with an eye toward healing, not punishing humanizing, and not othering. And that all starts with how we choose to design them.See More:

President Donald Trump came into office with plans to enact his agenda at breakneck speed, and to some extent, its working. Less than 100 days into his second term, Trump has already issued 99 executive orders a shock and awe approach meant to overwhelm his opposition and signal decisive action to his supporters.However, the courts have emerged as a key obstacle slowing down the implementation of Trumps policies. Advocates for the many people suffering from those policies including immigrants, scientists, government workers, and the other everyday Americans who rely on them are suing the administration and racking up key wins. Nearly 140 lawsuits have challenged Trumps executive actions so far, according to Just Securitys litigation tracker. Many of them have centered on the efforts spearheaded by Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency to slash staffing and spending across the federal government. But they have also focused on Trumps attacks on undocumented immigrants and on diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility policies in government and beyond. So far, federal courts have already blocked, in part or in whole, many of Trumps executive actions at least for now. That includes his ban on transgender military servicemembers, his executive order ending birthright citizenship, his efforts to fire thousands of probationary government employees, his attempts to deport people under an obscure 18th-century law, and more. Some of those blocks could later be lifted or made permanent in ongoing litigation and appeals that could reach the Supreme Court. Its not clear to what extent the courts will be able to delay, if not entirely stop, some of Trumps policies from going into effect. Notably, blocks on some of Trumps policies stayed in place through the end of his first term because courts ran out of time to resolve legal challenges to them. Trumps proposals to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, create work requirements for Medicaid, and put a citizenship status question on the 2020 census never went into effect as a result. But in his second term, his administration has hit the ground running, allowing more time for lawsuits to play out and policies to take effect. He was also able to reshape the judiciary during his first term by appointing conservative judges who might favor his policies. There is also a question of what this Supreme Court will do. As the ultimate interpreter of the law and the Constitution, the court will play a major role in checking or abetting Trumps power grabs. (My colleague Ian Millhiser breaks down two cases in particular to follow.) And then there is the concern that Trump will continue to ignore court orders. The US is arguably facing a constitutional crisis after the administration did not abide by a judges order to turn around planes transporting accused Venezuelan gang members to El Salvador. Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts issued a rare public rebuke of Trump after the president attacked the judge in the El Salvador case as a Radical Left Lunatic. Trump and his administration are determined to expand the presidents power, even when that means disrupting the Constitutions system of checks and balances or trampling civil liberties. With congressional Republicans complicit in that power grab, the courts have emerged as the Constitutions most effective defense at least for now.See More:

At around 5:15 pm on Tuesday, a man in a black hoodie stopped Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk on the street in Somerville, Massachusetts. She tried to walk by, but he grabbed her. She screamed, and it seemed like help was arriving.But the masked newcomers were actually there to help her assailant. They took off Ozturks backpack and seized her cellphone. The hooded man put her in handcuffs. Were the police, they told her.You dont look like it, an apparent bystander replied. Why are you hiding your faces?Ozturk, a Turkish national on a student visa, is currently being held in an Immigration and Customs Enforcement processing center in Louisiana despite a court order that she must remain in Massachusetts. The State Department has canceled Ozturks visa; ICE is preparing her deportation.The Trump administration claims she has engaged in pro-Hamas activity, but they have provided no evidence of material support for Palestinian militants (or any other terrorist group). The closest thing anyone has found is a 2024 op-ed in the Tufts student newspaper, in which Ozturk and her coauthors criticize Israels war in Gaza but do not express anything that even approximates support for Hamas. This troubling theory that Ozturk was punished purely for her political speech received more support during a Thursday afternoon press conference, when Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that his agency revoked Ozturks visa because she was part of a pro-Palestinian movement that caused a ruckus on campus.We gave you a visa to come and study and get a degree, not to become a social activist that tears up our university campuses, he said, while providing no evidence that Ozturk had done anything more disruptive than penning an op-ed. He also suggested he had revoked the visas of more than 300 students like her on similar grounds.This is a clarifying moment for American democracy. Unmarked and unidentified law enforcement abducting a lawful migrant, seemingly in retaliation for First Amendment-protected speech, is the sort of attack on civil liberties that we would not hesitate to label as authoritarian in another country.And it is only one example among many. The targeting of at least seven other pro-Palestinian students, the rendering of hundreds of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran prison camp, and the extended detention and physical abuse of lawful migrants at the border all of these represent extraordinary abuses of federal power, targeting groups whose citizenship status gives them limited legal recourse.Long-held fears about the weaponization of the US government against dissenters are thus no longer hypothetical. Whats happening is the full-spectrum application of federal immigration powers for authoritarian ends. And things are likely to get worse from here.On Wednesday night, Mother Jones published a story about how the Trump administration identified Venezuelans for deportation that illustrates just how dangerous the current moment is.Reporters Noah Lanard and Isabela Dias conducted extensive interviews with the friends, families, and community members of several men who had been sent to El Salvador. They found no evidence that these men were, as the Trump administration alleged, members of the Tren de Aragua gang. Rather, the reporters found, they were abducted purely because they have tattoos.Neri Alvarado Borges, a Venezuelan baker who lived in the Dallas area, is a case in point. No one who knew him believed he had any connection to Tren de Aragua. They did, however, note that he had a large tattoo of a ribbon a tribute to his brother, Nelyerson, a 15-year-old with autism. According to Borges, this tattoo and two others were the sole reasons for his detention.Well, youre here because of your tattoos, an ICE agent told Borges, per Mother Jones reporting. Were finding and questioning everyone who has tattoos.This is, as a matter of law enforcement, an absurd policy. Experts on Tren de Aragua do not believe there is a generally reliable way to use tattoos to identify gang members. This is substantiated by other reports of ICE mistakes, such as sending a professional soccer player to a Salvadoran prison because, his lawyer says, of his Real Madrid ink.But as an attempt to assert power, it makes sense. The government has identified groups they wish to repress like Venezuelan migrants and pro-Palestinian activists and is using the threat of abduction and physical harm to control or silence them. It is classic authoritarian politics: using law enforcement to punish law-abiding individuals who belong to the wrong groups or have the wrong ideas.It is easy to see why noncitizens are getting the worst of it right now. They enjoy fewer rights under the American legal system, making it far easier to subject them to the brutest of brute force.Yet, as Trumps treatment of universities and federal bureaucrats shows, he is eager to wield arbitrary power against citizens as well. And there are good reasons to believe that versions of the tactics being used on immigrants today might one day be directed against citizens not the least of which is the Trump teams longstanding fascination with denaturalization, the process of stripping citizenship from naturalized Americans.In his 2021 book Immigration and Freedom, political theorist Chandran Kukathas argues that immigration enforcement by its very nature entails restrictions on citizens rights. The very act of trying to distinguish between citizens and noncitizens, for the purposes of deportation or provision of benefits, requires increased levels of surveillance and monitoring against every person residing in the country. How else are governments to distinguish between those they intend to target and those whom they do not?Kukathas is writing about immigration enforcement systems in general pointing out that even the best-intentioned ones require some restrictions on freedom. But what happens when you have an attempt to wield the powers created by immigration enforcement in an arbitrary manner, one seemingly designed to repress critics and sow terror?Well, then you get statements like this one from White House aide Stephen Miller: Dear marxist judges: If an illegal alien criminal breaks into our country the only process he is entitled to is deportation.Miller here is not just expressing contempt for the idea of due process. He is expressing contempt for the idea that there should be any legal checks on their ability to identify whom to deport. Due process exists because law enforcement cant be trusted to only go after the right targets. Free societies depend on oversight and limitations on police power. Otherwise, freedoms are just words on paper subject to the whims of those who have guns.In expressing such unmitigated hostility to this idea, Miller has shown us the disturbing linkage between the administrations assault on immigrants, its repression of American citizens, and its contempt for legal oversight. They are acting like they have the right to go after whomever they want, for whatever reason they went, in whatever manner they want and that anyone who tries to stop them is disloyal at best and a terrorist sympathizer at worst.Weve seen this kind of politics before. And its track record is grim.See More: Politics

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.Welcome to The Logoff: Today Im focused on the Trump administrations attempt to deport a foreign student without trial, seemingly as a punishment for her political views.Whats the latest? On Tuesday, masked Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents outside Boston arrested Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish national and Tufts University PhD student who was in the US legally on a student visa. ICE is holding Ozturk in a Louisiana facility and plans to deport her. Ozturks lawyers have sued to stop the deportation, and the case is working its way through the courts.Why is the administration trying to deport Ozturk? So far, the administration has not charged Ozturk with a crime nor presented any evidence that she engaged in criminal activity.Ozturk last year co-authored an op-ed in Tufts student newspaper criticizing Israels actions in Gaza. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Thursday that he revoked her visa because of her participation in the anti-Gaza war movement. Rubio said the movement had engaged in vandalism and other crimes, but he did not say Ozturk was involved. Is this an isolated incident? The case is very similar to that of Mahmoud Khalil, and more arrests may be coming: Rubio suggested Thursday that hed revoked around 300 student visas on similar grounds.Can the administration do this? The administration argues that a 1952 immigration law gives Rubio the right to revoke the green card of any immigrant that he considers a threat to national security or acting against the interest of the United States. The courts will weigh that claims validity. Whats the big picture? The Trump administration has found another way to use the federal government to punish people for their political views. If Ozturk is being punished for some other reason, its incumbent on the government to publicly make that case. But so far, they havent felt the need to try. Thats a troubling sign for the civil liberties of immigrants, and for everyone else as well.And with that, its time to log offI know not everyone agrees, but I think its highly likely that theres alien life awaiting us in space. And so I devoured this episode of Voxs Unexplainable podcast about the search for extraterrestrials. You can listen to it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and elsewhere. But given how beautiful life on this planet is, might I recommend listening to it outside? Thanks for reading. 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:

Last week, the US Department of Agriculture announced sweeping plans to increase slaughter line speeds at pork and poultry plants a move that could further endanger workers who already process animals at a breakneck pace and suffer high levels of injury. Workers in poultry plants dont actually kill the chickens that task is automated on whats called the evisceration line, a conveyor belt that kills the chickens and removes their organs, which facilities can currently operate at a speed of up to 140 birds per minute. The chicken carcasses are then moved to another part of the plant where workers in cramped and cold conditions cut them up, handling dozens of birds per minute, to be packed for supermarkets and restaurants. Pork plants can currently operate at up to 1,106 pigs per hour.For decades, the meat industry has been pushing to both speed up slaughter lines and replace federal inspectors with company employees, wishes that the USDA under both Republican and Democratic administrations have granted to varying degrees. Now, the Trump administration plans to give the industry perhaps its biggest win on the issue yet, which worker safety advocates say will make one of the most dangerous jobs in America even worse. In the short term, the USDA will allow a few dozen chicken and pork processing plants that already have temporary waivers to operate slaughter lines faster to continue to do so. But the agencys longer-term plan is much more consequential: enacting a rule that will allow all pig and chicken slaughterhouses to increase slaughter line speeds. This comes at the same time as the Trump administration promises mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, who make up a significant share of the slaughterhouse workforce.The meat industry has celebrated the move: The National Pork Producers extended deep appreciation to the USDA for its plan and the National Chicken Council and the Meat Institute expressed similar sentiments. Worker safety advocates, on the other hand, are alarmed.Increased line speeds will hurt workers its not a maybe, its a definite, the president of the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, which represents over 15,000 poultry workers, wrote in a statement.The debate over slaughter line speedsAccording to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, workers in slaughterhouses who make fast, repetitive motions with sharp knives during long shifts suffer from injuries at far higher rates than those in all of private industry.But Debbie Berkowitz, who served as a chief of staff and senior policy adviser at the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) under President Obama, told me the reality is far worse than even these numbers suggest. Numerous government agencies, including the USDA, she said, have found the BLSs estimates to be undercounts, and Berkowitz noted that the injury rates are self-reported by meat companies, not tallied up by government inspectors.Slaughterhouse workers have also complained of wage theft, racial discrimination, sexual harassment, and denial of bathroom breaks. Exactly how fast the Trump administration will allow meat companies to operate their slaughter lines is unclear the agency has begun work on a draft rule but didnt provide details. During President Trumps first term, the USDA granted or renewed waivers to over 50 chicken slaughter plants, allowing them to increase line speeds from 140 birds per minute to 175. It also sought to eliminate line speed limits at pork facilities altogether, which a federal judge blocked in 2021, arguing the agency failed to consider how it would impact worker safety.In response, the USDA commissioned studies comparing chicken plants that operated their slaughter lines at 140 birds per minute to those operating up to 175 birds per minute, and pork plants that operated at the standard 1,106 hogs per hour and then sped up. They found that 81 percent of workers at poultry plants and 46 percent at pork plants are at high risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders, like carpal tunnel syndrome and tendonitis. That risk didnt stem directly from the speed of the automated evisceration lines the studies found no correlation between the two. But they did find a correlation between risk of developing musculoskeletal disorders and each employees workload, or piece rate the number of animals or pieces of meat they cut up per minute. If an individual employees workload goes above a certain pace, the researchers found, theyre more likely to get injured. There is no doubt from this study that the speed at which workers have to process chickens or swine is directly tied to risk of musculoskeletal disorders, said Berkowitz.In the study, some slaughter plants operating at faster slaughter line speeds added enough staff or automation to make up for the higher workload, but most did not which increased injury risk. An employee removes internal organs from a pig at a Smithfield Foods Inc. pork processing facility in Milan, Missouri. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesA chicken slaughter plant in the 1960s. H. Armstrong Roberts/ClassicStock /Getty ImagesTrumps USDA and meat industry groups have conveniently ignored that critical finding about employee workload their press releases about the benefits of speeding up slaughter lines fail to say anything about increasing staffing to prevent injury. The temporary waivers that allow slaughter plants to speed up slaughter lines dont require increased staffing, and the USDA didnt respond to a question as to whether its proposed rule would mandate it.The United Food and Commercial Workers International Union has already called for additional staffing, in addition to improved reporting of workplace injuries, expanded access to early and adequate medical treatment, and job modifications that minimize ergonomic stressors. Ultimately, Berkowitz said, the meat industry runs the USDA its a very captive agency. And she balked at the USDA and meat industry celebrating a study that found 81 percent of poultry workers and 46 percent of pork workers experiencing such high rates of injury risk: Are you saying thats acceptable?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: Future Perfect

On Wednesday, masked plainclothes immigration officers arrested Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish citizen on a student visa, outside Tufts University, where shes studying for a PhD. Video of her arrest, showing her being taken while walking down a street, has gone viral. Ozturk is now being held in a Louisiana detention center. This comes after a series of similar actions by the federal government. Just two days earlier, Yunseo Chung, a 21-year-old Columbia student and green card holder who has lived in the US since she was 7, sued the Trump administration for trying to arrest and deport her. The administration has targeted Chung and Ozturk for the same reason they detained Mahmoud Khalil earlier this month: pro-Palestinian views and activism.The governments actions are a serious threat to free speech. A Trump administration official explicitly told the Free Press that the cause for Khalils arrest was not that he committed a crime. The allegation here is not that he was breaking the law, the anonymous official said. He was mobilizing support for Hamas and spreading antisemitism in a way that is contrary to the foreign policy of the US. (Khalil was part of the pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia University when he was a graduate student last year.) Ozturk, Chung, and Khalil are in effect being targeted for their speech and activism activity that, in all three cases, the administration has deemed to be aligned with Hamas.These cases might be some of the more extreme examples of the US governments disregard for free speech. But unfortunately, theyre not unique. There have been many other instances when law enforcement trampled on peoples rights to protest and free speech. In one particular case, permanent residents of Palestinian descent were also arrested and threatened to be deported, all for daring to take the First Amendment at its word. That case ended with a blistering rebuke by a judge. But the incident and developments since then shows that the Trump administrations crackdown on the First Amendment, and pro-Palestinian speech in particular, has a long and shameful history.Before Khalil, there was the LA EightWhen I heard about Mahmoud [Khalil]s case, my mind went immediately to the LA Eight, said Maya Berry, the executive director of the Arab American Institute.In 1987, eight young immigrants seven of whom were Palestinian were arrested in Los Angeles, accused of supporting the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which the US had deemed a terrorist organization. They became known as the LA Eight. Two of those arrested, like Khalil, were permanent residents.The FBI had surveilled the group for a while, monitoring their protests, literature, and the people who attended their events. An informant sent to a dinner the group helped organize reported that it was clear the dinner was put on to raise money for terrorism, despite the fact that he did not speak Arabic. Instead, the informant came to that conclusion merely because of the tone of the music and speeches at the dinner. Eventually, the FBI deemed the group to be anti-Israel and anti-Reagan and recommended that they be deported. This was not because they had committed a crime; it was because the government was specifically targeting them for their speech and support for Palestinian rights, much like the Trump administration is today targeting students who participated in pro-Palestinian protests.The LA Eights case to remain in the US dragged on for two decades. None were ever deported, and during that time, some members went on to become US citizens. It went all the way up to the Supreme Court, which sent the case back down to immigration court. And in 2007, the case was finally dismissed, when a judge called the whole saga an embarrassment to the rule of law.How the war on terror became a war on civil libertiesThe story of the LA Eight reflects that anti-Palestinian racism has been deeply entrenched in US policy for a long time. But in the almost four decades since the US government began trying to deport them, the First Amendment has only been more eroded, especially for Arab and Muslim Americans, as well as those who support the Palestinian cause. In his 2021 book Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, journalist Spencer Ackerman documents how Americas war on terror resulted in neither peace nor victory, and instead laid the groundwork for an emboldened surveillance state that curtailed peoples civil liberties. The 2001 Patriot Act, which greatly expanded law enforcement surveillance, exacerbated racial profiling in the name of national security. Arabs, Muslims, and South Asians were detained by the FBI and viewed as security threats. The no-fly list disproportionately targeted Muslims. And law enforcement agencies started surveilling and infiltrating Muslim communities across the United States.The 9/11 moment was itself a product of longstanding trends, but what were seeing today is really the fruits of all of those really rotten seeds that the government planted in the early years after 9/11, said Mohammad Tajsar, a senior staff attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. It wasnt just peoples views or speech that were targeted. The laws that passed after 9/11 also undermined the First Amendment by encroaching on Americans religious liberty. In 2009, the ACLU released a comprehensive report that documented how the post-9/11 reforms, among other things, infringed on Muslim Americans right to practice their religion through charitable giving because of terrorism financing laws. In 2001, for example, the US government announced that it was investigating over 30 Muslim charities. By the end of that year, the government had frozen the assets of the three largest Muslim charitable organizations in the United States, forcing them to shut down. The contrast with the balance between civil liberties and anti-terrorism measures a few years prior was stark. In 1995, when Timothy McVeigh, an anti-government white supremacist, bombed a federal building and killed 168 people, politicians and media reports initially blamed the bombing on Muslims until it became clear that McVeigh was responsible. McVeigh was ultimately sentenced to death, but it was after legal due process. Congress didnt rush to pass legislation to crack down on white supremacy or domestic terrorism. Instead, it passed a law in 1996 that made it easier to prosecute people suspected of having ties to foreign terrorist organizations something that still expanded surveillance of Muslims, not white supremacists. When terrorism was white when its identity and its purpose claimed the same heritage as a substantial amount of the dominant American racial caste America sympathized with principled objections against unleashing the coercive, punitive, and violent powers of the state, Ackerman wrote. When terrorism was white, the prospect of criminalizing a large swath of Americans was unthinkable.After 9/11, it became normalized.Expanding the security state has come at the cost of weakening the Bill of Rights. In 2010, in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the Supreme Court ruled against the Humanitarian Law Project, a nonprofit seeking to help the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the Kurdistan Workers Party in Turkey both deemed terrorist organizations by the US government learn nonviolent conflict resolution tactics. The US government claimed that even peaceful assistance like conflict resolution is not protected by the First Amendment because it amounted to materially supporting terrorist organizations. The Court agreed.[It] basically shut down First Amendment challenges to these material support statutes and basically suggested, in some ways, that core constitutional rights can give way to these national security exigencies, Tajsar said. That particular case happened to be about nonprofits. But the big picture was that the constitution wont stand in the way of a lot of these government trends.That legal philosophy that national security interests take precedence over individual liberties is likely what the Trump administration is banking on to deport students for participating in pro-Palestinian protests. After all, thats what the Supreme Court argued in 1954, when it decided that permanent residents could be deported for their ties to the Communist Party.Ultimately, the LA Eight, Khalil, Chung, and Ozturk are clear victims of anti-Palestinian racism that runs so deep that it pushes the government to infringe on peoples constitutionally protected speech just as the government did to communists during the Red Scare. But theyre also free speech cases that have broader implications for every Americans rights. This is a matter of: are we a free country or not? Berry said. Will we honor liberty or not?See More:

By withholding federal funds and threatening investigations, President Donald Trump has tried to bend universities to his will.Now, hes doing something similar: trying to get states to change their election rules.In an executive order Tuesday, Trump made what amounts to a series of demands on states to change their election laws and policies. For one, he wants states to be more strict at requiring proof of citizenship for voter registration. Trump also wants states to stop counting mailed-in votes that were sent in on or before Election Day but arrive afterward in fact, he suggests that counting such votes violates federal law. Most judges and mainstream legal experts think this interpretation of the law is ridiculous, but it has gained steam on the right.Trump is trying to do all this even though the president has no legal authority to tell states how to run their elections. Indeed, several aspects of his order will likely be challenged in court.But hes trying to threaten states anyway, with the pulling of federal election assistance funding and with unspecified action from his Justice Department, in hopes they comply. The biggest threat of all is implicit that Trump is setting the stage for a really nasty attempt to use the federal government to dispute election results in states that dont make the changes he wants. This gives states a tough choice to make: give in now, or have an ugly battle later?Trumps demands on statesTrumps first demand is stricter citizenship proof for voters. He wants to force people registering to vote or renewing their registrations to prove their citizenship. He also wants to force state and local officials to do more to check the citizenship of people on their voter rolls. The order also instructs various federal agencies to make citizenship data more readily available to state and local officials.This demand reflects baseless right-wing conspiracy theories that noncitizens regularly vote for Democrats in huge numbers. For decades, conservatives have believed that this is happening. But they can somehow never find evidence to prove it. Existing data and studies suggest that vanishingly few noncitizens try to vote. For instance, the state of Georgia audited its voter rolls in 2024 and found that, out of more than 8 million registered voters, a mere 20 were noncitizens. Still, many on the right have long argued that, regardless of whether illegal voting is happening in significant numbers, it is common sense to require voters to prove their citizenship. Critics argue, though, that because there is no actual widespread problem of noncitizen voting, the most consequential impact would be to suppress legitimate voting from citizens who dont have proof-of-citizenship documents easily available.Trumps second demand is that state and local officials not count mailed-in ballots that arrive after Election Day.Every state that uses mail-in voting requires ballots to be postmarked that is, in the mail either on or before Election Day. But 18 states have later deadlines for when ballots can arrive (for instance, California accepts them until seven days after election day, and Alaska until 10 days after it.) This is to ensure legitimate votes are not excluded due to slow mail delivery and simply to give voters more flexibility. However, Trump is adopting a fringe legal theory that an existing federal law setting a uniform date for federal elections makes it illegal to count ballots arriving after Election Day. This theory has been rejected by nearly all (though not all) judges who have heard cases about this. But Trumps order asserts that this is the law and tells his attorney general to take all necessary action against states that violate it.This demand reflects baseless theories that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump by fraudulent late-arriving mail ballots. It is not true that late-arriving mail ballots swung the election Biden won Pennsylvania by 80,000 votes, while the state as a whole only received 10,000 mail ballots after Election Day. Many mail ballots were counted quite slowly in a process that took days (and which Republicans in key states refused to help speed up). But such ballots were overwhelmingly received on or before election day itself.Regardless, Trump is demanding these changes and threatening states that refuse to go along.The threats Trump is making to states that refuse to complyTo try to make his demands a reality, Trump is asserting authority over the Election Assistance Commission (EAC). The EAC was established in 2002 by Congress as an independent federal commission to help state and local governments improve election administration by distributing grant money and maintaining a template for a mail voter registration form.As Trump has done with other independent agencies, hes asserting his authority over the EAC in the (perhaps justified) belief that the current Supreme Court will endorse such a power grab. His order instructs the EAC to add a proof of citizenship requirement to its mail voter registration form. It also says the EAC should withhold funds from states that dont use that form and from states that count mail ballots arriving after Election Day.States could get by without EAC money. But the order also makes the more ominous threat of siccing the Justice Department on states that dont make the changes Trump wants.Trumps assertion that mail ballots showing up after Election Day are illegal even if state law says otherwise is particularly ominous. That lays the groundwork for him to dispute any close election Democrats win with such ballots. He would probably lose in court, given the Supreme Courts past refusal to take up this issue. But that outcome is not a totally sure thing, and even the fight would be ugly.So the 18 states with later deadlines for arriving mail ballots now will be forced to ask: How important is this late deadline, really? Like most state voting rules, the deadline likely has little partisan impact people adapt to different rules, and most would simply send in ballots earlier. Still, Trump is clearly hoping this change will be enough to tip some election outcomes in Republicans favor by disallowing late-arriving Democratic mail votes, and if a particular election is close enough, maybe hed be right. Then again, low-propensity voters have increasingly trended toward the GOP in recent years. These voters would probably be less likely to send in a ballot early. So Trump might not get the outcome hes hoping for.See More: Politics

President Donald Trump isnt a fan of judges who rule against him. During his first term, he famously attacked Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who sentenced his ally and adviser Roger Stone, by saying she was totally biased and had hatred for both Trump and Stone.Now, Trump has only ratcheted up the attacks on judges. This feud reached a new high-water mark after US District Court Judge James Boasberg ordered the Trump administration to stop deporting certain Venezuelan immigrants. Boasberg also pressed the administration on the timing of flights from the US to El Salvador, where the immigrants were moved to a mega-prison.In response, Trump called Boasberg a Radical Left Lunatic of a Judge, a troublemaker and agitator. In concert, Attorney General Pam Bondi said the judge had no right to be asking about the flights. Similar attack lines have been used by an array of Trump administration officials and allies. For more on Trumps grudge with judges, Today, Explaineds co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Kate Shaw. Shes a professor at the University of Pennsylvanias Carey Law School, and co-host of the legal podcast Strict Scrutiny.Click the link below to hear the whole conversation. The following is a transcript edited for length and clarity.Kate, what is going on with Trump and the judges?Trump has fared remarkably poorly in litigation in the last two months. He really is on an impressive losing streak. Hes zero for three in the courts of appeals in trying to defend the constitutionality of his birthright citizenship executive order. He has been losing in cases challenging various aspects of Elon Musks role in government and the activities of DOGE. In the only two cases to reach the Supreme Court so far, both very early-stage procedural matters, he lost both of them. Hes notched a couple of wins in the lower courts, but mostly on procedural issues. So, hes losing a lot and hes clearly really unhappy about it. And the biggest controversy in all of the losses is perhaps this situation with El Salvador.I think its the one that Trump is the most incensed about. That seems clear, right? And so the administration invoked this 1798 statute: the Alien Enemies Act. Thats been used three times, always in wartime: 1812, World War I, World War II. Now, they try to make an argument that this Venezuelan gang, Tren de Aragua, is somehow working in concert with the Venezuelan government in ways that makes them a state actor that were basically engaged in active hostilities with. Thats the [reasoning] for invoking this old statute, and that allows designating individuals as alien enemies and expelling them, essentially, to this prison in El Salvador. That has been challenged and is before this judge, Judge Boasberg. There have been some preliminary determinations made, but its pretty clear the administration is gonna lose big in front of Judge Boasberg. This is the one that I think has Trump the most spun up based on his social media.He has taken to Truth Social and basically called for Boasberg to be impeached. He has called him a radical left lunatic of a judge, a troublemaker, and an agitator. I dont know this judge, but, no, that is not an accurate characterization of him. He was put on the DC local court by George W. Bush and then on the district court by President Obama and then also designated to serve on the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court by Chief Justice John Roberts. This is not a judge who is in any way a radical left lunatic. Its a preposterous characterization, but calling for his impeachment based on this preliminary set of rulings is an enormous escalation of the way Trump has been talking about and acting toward the judiciary.And calling for a judges impeachment has that been reserved for Judge Boasberg, or does that apply to a number of these court battles that the Trump administration is facing?He has been criticizing federal judges. Others, I think including Musk, have called for other impeachments. I think this might be the first that Trump has called for [impeachment] himself. How do judges fight back when a president or an all-but-official vice president call for their impeachments?Its a good question and judges are very limited in what they can do. They cant take to public-facing communications channels. They dont have a bully pulpit the way the president does. They cannot tweet or skeet or truth or whatever in their own defense. They have a lot of power in a very limited domain. Theres defending themselves in the court of public opinion, but then theres also the possibility that they could actually have to end up defending themselves in the actual United States Congress against impeachment.How often do we see judges getting impeached? Remind us.Pretty infrequently. There have been 15 impeachments of federal judges. Only eight of them have resulted in conviction. Impeachment is a two-step process. We say somebody has been impeached if a majority of the House of Representatives has voted to approve one or more articles of impeachment against them. It just requires a simple majority in the House and then, colloquially, we say the person has been impeached. But then they actually just go to the other House of Congress, the Senate, and thats where an actual trial happens. It requires a two-thirds supermajority to actually convict someone in a Senate trial, which results in their removal from office. So impeachment, again, is the first half of the two-step process in the Constitution. And it does not seem impossible to me that we might see federal judges actually subject to real impeachment proceedings in the House, although 67 votes in the Senate is very hard for me to see ever occurring.But thats still playing within the boundaries of whats legally acceptable. What about if they just openly defy the courts? Thats what is at stake with this case, with Boasberg and the flights to El Salvador. Do we have concrete evidence that that has happened?I dont think so. I think we are close. [Theres] this delicate dance in front of Judge Boasberg, in which the administration does suggest that it is complying with a narrow and I think probably wrong, but at least defensible in legal-sounding language argument that they werent subject to this order. They werent defying the order, they were trying to comply with the order. So they are at least not saying to the court: you essentially have no power over us. They are maybe inching a little closer to that. I think it matters a lot that theyre continuing to make legal arguments and that theyre continuing to appeal. I think in some ways, the real red lights start flashing if they stop doing that and simply dont comply. I think theyre likelier to do it here than in the context of a challenge to the dismantling of USAID or the Department of Education or an order targeting law firms. Where the president is making claims about national security, the presidents power is always understood to be at its apex, and so they think they have the strongest legal footing for suggesting a court has no power over them here, [compared to] other spaces where its obvious that courts absolutely have the power to review and maybe invalidate things the executive branch has done.Interestingly, one source of that vast executive power comes from Chief Justice John Roberts, who last year helped expand our views of presidential power in this country. But in this case, especially when it comes to this fight between Trump and this DC judge, Boasberg, theres a bit of tension there.Yeah. So as you just referenced, July 1 of last year, Roberts authors this opinion granting sweeping new authorities and immunities to presidents and ex-presidents.And I think it hangs over virtually everything that weve seen in the last two months in terms of these extravagant assertions of executive authority and disdain at the idea that courts or any outside institution could act to check a president in any way. Theres a straight line between some of the descriptions of presidential power in that Trump v. United States case and the predicament we find ourselves in. So I do think that John Roberts bears a ton of responsibility for the way the administration has comported itself and broadcast its vision of essentially boundless executive power.It is interesting that Roberts kind of came out swinging after Trump [suggested] on Truth Social that Boasberg should be impeached. Roberts issued this very unusual statement, kind of a rebuke of President Trump.The chief justice rarely wades into the political fray in any way other than issuing his opinions. So he was obviously worried enough to speak up.Any response from the Trump administration?I think there was something general that didnt name Roberts, that did suggest, you know, Trump likes to have the last word. Maybe [Robertss statement] landed in some way. I dont know that the White House wants to antagonize John Roberts kind of directly and explicitly, at least right now. And to the earlier point, that does suggest that they are still, in some ways, dwelling in the land of law. And I think thats important.See More:

These are uncertain times for many immigrants in the US. There have been reports of individual visa and green card holders and tourists who have been detained and deported. However, the Trump administration does not seem to be indiscriminately targeting legal immigrants who have authorization to be in the US on a large scale. Some have reportedly been targeted based on their political activism. A Brown University professor and doctor with a green card was deported after officials found photos of former Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Irans supreme leader on her phone. Immigration authorities also invoked a Trump executive order prohibiting antisemitism to detain a former Columbia student and green card holder who helped lead campus protests over the war in Gaza.In other cases, the Trump administration hasnt clarified its rationale for detaining someone. A German citizen with a green card was interrogated by border officials in Boston and detained without access to his anxiety medication. Its not clear if the government has charged him with a crime. Similarly, the administration had not offered an official explanation for detaining a Turkish doctoral student as of Tuesday.And its not just immigrants who have been affected. A US citizen said he was walking down the streets of Chicago when he was arrested by immigration agents, who confiscated his ID and held him for 10 hours before releasing him. Even though limited in number, these cases have been going viral and are understandably causing fear in immigrant communities.According to immigration attorneys, its hard to tell how worried immigrants who are legally living and working in the US need to be. After practicing for 40 years, its really difficult to divine what a measured response is right now, said Kathleen Campbell Walker, former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. So far, cases of individuals with visas and green cards being detained or deported appear rare. That said, the lawyers I spoke with advised these immigrants, as well as US citizens, to consider certain precautions in an environment of such uncertainty.Consider carrying identification documentsLegal non-citizen immigrants have long been legally required to carry their immigration papers at all times. However, the penalties for failing to do so are becoming higher under Trump.In April, the Trump administration is expected to increase the associated fines from $100 to $5,000, Campbell Walker said. Failing to possess documentation is a misdemeanor. That could now land an immigrant in detention and deportation proceedings; Trump revoked the Biden administrations immigration enforcement priorities so that even people charged with nonviolent, minor crimes can now be deported.Relatedly, next month the Trump administration will also start requiring all noncitizens to register with the federal government and designate those who fail to do so as a priority for immigration enforcement. Many noncitizens who have had previous contact with the federal government whether because they applied for certain immigration benefits or were issued a notice to appear in immigration court are already considered registered under the new policy.Campbell Walker said US citizens should also consider carrying a passport card that fits in their wallet, or birth certificate, as proof of their nationality, given the reports of Americans swept up in Trumps immigration enforcement activities. In some of these cases, she said, there have been concerns that immigration agents are racially and ethnically profiling their targets.Carrying documents on your person, making sure that people who are not citizens or naturalized or acquired citizens have one place in your home where you have all your important documentation together and making sure that you have copies those are all reasonable and important steps to be taking in a moment like this, when we see the administration attacking free speech rights and attacking the basic norms of due process, said Heidi Altman, vice president of policy at the National Immigration Law Center.Reconsider international travelImmigration attorneys are urging immigrants to exercise caution in traveling abroad right now.Following the deportation of one of their professors, Brown University advised out of an abundance of caution that even green card holders delay any personal travel outside the US. The university said that changes in requirements to reenter the country and a draft proposal for a travel ban targeting 43 countries that could be implemented as early as this week might impact its students and staff. I believe that a lot of green card holders are making the decision to consult with an attorney before traveling, and I think thats a reasonable consideration, Altman said. Immigrants should consider whether their country of origin or where they are planning to travel may be on the list of countries that could be subjected to travel bans. They should also weigh their own history of activism and whether that could make them a target upon reentry to the US. We know that this administration is engaging in retaliatory actions against people who have engaged in constitutionally protected activism and speech, Altman said. And so I think people may want to think about their own history and imagine and explore if it might put them at high interest for retaliatory targeting and talk to an attorney about precautionary steps that can be taken before travel.If you must travel, consider leaving your personal electronic devices at home. Border officials can (and recently have) requested access to immigrants devices, including their cellphones. Refusing to grant them access might give them grounds to deny entry on the basis that they have insufficient information to determine if an immigrant is admissible to the US. But Campbell Walker said that she is concerned about officers lacking the training required to appropriately evaluate whats on a personal device. She said that, based on reports from member attorneys of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, officials are now looking through social media feeds on peoples phones for reasons to deny them admission to the US.Im not asking anyone to lie. Im not trying to obstruct justice, she said. But if somebody who may not have sufficient training is going to rip through a cellphone and jump to conclusions and potentially remove me or prevent me from entering the US, I dont think its advisable to have a bunch of social media or photographs on the phone you travel with. I dont think its very wise to be traveling with your [personal] laptop.See More:

This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Voxs newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.Over the next few weeks, millions of kids around the country will come home from school, toss their backpacks in a corner, and begin an annual ritual that can be fun, relaxing, stressful, and confusing all at the same time.I speak, of course, of spring break a phrase that has historically meant one thing to beach-bound college students, and quite another to families of younger kids, facing down a week (or sometimes two) when schools are closed and work is decidedly not.Summer has its own challenges, for kids and adults alike. But spring break, like the countless other interruptions that pockmark school calendars, can be even harder to plan for. Fewer camps are open; summer school is months away. Some families go skiing or take a cruise, but amid rising prices, those options are out of reach for more and more parents. For many families, you kind of cobble it together on your own, Lauren Smith Brody, CEO of the Fifth Trimester, a workplace gender equality consultancy, told me which means a lot of stress for parents and, often, a lot of screen time for kids. Its not just an inconvenience days off of school can mean days of hunger for kids from food-insecure families, who rely on school breakfast and lunch to get through the week. And the spike in juvenile crime between the hours of 3 and 6 pm on weekdays suggests that for some kids, unsupervised time can be dangerous.Some school districts and afterschool programs offer free or low-cost spring break camps a way to reinforce some of the learning thats going on in a way that feels like the kids are having fun and having a break, as Jodi Grant, executive director of the nonprofit Afterschool Alliance, put it. But those programs were underfunded even before President Trump ordered the closure of the Education Department, which administers federal funding for afterschool programs. For now, spring break is yet another reminder of the mismatch between American work culture and the needs of human life for relaxation, for connection, for something to shake up what can sometimes be a draining daily routine. At their best, Grant said, spring break programs for kids are just a chance to do things differently.If you dont have a school-aged child, you might not realize how many days off kids have in addition to summer break. In New York City, where I live, its about two dozen, which includes winter break, mid-winter break, spring break, and a number of religious and other holidays in between.School breaks are intended, at least in part, to give families and staff time to observe said holidays (in many districts, spring break encompasses Easter, Passover, or both). Spring break, in particular, is a popular time for travel, with 48 percent of families with children planning a trip during that period, according to a 2023 TransUnion survey. But that still leaves more than half who stay put (its not that easy for one or two adults to get a full week off work at a time thats neither summer nor the winter holidays). When kids are off but parents are working, the options are somewhat limited. Some camps operate during spring break, but the cost, which can run to hundreds of dollars a week, puts them out of reach for many families. Then theres the cobble-it-together approach, with parents (and sometimes other family members like grandparents) splitting up care and work as best they can. Theres a lot of juggling, Brody said, and nobody ever gets any rest.Kids, however, do really need breaks. Take it from a student at John Jay High School in Lewisboro, New York, who wrote in the school paper in 2022 that There are so many responsibilities on high school students plate, whether they must do homework, study, work, play a sport or activity, take SAT or ACT tests, look at or visit colleges, take AP exams, etc. Having a break in the school year could help a student relax and feel okay.Experts agree that theres a reason kids dont go to class 40 hours a week, 365 days a year. Longer school days have been tried in some districts, and both kids and teachers get exhausted, Grant said. Its also really important for a lot of kids to have an environment thats not graded or judged or prescribed. So what are families supposed to do? In Philadelphia, one answer is Spring Break Camp, a free, full-day program operating at 22 schools in the district. Some publicly funded afterschool programs offer spring break and other day-off camps as well, Grant said.These programs give kids a chance to hang out with new friends and new educators, to have more choice than they typically do during the school day, and to sample activities from yoga to weightlifting to building electric cars, Grant said.Many afterschool programs also provide snacks or meals for kids. But publicly funded programs often have limited space, and private ones can be expensive. Around the country, there are nearly 25 million kids whose parents want them to be in afterschool programs, but who dont have access, largely because of cost, Grant said. Expanding access to free or low-cost afterschool programs would help families deal with the three to four hours every weekday in which parents work but schools are out, as my colleague Rachel Cohen has written. It would also provide a solution for those two dozen days every school year that leave many parents scrambling for care and many kids bored on their iPads all day long.However, federal funding for afterschool programs has not kept up with inflation, Grant said. The Trump administration and DOGE have not cut support for these programs, but that support is administered through the Education Department, which Trump has instructed Education Secretary Linda McMahon to dismantle. Were feeling the same uncertainty as everyone else, Grant said.In the absence of robust federal funding, some states, like California, are stepping up by funding afterschool programs out of their own budgets. Employers, too, can help by fostering a culture that invites people to be open about their caregiving needs, Brody said.There is, of course, a core problem at the heart of the spring break conundrum: as Brody put it, the amount of paid vacation American parents typically get (which hovers around 11-15 days for all but the most senior employees) is just so out of line with the number of weeks that there arent school.You can solve this problem with camps, or you could solve it with more paid time off. The latter, of course, feels unattainable in a time of worker precarity and a resurgent grind culture. But as kids know well, everyone deserves a break sometimes.What Im readingThe Trump administration has reportedly cut funding for a program that provides legal representation for unaccompanied immigrant children, potentially forcing them to represent themselves in immigration court.Last week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced Operation Stork Speed to improve the safety of baby formula. Its not bad to devote more attention to formula, experts say but the Trump administrations cuts at the FDA could hamper safety efforts.Evereden, once a baby brand, is now trying to give Gen Alpha tweens what they want. And apparently what they want are body mists.My little kid and I have been reading Fox and His Friends, originally published in 1982 and now a time capsule of 20th-century child-rearing norms. Fox, a school-aged child/animal, is tasked with babysitting his younger sister for an entire day with no adult input whatsoever. He is terrible at his job and eventually allows her to scale a telephone pole, then bribes her for her silence with ice cream. I am not sure if this is an argument for giving kids more independence, or the opposite.From my inboxLast week, I asked for your spring break experiences. Reader Kareen H had less-than-fond memories of spring at the YMCA as a child: I NEVER wanted to be at the Y.However, Kareen did enjoy field trips, adding that I won best singer award, because I was singing to myself in the Y van, coming back from some field trip. I have no memory of what I did during spring break as a child, but I am positive I have never won a best singer award in any context. As always, thanks for your messages and get in touch any time at anna.north@vox.com.See More:

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. To submit a question, email Sigal at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form. Either way, if we choose your question, itll be anonymized. Heres this weeks question, condensed and edited for clarity: Im convinced that the fight against authoritarianism is the most important issue of our time. My family immigrated to America from an authoritarian country, and some of my relatives and I are astonished and horrified that the same thing is befalling the US. Theres more that I could be doing to participate in the pro-democracy resistance. Im in a public-facing (not government) job where I could shape my work in a way that draws more attention to Trumps corruption and war on the American people. But I feel both like my work wouldnt make much of a difference, and like I will be targeted and punished by the Trump administration for it, so what is the point? With the path were on now, more and more Americans are going to be persecuted for doing things the administration doesnt like, and Im terrified of the potential consequences for myself and my colleagues. Its a collective action problem, because no one persons actions alone are going to stop Trump and Musk, yet if we all tell ourselves that the risk isnt worth the gain to democracy, no one will do anything. How can I navigate this dilemma ethically, rationally, and without ruining my life?Dear Rational Resistance,Growing up in the Jewish community, my childhood was full of stories about the Holocaust. I heard horrifying stories, obviously, but also stories about inspiring people who resisted the Nazis like the Righteous Gentiles who hid Jews in their homes at great personal risk. My child-mind obsessed over the question: If I were in their place, would I have had the same courage they did? Would I hide someone in my attic? Ive been thinking about this question a lot since January 20. Not because I think todays America is equal to Nazi Germany, but simply because a lot of us are wondering how far to stick our necks out right now. How do we navigate the tension between personal safety and moral responsibility? Is there something about living in extraordinary times that demands more from us, morally speaking, than we would normally risk?I dont think that the moral demandingness of the universe suddenly changes in times like these. Instead, I think times like these open our eyes to the reality that was there all along: We are not just atomized individuals, as Western modernity conditions us to think. We are interdependent. Our fates are connected to the fates of other people, so to truly look out for ourselves and our own family, we have to look out for the broader collective, too. While a special minority of people are always tuned into this Buddhist monks, say, or extreme do-gooders most of us only see reality this way when tragedy strikes. As author Larissa MacFarquhar wrote in her book Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help:In wartime or in a crisis so devastating that it resembles war, such as an earthquake or a hurricane duty expands far beyond its peacetime boundaries. In wartime, its thought dutiful rather than unnatural to leave your family for the sake of a cause. In wartime, the line between family and strangers grows faint, as the duty to ones own enlarges to encompass all the people who are on the same side This is the difference between do-gooders and ordinary people: for do-gooders, it is always wartime. They always feel themselves responsible for strangers they always feel that strangers, like compatriots in war, are their own people. Whether its a war or an earthquake or an attack on democracy, dramatic events can cause a vertiginous shift in perspective, from me-myopia to a more telescopic vision. We see ourselves as part of the bigger story of humanity, which transcends not only national borders, but generations. Have a question you want me to answer in the next Your Mileage May Vary column?Feel free to email me at sigal.samuel@vox.com or fill out this anonymous form! Newsletter subscribers will get my column before anyone else does and their questions will be prioritized for future editions. Sign up here!I suspect thats why we all admire the Righteous Gentiles even though by taking in Jews, they were sometimes putting their own kids at risk, something we normally consider morally dodgy (in fact, its so counter to a parents wiring that I wouldnt blame parents who couldnt bring themselves to do it). They were looking beyond their children to the world they would inherit. What good is it to bring your kid up into a world thats morally bankrupt? And what would you be modeling for them if you did? Seeing that bigger story can motivate us to take action against authoritarianism, even when its risky. Yes, it may feel scary to stick our necks out now as you said, Im terrified of the potential consequences for myself and my colleagues but remember that authoritarians want you to feel too terrified to resist. Thats how they cultivate anticipatory obedience and how they gain power over time. Right now, for most of us, the risk is actually relatively minimal. Act now and you might lose your job, or maybe even get your organization defunded, resulting in more lost jobs. Thats not nothing. But unless you are an undocumented immigrant or otherwise especially vulnerable under Trump administration policies, you are, right now, not likely to be deported, imprisoned, or physically harmed the way resisters have been in more authoritarian states. And if you dont act now, America could well become a more authoritarian state. If that happens, people in the future really might not be able to resist without facing extreme consequences. Thats an argument for resisting now, while you can do it at relatively low risk. It is not, however, an argument for acting nobly but recklessly. Its an argument for acting strategically. Consider the story of Queen Esther from the Hebrew Bible. When she learns of a plot to destroy her people, the Jews, she faces a terrifying choice: She can go to her husband, the king of Persia, to plead for their protection which would mean risking her own life, since the king would kill anyone who approached him without being summoned or she can stay silent to protect herself. At first, she tells her cousin Mordecai that she cant just march over the king and speak her mind; thats not how being queen works. But he responds with a powerful rejoinder: Who knows if its for a time like this that you were made queen to begin with? What hes doing there is triggering the vertiginous shift in perspective getting her to stop seeing herself as an individual and start seeing herself as someone who was always meant to look out for the collective.You can be strategic, too. Rather than acting impulsively and alone, you can build a network of support by reaching out to colleagues both inside and outside your organization.And that who knows? also acts as a challenge. In situations of moral crisis, people often feel, as you wrote, that my work wouldnt make much of a difference so why bother? To which Mordecai says: Who knows! Its possible that your work wont make a difference but you dont know that, so youve got to try something. It works: Esther acts. But notice how she acts. She doesnt just rush immediately to the king and tell him to save the Jews. First, she builds a network of support and develops a multi-part strategy. She dresses up to the nines, making herself attractive to the king so he might want to keep her around. She invites the king and his vizier to a party, where she wines and dines them. The next day she invites them to another party. Gradually, through carefully orchestrated moments of influence, she reveals the truth and makes her ask.Esther is what the Dutch historian Rutger Bregman might call a Noble Winner. In Moral Ambition, Bregman urges readers to be more ambitious about the good they can do for the world. As he points to historical examples of people who stood up for whats right, he notes that some are Noble Losers they take a personal stand, but nothing much comes of it. Think of that famous photo showing a crowd of Germans all saluting Hitler, and the single man who refused to salute. He was on the right side of history, but he didnt make history, Bregman writes. If you really want to change things, then someone like Rosa Parks is a better role model.Parks was a Noble Winner. She didnt just decide one day, in a rash moment of fury, to refuse to give up her seat on that bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Instead, she spent years quietly getting involved with the civil rights movement and studying protest tactics. Her refusal to surrender her seat was planned. An action group called the Womens Political Council strategically portrayed her as a kindly seamstress and demure heroine someone milquetoast enough for white Americans to get behind and launched the call to boycott the bus system the instant she was arrested. The careful planning and collaboration paid off: They achieved not just fame, but concrete wins. You can be strategic, too. Rather than acting impulsively and alone, you can build a network of support by reaching out to colleagues both inside and outside your organization. If youre a nonprofit employee, you can organize within your union and push them to take a particular stance. If youre an educator, you can coordinate action with other schools. If youre a journalist, you can reach out to other journalists to forge consensus around covering news events in a certain way for example, calling a purge a purge. The point is to reach out to others and build power together. And one more word about those Righteous Gentiles. After the Holocaust, psychologists began to study them to figure out what made them courageously agree to hide Jews while the majority went along with tyranny. Maybe they were friends with Jews before the war? Maybe they had spare rooms or extra savings tucked away? Maybe some people just come wired with an altruistic personality?Nope. The psychologists found that none of these factors made the difference. Instead, as Bregman recounts in his book:Turns out there was one circumstance that determined almost everything. A new analysis of data showed that when this condition was met, nearly everyone took action 96 percent to be precise. And what was that condition? Simple: you had to be asked. Those who were asked to help someone in danger almost always said yes. Asking things of each other and acting together is how we move unjust systems. So go ahead. Reach out to someone. Ask. Bonus: What Im readingIn the New Yorker, Kyle Chayka writes about Elon Musks AI-fueled war on human agency. He notes that a government run by people is cautious and slow by design; a machine-automated version will be fast and ruthless, reducing the need for either human labor or human decision-making.Are major trends in philosophy today the consequence of the fact that most great Western thinkers were bachelors? The philosopher Mary Midgley thought so. Having no experience of living with women and children, she argued, led these unmarried men to generate philosophy that is overly abstract and removed from life, as this Aeon essay explains.In a previous installment of this advice column, I challenged the idea that having a child always fundamentally transforms someones personality. So when I saw Olga Khazans new article on the topic, with the subtitle I knew that becoming a parent would change me but I had no idea how it was an instant click for me. The always-hilarious Olga does not disappoint. This story was originally published in The Highlight, Voxs member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.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:

Roku City, the oddly alluring cityscape screen saver, scrolls across millions of idle TVs every day. Recently, an island paradise appeared in the picture. In the foreground, a floating billboard invited me to subscribe to Disney+ and watch Moana 2 at the press of a button on my remote. The convenience, I dont mind about the new era of ad-supported everything. The wiretapping, I do.Ads are obviously not new on TV. As long as weve been watching shows on glowing boxes, weve been watching commercials that provide the economic engine for the entire entertainment factory to operate. While streaming platforms offered a reprieve for a few years by charging monthly fees for commercial-free content, its now practically impossible to watch TV without seeing some sort of marketing. Whats happening more under the radar is that your TV is collecting data about you and your watching habits sometimes by directly monitoring whats on your screen and serving you personalized ads on your TV or elsewhere.The screen that you once loved for private, uninterrupted Netflix-watching has become a big billboard that also spies on you.This isnt just a Roku problem, although the company found itself in hot water when some users were recently required to watch a video ad a Moana 2 trailer before they could access their TVs home screen at all. Roku says this is just a test, but the fact that its similar to a feature Amazon rolled out over a year ago on Prime Video suggests that ads are generally getting more brazen on streaming platforms. How you feel about it depends a lot on your mindset and feelings about privacy. Your TV wants your dataThe TV business traditionally included three distinct entities. Theres the hardware, namely the TV itself; the entertainment, like movies and shows; and the ads, usually just commercials that interrupt your movies and shows. In the streaming era, tech companies want to control all three, a setup also known as vertical integration. If, say, Roku makes the TV, supplies the content, and sells the ads, then it stands to control the experience, set the rates, and make the most money. Thats business!Roku has done this very well. Although it was founded in 2002, Roku broke into the market in 2008 after Netflix invested $6 million in the company to make a set-top box that enabled any TV to stream Netflix content. It was literally called the Netflix Player by Roku. Over the course of the next 15 years, Roku would grow its hardware business to include streaming sticks, which are basically just smaller set-top-boxes; wireless soundbars, speakers, and subwoofers; and after licensing its operating system to third-party TV makers, its own affordable, Roku-branded smart TVs. While most people think of Roku as a hardware company, it actually transitioned into becoming an advertising company almost a decade ago. In the early days, you might see a banner ad on your home screen or a tile telling you to watch Game of Thrones on HBO Go. But after firing up a more serious ad business in 2016, Roku started selling targeted ads on the Roku Channel, a free, ad-supported TV (FAST) service across its devices in 2017. Roku even started making its own content, including a biopic of Weird Al Yankovic. Your TV is collecting data about you and your watching habits sometimes by directly monitoring whats on your screen and serving you personalized ads on your TV or elsewhere.Things really ramped up when Roku started acquiring ad-tech companies, including Nielsens Advanced Video Advertising business in 2021. This helped Roku gain new insights into its audience in order to target ads better and ultimately charge more money for those ads. At the end of 2024, Roku reported annual ad revenues of $3.5 billion, which accounted for 85 percent of its total revenue far higher than its hardware business. Roku also has 90 million users millions more than Apple TV+ who have become a gold mine of data, not just about what they watch on TV but also who they are and what they like. Today, its better to think of Roku not just as an advertising company or the folks who make cheap TVs and streaming sticks, but also as a data company with millions of detailed profiles.The magical world of Moana 2 made an appearance in Roku City when the movie hit streaming in March 2025. RokuRegarding the Moana 2 controversy, Roku said in a statement that the companys growth has and will always require continuous testing and innovation across design, navigation, content, and our first-rate advertising products. The statement also said, Our recent test is just the latest example, as we explore new ways to showcase brands and programming while still providing a delightful and simple user experience.The shift toward ad-supported everything has been happening across the TV landscape. People buy new TVs less frequently these days, so TV makers want to make money off the TVs theyve already sold. Samsung has Samsung Ads, LG has LG Ad Solutions, Vizio has Vizio Ads, and so on and so forth. Tech companies, notably Amazon and Google, have gotten into the mix too, not only making software and hardware for TVs but also leveraging the massive amount of data they have on their users to sell ads on their TV platforms. These companies also sell data to advertisers and data brokers, all in the interest of knowing as much about you as possible in the interest of targeting you more effectively. It could even be used to train AI.The wealth of Rokus first-party data could be a gold mine for Amazon or Google, according to Laura Martin, an analyst at the investment bank Needham and Company. Roku is the perfect size with a really strategic fit, Martin told me, referring to a possible Amazon purchase. She added that Rokus data could also be a boon for any company with AI ambitions, including OpenAI. If I was a large language model, this is data I would absolutely want to own.The streaming industry has faced a reckoning in recent years too: After years of prioritizing growth over all else, companies like Netflix and Disney finally had to start making money. Thats resulted in those companies charging more, bundling services, and introducing cheaper ad-supported tiers. For better or worse, ads are the future of the TV business, just as they were its past. For consumers, its definitely a complicated ecosystem, said Jon Giegengack, founder of Hub Entertainment Research. Giegengack argues, though, that this ecosystem is ultimately better for consumers. In effect, theres a streaming option that works for any budget, and ads fill in the gaps.But not everyone is thrilled to be bombarded by ads and to have their data passively harvested. More ads also means less attention paid to the content you want to watch and more to the ads these companies want you to see. Nevertheless, the trade-off is worth it to a lot of Americans. Some 43 percent of all streaming subscriptions in the United States were ad-supported by the end of last year, according to the market data firm Antenna. Even if you pay for an ad-free tier, youre contributing to the ad ecosystem by giving up your data to whatever streaming platforms you use and even the company that makes your TV.Is it possible to escape the ads? Breaking free from this ad prison is tough. Most TVs on the market today come with a technology called automatic content recognition (ACR) built in. This is basically Shazam for TV Shazam itself helped popularize the tech and gives smart TV platforms the ability to monitor what youre watching by either taking screenshots or capturing audio snippets while youre watching. (This happens at the signal level, not from actual microphone recordings from the TV.) Advertisers and TV companies use ACR tech to collect data about your habits that are otherwise hard to track, like if you watch live TV with an antenna. They use that data to build out a profile of you in order to better target ads. ACR also works with devices, like gaming consoles, that you plug into your TV through HDMI cables. Yash Vekaria, a PhD candidate at UC Davis, called the HDMI spying the most egregious thing we found in his research for a paper published last year on how ACR technology works. And I have to admit that I had not heard of ACR until I came across Vekarias research.They havent kept it secret, but theres no awareness about it, Vekaria told me. So if people dont know, they will not question it.One surprising thingIts very difficult to watch streaming TV and avoid ads altogether these days. One, perhaps surprising option? Your local library. An app called Kanopy taps into the collections of local libraries across the country and has tons of great classic movies, documentaries, and indie films. Its also free and ad-free all you need is a library card.While ACR is popular across platforms, Roku is especially excited about the technology. Many of the companies that Roku has acquired in recent years have been working on ACR, and a Roku-owned company won an Emmy in 2023 for its work on the technology. Roku has also said that, because its share of the TV operating system market is 40 percent, the scale of its data collection capabilities is unparalleled. Unfortunately, you dont have much of a choice when it comes to ACR on your TV. You probably enabled the technology when you first set up your TV and accepted its privacy policy. If you refuse to do this, a lot of the functions on your TV wont work. You can also accept the policy and then disable ACR on your TVs settings, but that could disable certain features too. In 2017, Vizio settled a class-action lawsuit for tracking users by default. If you want to turn off this tracking technology, heres a good guide from Consumer Reports that explains how for most types of smart TVs.To be honest, after learning about all this in the past week or so, I havent done anything revolutionary. I can actually buy into the idea that more relevant ads provide a better experience. I dont need to see ads for a dozen different eczema treatments while Im watching YouTube TV, because I dont have eczema. Im okay learning about a new toy for young kids, because I have a young kid. (Advertising to kids or even letting your kids watch YouTube is an entirely different matter.) So Ive agreed to all the privacy policies and am enjoying my streaming content as the industry intended.But it does bug me, just on principle, that I have to let a tech company wiretap my TV in order to enjoy all of the devices features. If youre set on an ad-free TV experience, your best bet is to buy an old dumb TV off eBay and never connect it to a Roku, Amazon, or Google device. You can buy an antenna for network television, and a DVD player for movies. There are worse Y2K trends to resurrect than being completely offline for a few precious leisure hours.A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you dont miss the next one!See More:

An exceedingly rare event occurred on Wednesday the Supreme Court upheld a federal gun regulation, with four of the Courts Republicans in the majority.Justice Neil Gorsuchs opinion in Bondi v. VanDerStok is narrow, but it turns aside a challenge to a federal regulation targeting ghost guns, disassembled firearm kits that can easily be assembled into a fully functional gun. Under federal law, guns sold in the United States must have a serial number that law enforcement can use to identify the weapon. And someone purchasing such a gun ordinarily must submit to a background check before they can complete the sale. The plaintiffs in this case essentially argued that ghost guns are exempt from these requirements because they are not in working order when they are purchased and thus dont count as guns.Though this Court normally takes an expansive view of gun rights, it disagreed with the VanDerStok plaintiffs, meaning ghost guns are still subject to the same laws they were subject to yesterday.As Gorsuch explains, the plaintiffs argument makes a hash of the relevant statute. That law provides that the background check and serial number requirements apply to any weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive. The plaintiffs primarily argued that a ghost gun does not count as a weapon until it is assembled. But, as Gorsuch notes, people often use a noun like weapon to refer to an item that is not fully constructed. His opinion analogizes ghost guns to a writer who describes their unfinished manuscript as their novel, or to a consumer who refers to the box of disassembled parts they just purchased at IKEA as a table.That said, VanDerStok does not hold that any partially assembled gun is subject to the background check and serial number laws. As Gorsuch explains, the plaintiffs in this case brought a facial challenge to the ghost gun regulation, meaning that they claimed that it must be stuck down in its entirety because there is no set of circumstances where it is valid. While its possible to imagine a set of unfinished gun parts that are so far from completion that they should not be subject to federal regulation, many of the gun kits targeted by the ghost guns regulation are nearly fully complete. As Gorsuch writes, one such kit was so easy to assemble that an individual who had never before encountered the kit was able to produce a gun from it in 21 minutes using only common tools and instructions found in publicly available YouTube videos.So, the fact that at least some ghost gun kits exist that can fairly be described as weapons is enough to defeat a facial challenge. Gorsuchs opinion does, however, leave open the possibility that someone could later bring an as-applied challenge claiming that a particular kit is too far from completion to be subject to the background check and serial number law. (As-applied challenges permit someone to argue that a law or regulation should not apply to them, even if it validly might be applied to others.)VanDerStok, in other words, is a very small victory for the cause of gun control. But it is a victory. And it shows that, at least in a case where the statute is very clear and the pro-gun sides arguments are very weak, this Supreme Court is capable of upholding a gun regulation.See More:

What does a contrarian, grievance-happy comedian do when contrarianism and grievance become the norm? Bill Burr, long the poster child for a type of angry white male misanthrope, may be the last person youd expect to embrace empathy in response to, well, everything but that seems to be the case.Burr recently told NPRs Terry Gross that theres also a part of me that really hates the fact that I have been so angry. His new Hulu comedy special, Bill Burr: Drop Dead Years, leans all the way into that remorse, with jokes that for the most part sidestep giving into anger and remonstrance in favor of self-reflection. Its a far cry from his old persona, which often reveled in jokes about lesbians, fat people, trans athletes, and other marginalized groups who seemed to draw his ire. Burr discusses things that he previously would likely have been the first to ridicule: his experiences with therapy, learning how to be a kinder partner, and the real effects of toxic masculinity on men. He even opens up briefly about experiencing intense depression and childhood sexual abuse. Its pretty weighty stuff, treated with surprising and studious care.Alongside the special, hes also making headlines for taking aim at billionaires, defending Luigi Mangione, getting into fights with conservative commentators, and roasting Elon Musk for doing a Nazi salute a move that he claims got him flagged by the Musk-owned X. Its leading some conservatives to ask, is Burr actually going woke?Well, no, not exactly. But there is something new to the way Burr is positioning himself as a man in 2025 America. He is giving voice to a feeling that the rules or acceptable strategies for climbing the masculinity ladder feel opaque, contradictory, and changing, Northwestern sociologist Rebecca Ewert told Vox, referring to the status hierarchies men have to navigate in a patriarchal society. There have been rules they have never been consistent. Black men need different strategies than white men. There are different ways of proving dominance in a weightlifting gym than on the floor of Congress. Burr is explaining that they feel more contradictory than ever.As a 56-year-old white guy, Burr embodies the much-discussed masculinity crisis yet while griping about his losses, hes also noticing that even his advantages can be shortcomings in disguise. Hes articulating ways the system doesnt serve him, Ewert said, but hes also so afraid to lose that system hes been seeing his whole life. And were seeing that throughout the culture.You might think that anxiety over his perceived loss of status would produce even angrier comedy. Yet counter to prevailing cultural narratives about angry white men getting older and more cantankerous, Burr seems to feel liberated by aging. Hes happy to be getting along better with his wife, relieved to finally be able to say out loud that hes sad. Men arent allowed to be sad, he says, in a self-deprecating moment describing how he opened up to his wife about experiencing emotion. Were allowed to be one of two things. Were allowed to be mad or fine. Its far from an earth-shattering revelation, but it feels significant when its coming from someone like Burr, who previously seemed defiant and even proud of his limited emotional range. He was far from alone; if anything, he was part of a cultural moment that seems geared toward rewarding emotional repression and regressive forms of masculinity. University of Birmingham sociologist Yuchen Yang points out that Burrs sudden interest in chilling out is self-serving on an existential level. He has for many years served as the poster child for a kind of masculinity that, as Yang put it, is not only harmful to women, queer, and people of color, but also detrimental to [men]s own existence.Dominant cultural beliefs about manhood often lead men into an unhealthy lifestyle, Yang said. Yet at the same time, the stigma around vulnerability also makes it difficult for men to seek help when needed, he explains, pointing to therapy, medical invention, and simple wellness tactics as preferable alternatives to doubling down.The real issue, Yang says, is that men are chasing a cultural ideal that is far from realistic. As he points out, Very few men can actually achieve this ideal, and those who do get close to it can hardly embody it all the time. In other words, even as men want to embody a patriarchal masculinity, theyre just as trapped by its societal expectations as everyone else. Over the last decade, the manosphere internet spaces focused on the lives and status of men, dominated by influencers and podcasters like Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan, and a coterie of their peers emerged as both a reaction to and worsening agent for this problem. Yang suggests its existence is an attempt to resolve the inherent contradictions of patriarchy without overthrowing patriarchy. Those in the manosphere want to recover mens natural masculinity, he said, but there is nothing natural about the kind of masculinity they are invested in.While these online spaces give men a sense of community, they also foster growing misogyny, extremism, and disgruntlement. Men now are more isolated than ever, and compared to women, theyre dying younger and are more likely to die by causes including suicide, overdose, or complications from alcohol or drug abuse. Throughout Drop Dead Years, Burr discusses his own struggle with alcohol addiction as well as the broader epidemic of sad men. (The number one place to see sad men? he jokes. Guitar Center.) Yet he seems to have not only recognized all of this, but decided to evolve in response. Burr makes the point that all of that repression of emotion takes a real toll on mens health notable in a special that references his awareness of dying throughout. You start thinking about your life, you know? he confesses. You take stock in it. I start thinking about how fast my lifes going by, how quick my kids are growing up. None of this is quite as simple as man realizes he wants to be a better person as he gets older. What stands out to Ewert is his deep ambivalence about all of this. She notes that Burr often swings from serious discussion about his deepest fears and hopes to jabs about women as if his gut reaction is to punch down in order to remind himself and others that hes not on the bottom.I dont see him making a coherent argument. I see a lot of reactions, she says. Thats relatable I think thats what a lot of men are going through.Theres a sense that Burr has been working out not only how to get in touch with his softer emotions, but how to do softer, less confrontational comedy in a way that still feels nuanced comedy that we might think of as punching sideways instead of either of the expected directions. At one point, he roasts his audience members for laughing at a joke he sets up about Joe Biden and dementia. Not 30 seconds ago, when I said someone in my family got diagnosed [with dementia], you guys were all you could hear a pin drop. And you had empathy, he points out. Second you put a blue or a red tie on it Fuck that old man! Fuck him! Im glad hes gonna die! In recent years, comedy has been treated to a litany of comics, from Dave Chappelle to Louis C.K., who, when called out for various offenses, have doubled down on their commitment to disgruntlement. Burr, too, isnt over the idea; hes still frustrated that the rules about who gets canceled and who doesnt are so inconsistent, still talking about how the social phenomenon has rendered him unable to insult someone who deserves it. Even if he took my last slice of pizza and is denying it with pepperoni on his breath, Burr says, I cant be like, You fat, man-titted c**t. But whatever Bill Burr might say about cancel culture as a corrective, in his case, hes managed to do the one thing that the liberal backlash was seeking all along: listening and trying to be a little better. Its the thing that none of those other comics got around to.I think he has been seeing the real rewards of emotional connection in his life, Ewert said. Yelling on stage is one thing, she notes, but at your house you realize that not yelling makes you feel better. I think theres hope in this message, she continued. If more of us could talk about mens issues, about mens mental health, as the result of a patriarchal system that puts all of us in a hierarchy, then that helps all of us.See More:

The state of a kitchen pantry, closet, or garage says a lot about a person. There are some who seem to have the innate ability to keep their spices alphabetized, their clothes separated by color and season, and power cords neatly wound all in one place. Then there are others with more junk drawers than regular ones and small collections of stuff that have accumulated over time. If youre a member of the latter group, you may have been one of the many curious minds scouring Google for decluttering tips the search term hit a five-year high in 2025 or found yourself in a hypnotic home organizing TikTok wormhole. A home thats disorganized can create anxiety and overwhelm, says Amanda Wiss, the founder of Urban Clarity, a New York City-based professional organization business. In her experience, the greatest decluttering hurdle is finding the will to get started. Some clients have the perception that the task will be too difficult, the project too big. Maybe youre in the same boat. Or perhaps the online content youve seen around home organization rife with expensive bins and colorful labels has you feeling pressured to drop hundreds of dollars on products. However, the secret to decluttering, experts say, is to rely on function over aesthetics and to organize like a real person and not an influencer.RelatedHow to organize your fridge, with tips from chefsStart with a small, manageable taskFor those who struggle getting started, take some pressure off: You dont need to organize your entire house in one weekend. But you should begin with a smaller task or area, ideally one that causes you the most aggravation. Are you constantly tripping over shoes and bookbags as soon as you walk in the door? Start with your entranceway. Does your laundry pile up on an office chair that youd really like to sit in again? Tackle that first. Do you struggle to find a spot for groceries in the fridge? Make that your project for the day.Decluttering is decision-making, Wiss says, and its exhausting, and theres decision fatigue, and you could at some point just hit a wall.If even those assignments seem too big, Wiss suggests breaking them down into micro-tasks: clearing out just the vegetable drawer or storing winter coats. Keep these smaller projects relegated to one room and commit to slowly making progress over time, says professional organizer Robyn Reynolds, the CEO of Southern California-based company Organize2Harmonize. If you do a corner here in this room and a corner there in the other room, youre not really going to see the progress and then youre going to feel defeated, she says. But if you actually are able to finish an entire room, then youre going to feel really motivated and proud of yourself because you actually did it.You might let that momentum carry you onto another small to-do list item. But be mindful of your energy levels. You dont want to empty your pantry and lack the motivation to put everything back. Decluttering is decision-making, Wiss says, and its exhausting, and theres decision fatigue, and you could at some point just hit a wall and then you still need for those piles to go somewhere.Try the three-second rule for purgingWiss has a straightforward three-step approach to decluttering: Sort like with like, purge, then containerize. First, make sure everything you want to organize is in one place. For instance, all of your chargers should live in one area, all of your shoes should be stored in the same place, all your bowls and plates should be in the kitchen. Then, you can see how many chargers or sneakers or bowls you have and pare down where needed.If youre finding it hard to part with impractical but sentimental itemsRemind yourself that youre not discarding the memory of a loved one, just their possessions.If the item is not your style and youll never use it, let it go.Dont hold onto items that will only get damaged over years in storage. So many times when I clear out garages with clients, Reynolds says, so many things we find [have] mold or water damage. So what was the point of holding on to it when it just got destroyed and now theyre throwing it out anyway?The purge stage can often be challenging because many people attach memories and sentiments to objects and find it difficult to part with them. Kayleen Kelly, a professional organizer in Olympia, Washington, developed a three-second rule to help her clients pare down items. After youve collected and sorted all of one category of item like coffee mugs go through one by one and decide which item youll keep. If you hesitate for more than three seconds when weighing whether or not to keep a specific mug, its an automatic keep. This technique ensures youre making confident decisions about what to get rid of. If you cant decide, Kelly says, and you hesitate, theres no punishment for indecision. So you just keep it and you keep moving forward.To further aid your decision-making process, ask yourself if the item is actually useful, Reynolds says. Again, not everything needs to be utilitarian, but it isnt worth keeping posters from college you never plan on hanging up again. But if you do manage to get infrequent but meaningful use out of that family heirloom fondue pot, by all means, keep it. Reynolds also recommends taking photos of sentimental but impractical items and collecting them in a photo book or digital slideshow. That way, you can memorialize grandmas couch without needing to sacrifice space for it in your basement.Once youve pared down items, you can properly organize them. This is where youll create a system for your closet, garage, pantry, or other area youre decluttering. It can be as simple as dedicating one shelf in the linen closet to sheets and another for towels.Dont spend money on organizers when an old shoebox will do Experts have observed clients all-too-common urge to buy expensive organizers and bins before they even start discarding items. Online, influencers push aesthetically pleasing storage containers and label makers, only adding to the pressure that true decluttering involves spending money. Its not about buying more products, Kelly says. The reality is, once you pare down your makeup brushes, you may realize you dont need a container, and a cup from the kitchen will do.The most important aspect of organizing, Kelly says, is for your system of choice to be functional, so dont waste money on eight-tier hangers if you know you lack the patience to put eight shirts on them. If you do need a container, try to reuse what you already have at home, like a shoebox, Tupperware, an old iPhone box, or a piece of cardboard from an Amazon box as a drawer organizer. For everything else, your local dollar store will have inexpensive organizers and bins. Donate what you dont needThe most integral aspect of decluttering is to remove the clutter from your space. Dont get hung up on the logistics until after youve set aside the items you want to get rid of, Kelly says. In her experience, most of her clients discarded items are in good enough condition to be donated. Find a place in your local area that takes the majority of everything, she says. That might be your local Goodwill, Salvation Army, thrift store, or womens shelter. RelatedBuy less stuffAfter organizing smaller spaces, like your linen closet or the cabinet under the sink, you may have a more limited collection of items to donate. You can be more targeted with these donations, Kelly says, since you have less to discard and fewer decisions to make.Local Buy Nothing Facebook groups are also effective in finding your stuff a new home. For items that cant be donated or given away, look up your city or towns recycling rules. If all else fails, throw items in the trash.Make it a habitBecause life inevitably happens, systems may fall into disarray and products may once again accumulate. Decluttering should be an ongoing process throughout the year. To keep her clients in a clutter-free state of mind, Reynolds often imparts some words of wisdom. Everything has a price: time, space, money, or energy, she says. Consider what your clutter is costing you in terms of the time that could be better spent doing anything other than decluttering, the space your items take up, the money it costs to keep, and the vibe it brings to your home.Is it really worth it for me to keep or even buy this particular item, Reynolds says, because what is it costing me?See More:

The Supreme Court spent Wednesday morning giving very serious consideration to a case that no one should take seriously. FCC v. Consumers Research asks the justices to revive a long-dead legal doctrine known as nondelegation, which places strict limits on Congresss authority to delegate power to federal agencies, and essentially move that power over to the judiciary. The problem with this legal doctrine, besides the difficulty it would create for agencies trying to carry out their mandates, is that it appears nowhere in the Constitution, and so it is impossible to come up with principled rules to guide when judges should strike down a law empowering an agency.The Consumers Research case is also a strange vehicle to revive the Nondelegation Doctrine because the particular statute at issue in this case clearly should be upheld under the Courts current nondelegation precedents. In fact, even if the Court were to abandon those precedents in favor of an alternative, more restrictive nondelegation framework that was proposed by Justice Neil Gorsuch in a 2019 dissent, the federal program at issue in Consumers Research should still be upheld. While all six of the Courts Republicans showed sympathy with the broader project of expanding the Courts power to overrule federal agencies, only three of them appeared likely to strike down the law that is actually at issue in Consumers Research. The Courts opinion in this case could still have considerable long-term implications if it embraces Gorsuchs proposed framework or otherwise expands the judiciarys authority. But the statutory scheme that is before the justices right now seems likely to survive.So what is at issue in this case?Consumers Research involves a program known as the Universal Service Fund, which provides telephone and internet service to rural areas and other regions that are difficult to wire. In the absence of this program, these services would be prohibitively expensive in many poorer or more sparsely populated regions of the country.The Universal Service Fund effectively taxes telephone and internet service providers and uses that money to pay for service in these expensive areas. As a practical matter, that means service providers pass the cost of this tax onto their urban and suburban customers so people in cities wind up subsidizing communications for people in rural communities.One challenge Congress faced when it created this program is that the amount of money the Fund must raise to achieve universal service varies from year to year. So, rather than setting a precise annual tax rate for service providers, Congress tasked the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) with determining how much money the fund should collect.The federal statute at issue in Consumers Research provides extraordinarily detailed instructions regarding how to make this determination. It only permits the FCC to subsidize services that are used by a substantial majority of residential customers, it instructs the FCC to raise enough money so that rural customers pay reasonably comparable rates to other customers, and it lays out numerous other principles which the FCC must follow. Thus, the FCC should look at which communications services the overwhelming majority of Americans already have, and it should raise enough funds to ensure that rural customers pay similar rates to urban customers, without raising so much money that rural rates are significantly cheaper.Under the Courts current precedents, Congress must only provide an agency with an intelligible principle that it must follow when it exercises its authority, and theres no serious argument that this statute fails this test. Gorsuchs dissent in Gundy v. United States (2019), which also concerned nondelegation, proposed a new and much vaguer rule Congress must put forth standards sufficiently definite and precise to enable Congress, the courts, and the public to ascertain whether Congresss guidance has been followed but even under Gorsuchs standard it is tough to make an argument that the Universal Service Fund is illegal.Only three of the justices seemed to believe that the Universal Service Fund is illegalPerhaps for this reason, Justice Clarence Thomas suggested a completely novel way to invalidate the Fund. Thomas suggested that the nondelegation doctrine should apply with more force in taxing cases, limiting Congresss power to determine how much a federal agency may raise.One problem with Thomass approach, however, is that the Court held in Skinner v. Mid-America Pipeline Co. (1989) that the Constitution does not require the application of a different and stricter nondelegation doctrine in cases where Congress delegates discretionary authority to the Executive under its taxing power. So reaching Thomass preferred result would require the Court to overrule Skinner.Justice Samuel Alito, meanwhile, followed his typical practice of peppering the side that counters Republican orthodoxy with a series of unrelated questions, in the hopes that they would stumble over one of them and he was joined in this tactic by Justice Gorsuch. Over the course of the argument, Alito and Gorsuch complained that the FCC created a corporation to advise it on how to set rates, that the taxing power can potentially be used to destroy companies, and that the FCC sought input from the same companies that they are taxing. At one point, Gorsuch went off on a strange tangent about how the governments decision to break up Ma Bell in 1982 created other telephone monopolies. None of these arguments are relevant to whether the Universal Service Fund is constitutional, at least under existing law.Meanwhile, the Courts other Republicans asked some skeptical questions of the two lawyers who defended the Fund, but they ultimately seemed to conclude that this particular nondelegation challenge is unworkable. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, for example, did ask acting Solicitor General Sarah Harris how to distinguish between a tax and a fee, a question that suggests that Kavanaugh has some sympathy for Thomass position, but ultimately seemed satisfied with Harriss response that this distinction is unbelievably murky in practice.Similarly, while Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked Harris to distinguish this law from other hypothetical laws that would raise more serious nondelegation questions, such as a law that merely instructed the IRS to raise enough money to provide food for the needy, she too seemed skeptical that this particular law is unconstitutional.Notably, Barrett threw cold water on Thomass suggestion that there should be a special rule for taxes. Congress, she noted, could potentially solve the problem by imposing a cap as high as $3 trillion on the Funds ability to raise money, but that would be an empty requirement that amounts to nothing more than throwing out a number for the sake of throwing out a number.It appears, in other words, that the Republican justices general desire to expand the nondelegation doctrine a desire that five of them have expressed openly at one point or another is likely to run aground in the Consumers Research case because this case is such a poor vehicle to expand nondelegation. Congresss instructions to the FCC were as detailed as they could possibly be, unless the Supreme Court wants to strip Congress of its ability to, as Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said, provide a service, however much it costs.The Court could still use this case to seize powerIts notable that, while even the Trump administration agrees that the Universal Service Fund is legal, the federal government switched its position in this case after Trump took office. The governments initial brief, which was filed in the final two weeks of the Biden administration, argues that the Court should apply existing law and uphold the Fund. By contrast, its reply brief (a brief responding to the other sides arguments) treats Gorsuchs Gundy dissent as if it were the law. The reply brief was filed after Trump took office.Even if the Court upholds the Universal Service Fund, which seems likely, the Republican justices could still use this case to abandon the longstanding intelligible principle framework, which gives Congress a great deal of authority to delegate power to agencies, and replace it with Gorsuchs sufficiently definite and precise framework. Because that later framework is so vague, a decision embracing Gorsuchs approach would give judges far more discretion to strike down federal programs that they do not like.So, even if the Court rejects the exceedingly weak attack on the law at issue in this case, it could still use this case to achieve a significant power grab. Gorsuchs framework would transfer a great deal of power from federal agencies, which are controlled by an elected president, and toward a judiciary dominated by Republicans who serve for life. That would mean that the American people would have far less control over how they are governed.See More:

Can you truly be friends with a chatbot? If you find yourself asking that question, its probably too late. In a Reddit thread a year ago, one user wrote that AI friends are wonderful and significantly better than real friends [...] your AI friend would never break or betray you. But theres also the 14-year-old who died by suicide after becoming attached to a chatbot.The fact that something is already happening makes it even more important to have a sharper idea of what exactly is going on when humans become entangled with these social AI or conversational AI tools. Are these chatbot pals real relationships that sometimes go wrong (which, of course, happens with human-to-human relationships, too)? Or is anyone who feels connected to Claude inherently deluded?To answer this, lets turn to the philosophers. Much of the research is on robots, but Im reapplying it here to chatbots.The case against chatbot friendsThe case against is more obvious, intuitive and, frankly, strong. DelusionIts common for philosophers to define friendship by building on Aristotles theory of true (or virtue) friendship, which typically requires mutuality, shared life, and equality, among other conditions.There has to be some sort of mutuality something going on [between] both sides of the equation, according to Sven Nyholm, a professor of AI ethics at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. A computer program that is operating on statistical relations among inputs in its training data is something rather different than a friend that responds to us in certain ways because they care about us.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.The chatbot, at least until it becomes sapient, can only simulate caring, and so true friendship isnt possible. (For what its worth, my editor queried ChatGPT on this and it agrees that humans cannot be friends with it.)This is key for Ruby Hornsby, a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds studying AI friendships. Its not that AI friends arent useful Hornsby says they can certainly help with loneliness, and theres nothing inherently wrong if people prefer AI systems over humans but we want to uphold the integrity of our relationships. Fundamentally, a one-way exchange amounts to a highly interactive game. What about the very real emotions people feel toward chatbots? Still not enough, according to Hannah Kim, a University of Arizona philosopher. She compares the situation to the paradox of fiction, which asks how its possible to have real emotions toward fictional characters. Relationships are a very mentally involved, imaginative activity, so its not particularly surprising to find people who become attached to fictional characters, Kim says. But if someone said that they were in a relationship with a fictional character or chatbot? Then Kims inclination would be to say, No, I think youre confused about what a relationship is what you have is a one-way imaginative engagement with an entity that might give the illusion that it is real.Bias and data privacy and manipulation issues, especially at scaleChatbots, unlike humans, are built by companies, so the fears about bias and data privacy that haunt other technology apply here, too. Of course, humans can be biased and manipulative, but it is easier to understand a humans thinking compared to the black box of AI. And humans are not deployed at scale, as AI are, meaning were more limited in our influence and potential for harm. Even the most sociopathic ex can only wreck one relationship at a time.Humans are trained by parents, teachers, and others with varying levels of skill. Chatbots can be engineered by teams of experts intent on programming them to be as responsive and empathetic as possible the psychological version of scientists designing the perfect Dorito that destroys any attempt at self-control. And these chatbots are more likely to be used by those who are already lonely in other words, easier prey. A recent study from OpenAI found that using ChatGPT a lot correlates with increased self-reported indicators of dependence. Imagine youre depressed, so you build rapport with a chatbot, and then it starts hitting you up for Nancy Pelosi campaign donations. DeskillingYou know how some fear that porn-addled men are no longer able to engage with real women? Deskilling is basically that worry, but with all people, for other real people.We might prefer AI instead of human partners and neglect other humans just because AI is much more convenient, says Anastasiia Babash of the University of Tartu. We [might] demand other people behave like AI is behaving we might expect them to be always here or never disagree with us. [...] The more we interact with AI, the more we get used to a partner who doesnt feel emotions so we can talk or do whatever we want.In a 2019 paper, Nyholm and philosopher Lily Eva Frank offer suggestions to mitigate these worries. (Their paper was about sex robots, so Im adjusting for the chatbot context.) For one, try to make chatbots a helpful transition or training tool for people seeking real-life friendships, not a substitute for the outside world. And make it obvious that the chatbot is not a person, perhaps by making it remind users that its a large language model.The case for AI friends Though most philosophers currently think friendship with AI is impossible, one of the most interesting counterarguments comes from the philosopher John Danaher. He starts from the same premise as many others: Aristotle. But he adds a twist.Sure, chatbot friends dont perfectly fit conditions like equality and shared life, he writes but then again, neither do many human friends. I have very different capacities and abilities when compared to some of my closest friends: some of them have far more physical dexterity than I do, and most are more sociable and extroverted, he writes. I also rarely engage with, meet, or interact with them across the full range of their lives. [...] I still think it is possible to see these friendships as virtue friendships, despite the imperfect equality and diversity.These are requirements of ideal friendship, but if even human friendships cant live up, why should chatbots be held to that standard? (Provocatively, when it comes to mutuality, or shared interests and goodwill, Danaher argues that this is fulfilled as long as there are consistent performances of these things, which chatbots can do.)Helen Ryland, a philosopher at the Open University, says we can be friends with chatbots now, so long as we apply a degrees of friendship framework. Instead of a long list of conditions that must all be fulfilled, the crucial component is mutual goodwill, according to Ryland, and the other parts are optional. Take the example of online friendships: These are missing some elements but, as many people can attest, that doesnt mean theyre not real or valuable. Such a framework applies to human friendships there are degrees of friendship with the work friend versus the old friend and also to chatbot friends. As for the claim that chatbots dont show goodwill, she contends that a) thats the anti-robot bias in dystopian fiction talking, and b) most social robots are programmed to avoid harming humans. Beyond for and againstWe should resist technological determinism or assuming that, inevitably, social AI is going to lead to the deterioration of human relationships, says philosopher Henry Shevlin. Hes keenly aware of the risks, but theres also so much left to consider: questions about the developmental effect of chatbots, how chatbots affect certain personality types, and what do they even replace? Even further underneath are questions about the very nature of relationships: how to define them, and what theyre for. In a New York Times article about a woman in love with ChatGPT, sex therapist Marianne Brandon claims that relationships are just neurotransmitters inside our brains.I have those neurotransmitters with my cat, she told the Times. Some people have them with God. Its going to be happening with a chatbot. We can say its not a real human relationship. Its not reciprocal. But those neurotransmitters are really the only thing that matters, in my mind.This is certainly not how most philosophers see it, and they disagreed when I brought up this quote. But maybe its time to revise old theories. People should be thinking about these relationships, if you want to call them that, in their own terms and really getting to grips with what kind of value they provide people, says Luke Brunning, a philosopher of relationships at the University of Leeds.To him, questions that are more interesting than what would Aristotle think? include: What does it mean to have a friendship that is so asymmetrical in terms of information and knowledge? What if its time to reconsider these categories and shift away from terms like friend, lover, colleague? Is each AI a unique entity?If anything can turn our theories of friendship on their head, that means our theories should be challenged, or at least we can look at it in more detail, Brunning says. The more interesting question is: are we seeing the emergence of a unique form of relationship that we have no real grasp on?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:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Voxs member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.This past fall, I set out to get rejected as often as I could. A healthy fear of rejection lives inside most people, and has some of us in a chokehold. Being rejected is seen as, at worst, an embarrassing personal failure, and, at best, an obstacle standing in the way of our hearts desires: a dream job, a thriving social circle, a first date with a gorgeous future partner. Last year, it dawned on me that I was actively avoiding rejection in my writing career in order to keep myself safe and small. So I set my sights on denial.I dreamed up a project called November of NO and gathered an online group of 15 people to join me in my quest. Well build resilience by inviting nos into our lives, all in the pursuit of getting to yes, my pitch went. The point was to make rejection itself the goalpost to reduce the fear and stickiness around it, and simultaneously get closer to our objectives. We set goals to eagerly get rejected from job applications, film grants, pitches (my personal goal as a freelance journalist), and other targets of our yearnings. Each week, we logged our attempts, rejections, and finally, any yeses we received.I aimed to get three pitch rejections a week, or 12 in total. When I shifted my attention to rejection rather than success, it felt so much easier to do the work my perfectionism-forward world was topsy-turvy, and getting a no was suddenly worth celebrating. By the end of the month, I had racked up seven rejections and landed three new editorial assignments. Sera Bonds, a November of No group member who has long worked in nonprofit development, says she sent out around 80 total asks that month. It was also her first time tracking the number of rejections she received, even though rampant rejection has been a part of her work for 30 years.I dont take it personally when friends cant hang out, or my teenagers say no, she says. A no is actually a yes to something else.I feel like about five years in, I really learned that theres a critical mass of nos you have to get to get to the number of yeses you need, and it really has nothing to do with me, Bonds says. When I ask somebody for money, or Im looking for a contract or a collaboration, most of the time the reason they say no is something on their end. So now I just trust it, and I dont take it personally.Bond says that attitude has seeped into other parts of her life, too. I dont take it personally when friends cant hang out, or my teenagers say no, she says. A no is actually a yes to something else.Learning to see rejection as opportunity rather than failure can lead to more satisfaction in many aspects of life, from work and personal goals to dating and building strong relationships, experts say. And research has long shown that having high rejection sensitivity can mean developing low self-esteem; avoiding closeness in relationships, especially romantic ones; and is linked to a higher risk of other mental health issues such as anxiety and depression. Plus, failing, regrouping, and getting back up again builds resilience. As the adage goes, you miss every shot you dont take and even missed shots can help you take better aim. Ryan C. Warner, a psychologist and consultant, trains his leadership and business clients to adopt a rejection mindset, which means learning to approach rejection rather than avoid it. Its teaching individuals to deliberately seek out situations where they may fail and, ultimately, that helps build confidence that they will succeed.That emotional pain that we experience from rejection gives our brains a signal: Hey, somethings wrong.Our aversion to rejection is deeply rooted in evolutionary psychology, Warner says. Fitting into social groups helps ensure our survival, so we instinctively learned to avoid any behavior that caused a negative social reaction. Rejection triggers a response in the amygdala, the part of the brain that processes emotions as well as our fight or flight instinct.That emotional pain that we experience from rejection gives our brains a signal: Hey, somethings wrong, Warner says. You need to react, or you need to avoid, so you dont feel that pain anymore. When this is constantly reinforced, it will ultimately recreate that fear of future rejection internally, [and lead to] avoidance.Some neurodivergent people might experience rejection aversion even more acutely. Some 6 percent of American adults have ADHD, and people with ADHD can experience rejection sensitivity dysphoria (RSD), or intense emotional pain when faced with rejection. Anushka Basu, a 29-year-old finance writer based in India, was diagnosed with ADHD after experiencing extreme social anxiety during college, and later RSD, which she says starts subtle but, eventually, freezes my body and mind. It was a long process for Basu to learn how to better handle rejection, she says. It starts with friends and family pointing out your shortcomings, she wrote in an email. Then, we go on to internalize it, and before we know it, it paralyzes us. So, in essence, we reject our own selves before anyone else.How to have a better relationship to rejection It is possible for each of us to build more tolerance to rejection, and even to grow our self-confidence and self-acceptance as we do it. The key is to learn to understand no as a hallway to the next room rather than a closed door in your face and that its not usually personal. Helping people with RSD conquer fear of rejection is a key part of the work that therapist Billy Roberts, founder of Focused Mind ADHD Counseling in Columbus, Ohio, does with his clients. Ultimately, if someone tells you no, the default isnt that they think youre worthless or that they think youre a bad person or not good enough, Roberts says. Youve got to learn to manage your emotions so that you can put yourself out there again and then eventually you win, because youre putting yourself in situations where winning is a possibility.1) Create rejection goals Warner recommends deciding on an aspect of your life you want to improve or change, then creating tangible goals. He finds the SMART framework helpful that is, setting goals that are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART). This means your goals are actually achievable and trackable over time, and youll know whether or not you hit them. For example, if you want to date more, you might set a SMART goal to go on five dates in the next three months, or meet five new people which necessarily entails putting yourself out there more. Just make sure your goals are realistic.I think its definitely effective for people, having measurable [goals] that you feel like youre making progress toward, Roberts says. But people set themselves up and theyre like, Im going to apply for 100 jobs this week, and then they have a hard time taking action on that.Carla Birnberg, an author who writes a newsletter about building habits for a successful life, first got more comfortable with rejection when she was shopping her book manuscript around 2000. It definitely desensitized me to rejection, she says. Now, she has a goal to get rejected as a podcast guest five times a week. I would love to be on two podcasts a month, but I know five rejections a week is the only way to get there, Birnberg says. It brings me closer to that yes.She also uses peoples responses and feedback to refine her message, and hopefully get a higher response and approval rate as she goes along. Rejections arent all the same, she says.2) Reflect on your rejection hangupsBoth meditation and journaling are easy and inexpensive ways to get to know yourself better, and have proven mental health benefits. They can also help you interrogate your response to rejection. Ask yourself, What are some times I may be rejecting myself? Warner says. You can also get guided support from a professional with therapy or counseling.When Basu realized she didnt want to define herself through rejection, she began to analyze rejections in her journal, asking herself why each situation did not work out as she had hoped or expected. Then, she wrote down things she learned, what she could do differently next time, and how this rejection might change her future for good. She began to notice that some rejections werent personal, and took note of her own resilience.In hindsight, I noticed moments where I thought rejection spelled the end, yet I ended up with something better down the line, Basu says. I started telling myself, I am good enough. Over time, I started to view rejection as a part of the process towards finding the right prospects. And I began looking at job applications as a numbers game. I knew that at least one would land if I kept at it. I started to view rejections as a need for redirection instead of failure.3) Trust that rejection can get easier and builds confidence The catch-22 of rejection is that you have to experience it, recover, and try, try again to get that positive feedback loop going, Roberts says. The more rejections you sail through, the easier it will get, and, eventually, the more youll discover that risk, and even straight up rejection, does reap rewards. Roberts wants to remind people that action comes before healing, meaning its only through repeatedly being rejected, processing your emotions, and moving forward that you will eventually have a reduction in anxiety around rejection. [People say], I want to feel more confident, and then Ill ask them to hang out, or then Ill apply for the job, when I actually think its the opposite, Roberts says. We have to put ourselves out there and embrace the discomfort, knowing that that discomfort will reduce, and take action towards our goals.See More:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Voxs member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.If you want to observe a particularly American problem, go open your phones Venmo app. Click on me and then click on transfer. If you have a balance in your account, youll be given two options. Option one gives you your money for free but in up to 3 biz days. The other option is instant, but comes with a price tag of 1.75 percent of the transfer, going up to $25 for large transactions. Getting access to your own money comes with a price, either in time or in cash.The problem is relatively trivial when it comes to settling up restaurant bills with your friends, but for more life-critical things like rent or paychecks, these delays really matter. Its an especially embarrassing situation when other countries, like Brazil, Japan, and the UK made instant bank transfers ubiquitous and affordable years ago.If you work through the full costs of what Americans pay for their payment system, Dan Awrey, a professor at Cornell Law School and an expert on payment systems, told me, its probably the most expensive payment system in the G20 by a pretty significant margin. The Brookings Institutions Aaron Klein, one of the few vocal advocates for instant payments, has estimated that the costs to consumers from delayed payments, from overdraft fees to interest on the loans Americans take out to cover their expenses, could be as much as $10 billion a year.In fairness, the US is trying to do better. For years, the Federal Reserve has been building out an instant payments system called FedNow, meant to supplement or eventually supplant traditional ACH (automatic clearing house) transfers, the slow but cheap multiday check-clearing system now used for many transactions, like paychecks and rent payment. So far, though, its been largely a bust. The services most recent quarterly report, for Q3 2024, reported only 336,000 transactions. By contrast, the Fed processed 5 billion ACH transfers that quarter; next to that, FedNow is a rounding error.FedNow offers faster payments, at a low price to banks, which could help workers get paychecks earlier and move money between accounts more easily, possibly avoiding costly overdraft charges. Why have so few banks switched over?Klein describes it as a case of industry sabotage. Banks maximize profit, Klein summarizes. The slow payment system is more profitable to them.How money movesTo understand why, lets back up for a second. How, exactly, does money move around the banking system right now?The main method, familiar from getting direct deposited paychecks or depositing physical checks, is ACH. This is known as a deferred net settlement system. Individual checks are not processed on their own: If my granddad sends me a check for $50, and I deposit it in my checking account, my bank does not, the second that happens, add $50 to my balance and tell my granddads bank to debit $50 to his balance. Instead, a few times a day the payment authority (in the US, this is almost always the Federal Reserve) will collate millions of check payments made, and then deduct or add the total amount that specific banks owe or are owed when all those payments are processed. This is the net part of net settlement. Once their own books are settled, banks then confirm the charges in individual checking or savings accounts.ACH has changed and sped up over the years, but this basic approach remains. Even so-called same-day ACH often dont post the day theyre initiated. (Zelle, the instant peer-to-peer payment system offered by many banks, is just a wrapper on ACH payments still take days to settle, even though funds are made available earlier than usual to customers.) So payments arent processed in real time, but in batches at regular intervals. That means waiting.Who benefits from this system? Not the people sending or receiving payments, of course. But banks benefit in a few ways. While payments are processed, the sending bank can still use the money being transferred (the float, in finance jargon) to make profitable loans.The systems sluggishness used to be an even bigger problem back when checks needed to be physically present at the bank where theyre deposited before a transaction could be processed. Banks had to use car and plane courier services to schlep checks around and on September 11, 2001, with planes grounded, $47 billion in mid-process payments were stuck, unable to settle. To avoid a repeat of that experience, Congress in 2003 finally passed the Check 21 Act, eliminating the requirement for checks to be physically present. That cut check processing times by one day on average, which per one study, saved check recipients over $1 billion a year, money that used to accrue to banks.While Check 21 reduced float revenue for banks, delays in ACH mean they still get some. If the payments were instant, that source of profit would be gone.Payment delays can also lead to problems like account overdrafts, which in turn allow banks to charge consumers fees. The average fee costs users $27 per overdraft; in 2023 alone, banks earned $5.8 billion from the fees. Most large banks only earn a small share of their revenue from fees charged to checking and savings account holders, of which overdraft and non-sufficient funds fees are the most common type. JPMorgan Chase earned 2.1 percent of its revenue that way per the most recent data available, while Bank of America got 2.7 percent. But a small handful of banks are heavily dependent on the fees to survive.Woodforest National Bank in Texas, for instance, earned 22.4 percent of its revenue, over $192 million, from fees on account holders as of last year. Thats more than the $154.6 million in profit the bank made last year: Without fees, theyd have been in the red. There are several banks in that situation. First National Bank of Texas earned depositor fees worth over three times their profit margin in 2024. Gate City Bank in Fargo, North Dakota, had fees worth more than twice its profits. So too did Arvest Bank in Arkansas, owned by the Walton family of Walmart fame. While the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau has been pushing to lower these fees in recent years, with some success, that seems likely to end with the Trump administrations move to defang that agency.Outside the formal banking system, check clearing delays create demand for expensive, and sometimes predatory, services like check-cashing that charge customers money for deposits that would be free at a normal bank. According to Brookings Klein, about 70 percent of people using check-cashing services already have checking accounts: They just want the money now. Instant payments would remove the market for check-cashers, as well as revenue for banks reliant on overdraft fees.Whatll it take to get fast payments?All that said, it would be overly simplistic to blame slow payments in the US entirely on bank greed. Consumers arent exactly demanding faster payments, because credit and debit cards allow them to experience many payments as though theyre instant.Theyre not actually instant settlement on credit and debit card networks happens in net, batched fashion, just like ACH and the fees involved are exorbitant. Demand for something better than what we have hasnt been great because what we have is reasonably efficient. Timothy Massad, as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2014 to 2017The major credit card networks vary dramatically in what they charge, but for credit transactions, the fees are generally in the 1 to 3 percent range. Retailers pay that every time they charge a credit card. Debit fees used to be in that range, too, until Barack Obama signed the Dodd-Frank Act in 2010, which set a cap, currently at 21 cents plus 0.05 percent of the transaction amount. But some debit transactions, like cashing out your Venmo, still fall outside that cap hence the 1.75 percent fee for getting your Venmo cash. Its not just Venmo, either, as banks like PNC also charge around 2 percent to get your cash immediately.Credit and debit fees are ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. But theyre usually paid by the retailer and thus hidden from customers, giving them little reason to object; theyre not listed on a receipt like a sales tax.For individuals, the fact that we have a very extensive credit and debit card industry and then more recently mobile banking and apps on your phone those have made people feel fairly satisfied, Timothy Massad, who served as chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission from 2014 to 2017 and works on payments issues, told me. Demand for something better than what we have hasnt been great because what we have is reasonably efficient.Among small retailers, the demand for something better is greater, and louder. Fights against high retailer fees charged by Visa and Mastercard are now a mainstay of congressional politics and the courts; just last year, the two networks agreed to cap fees after a decades-long antitrust suit by retailers. The stakes here could be large: Empirical research Awrey is working on now, he said, is finding that for many small businesses, card swipe fees can eat away a large share of their net margins, and could make the difference between viability and failure. If you look at the squeezing of small business margins, he says, a surprisingly large extent of that can be accounted for by merchant fees and interchange.But itll take more than retailer anger to turn a system like FedNow from its current near-moribund state into something that, say, Vox uses to send me my paycheck, or that I use to send my rent to my landlord. A common thread among countries that have made the transition, like Brazil and the UK, Klein says, is a central bank that fought hard to adopt the new system and overcame objections from banks worried about losing out. That push can yield big dividends. In Brazil, the rollout of the Pix instant payments system has pushed normal transactions at stores away from expensive debit and credit cards and toward Pix, meaning retailers pay lower fees, and dont pass the cost onto consumers. According to research by the Ohio State University economist Sergey Sarkisyan, Pix also spurred much more competition among traditional banks and enabled more Brazilians to get interest-bearing accounts and loans, resulting in benefits for the average Brazilian of around $380 per quarter.But here in the US, the Federal Reserve is not exactly motivated to launch a push like that. Payments are, perhaps understandably, not a focus of the Feds Board of Governors, which is preoccupied with monetary policy and bank regulation (Have you ever met somebody who said that theyre excited to serve on the Federal Reserve Board because they want to focus on payments? Klein asked me. Indeed, Ive met several people excited to serve on the Board and none of them wanted to focus on payments.)Without action from the Feds governing body, the issue falls to the agencys staff, which does not tend to want to rock boats, certainly not those of client banks. But not rocking the boat might mean saddling us with a costly, decrepit, out-of-date payment system for many more years to come.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 biggest story in America is, and should remain, the Trump administrations accidental inclusion of Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg on a Signal group chat about planning airstrikes in Yemen.This is not only colossally incompetent, but a scandal of the first proportion: Top officials, including the vice president and secretary of defense, discussing the most sensitive information on a commercially available app that is both easy for foreign adversaries to penetrate and seemingly designed to circumvent the public records laws that allow for scrutiny of their policy communications.But this is more than just incompetent and scandalous: its revelatory. The chat logs give us an unusually unvarnished look into key players worldview, the kind of thing historians usually have to wait decades to access. And what was said points to the incoherence of the Trump foreign policy project: a worldview that cannot decide on what it means to put America first. The Trump team, taking its cue from the president, is trying to pursue two contradictory visions at the same time to maintain Americas status as the worlds leading power while also trying to scale down its international commitments. They want to simultaneously dominate the world and withdraw from it.These contradicting views of what America First means America as first among nations, or America scaling back to put its internal affairs first were visible even before the new administration took office. The text logs confirm, in dramatic fashion, that the contradictions are shaping policy, producing an internal debate over war and peace that proceeds on bizarre and incoherent terms.All of this suggests there is no coherent Trump foreign policy doctrine. And there likely never will be.The ideological incoherence exposed by the chat logsWaltz created the Signal group to discuss implementing the presidents directive to take a harder line on the Houthis, an Iranian-backed militant group in Yemen. Since the outbreak of the Gaza war, the Houthis have been firing missiles at ships near Yemen in order to attack international shipping. Specifically, they have targeted a commercially vital route that runs through the Bab al-Mandeb Strait off Yemens coast to the Suez Canal and then, from there, into the Mediterranean and Europe.At its peak, the Houthi campaign was doing meaningful damage to the global economy. But the pace of attacks had slowed dramatically over the past year thanks to a combination of the shipping industry changing routes, a multilateral military campaign weakening Houthi capabilities, and the Houthis declaring a pause during the Gaza ceasefire. The Houthis, in short, simply arent the threat to global commerce they used to be.So why bomb them at all?This was the subject of the most substantive exchange Goldberg revealed, one initiated by Vice President JD Vance. The administration, Vance suggested, was making a mistake by launching the airstrikes at this moment. In his view, the Houthis are not really an American problem.3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesnt understand this or why its necessary, he writes. I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. Theres a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices.Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, agrees with Vance on Europe: I fully share your loathing of European free-loading. Its pathetic. However, he argued, restoring Freedom of Navigation is a core national interest and only the United States had the military capabilities to do meaningful damage to the Houthis.These short comments reveal two very distinct underlying assumptions about the world.Vance seems to think the United States should narrowly focus only on things that immediately affect it, and do virtually nothing that benefits other nations more even if theyre American allies. Hegseth, by contrast, believes that the United States has truly global interests that America benefits from maintaining freedom of navigation, and thus it can and should fight to keep global trade flows unobstructed.There is, in theory, nothing wrong with members of the White House team disagreeing ideologically. In fact, it can be healthy.But when these disagreements are this irreconcilable, the president needs to step in and make a decision as to which one will define policy going forward. And this president cant.For nearly a decade now, Trump himself has long advanced both a transactional view of American foreign policy the Vance whats in it for me? approach to world affairs while insisting that America remain the dominant global power, one whose might sets the term for world affairs. The fact that these approaches counsel fundamentally different approaches on different issues like Yemen never appears to cross his mind.You can see this on display in the chat logs when Stephen Miller, one of Trumps most trusted advisers, intervenes in the Vance-Hegseth debate.As I heard it, the president was clear: green light, but we soon make clear to Egypt and Europe what we expect in return. We also need to figure out how to enforce such a requirement, Miller writes. If Europe doesnt remunerate, then what? If the US successfully restores freedom of navigation at great cost there needs to be some further economic gain extracted in return.Miller, seemingly speaking on behalf of the president, is trying to have it both ways. Yes, the United States should be policing the worlds shipping lanes, but it also should be providing an itemized bill to countries that benefit and figuring out how to extract payments if they wont cough up.Yet the entire argument for why the United States should be protecting global shipping is that its a genuinely global concern. When the Houthi attacks were at their peak last year, the disruption to the shipping industry affected prices and supply chains everywhere. Thats how things work in a global economy.You can argue, coherently, that these disruptions are not significant enough to warrant the use of deadly force. Thats a reasonable position, if one I might not necessarily agree with.But what you cant argue is that the shipping disruption is a problem worth killing for and that America should be charging the Europeans for it as if theyre the only people that benefit. The Miller-Trump position isnt just mafia-esque: its incoherent.Its an incoherence born out of a deep refusal by everyone involved to recognize that Trumps belief in America being great and awesome is at odds with his belief that being deeply involved in foreign affairs is a mugs game that allows our allies to take advantage of us.Once you start to see this contradiction, its visible across Trumps foreign policy. Its part of why, for example, his rationales for imposing tariffs on Canada are constantly shifting and mutually contradictory. And its why there never will be a coherent Trump doctrine: because the man who would create one has no interest in doing even a cursory examination of the tensions in his own ideas.See More:

The Social Security Administration which distributes benefits to tens of millions of retired workers, people with disabilities, and their families is in crisis.Since billionaire Elon Musks Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) set its sights on finding fraud in Social Security, the agency has been trying to shed 12 percent of its workforce, or 7,000 workers. Leland Dudek, who took over as acting commissioner of the Social Security Administration in February, has pushed out officials and prompted others to resign in protest of his leadership. He has canceled research contracts with universities, including one that studied demographic trends, and closed six regional offices.Plus, the agency recently announced that it will soon no longer allow claimants to verify their identity on the phone, instead requiring them to go online or to field offices in person, a move that would likely delay peoples benefits from being delivered.As a result, field offices have gotten so understaffed that managers have doubled up as receptionists, answering calls at the front desk because there arent enough people to handle the phones, according to the report in the Washington Post. Phone lines have been jammed, with beneficiaries waiting as long as four or five hours to connect with a customer service representative. Congressional offices and the AARP have noted a spike in calls from constituents concerned about their Social Security benefits. The Social Security Administrations website has also crashed several times.This is all happening because of Trump officials insistence that Social Security is mired in fraud. Trump and Musk have both falsely claimed that a large number of people who have been dead for decades are still receiving social security benefits. Despite those claims, experts say that the Trump administration is vastly overstating the problem. A federal judge who stopped Musks team from gaining access to sensitive personal data said that DOGE has launched a search for the proverbial needle in the haystack, without any concrete knowledge that the needle is actually in the haystack.The current mess was largely anticipated. Martin OMalley, the former Democratic governor of Maryland who served as Social Security commissioner during the Biden administration, has warned that DOGEs actions threaten to collapse the system and interrupt benefits.Trump has claimed that he will not cut Social Security. But his administrations assault on Social Security (all under the guise of going after fraud, waste, and abuse) has critics worried that hes putting Social Security onto a path toward privatization.Trump administration officials have also acknowledged a potential disruption in Social Security payments. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, for example a billionaire and former Wall Street executive claimed that people wouldnt complain if they dont receive their Social Security payments, saying that only those committing fraud would try to raise concerns. Lets say Social Security didnt send out their checks this month. My mother-in-law, whos 94, she wouldnt call and complain, he said in a podcast interview. She just wouldnt. Shed think something got messed up, and shell get it next month. A fraudster always makes the loudest noise, screaming, yelling, and complaining.The reality, however, is that millions of people rely on Social Security to make ends meet. The program lifts more than 20 million people out of poverty each year more than any other federal program. So if the Trump administration doesnt quickly pull Social Security out of this crisis, a whole lot of people will complain. And Lutnick will soon find out that his prediction is likely to be very, very wrong.See More:

The second Trump administration has shown remarkable aggression in abruptly canceling hundreds of millions of dollars in research grants at elite universities in an effort to force them to make major policy changes in line with the presidents politics.Trump officials revoked $400 million in research funding to Columbia University (illegally, per experts). Theyve also paused $175 million in funds to the University of Pennsylvania.Thats likely just the start. Theyve threatened dozens of other schools. And the National Institutes for Health (NIH) is also trying to change its research funding formula in a way that would hit elite universities particularly hard.The administrations demands on these schools include cracking down on protesters of Israels war in Gaza, disallowing trans women athletes from womens sports teams, and ending the practice of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in admissions and campus life. For Columbia, Trump officials even demanded the Middle Eastern, South Asian, and African studies department be taken out of the hands of its current leadership a threat to academic freedom from the state.All this fits into a larger strategy. Right-wingers have increasingly come to believe that elite universities are one of the main incubators of woke cultural progressivism; that, by advancing left-wing ideas about various issues and socializing young Americans into believing them, they help progressives dominate the culture. Winning the culture war, they believe, requires a more aggressive attack on elite universities to hurt them, and to coerce them into being more sympathetic to the right.And Trump officials believe the tens of billions of dollars in research funding the federal government provides to academic institutions gives them leverage to make this happen.They are apparently correct in this belief. On Friday, Columbia agreed to give in to various demands Trump officials had made, including giving campus police new powers to arrest student protesters and taking its Middle Eastern studies department away from its current leadership. (Trump officials have not yet said theyll restore the revoked $400 million.)All this comes at a cost to the nation. One key reason Republican presidents havent tried anything like this before: This research funding is largely for scientific and medical research, generally not for woke or political stuff. Until recently, there was bipartisan agreement that such research funds shouldnt be used to play political games. Now, though, its being used as a weapon in the rights war against the left.I think that putting the universities into contraction, into a recession, into declining budgets, into a greater competitive market pressure, would discipline them, conservative activist Christopher Rufo said recently. He wanted to threaten federal funding to universities, he said, to put them in an existential terror. Which is exactly whats happening. How elite universities came to rely on federal funding and how conservatives realized this was leverageAs World War II made the US a global superpower and the Cold War pitted it against the Soviet Union, the federal government provided a huge commitment of research funds to try to make the US the global leader in science and technology. Much of that funding went to higher education institutions, funding for labs, experiments, and other studies from university-affiliated researchers. (Student loans, meanwhile, became another hugely important source of federal funds to universities.)For nearly as long, elite universities have drawn the ire of conservatives who have argued that theyre poisoning the minds of Americas youth with their far-left ways, while being intolerant toward the right. For instance, when protests over the Vietnam War and other social justice issues dominated campuses in the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Richard Nixon seethed in the Oval Office: The professors are the enemy. Professors are the enemy. Write that on the blackboard 100 times and never forget it. Though Nixons administration and state governments wanted new laws punishing universities, few of these measures passed and fewer were enforced, historian Ellen Schrecker has written. Further national controversies in which conservatives were angry about happenings at elite universities also tended to fizzle out.Over the past decade, though, elite universities have become increasingly central to the rights narrative about what ails America and conservatives have gotten more serious about trying to do something about it.Many on the right have spent much of the past decade seething about the Great Awokening the leftward move of the culture around race, gender, and sexuality in the mid-to-late 2010s. Incidents at colleges and universities involving the alleged mistreatment of conservatives or people with non-left views got attention in the national media, and similar controversies soon unfolded across American society.Influential voices on the right argued that wokeness was in large part created by elite universities. Rufo, for instance, argued that it was the evolution of a legal scholarship school known as critical race theory, and that to defeat it, conservatives needed to go after elite universities.The blogger Curtis Yarvin, meanwhile, had argued for years that progressives dominated the countrys culture because of the Cathedral elite academic and media institutions that, in his telling, set the bounds of acceptable political discourse and distort reality to fit their preferred ideological frames. Such explanations like these seemed to ring true to those on the right frustrated by the leftward cultural shift. It named a specific enemy that could be fought against, as part of a strategy for gaining cultural power for the right.So by 2021, then-Senate candidate (and Yale Law School alum) JD Vance was arguing that conservatives have to honestly and aggressively attack the universities in this country. So much of what drives truth and knowledge as we understand it in this country, Vance said, is fundamentally determined by universities who are very hostile to the right. Why, he asked, had conservatives accepted that state of affairs? Wasnt it time to do something about it?Why the second Trump administration finally went through with trying to defund universitiesThe idea of pulling federal research funding from universities due to excessive wokeness was kicking around during the first Trump administration. Trump even signed an executive order that he claimed would do this back in 2019. But this turned out to be mostly toothless. The appetite to punish universities was not yet so strong to make it really happen.In the early 2020s, though, the rights backlash against academia intensified further, due to new controversies.The second Trump administration is far more willing to bend and blatantly break the law, to try and get what they want.Part of this was specifically a backlash against the medical establishment. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the rights distrust of scientists and public health experts deepened, due to vaccine skepticism and other controversies. So putting medical research funding at risk no longer seemed so unthinkable to them; indeed, it was arguably desirable.As secretary of the Department Health and Human Services, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. now oversees much of this research spending through the NIH. Kennedy and his allies seem not just willing but downright eager to take a wrecking ball to the medical research status quo. ($250 million of the frozen $400 million in Columbia funds was NIH funding.)Meanwhile, a separate backlash began, in response to campus protests against Israels war in Gaza. Many students and faculty members supported the protests, but others including major donors opposed them, and argued Jewish students had become newly unsafe on campus. Trump took this up as a cause: His threats to Columbia came through his new Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism.A final reason this attack on universities is happening now is that the second Trump administration is far more willing to bend and blatantly break the law, to try and get what they want. The revocation of Columbias funds, analysts have said, is illegal. Cornell Law School professor Michael Dorf wrote that the federal government can cut off funding to punish civil rights violations, but only after a lengthy process. Instead, perhaps inspired by Elon Musks move fast and break the law approach, Trump officials just went ahead and did it.Wheres the pushback?All this seems to be working out quite well for the administration so far, as universities appear to be conceding to their demands. Some schools are being proactive: The University of California announced last week that it would drop mandatory diversity statements from its hiring process.And despite the seeming illegality of Trump revoking Columbias funds, the school didnt sue in court to try and stop it. Columbia instead opted to seek an agreement with Trump officials. Per the Wall Street Journals Douglas Belkin, the university feared that a court fight would simply spur Trumps team to find other legal avenues to take back those or other funds. (Columbia receives far more in federal funding that wasnt yet revoked.)So it seems that Trump officials and right-wing activists really did figure out how to effectively use federal funds as leverage to coerce universities. Such cuts would be devastating and universities deeply want to avoid them.But Belkins Columbia sources cited another reason for the schools concession: The schools leadership also believed there was considerable overlap between needed campus changes and Trumps demands.So university trustees and administrators, according to this reporting, believed the Gaza war protests had gone too far and needed to be reined in. At least in part, they were using Trumps demands as an excuse to make changes they wanted to make anyway.This is part of a broader dynamic, in which many elites formerly sympathetic to left causes or at least unwilling to fight them have turned against the left. Many progressives, meanwhile, seem exhausted and disillusioned, and are no longer fighting back with much fervor. It isnt the first Trump administration anymore, when social justice activists felt the arc of history was bending in their direction.The implications here are ominous. Trumps research funding extortion worked so well that he (and future Republican presidents) will surely be encouraged to use similar tactics again and again. Could a precondition for future federal funds be obeisance to the conservative agenda? How in the world can a situation where universities are so dependent on federal cash coexist with long-term academic freedom?See More:

The only thing worse than being homeless in America is not being considered homeless in America, says Brian Goldstone, a journalist and ethnographer. Americas homelessness crisis extends far beyond what we see on the streets, and Goldstone wants us to pay attention to those who are hidden from public view. In his new book, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America, Goldstone examines the lives of families caught in extended-stay motels, sleeping in cars, or shuffling between precarious arrangements situations that often leave them uncounted in official homeless statistics despite housing instability. His reporting challenges the longstanding American narrative connecting homelessness with unemployment or an unwillingness to work.I spoke with Goldstone about the distinction between falling and being pushed into homelessness, the stigma attached to the homeless label, and his perspective on what meaningful solutions might require. Our conversation has been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.You note that many people with unstable housing situations resist identifying as homeless. How does this reluctance to adopt the label affect both individuals experiences and our collective understanding of the housing crisis?There is absolutely a stigma attached to the term homeless and theres also a way in which HUDs prevailing definition of homelessness where only those who are sleeping on the streets or in homeless shelters count has filtered into the public narrative and the public imagination. The people Im writing about in my book belong to that public they themselves often dont recognize themselves as homeless when theyre doubling up with friends or sleeping in motels. Theyre often surprised to learn, for example, that their kids schools, and the Department of Education, do consider them homeless if theyre in those situations. These official metrics and official ways of conceptualizing the problem absolutely impact the people experiencing it on a psychological level.One person in my book, Celeste, her house burns down and when she finds she can basically secure no other apartment because an eviction has been filed against her, she and her son wind up at this extended stay hotel. At some point a social worker at her sons elementary school gave her this homeless resource list. But Celeste was like, Im not putting that homeless label on me and my kids. Part of it was this idea that she didnt want to speak something into existence, she didnt want to make this homeless category her identity. But in practical terms, she also ignored those resources until she was later diagnosed with cancer and she realizes that shes in this hotel trap thats virtually impossible to get out of.So there was that tension of refusing the [homeless] category, but then realizing she needs the category. We have a measure of poverty in America and a lot of people who fall under the poverty threshold dont want to necessarily think of themselves as impoverished, but that that definition and threshold is absolutely essential for determining and parceling out resources. Most of the reporting for your book was done before homelessness really blew up post-pandemic as a political issue in the US, with encampments and then the Supreme Court case. Tell me about your decision to not bring that more recent history into the book.I didnt know a pandemic was coming, but in retrospect, I think its really important to show that the emergency that we became more aware of during the pandemic when we saw how absolutely threadbare the social safety net was was already well on its way. The pandemic intensified rather than produced this housing catastrophe. As far as how all this relates to the encampment sweeps, the criminalization of homelessness, the war on unhoused people that has been unleashed and given the green light by the Grants Pass decision, I tried to not draw a clear line of demarcation between the kind of homelessness that has become the object of those sorts of crackdowns, and the more invisible or hidden population that Im writing about, which are largely working families. By and large these tents on the street are like the tip of the iceberg, and thats the most extreme edge of homelessness in America. A lot of the people Im writing about in the book are like whats under the water surface. But its important to say that this is all one giant iceberg. The more extreme and acute this emergency gets, the more visible it becomes, because it simply pushes up to the surface. But until we address whats under that surface or or out of view, that visibility will continue. There just wont be enough places for it to hide, so to speak.Other countries have for-profit housing systems but dont experience our level of homelessness. Based on your reporting, do you see a way forward that could maintain aspects of our current system while meaningfully addressing homelessness, or does the solution require more fundamental change?I hesitate to enter directly into debates over market-rate housing and zoning reform and tenant rights and rent control. My own view is that we need everything like that, and nothing on its own is going to be sufficient. The only thing that might truly be sufficient is a massive investment at every level of government in social housing. I think that we can only convince ourselves that these kinds of half measures are adequate when we have narrowed the scope, magnitude and nature of the crisis. I dont think that a few tiny homes here or a couple of permanent supportive housing units over there are anywhere close to what we need to truly address the magnitude and severity of this problem. But it doesnt mean that we dont also need those things. So yes, something fundamental has to change in how we approach housing in America. Some of your characters developed a fairly cynical view of the homeless services industry, and we have a new Republican administration casting doubt on the idea of more subsidies to help. Certainly reading your book one could see a little bit how that might be true. What is your own view now? I think the current system is very much working within the constraints that have been imposed on this world of homeless services, and in many cases theyre doing the best they can with what they have. Homeless service providers have been told to prioritize those who according to certain scholars and experts on this issue are most at immediate risk of dying on the street and so theyre trying to ration out scarce resources. I think the problem is not the system itself. Its what has shaped that system. You focused a lot in your book on extended stay hotels and motels which are these last-resort options where people pay a lot of money for pretty poor quality conditions, receive none of the traditional tenant protections, and are often not counted as officially homeless when staying there, even as they cant afford to go anywhere else. They exist in such a gray area of our housing conversation. How are you thinking about these places today?For the thousands and thousands of families and individuals living at these extended stay hotels, which are effectively for-profit homeless shelters, theyre places where the casualties of Americas housing crisis have been consigned and then people find it almost impossible to leave. The way I think about them often is like the only thing worse than being homeless in America is not being considered homeless in America. The only thing worse than being a low-income tenant in America is not even having the privilege of being considered a tenant. I think the people living in these hotels are at once the most vulnerable renters in America and the most vulnerable homeless people in America. And I know it sounds paradoxical that those two things can coexist, but I think thats what makes these places so important for us to reckon with.You write that families arent falling into homelessness, theyre being pushed. Who or what is doing this pushing, and how does that change how we think about addressing the problem?Theres this language of falling into homelessness, which almost makes it seem like someone tripped, or like theyve been struck by a natural disaster. That theres something, unavoidable, beyond their control, beyond anyones control, and it just kind of happened to them. I argue in my book that the immense wealth accumulating in cities across America, and the revitalization of urban space, isnt just sort of existing alongside this deprivation and precarity, but that its actively producing it. And so when I talk about people being pushed into homelessness and this kind of insecurity, Im really trying to insist on that causal relationship. You highlight the working homeless throughout your book people who have jobs yet still lack stable housing. How does this reality challenge the longstanding American narrative that connects homelessness with unemployment or unwillingness to work?Many people in this country, especially those who are not experiencing this precarity themselves, have needed to believe a story about poverty and homelessness that says if people just work harder, if they just get a job, they will be okay. Yet in some cases, certain jobs can actually make it even more likely that homelessness will be waiting for you and I think thats really, really hard for us to come to terms with. What was so shocking to me is just seeing people work and work and work and work some more and work some more after that and its never enough. Its never enough to secure their most basic material needs, housing being the most essential, arguably, among them. That reality is not new, that didnt just happen in the last few years, but the scale is new. People across the political spectrum almost need to believe certain things about homelessness because acknowledging the reality calls into question too many of the fundamental assumptions that we in the United States hold dear, like the necessity for hard work. And Im saying that hard work is not enough in this country.See More:

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Voxs member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.Americas fragile child care system relies heavily on immigrant workers. Donald Trumps immigration crackdown could cripple it.Since 2011, federal guidance has advised Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents against conducting enforcement in sensitive locations like hospitals, churches, schools and day care centers. On his first day back in office, Trump removed these longstanding protections, marking a major change from his first term as president. Now with ICE officials charged with increasing their daily arrests from a few hundred people to upward of 1,500, and top immigration agents demoted for not deporting people fast enough day care centers stand as direct targets.The crackdown on immigrants threatens to upend an industry where foreign-born staff make up one-fifth of the workforce nationally and nearly half in cities like New York, Los Angeles, and San Jose, California. Research led by the New American Economy think tank estimated that over 200,000 undocumented immigrants work in child care and day care services. The new, harsher enforcement comes at a particularly precarious time, as major employers phase out remote work policies, leaving parents with an intensifying scramble for child care. Child care programs already have an employee turnover rate 65 percent higher than average. The pay helps explain why: As of 2023, the median hourly wage for full-time, year-round child care workers was just $14.60, and the field ranked as the 10th lowest-paid occupation out of nearly 750 jobs across the economy, according to one analysis. The Trump crackdown could make everything even worse.RelatedJessica Brown, an economist at the University of South Carolina, has studied how earlier bouts of immigration enforcement affected child care markets. Her analysis of the Secure Communities program, which operated nationwide from 2008 to 2014, found that even when immigration enforcement primarily targeted men, it still disrupted female-dominated child care. The program decreased the overall supply of child care workers and centers and reduced enrollment overall.Despite claims that immigrants are taking jobs from native-born Americans, when immigrant workers left the child care industry, native-born workers didnt fill the gap. Instead, the number of native-born child care workers also decreased as costs went up and centers closed.Todays situation could prove even more disruptive.The current raids represent a much more salient threat of deportation for women, said Brown, who anticipates a larger impact on child care markets compared to Secure Communities, at least in the short-term. The long-term effect depends on whether this becomes the new normal. More importantly, its about perception even if the raids decrease, once fear takes hold in immigrant communities, the chilling effects could linger. Among those most vulnerable to such fear are the children themselves. The cascading effects of immigration enforcementThese chilling effects arent theoretical. The first Trump term provides insight into the impacts these raids could have on both kids and child care providers. Back in 2017, the Center for Law and Social Policy (CLASP), a national anti-poverty organization, launched a multistate study on how Trumps immigration policies were affecting children under age 8. In interviews with staff and families across six states, researchers found that children as young as three were showing signs of trauma from fears about enforcement.RelatedEarly childhood educators reported disturbing new behaviors increased aggression, separation anxiety, and withdrawal that they described as distinct from childrens behaviors in past years. One preschool director in Georgia described a 5-year-old child whose anxiety was so severe that he was biting his fingertips until they bled.The study found widespread drops in day care attendance and enrollment as families isolated themselves. Programs reported parents leaving young children with older siblings or grandparents instead of in formal care, minimizing time outside the home to avoid law enforcement encounters. With enrollment declines cutting into already-thin margins and state subsidies often tied to attendance, these shifts threatened the financial viability of centers that entire neighborhoods depend on.The crisis extended beyond the direct provision of child care. Providers and parents reported increased reluctance to access public benefits like health insurance and nutrition assistance due to worries that Medicaid or SNAP information could be shared with immigration officials. Early childhood staff themselves reported intense anxiety about increased incidents of racism and xenophobia affecting the families they serve and, in some cases, themselves personally. Many providers described the emotional burden of being asked by parents to become emergency guardians for their children in case they were deported.One-third of young children in the US live with at least one parent who speaks a language other than English at home, and these children achieve better academic outcomes in dual-language child care programs programs that often rely heavily on immigrant teachers.Wendy Cervantes, the director of Immigration and Immigrant Families at CLASP who co-led the research, told Vox that the difficulty of finding child care providers who have the right skills to educate dual-language children is often overlooked. There are not a lot of people who have the training and are also bilingual who are competent, she said.How policymakers, advocates, and child care directors are trying to protect families and staffDuring the first Trump administration, many child care providers didnt even know their centers were protected under the sensitive locations federal guidance, leading advocates to launch national campaigns to raise awareness about these safeguards. Now, however, those same advocates are working to help providers understand that guidance is no longer in effect, but that they still have constitutional rights.They still have rights under the Fourth Amendment to restrict the extent to which ICE can enter, Cervantes said. Immigration agents still need signed judicial warrants with a specific persons name and address to raid a private space. To help providers navigate these changes, CLASP is coordinating resources and planned a national webinar at the end of February for child care programs specifically.The political crusade against immigration may score political points, but on the ground, its setting up a chain reaction that could cascade through the entire economy.Many child care centers are also developing new protocols to operate in this environment. Some are removing outdoor signage to avoid ICE attention and developing new systems to communicate warnings to parents. Others are rethinking their data collection policies, to limit questions that ask about families immigration status.Theres a difference between finding out something and documenting, said Atenas Burrola Estrada, an attorney with the Amica Center for Immigrant Rights. She emphasized the importance of child care centers making plans ahead of time so that staff know what they need to do if ICE enforcement comes.What can be different about child care is the fear-factor, and it can be much more traumatizing for a small child, she said. Providers also need to know who to call if mom and dad dont come home, so they can avoid children ending up in state custody.Some states are hoping to create new protections through legislation. In California, a bill would make it harder for ICE agents to enter schools or child care centers. And even if agents met the requirements for entry, theyd still only be able to enter areas where children arent present.In Congress, Democrats Rep. Adriano Espaillat and Sen. Richard Blumenthal recently reintroduced a bill to codify the sensitive locations federal guidance. But the legislation is a long shot: It failed to pass in 2017, and todays political landscape has shifted so that even many Democrats now support tougher immigration enforcement amid growing concern about border security. Earlier this year, Congress passed the Laken Riley Act, requiring mandatory detention for immigrants accused of theft and related crimes exactly the type of broad enforcement that advocates fear could sweep up child care workers. As politicians wage war on immigration in the name of protecting American jobs, their policies threaten to unravel the very system that keeps millions of Americans especially mothers in the workforce. In classrooms across the country, children form bonds with care workers who help shape their earliest years, and immigrant teachers create the bilingual, multicultural spaces that define modern American childhood. The political crusade against immigration may score political points, but on the ground, its setting up a chain reaction that could cascade through the entire economy from parents forced to cut back work hours to businesses losing productive employees to a generation of children without supportive care at their most formative age.This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.See More:

Kerr v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic is one of the most straightforward cases the Supreme Court will hear this year. It involves a federal law that requires every states Medicaid program to ensure that any individual eligible for medical assistance may obtain that care from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required. Thus, Medicaid patients, and not the state, clearly have a right to choose their own health providers, with only one exception. The provider must be qualified, which, as the federal appeals court that heard this case explained, means that the provider is professionally competent to provide the care that the patient seeks.Nevertheless, South Carolina, along with several other states, attempted to exclude Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program in violation of this statute. The reason, of course, involves abortion. In 2018, Republican Gov. Henry McMaster issued an executive order forbidding abortion clinics from being paid to provide care to Medicaid patients. Though the state is permitted to ban abortion outright under the Supreme Courts decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Womens Health Organization (2022), South Carolina permits abortions up to the sixth week of pregnancy.But the state is not allowed, under the Medicaid statute at the heart of Kerr, to prevent Medicaid patients from choosing Planned Parenthood for non-abortion-related care at least as long as Planned Parenthoods providers are competent to provide this care. And the state admits in its brief that it did not cut off Planned Parenthood because it believes that its doctors are professionally incompetent. According to that brief, Planned Parenthood could restore Medicaid funding if it stops performing abortions but it has chosen not to do so.So how on Earth did this straightforward case wind up before the highest Court in the country? The answer to that has two parts, one legal, the other political.The legal issue is that South Carolina claims that the federal law allowing Medicaid patients to choose their health providers is virtually unenforceable. And the state is correct that the Supreme Courts rules governing when individual patients may sue to enforce federal Medicaid law are complicated, although not nearly as complicated as its lawyers claim.The political issue is that this case involves abortion, an issue that often causes judges to place politics above law. And so, while most federal appeals courts have concluded that the choice-of-provider law is enforceable, two GOP-dominated courts did not. The Supreme Court typically steps in to resolve legal questions that have divided federal appeals courts.Notably, however, both of the lower courts that ruled against Medicaid patients did so before the Supreme Court decided Health and Hospital Corporation v. Talevski (2023), a significant decision clarifying which provisions of federal Medicaid law can be enforced through private lawsuits. The Talevski case cuts strongly in favor of Medicaid patients, and against South Carolinas position in this case.So its likely that even this Supreme Court will reject South Carolinas attack on Planned Parenthood. The law in this case is simply too clear, and it was recently reaffirmed in Talevski, a decision that is less than two years old.Still, nothing is ever certain when an abortion-related case reaches this Court, as most of its Republican members have a history of handing down preposterous interpretations of the law in order to restrict abortion rights. If the six Republicans on the Supreme Court were to abandon longstanding law, that could have disastrous consequences for Medicaid patients, and for thousands of other Americans.The specific legal issue in Kerr, briefly explainedA federal law known as Section 1983 is probably the most important civil rights statute ever enacted by Congress. It permits state officials to be sued in federal court if they deprive someone of any rights, privileges, or immunities secured by the Constitution and laws. Without this law, many federal laws and even many provisions of the Constitution would be unenforceable, because there would be no way to bring a lawsuit vindicating the rights protected by those legal provisions.Notably, Section 1983 does not permit anyone to bring a lawsuit challenging any violation of any federal law whatsoever. Instead, as the Court said in Blessing v. Freestone (1997), a plaintiff must assert the violation of a federal right, not merely a violation of federal law. Talevski, meanwhile, laid out the Courts framework for determining whether a particular federal law creates a right that may be enforced through private lawsuits. The key question is whether the provision in question is phrased in terms of the persons benefited and contains rights-creating, individual-centric language with an unmistakable focus on the benefited class.Thus, if Congress passed a law stating that no state may prevent a hungry person from eating at Taco Bell, that statute would be enforceable through private lawsuits because its language focuses on the people who benefit from it (people who are hungry). A similar statute stating that states shall not impede access to cheap burritos would likely not be enforceable through such lawsuits, because this hypothetical law is silent regarding who is supposed to benefit from it. The second version of this law would, at the very least, need to have some language focused on the people the law was supposed to protect in order to authorize private suits.And so, with Talevskis framework in mind, consider the statutory language at issue in the Kerr case:A State plan for medical assistance must provide that any individual eligible for medical assistance (including drugs) may obtain such assistance from any institution, agency, community pharmacy, or person, qualified to perform the service or services required (including an organization which provides such services, or arranges for their availability, on a prepayment basis), who undertakes to provide him such services.This law is riddled with the kind of individual-centric language with an unmistakable focus on the benefited class demanded by Talevski. It provides a right to any individual eligible for Medicaid benefits. It provides that these individuals may obtain care from their choice of provider. And it concludes with a pronoun (him) which refers back to the individuals who benefit from the law.South Carolinas lawyers most of whom work for the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the Christian right law firm that unsuccessfully tried to get the Supreme Court to ban the abortion drug mifepristone essentially ask the justices to replace Talevski with a new rule that would drastically limit private lawsuits enforcing Medicaid statutes, and many other laws that are enforced through Section 1983 lawsuits.Specifically, they claim that the Court has heard only four cases where it ultimately concluded that a federal law contains the kind of language that Talevski requires, two of which explicitly used the word right, and two of which used language that closely mirrors the text of the Fifth Amendment. Based on this claim, they then allege that the Supreme Court has limited clear rights-creating language to statutes where Congress explicitly uses the label right or lifts language from the rights-creating provisions of the Constitution.But that is not what the Court said in Talevski. Again, Talevski did not hold that Congress must use certain magical words or a statute is unenforceable. It held that federal laws may be enforced by private lawsuits if they focus on the individuals who benefit from the law, regardless of which specific words Congress used when it wrote that law.If the Court were to impose such a magic words requirement in Kerr, moreover, that would have disastrous consequences for Medicaid beneficiaries and for many other Americans. Congress could not possibly have known, when it wrote the original Medicaid law in 1965 or when it wrote any of the various amendments to it, that the Supreme Court would later require it to use very specific language if it wanted the law to be enforceable. Nor could it have known that the Court would impose a magic words requirement when it wrote countless other federal laws. Because the laws governing Medicaid were not written with the ADFs proposed new rule in mind, huge swaths of that law could cease to function if the Court agrees with ADF in this case.In fairness, federal law does provide one alternative remedy if the Supreme Court does shut down private lawsuits enforcing Medicaid law the federal government can cut off Medicaid funding to states that violate this law. But the government rarely uses this power, because it effectively punishes Medicaid patients and providers for a legal violation by the state. And, in any event, theres little chance that the Trump administration will use this power to protect abortion providers.So, Medicaid patients of all kinds should hope that the Supreme Court does not, in its zeal to restrict abortion rights, embrace the Alliance Defending Freedoms arguments in the Kerr case. Because if the Court does, much of federal law will become unenforceable overnight.See More:

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.Welcome to The Logoff: Today Joshua Keating and I are focusing on top Trump administration officials accidentally messaging a journalist with their plans for bombing Yemen. Its a bizarre story and one with longstanding implications for our European allies ability to trust us with sensitive information.Wait, what? The Atlantic revealed today that a top Trump official accidentally added Jeffrey Goldberg, the magazines editor-in-chief, to a group chat on the encrypted messaging app Signal earlier this month. With Goldberg reading, Vice President JD Vance, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, policy adviser Stephen Miller, and others discussed a potential attack on military targets in Yemen, where a group called the Houthis has been disrupting global trade by attacking passing ships.Then, days later, Goldberg says, Hegseth messaged the group with extraordinarily sensitive and detailed information about the planned US strikes, which took place hours after Hegseths message.That sounds made up. How do we know the chat isnt fake? Just how big of a mistake is this? Its a major protocol violation to discuss sensitive military operations on a group chat. Such conversations are held in secure facilities where cell phones are typically banned.Is it illegal? The Atlantic reports that the official who invited Goldberg, national security adviser Michael Waltz, may have violated multiple parts of the Espionage Act. Its hard to imagine the Trump administration prosecuting him, however. So whats the big picture? Arguably, the officials got lucky they added Goldberg, who withheld certain details of the messages in the name of national security. But already wary US allies concerned about Trumps friendliness toward Russia and hostility toward NATO could have even more reason to feel wary about the information they share with this administration.And with that, its time to log offTodays news has me thinking about the value of the (non-national security damaging) group chat. I really appreciate how, via a few text threads, I get to stay in daily touch with some of my favorite people even those who live a long way away. Many of mine really picked up during Covid, so I appreciated this classic (height-of-the-pandemic-era) piece from my colleague Alex Abad-Santos about exactly why these chats are so helpful to our well-being. Thanks so much for reading, and Ill see you back here tomorrow.See More: