Jonathan Hale was ready to lay down his paint rollers. Hale, a law student turned viral road safety advocate, had run into legal trouble for painting his own DIY crosswalks across some of Los Angeles’s most dangerous intersections. In a meeting with LA Mayor Karen Bass earlier this year, he told her that if the city could commit to making its own streets safer for pedestrians, then he would stop his own vigilante activism. 

“Dude, you’re the mayor. Do something about this. It’s you, dude,” he recalls insisting to Bass — in so many words — after she apologized for his arrest on vandalism charges for a paint job last December. For months, Hale upheld his end of the bargain and stopped painting, believing in her office’s emailed assurances that a new executive order was coming soon. 

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But, eventually, after weeks of unresponsiveness, Hale grew tired of waiting, just as he had the first time he picked up a stencil and a bucket of white paint. “We’re so focused on looking for reasons why we can’t do stuff instead of ways that we can,” he said, “and it’s just paralyzed our institutions.” 

Across the country, such civic paralysis has compelled a legion of guerrilla urbanists to take their city’s matters into their own hands. In Boston, a group of cyclists used strips of green and white duct tape to build a bike lane at an intersection where a truck struck and killed 36-year-old Louisa Gag in July. In Nashville, Kansas City, and across the Bay Area, volunteers have built and installed their own public benches at bus stops where city officials had slowly removed places to sit, after years spent curating increasingly hostile public spaces. 

Every time one of these friendly neighborhood vigilantes paints a crosswalk, fills a pothole, or builds a bench, they remind us that it is not actually that hard — or even that expensive — to do many of the simple things that can make our cities safer and more pleasant places to live. Though our local governments may seem incapable of getting these basic tasks done, they are probably less constrained by money than they are by a sluggish status quo. And in some cases, they’re so afraid of being sued that they’d rather build nothing at all. 

“We see the fear of litigation and liability” so thoroughly sabotaging mundane municipal projects that “a crosswalk takes half-a-million dollars in five years to do when it’s really a bucket of paint in an afternoon,” said Anthony Garcia, a Miami-based urban planner who, with his longtime collaborator Mike Lydon, pioneered the study of tactical urbanism, or low-cost, quick-fix interventions often led by ordinary citizens themselves. Both Garcia and Lydon now advise cities nationally on how to integrate the practices of guerrilla urbanists into the ways they govern and pilot their own new policies. “You don’t have to hold a crosswalk to the same standard that you hold a bridge,” Garcia said.

It can be inspiring when a random citizen feels compelled to pick up a paintbrush and finish what their city can’t seem to start, but it is also an infuriating embodiment of just how stunted some of our most basic systems of governance have become. These industrious urban vigilantes show that making our cities more livable can be an easy, and even joyous practice. But if their work is going to serve as more than mere symbolism, cities themselves will need to learn from their example — or, as some municipalities have recently demonstrated, find new ways to collaborate.

“The point of the crosswalks is the protest. It’s to draw awareness to the issue,” not to create a permanent class of illicit crosswalk painters, Hale told me. “We need to hold the government to a higher standard.”

The quasi-legal case for taking your street into your own hands

While there are some reasons that a municipality would take longer to install a bench or paint a crosswalk than a crew of local residents — compliance with regulations and the installation of proper signage comes to mind — they rarely need to take as long as they often do now.

Take Los Angeles, where even the most basic road safety projects can take years to build, racking up eye-popping bills along the way. Some of these delays have proved deadly. For over a decade, the city sat on funds to improve a perilous intersection in Koreatown, according to Streetsblog, an intersection where, last summer, a drunk driver hit and killed 9-year-old Nadir Gavarrete. 

As the city twiddled its thumbs in the days that followed, the Crosswalk Collective LA — a DIY group that gave Hale his start — started painting. It wasn’t until three months after Gavarrete was killed that the city scrubbed the guerrilla crosswalks, replacing them with “official” crosswalks and a tiny, temporary traffic circle. A permanent solution is supposedly on its way this year.

It shouldn’t take this long, and though cities like LA have the resources and expertise to pull off more permanent and often more effective solutions than a group of vigilantes could, it also shouldn’t take a profound tragedy to convince them to finally act. And just as importantly, they should be capable of also making the sort of small, low-cost, even temporary interventions in the interim, ones that don’t require bespoke planning and a prolonged procurement process.  

As much as Hale has come to enjoy painting crosswalks along with the group he founded, People’s Vision Zero, he does so not as a hobby, but as an expression of discontent with a government that rarely seems to take the safety of his streets as seriously as he’d like them to. Painting a rogue bike lane or giving bus riders a place to sit might not do all that much to fix what’s wrong with our cities directly, but every single DIY urbanist I’ve spoken to has told me that their efforts have helped them reclaim a sense of collective agency over how their cities function, after years of frustration with seemingly impenetrable civic institutions. 

“It’s very easy to feel small, and that nothing that you do matters,” said Carter Lavin, co-founder of the TransBay Coalition, a transit advocacy group with ties to the San Francisco Bay Area Bench Collective, but “one thing about building benches is that every screw you drive, every board you sand makes your neighbor’s life better, and it does it for hundreds of people.”

Unfortunately, getting a city to formalize these often quasi-legal urban interventions is no easy feat, as Pastor Robin Owen, a local nonprofit leader in Nashville who writes a Substack called Jesus Urbanist, knows all too well.

For the past year, Owen has been embroiled in a cat-and-mouse game with the city of Nashville in which she and her growing bunch of bench-building acolytes install a DIY bench that the city later removes, after which they replace it with another bench, which the city will inevitably remove again. For many municipalities, getting rid of useful changes proves far easier than simply implementing them in the first place.

As ill-fated as that dance might seem, it can still feel more meaningful to locals, Owen told me, than the even more hapless task of prodding the government to get something done itself. 

“When you care about a place and want to make it better, you’ve very likely spent hours in meetings or emailing elected officials, and progress is just really complicated and slow,” she told me, “and building a bench and then putting it on a street corner, you actually do something that impacts someone’s life.”

How cities can learn to build the simple stuff quickly

Advocates tell me that in almost every case they would much prefer to work with their city governments than against them. And sometimes they do: For well over a decade, the local transit advocacy group Reconnect Rochester has partnered with Rochester, New York to lay out boxy, brightly colored “bus stop cubes” at transit corridors around the city. Critically, these boxes were permitted.

“If we were to have just kind of gone out there and done this in the dark of night without following any sort of process,” Mary Staropoli, co-executive director of Reconnect Rochester, told me, “I think those bus stop cubes would have been quickly removed.”

Owen has tried for months to convince her city to issue a similar permit for her benches. Nashville happens to boast one of the nation’s only programs dedicated explicitly to facilitating tactical urbanism, which should have made this an unusually straightforward process. And yet, because of a new requirement compelling such projects to pay for liability insurance, she says that she cannot obtain a permit without paying thousands of dollars to protect benches that cost just $35 a pop to build. 

With the exception of some disability protections, cities are indeed far likelier to get sued over the infrastructure they build than over the infrastructure they never bothered to build at all. A crosswalk that never gets painted is one less crosswalk to worry about. A bench that never gets built can’t lead to a lawsuit. But if they never get built at all, then they also have no chance of protecting a pedestrian from a speeding car, or giving an elderly commuter a place to sit. 

“There is this massive moral disconnection where cities are not concerned about liability when it comes to people dying in traffic violence, but are concerned about liability when citizens take action ourselves,” Owen said. “We should be more concerned about our moral liability of people having to suffer as they navigate our cities.” 

Nevertheless, when a citizen paints a crosswalk or builds a bench, whether as a stopgap as an act of protest, it can also exert a sort of “productive tension” on a city, said Lydon, one that can compel a static government to act much more quickly than it would otherwise, even if such changes takes time to materialize.

It wasn’t until a group of local wheelchair users took sledgehammers to sidewalks and began pouring their own cement ramps in the 1970s that Berkeley, California became one of the first cities in the nation to mandate curb cuts, now a hallmark of nationally mandated accessible design that benefit almost everyone at some point: parents pushing strollers, travelers pulling roller bags, and the rest of us in one way or another. 

And in another famous example, a graduate student named Matt Tomasulo zip tied a few dozen wayfinding signs to street poles around Raleigh, North Carolina in 2012, telling passerby how far away various destinations were by walking. While the city initially tore down the signs, they proved popular enough that Raleigh changed course, eventually integrating them into its own planning.

“We’ve documented this over and over,” Lydon said, noting the shift that comes when a city stops fighting a guerrilla intervention and opts to embrace or iterate upon it instead. “You can do these small things, and it can very much lead to transformational change.”

They have fun names like Feel Free, Smurphs, and Hazy Tabz. They come in colorful packages and in gummy form. They’re widely available at gas stations, corner stores, and smoke shops across the country.

They’re also highly addictive, largely unregulated, and in the news after they were found near the bodies of two dead University of Mississippi students.

The drugs are called Kratom and 7-OH. The first, kratom, is derived from the leaves of a coffee-like plant in Southeast Asia. When taken in small doses, kratom causes a low-key buzz. In higher doses, the high is described as euphoric. It operates like an opioid — a chemical in kratom called mitragynine binds to opioid receptors in the brain, which leads to that euphoric high. It also can lead to addiction and overdose. 

Social media is full of videos of people trying to kick the drug, with harrowing stories of dependence and withdrawal. 

7-OH is a highly concentrated compound derived from kratom, which dials up both the high and the danger. The drug has caught the attention of US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who warned in a press conference last year that 7-OH was “marketed for children.” 

“They’re gummy bears, they’re bright colors, they’re candy-flavored,” Kennedy said. “This is really a sinister, sinister industry.” In August, federal agencies announced they were taking steps to effectively ban 7-OH nationwide. 

To break down the increasing prevalence of both kratom and 7-OH, what the drugs do, and what to do about them, Today, Explained spoke with Mattha Busby, a freelance journalist who covers drugs and drug policy and who wrote about kratom earlier this year. 

As Busby explains, kratom and 7-OH are “definitely in the zeitgeist. It’s in the news and for good reason. To have these 7-OH gummies just in gas stations is a really potentially problematic thing. Without the drug education alongside it, this drug has just popped up out of nowhere.”

Busby also talked with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about the business interests behind the drugs, why they’re a complicated topic for the Make America Healthy Again movement, and how industry lobbyists have teamed up with several Trump administration officials to try to sway the results of regulatory decisions. 

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

Is there an important distinction between kratom and 7-OH? Is 7-OH found in kratom?

7-OH is found in relatively small quantities within kratom, but this businessman, Vince Saunders, who is the self-styled American shaman out of Kansas City, basically figured out how to extract the 7-OH and blow it up into entire pills.

I’ve never tried 7-OH and I’m not interested, just for the record, since I’ve been talking about how I don’t mind kratom, but these 7-OH tablets are uber, uber strong. I think the large number of people that are taking it are using it instead of opioids. And maybe it’s better, maybe it’s not. 

Is 7-OH something you can also easily find at your neighborhood gas station?

Yeah. It’s much the same as the kratom formulations, so you’re talking gummies, little shots, capsules, and the brand names for the 7-OH companies are perhaps even more kind of out there — 7-OHeaven is one. 

It’s certainly not heaven when you’re going into withdrawals.

And do we know that people are? Are people becoming addicted to 7-OH?

People are becoming addicted to kratom and 7-OH. I think the whole thing, the concern originally sprung up with the Feel Free tonics that are like a mix of kava and kratom. And people just got habituated into drinking several of them per day and realized that it’s very unpleasant if they don’t continue to do that on a daily basis.

We have a federal government that loves to police drugs of all sorts. What are they doing about 7-OH? 

It’s this MAHA dilemma, right? Because their ethos is very “natural medicines and freedom.” The idea that this Feel Free tonic, whose owner JW Ross recently gave, or a company related to him recently gave, like $500,000 to the MAHA PAC, and he’s been photographed next to RFK Jr. — he’s perhaps predictably come out on the side of the kratom industry, which is lobbying for a ban of 7-OH. 

RFK Jr. called it sinister and said that it targets children, which it appears to do in some cases with the gummies. There’s kratom gummies too and clearly gummies are an easier way, especially for older people, to ingest the medicine or substance, so we shouldn’t just blame the gummies here. 

But clearly, when you’ve just got packets of these gummies that are called like 7-OHeaven just on the shelf or indeed behind the counter at the gas station, there’s going to be concern about that. 

There are other MAGA figures like Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin, who’s got a million-dollar investment in the parent company of Feel Free. There’s definitely this nexus of figures in the government that have got some interest, potentially, or relationships with the kratom industry. And indeed the department when I was writing my Wired story reminded us and readers that everything he’s done is ethical and I’m sure it has been.

We usually think of liberal drug policies as a lefty thing. Markwayne Mullin’s about as right as they come. Are kratom and 7-OH making friends across the political spectrum because there’s a big business opportunity here?

You look at Trump’s executive order on psychedelics and then rescheduling cannabis, and it seems that the right has really seized the mantle and is looking at it from a more libertarian perspective of, “Hey, what happens in a man’s head is his own business.” 

They’re also being probably more business friendly than people on the left would be, so it’s a really interesting moment, especially with RFK Jr. as health secretary.

Trump has spoken at length about the opioid crisis in the United States and how it’s tearing our communities apart and whatnot. Here we have readily accessible opioids at our gas stations. 

Yes, they’re not killing nearly as many people as prescription drugs are. However, they’re a lot easier to get than prescription drugs. Help me understand this administration’s position in relation to what could be a real terror for some people.

They are in the process of banning 7-OH. Last month, the Department of Justice set out an emergency scheduling, so that’s open for comments at the moment. When they ban something, it doesn’t just happen overnight. 

I think by the beginning of next year, it’s quite possible that these 7-OH products won’t be in gas stations and indeed some states have already taken action.

And just to get ahead of any confusion here, 7-OH may be banned from gas stations and probably other convenience stores, but not kratom?

Exactly.

Why one and not the other? Obviously 7-OH is stronger, but you could take a lot of kratom and it might feel like taking a little 7-OH, no?

Absolutely. You just need to take a lot and it’s in powder form. So you need to consume a prodigious quantity of it or drink a bunch of these seltzers. 

I think that they’re not going to ban kratom because there’s an obvious recognition of the good it does for people that are recovering from opiate addictions and that they do have a kind of natural off-ramp, [which] is very unlikely to kill you even though you might take a huge amount. Whereas, if you’re taking like 26 different medications, including a bunch of opioids for your chronic pain, you might die. 

Who do you think wins the argument at the end of the day? We have some strong lobbying forces involved here. You’ve got a lot of people who have come to enjoy or depend on these substances that are, as we’ve established many times now, readily available all over the country. 

Do you think we see fewer or more kratom products in our gas stations and convenience stores in the years to come?

The kratom advocates are a lot more eloquent and suited and booted than the 7-OH folks. What I see is that 7-OH will be forced underground and that kratom will continue its long and illustrious ascent in American culture. 

We do really have a gas station culture in this country, and I wonder if these substances being so available in them is a particularly American thing. You live in the UK. Are gas station drugs a US thing?

It’s an American thing for sure. But you guys take a lot of drugs!

Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. You can sign up here to get it in your inbox every week. Let’s get into it.

One big idea: Black Democrats are facing a crossroads

One thing I’m thinking: A party that once said “representation matters” is watching Black power recede — and two of my recent interviews show the fork in the road.

The civil war roiling the Democratic Party has typically been defined by ideological camps. Moderates vs. progressives. Establishment vs. DSA. But ahead of a wide-open presidential primary, where the party hopes to define who and what it’s fighting for, there are other fault lines as well.

A big one: Where does the party’s changing electorate leave its traditional bases of power — like Black voters and the elected officials who represent them? 

Black voters have been one of the most reliable Democratic constituencies for generations, and their elected officials, at least, have enjoyed the perks of access. Looking back, there’s an argument that the Black Democratic class had more voice in the Joe Biden version of the Democratic Party than in the years of Barack Obama. Biden had long maintained close relationships with Washington’s Black elected officials, going back to his decades representing Delaware. And in the wake of the outcry for racial justice that came after the murder of George Floyd, and the important role Black voters played in his primary campaign, Biden made clear that focus would follow him into the presidency.

“When this campaign was at its lowest ebb, the African American community stood up again for me,” I watched President-elect Biden tell a crowd soon after he was elected. “You’ve always had my back, and I’ll have yours.”

Biden followed up by prioritizing Black representation in his administration: He nominated Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court, fulfilling the promise he made to James Clyburn ahead of his all-important endorsement in 2020. He installed Jaime Harrison, another Clyburn mentee, as DNC chair, and made Karine Jean-Pierre the first Black and openly LGBTQ+ person to serve as White House press secretary. There was Lloyd Austin, the first Black man to run the Defense Department. And of course, there was Kamala Harris — the first Black and South Asian vice president and leader-of-the-Democratic-Party-in-waiting.

Importantly, Black elected officials were winning outside of Washington, too. As Politico noted in 2022, the Biden years marked the first time that New York City, Houston, Chicago, and Los Angeles — America’s four most populous cities — all had elected Black mayors.

But fast-forward to now, and it’s all gone a bit bleak. The John Lewis Voting Rights Act, a core Biden-Harris promise, never materialized. Harris lost to Trump in the 2024 election. And Democrats have broadly backlashed against any explicit focus on Black racial politics. Two of those mayors (Eric Adams of New York City and Lori Lightfoot of Chicago) were bounced after one term. Houston elected a white mayor, John Whitmire, who defeated Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, a longtime member of the Congressional Black Caucus. And this November, Mayor Karen Bass of Los Angeles is at risk of becoming the latest political casualty, as she faces a tough race from an insurgent Democratic socialist, City Council member Nithya Raman.

To make matters worse, the Supreme Court’s decision in Louisiana v. Callais may put as many as 19 members of the Congressional Black Caucus — nearly a third of the caucus — at risk of losing their seats, with a particular impact on the American South. And the current energy in the Democratic Party has come from its progressive left, which has found a winning formula for winning in primaries that essentially goes around Black voters — as seen in races like Zohran Mamdani’s win in New York City, or even James Talarico’s defeat of Jasmine Crockett in Texas.

I could go on. But here’s the point: Just a few short years after Democrats declared that “representation matters,” the Black elected officials who benefitted from that priority have largely receded into the background, and it reflects the larger crossroads facing many Black Democrats in a changing party. On one side, the choice is a failed establishment that historically made space for (some) Black causes; on the other is a progressive wing that is often working from a deficit of trust, with little history in Black communities and connection with Black political leaders. 

Earlier this year, two interviews on America, Actually showed the divergent paths. One with Rep. Jim Clyburn of South Carolina. The other with Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate seat in Florida. 

The power broker

If you haven’t watched my interview with Clyburn, I’d encourage you to — because the anguish on my face is pretty palpable throughout the whole thing.

It made news because of what Clyburn said (or didn’t) about artificial intelligence, but the conversation on Black politics is what most stuck with me. The Congress member explicitly blamed Black voters for Kamala Harris’s 2024 loss, saying they let her and the party down — not the other way around:

Me: “So is the argument that Black people let Kamala Harris down?”

Clyburn: “In many instances, absolutely…if that 59 percent had been 69 percent, she would’ve won.”

He defended taking corporate dollars even as polling says most Democrats, including Black voters, wish their politicians did not. And when I asked about his two most notable endorsements since the 2024 election: supporting Andrew Cuomo against Mamdani in New York City’s mayoral race, and backing Haley Stevens against Abdul El-Sayed in the Michigan Senate race — here’s what he said:

So I’m supposed to throw away all these relationships for somebody I never saw before, never heard of before…come on. Why don’t they just get off of that?

At one point, I asked Clyburn whether Mamdani’s enduring popularity, including among Black New Yorkers, caused any reflection: “Oh, I’m not paying attention to that. I got 90 percent. I just ran for reelection. I got 90 percent.”

Clyburn didn’t just defend centrist ideology. He defended a way of politics that was fundamentally unresponsive to voters, and he plainly articulated the lack of accountability at the heart of establishment politics: We didn’t fail, the voters failed us. 

But importantly, Clyburn’s policy positions — and those of the larger Congressional Black Caucus — are increasingly out of step with public opinion. Voters, including Black ones, want corporate money out of politics. And like much of the Democratic base, Black voters have also shifted left on Israel and are skeptical of things like Big Tech. Meanwhile, CBC members like Crockett are awash in crypto-industry money — from the likes of Marc Andreessen and the Winklevoss twins. At the CBC’s recent legislative conference, one of the “top sponsors” was Palantir Technologies — the data firm with major ICE contracts — even as the Congressional Hispanic Caucus canceled its financial relationship with the group. 

Black Democrats have never lived in a world where corporate cash was this unpopular, anti-Israel sentiment was this high, and their relationship with Big Tech was so under scrutiny. And in talking to Clyburn, I felt that distance. 

The upstart

Contrast that to Angie Nixon, the Democratic nominee for the US Senate in Florida. 

After Nixon won her primary — a 12-point victory (56-44) against a candidate who outraised her roughly 17-to-1 — all the focus went to why she couldn’t win the general election. She became a DSA member this year, making it easy for Republicans to tag her as a socialist (she says she’s not). There was her pro-Palestinian advocacy. Her lack of fundraising. And Democratic commentators used that to write her off on primary night, before the candidate had any chance to introduce herself to the general public. 

However, since the primary, Nixon has seemingly won those same people over — through what feels like sheer force of personality. She’s gained kudos from the commentariat with viral tweets aimed at Republicans, Emily’s List, which stayed neutral in the primary, has endorsed her, and progressives led by Bernie Sanders have begun steering real money into the race. Most importantly, she has taken advantage of the new media environment, doing interview after interview in a Mamdani-style blitz that prioritizes authenticity over polish:

“As a former single mom for 12 years, I know how to make a dollar stretch,” she told me, explaining her victory against long odds. “And clearly I know how to make one stretch to like 18.”

This is not to say Nixon is going to win — because I don’t think that’s the point. At a time when so many Black Democrats are trying to figure out where they fit in the party’s changing landscape, she represents an important lesson in how to blend personality with policy. The reason Nixon can be so “authentic” is that she’s clearly not thinking about how to calibrate to appease donors. She’s not thinking about whether her honesty upsets party leaders. Her distance from corporate money, or the party’s pro-Israel wing, has afforded her a freedom many Black politicians do not have. She is leading with Angie Nixon. Not Palantir. Or the DSA.

It’s essentially the opposite of what Clyburn did — not blaming the voters, but blaming the structures that have historically oppressed black communities. Which would of course also include the Democratic Party and its corporate donors. 

“I am a team player when you are playing for the team of hardworking people,” Nixon told me. “But when you start playing for corporations, I can’t get down like that.”

Looking ahead to 2028, there are several Black Democrats priming to run for president — including Harris, Sen. Cory Booker, and Maryland Gov. Wes Moore. Each will likely try to stake a middle ground between the Clyburns of the world and the Angie Nixons, and with South Carolina set to go first in the Democrats’ presidential nominating calendar, it would seem each would have a distinct advantage heading into the primary. However, even as Black voters were a key part of Hillary Clinton’s win in 2016, and Biden’s primary win in 2020, I don’t think we can assume this is a boon for centrists and establishment candidates.   

As I wrote earlier this summer, the Black electorate has historically moved in unison, but there is no guarantee that continues — particularly if Harris does not run again. For one, South Carolina going first in the primary may diminish its predictive power, since it’s further away from Super Tuesday. And most importantly, the electorate has changed. There’s now a rising generation of Black millennials — less committed to traditional party politics and less defined by the civil rights movement — and growing in number.

TL;DR: Democrats have long said Black voters aren’t a monolith. I think they’re about to learn what that means.

One thing I’m hearing 

This week we connected with Ryan Oehrli, a statewide accountability reporter at NC Local who has been covering election security in that state, and the state’s all-important Senate election. I wanted to ask him how state officials are dealing with election security concerns, and what he’s hearing from North Carolina voters on the ground.

You reported that some North Carolina election officials have promoted conspiracy theories about the elections they’re now helping run. How did these people get into those positions, and how much power do they have?

In North Carolina, the state board of elections appoints two Republicans and two Democrats to county election boards every other year. 

Chairs are the tie-breakers, so to speak. Historically, the governor appointed those chairs. In 2024, though, our Republican-led General Assembly stripped Gov. Josh Stein, a Democrat, of that power and gave it to State Auditor Dave Boliek, a Republican. Under the new law, every election board in the state flipped from Democratic to Republican control in one fell swoop in 2025.

One person I reported on was a “voter integrity” activist long before he was appointed to his county’s election board last year. Others were already serving on boards, then appointed chair by the state auditor even after they promoted conspiracy theories — in one instance by alleging in an email to lawmakers that there was some widespread effort to undermine the 2024 elections and help Democrats.

These are important positions. County election boards investigate ballot irregularities, decide where polling places are, conduct election protest hearings, and much more. 

You covered an effort in Lee County to eliminate Sunday voting. What have you seen these officials actually change, or try to change, about how people vote, and how have communities responded?

“Politics here feel more nationalized than even a few years ago, and there’s a lot more attention on us.”

From what I can tell, the people we wrote about haven’t had much of an effect individually, at least so far.

A chair who once called on President Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act because of the 2020 election results told me he’s found “no proof” of widespread voter fraud in his own county. 

The “voter integrity” activist I mentioned above, Jay DeLancy, told me that he’s tried to cut some names from voter rolls in his county (he claims they are “duplicates”). But the usual guardrails have stopped him. He complained that too many lawyers were involved in the process.

DeLancy did play a part in the effort to eliminate Sunday voting in Lee County. When he made his case to the state board, one of his arguments was that it would be wrong to order election workers to violate the Fourth Commandment, to keep the sabbath, “all because of politics.” The state board did not side with him.

Beyond the people we reported on, the ones who have promoted conspiracy theories, there was more controversy this year as counties drafted their early voting plans. These plans have to be agreed to unanimously, or they get passed on to the state. It emerged that an employee of the state auditor’s office, who was also the former director of the North Carolina GOP, had been texting Republican county election board members and telling them what positions to take on early voting plans.

DeLancy acknowledged that he got the idea to eliminate Sunday voting from him.

Beyond the fights over how elections are run, what are you hearing from people in North Carolina about this year’s midterms? What issues are coming up most in your reporting?

Across party lines, it’s agreed that Hurricane Helene recovery has not been handled well. You can see this in the Senate race between Roy Cooper and Michael Whatley. Whatley blames Cooper, who was governor when Helene hit in September 2024, a few months before his term ended. Cooper blames Whatley, who Trump once said would be “very much in charge” of the administration’s recovery effort and is on the FEMA Review Council.

The state has received less than half the money it requested from the federal government. This is a bipartisan, deeply felt source of frustration in the region. 

North Carolina gets a lot of attention as a battleground state. What does the national coverage miss about the politics you’re seeing locally?

North Carolinians are worried about the same issues as much of the country, like the cost of living, but the state has been through a lot on its own in the last few years. 

Hurricane Helene, of course, devastated much of the mountains, and recovery for some places will take years. The killing of Iryna Zarutska resparked a national conversation about mental health, the courts, and public safety. It’s largely been forgotten because it was overshadowed by what happened in Chicago and Minneapolis, but Border Patrol agents spent a week in Charlotte last year and arrested hundreds of people. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stayed busy here.

Just recently, President Trump said North Carolina has become “one of the most violent and one of the worst” states in the country.

Politics here feel more nationalized than even a few years ago, and there’s a lot more attention on us. This is a big change, and I wonder what it means for both major parties, at the state level, in the long run.

Most of America’s major cities have made little to no progress reducing racial segregation in their public schools over recent decades. Many have slid backward, and are more polarized today than they were at the turn of the century.

These challenges were highlighted in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s wrenching New York Times Magazine piece in September about her experience sending her daughter to poor, intensely segregated public schools in New York City as part of a campaign to fix them — only for her child to fall behind in her education and demand a change to a more selective school with few Black and Hispanic students. The essay ends with both the writer and subject frustrated: Hannah-Jones with the seemingly insurmountable barriers to improving and integrating schools, and her daughter, with the burden of confronting these structural barriers on her own. 

But Washington, DC, the city I’ve called home on and off for most of my adult life, is one of the few standout exceptions to these trends. 

During the 2000s and 2010s, its public schools underwent a dramatic set of reforms that helped improve teaching and student achievement. At the same time, the number of white students leapt up, and the share of schools that had been almost uniformly Black or Hispanic plummeted by about 20 percentage points, the largest drop among the country’s 50 biggest cities.

Recently, I called Kaya Henderson, DC’s former top schools official, to ask about that era of progress, and whether she thought the policies she implemented had helped encourage integration. If not, what had? Her answer surprised me a bit: It simply wasn’t a question she had ever really pondered. 

“For me, integration was never the point,” Henderson said. “Giving our citizens of the district, no matter where they come from or what they look like, a high-quality school system, that was the point.” 

It’s always perilous to read too much into a single example of success in education. Each state and school district is different, and seemingly small differences in how reforms are implemented can make or break them. 

Each state and school district is different, and seemingly small differences in how reforms are implemented can make or break them.

But I think DC’s story is an instructive and hopeful counterpoint to the pessimism that seemed to pervade Hannah-Jones’s discourse-devouring essay. Having witnessed the dysfunction of these schools firsthand and concluding she was wrong to sacrifice her daughter’s education in a noble attempt to address it, Hannah-Jones doesn’t offer any explicit solutions. But she does seem to suggest that we won’t be able to fix the deep-seated problems in our education system unless we find a way to end de facto segregation, which she has long argued is a critical prerequisite to improving school quality for historically disadvantaged minority students. In her media tour, she has been more explicit, calling for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to produce “a plan to address and dismantle school segregation in the city.” 

“Nothing can help the working class change its material condition more than actually having access to an equal and quality education,” she told radio host Brian Lehrer.

I agree with much of that sentiment. But I can’t help but feel like Hannah-Jones is reversing the order of operations. As DC’s example suggests, the most realistic way to desegregate our schools today might actually be to focus on improving their results first. We don’t need to wait. And while Hannah-Jones famously sought to do that by rallying better-off parents to enroll and advocate for their children on a school-by-school basis, DC shows that, with the right plan, school administrators and teachers can deliver gains as well. 

Integrating schools is hard

One of the many reasons integrating public schools has proven so historically difficult is that most modern-day segregation is driven by differences between districts, rather than within them. Well-to-do and white families decamp to wealthy suburbs when it’s time for kindergarten or middle school, while Black and Hispanic families remain within city limits, or in working-class suburbs.  

Overcoming municipal boundaries tends to be an insurmountable challenge, both politically and legally. Forced bussing was never popular, and in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that court-issued integration orders that required swapping students between districts were effectively unconstitutional, taking away one of the few tools activists thought they had to break through borders. 

Today, ideas like redrawing school boundaries to make them more diverse poll well when Americans are asked about them in the abstract, but it’s at best unclear how many suburbanites would tolerate such a thing if it was proposed in their town. 

Those sorts of options were never available to DC, anyway. It’s a politically isolated city bordered by neighbor-state suburbs like Arlington, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, where the region’s well-off professionals have long moved for the school systems. The only way to meaningfully integrate its own schools racially and economically was to lure more white or high-earning families into the district and keep them there. 

How DC saw a major drop in segregated schools

And that is in fact what happened. 

Starting in the early 2000s, DC’s population started to balloon with Gen X and millennial professionals of all races, which had the net effect of raising the overall share of white residents. Many flocked to the city after the financial crisis and Great Recession, since Washington was one of the few places where jobs remained plentiful. And they eventually set down roots. Public school enrollment — including both charters and traditional schools — grew alongside the city’s population, and the share of those students who were white jumped from 3.9 percent in 2000 to 13.7 percent in 2023. 

The influx led to a large drop in the number of what the Civil Rights Project at UCLA has defined as “intensely segregated” schools — where fewer than one in 10 students are white. In 2000, 90 percent of DC’s traditional public and charter schools fell into that category, the most of any district covering the country’s 50 largest cities, according to data from the Segregation Tracking Project at Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project. By 2023, it had fallen to 69 percent, leaving it in the middle of the pack. 

Over that same period, only five of the 50 largest saw any decline at all. 

I don’t want to oversell DC’s progress. It went from among the worst in the country on this measure to looking more like a typical urban school district — similar to New York City today, where 71 percent of schools remain “intensely segregated.” I doubt many are satisfied with that status quo. There are also obvious downsides to the kind of gentrification that made these gains possible — the city lost thousands of Black families during the 21st century to rising housing prices (though the decline was even larger in the ’80s and ’90s, as its economy was in collapse). 

DC’s white students still tend to cluster in public schools serving affluent neighborhoods, such as Capitol Hill or the famously leafy areas west of Rock Creek Park, and there are vanishingly few white families in the city’s poorest wards, east of the Anacostia River. Using the Segregation Tracking Project’s “normalized exposure” index, I found that there were only three other large cities where white students were spread less evenly across their school district. But because white enrollment grew so much, it still spilled out of those enclaves, and helped diversify schools that had previously been overwhelmingly low-income, Black, and Hispanic. As a result, the city became a rare example of progress on one of America’s most stubborn social ills. 

The city’s school performance improved

During the same period in which its schools became less segregated, DC was also embarking on a high-profile education reform effort.

That drive began with the arrival of charter schools in the late 1990s, which put new competitive pressure on the district’s traditional public schools; today the charter sector teaches almost half of the city’s students. But the pace of reforms hastened after 2007 when then-Mayor Adrian Fenty took control of the city’s schools. His major changes included a controversial pay-for-performance system for teachers known as IMPACT, as well as stronger curriculum standards tied to the Common Core. Later leaders adopted more rigorous standardized tests that allowed parents to easily compare results between schools, a single citywide school lottery, and the city’s much celebrated universal pre-K program.

These changes did not work miracles — but they did lead to a major rise in students’ reading and math scores. DC became the fastest-improving large urban school district in the country on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), considered the gold standard for measuring learning gains, with both Black and white students seeing significant progress. Again, this was largely a game of catchup: Washington went from among the very worst performing urban school districts on the NAEP to matching the large city average. But it led to a broad sense that schools were on the upswing. 

It’s difficult, and maybe impossible, to say how much any one of the reform policies actually affected parents’ decisions to stay in the city, or helped reduce segregation in schools. Some have had an obvious impact: DC’s universal pre-K program, which began in 2008, anchors professional families here when their children are young, then acts as a funnel into the public school system. Others are probably less consequential on their own: Studies have found that centralized lotteries like the one DC adopted have only small impacts on integration. 

Regardless, the total package seems to have worked. It’s theoretically possible that the army of Sweetgreen-chomping, DC-Brau-chugging millennials who showed up to DC in the Obama era would have decided to raise their kids here no matter what the state of the city’s schools had been. The more reasonable reading, however, is that DC created a virtuous cycle, by taking steps to improve its K-12 system just as its economy was attracting a new influx of relatively well-off transplants. One telling fact: While the number of white children in DC roughly doubled in this time, the number in public and charter schools more than quadrupled, meaning parents were choosing to send them at higher rates. 

Still, it’s a model, one that shows how a city can change the makeup of its school system when it realistically can’t just make kids commute in from the suburbs. 

It seems telling that one of the only other cities to see similar declines in segregation, Atlanta, put a similar emphasis on education reform early in the century. Although those efforts were eventually sidetracked by a cheating scandal in which schools and teachers were caught faking standardized test scores, it did notch real improvements, as shown on the NAEP. 

Some will ask how much of a model DC can really be, given the uniqueness of its circumstances — not every city will have a chance to capitalize on a boom in young professionals. Still, it’s a model, one that shows how a city can change the makeup of its school system when it realistically can’t just make kids commute in from the suburbs. 

What Henderson, who served as DC schools chancellor between 2010 and 2016, emphasized to me was that insofar as DC has succeeded more than other cities at integrating in its schools, it was at best a side effect of education reform policies, rather than an explicit goal. At one point in our chat, I started reading a few of the stats I had dug up about the decline in “intense” segregation before she stopped me.

“I don’t even know if people collected that kind of data,” she said. “We prided ourselves on ‘what gets measured, gets done.’ If integration was a goal, that would have showed up on some of my [performance indicators]. And we just literally never had that conversation.” I suspect she was exaggerating slightly — Henderson and her deputy celebrated DC’s increase in white enrollment back in 2011. But it’s hard to think of a deeper contrast with Hannah-Jones’s view — where unless cities take politically implausible steps to desegregate, we’re doomed to failing children.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Jewish communities in Israel and around the world are currently marking the third anniversary of the October 7 attacks that killed 1,200 people and triggered the war in Gaza.

Memorials for the victims of the attacks have been held at homes, on highways, and at the site of the Nova music festival. In Tel Aviv, a massive art installation at the Trumpeldor beach commemorated both the victims and the 251 hostages taken by Hamas three years ago.

Of those hostages, 166 have since returned alive, and the remains of the last deceased captive were released to Israel in January. But there’s no undoing the national trauma of the October 7 attacks — the deadliest massacre of Jewish people since the Holocaust — or the brutal retaliatory campaign that Israel launched afterward.

Those events profoundly changed Israel, Gaza, the broader Middle East, and the United States, and they continue to shape global and domestic politics. So today, we’re taking a look at the very long shadow of the October 7 attacks and Israel’s response to them.

Go a little deeper

Writing about the first anniversary of October 7 two years ago, Vox’s Zack Beauchamp warned that the “horrors” first triggered by the attacks would continue to unfold in tragic and unforeseeable ways. “Events that might seem contained to the Middle East have come to hurt people around the world,” he wrote, “in ways that we may not yet fully understand or even be capable of predicting.”

That hurt has undeniably been most acute in the Gaza Strip, where three years of war have reduced entire cities to rubble. Israel’s military campaign has killed more than 74,000 Palestinians — most of them civilians — since October 2023. Most of Gaza’s 2 million residents have also been displaced from their homes, crowded into makeshift shelters and refugee camps riddled with hunger and disease.

But the consequences of October 7 extended beyond Gaza. Settler violence against Palestinians intensified in the occupied West Bank. And the ensuing conflicts also weakened Iran and changed the balance of power across the Middle East.

That’s because Iran had long relied on its allies, like Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, to project power and deter attacks by its longtime rival, Israel. After October 7, however, Israel significantly weakened both groups, leaving Iran vulnerable and setting the stage for the direct strikes on Iran that Israel and the US began last winter. 

Both the war in Iran and the continued occupation of Gaza have badly hurt Israel’s international image. Across 36 countries surveyed by Pew last spring, a median of 67 percent of adults viewed Israel negatively. That disapproval has translated into diplomatic shifts, as well: 155 countries — including longtime allies of Israel, such as the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia — now officially recognize Palestinian statehood, up from 136 before the war. That doesn’t change much on the ground, but it represents a real rebuke to Israel. 

In the US, meanwhile, Israel has become a huge flashpoint in domestic politics. While more than half of Americans had a favorable view of the country before October 7, sentiment deteriorated sharply in 2025 and 2026, particularly on the left.

The issue could help determine some key midterm races, like the Michigan Senate election, where Democrat Abdul El-Sayed has called for ending US military aid to Israel. That’s a policy nearly half of House Democrats and many potential presidential candidates have also endorsed. 

Cutting off US aid to Israel isn’t likely to change the country’s stance toward Palestinians, however. (Israel is a wealthy country in its own right, and American aid represents just a small piece of its budget.) Instead, changing Israeli policy on Gaza and the West Bank would likely require far more aggressive pressure — pressure that, even in the current political environment, the US is unlikely to apply.

A single day may have kicked off a cascade of hurt and horrors. But putting an end to them will take far more time.

One link for later

➨ Cultivate hope. It can feel difficult (not to mention: naive, pointless, and exhausting) to maintain optimism in the face of current events. So Jamil Zaki, a psychology professor and the director of the Stanford Social Neuroscience Lab, suggests another tact: Do away with blind optimism and lean into hope — that belief that the future could turn out well, but requires real care and attention.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that sea turtles regularly cry (okay: “shed tears”) to rid their bodies of excess salt? Scientists are studying sea turtle tears to learn more about animal navigation. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the word for a baby eagle? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the final letter of the Greek alphabet. That would be omega, as in the Bible verse, Swiss watch brand, and nutritional supplement. 

This story is part of a series supported by Animal Charity Evaluators, which received a grant from EarthShare.

When I was a kid, my family would occasionally go fishing on small row boats on the lakes of Montgomery County, Maryland. The point wasn’t to catch fish to eat — we always released them — but rather to spend time together in nature. And for a while, I looked back on those times fondly. But as I’ve learned more about fish and their apparent capacity to feel pain, I now wonder: Was I just stabbing a bunch of fish in the mouth and throwing them back in the water, injured and vulnerable?

Ted Kerasote, a nature writer and lifelong hunter and angler, asked himself some version of this question decades ago after fighting to reel in a silver salmon in Alaska — the last he ever released. He still occasionally catches trout for dinner, but said that his decision to stop catch and release fishing that day in Alaska came down to looking at the situation critically: “Seeing this fish struggle for its life, for what end? I wasn’t going to eat it. Catch and release regulations were in place there. And so it was simply for my pleasure to fight this fish.”

Each year, tens of millions of people take to America’s lakes, rivers, streams, and coastal waters to catch billions of fish. Many of these fish only exist because US governmental agencies put them there; each year, over 1 billion fish are bred in hatcheries and stocked in water bodies primarily for anglers. And although firm estimates are hard to come by, it’s clear that the majority of fish caught are not kept for dinner, but tossed back in. Many fishing grounds actually require fish to be released (more on that later). 

While anglers report being primarily motivated to get on the water to commune with nature, spend time with friends and family, and relax, the whole endeavor is anything but pleasant for the fishes themselves. After the steel hook pierces their oral tissue — and sometimes their eyes, gills, or esophagus — they’re often yanked around to the point of exhaustion before being reeled in. Then they’re exposed to air while the hook is removed from their body (and sometimes also for a photo opportunity), before the angler puts them back into the water. There, the fish reenters an often-treacherous ecosystem while fatigued and injured. Sometimes, the hook can’t even be removed and likely remains in their mouths for hours or days.

Estimates on what percent of released fish die vary widely. One 2005 literature review landed the average at 18 percent, while a 2026 review put it at 11 percent. But these are by no means definitive, as they each pooled together data from dozens of studies with different methodologies and time observed after catch and release, which limits our understanding of fishes’ survival from these encounters. 

A different 2026 study, though also imperfect, took a more cleanly experimental approach. Researchers line-caught 489 Chinook salmon and then placed them in holding tanks for observation. Eight percent died within two hours of hooking, and about 25 percent died within 10 days. It’s reasonable to assume that the mortality rate would be higher if the fish were placed back into their local waters, with predators and other natural threats lurking.

Even when fish are caught by scientists like in this case, the operation is by no means surgical. In the Chinook study, 90 percent of the fish experienced moderate to severe fin damage, around 45 percent had moderate to severe hook wounds, and 8 percent suffered severe eye damage.

“No fish is better off because we’ve caught it,” Steven Cooke, a biologist and fisheries scientist at Carleton University in Canada — and an avid angler himself — told me. “It is impossible to catch a fish without causing, one, some level of injury, and two, physiological disturbance.” 

In other words, recreational catch and release fishing injures billions of animals (a vast number of whom were bred for this fate) and condemns many of them to a premature death, and likely a more unpleasant one than if they had simply been killed humanely immediately after catch. Which means that what is often portrayed as a peaceful — even benevolent — pastime is, in another light, a more torturous activity. Especially if you think fish might experience pain. 

What does a fish feel? 

For much of recent history, it’s been thought that fish — far from us on the evolutionary tree, living in ecosystems largely foreign to us — don’t feel pain. But in the early 2000s, a group of scientists in the United Kingdom began to conduct experiments on fish that slowly undermined this belief.

A seminal study, published in 2003, found that fish have nociceptors — sensory neurons that identify and respond to threatening stimuli, like predators or, well, metal hooks jabbed in their mouths. But it wasn’t necessarily evidence that fish feel pain in a similar sense to how we and other animals might; for that, a scientist would need to demonstrate that fish are not just reflexively reacting to noxious stimuli but also that their brains perceive it as pain.

Since then, researchers have poked and prodded fish to see if something more is going on than mere threat avoidance. They have, for example, injected acid and bee venom into the lips of rainbow trout, whose respiration rates nearly doubled and who proceeded to rub their lips against rocks or the tank walls — seemingly in an attempt to soothe the injury. 

In another experiment, scientists trained fish to feed in a certain part of their tank, and then subjected them to electric shocks in that area. The fish were less likely to seek out food as the shock intensity increased. 

But Cooke, the angler and fisheries scientist, isn’t convinced. He wants fellow anglers to treat fish better insofar as he wants fish to reproduce, grow, and have a good life, but says he’s a “fish pain skeptic.” 

“The evidence base around fish pain is meager and generally low quality, extremely biased, and unable to tell us whether or not fish have the capacity to feel pain or not,” Cooke told me. (Cooke, for his part, says he is biased too, and has received funding from pro-fishing interests.) 

The core of the skeptics’ argument boils down to the idea that fishes’ brains don’t possess the necessary equipment to experience pain — namely, the neocortex, which plays a major role in our and other mammals’ processing of pain.

Culum Brown, a professor and fish welfare researcher at Macquarie University in Australia, vehemently disagrees. “All [the information] we have to date suggests the behavioral, physiological, and psychological responses [in fish] mimic humans,” Brown told me. “Whatever way you look at it there are far more similarities than differences, which is not surprising given how important pain perception is from an evolutionary standpoint.” (Brown, I should note, has received some funding from animal welfare and ocean protection foundations.)

We know that various species of fish can use tools, recognize themselves in a mirror, build artistic nests, form complex social relationships, distinguish between human faces, and maintain long-term memories, among other abilities. Is it such a stretch, then, to extend them the capacity for pain?

Ultimately, as my colleague Marina Bolotnikova has written, the fish pain debate is partly a scientific one and partly a philosophical one. “The question remains unsettled because pain is a subjective feeling that science cannot prove definitively,” she wrote. One must be conscious to feel pain, and consciousness remains a mystery. With this uncertainty, we can continue to act as if they don’t feel pain, or we could give them the benefit of the doubt. 

Georgia Mason, a behavioral biologist at the University of Guelph in Canada, is, like Cooke, not quite convinced fish feel pain. But she argues that we ought to take a precautionary approach and act as if fish can experience pain until proven otherwise. 

With that in mind, should we be fishing for fun at all? 

Reducing harm in sportfishing — and rethinking it altogether

For his part, even as a fish pain skeptic and angler, Cooke is keen to reduce harm to fish. And the most important way to do that, he says, is to keep fish wet. He’s even on the board of a nonprofit called Keep Fish Wet.   

Why? “Most fish do not do well when exposed to air,” Cooke said. Their gills collapse and/or stick together, making it hard for them to get the oxygen they need.

“A fish should always be dripping wet,” and only out of the water for 10 seconds or less (the average time anglers kept fish in the air, in one study, was 29 seconds). The group Cooke works with also suggests anglers minimize handling time. And Cooke said fish will experience more stress if they’re caught in warm waters, as it holds less of the oxygen they need. 

Brown had a lot more to say. Anglers should avoid “playing” with the fish and bring them in as quickly as possible; use barbless hooks, which makes for an easier release; and when deepsea fishing, bring the fish up slowly to prevent barotrauma. And for those who kill, rather than release the fish they catch, do so quickly, rather than letting fish slowly suffocate or bleed out.

As Kerasote, the nature writer and hunter and angler, pointed out, catch and release as a widespread hobby is a relatively new phenomenon. Only in recent decades have state wildlife agencies made it a rule in many water bodies, in an effort to prevent fish depletion so as to ensure there is enough for wildlife to eat — and also so that there are always plenty of fish for anglers to catch. 

Before this, Kerasote said, “you went out there, you caught your limit and you were done.” But with catch and release, “there was no limit anymore, and that’s what became embedded in the fishing culture.”

To account for this shift, Kerasote wants to see states limit access to fishing in the same way that they hold lotteries to hunt certain mammals, like elk and Bighorn sheep.

Some fish scientists question the practice of catch and release altogether. While addressing an audience full of anglers at a conference, zoologist Eugene K. Balon bravely — or perhaps foolishly — shared a provocative thought experiment to prove his point. 

Imagine there is a recreational activity called “sportbirding,” Balon proposed, in which participants take fishing rods, put earthworms on the hooks, and cast them out into the forest. Then they wait until a bird — a Robin, in his example — falls for the bait and bites down on the hook.

“The shrieking and flopping bird is proudly wheeled toward the hide, the hook removed and the bird drowned in the water,” Balon said to the crowd (the water, in this case, is a parallel to fish exposed to air). “Would any one of you support such recreational activity? How does it differ from the sportfishing you support?”

“Sportbirding” would surely be considered barbaric to many — even many anglers, I imagine — and yet sportfishing enjoys widespread social acceptance, perhaps because of the persisting belief among many that fish don’t experience pain. 

Recreational fishing also has far-ranging impacts on species beyond its direct targets. For example, a study of over 2,500 pelicans taken into wildlife rehabilitation centers in Florida near the longest fishing pier in the world found that more than half of the birds had been injured by fishing hooks and lines — the leading cause of injury. Stocking nonnative fish to local water bodies can also upset natural food chains and ecosystems. And some of the live baitfish used by anglers spread disease to wild fish populations. 

There is also the issue of these “bait” animals themselves. Billions and billions of smaller fish — like minnows and shiners — are reared and sold each year in the US only to themselves be stabbed through with a fishing barb and intentionally kept alive and thrashing to entice a larger fish to chomp down on them. This is an additional, yet largely hidden, layer of suffering in the recreational fishing industry.

“I think fishing is worse than hunting,” Brown told me. “At least you know what you are targeting when hunting. And hunters pride themselves on a clean kill. It is a very different ethic,” than fishing, he said. That’s evident particularly in the world of competitive sportfishing, where marathon “fights” to reel in enormous fish are glorified.

For Cooke, many survey respondents, and even for me years ago, fishing is often about spending time with family outdoors, away from technology, while marveling at fish. But couldn’t that all be more or less achieved by taking a hike in the woods, snorkeling, boating, scuba diving, catching fish in nets, or even “hookless” fishing, which is practiced by a tiny contingent of anglers?

Not necessarily. Anglers, he said, are also motivated by the “thrill of the chase.” The uncertainty of what type of fish they will catch, and whether they catch any fish at all, keeps drawing anglers back to the water. Cooke said plenty of people who fish might also be driven by the “human domination of nature.”

Humans, like all creatures, are hardwired for survival. And for the vast majority of our history, that entailed catching and killing fish for sustenance. But now, most fishing is done for fun, or for those other pursuits: relaxation, thrills, the domination of nature. But the fun comes with an enormous moral cost that most anglers, it appears, would rather not confront. Because as our understanding of fish and their capacities evolves, our ideas about fishing might need to evolve, too.

What can an economist teach us about misery? 

I had that question in mind while reading the new book The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us, by eminent researcher George Loewenstein. The field is not exactly known for its facility with human emotions, but Loewenstein is a co-founder of behavioral economics, the subdiscipline that studies the many ways that people depart from the ideal of the perfectly rational actor. He’s spent a career investigating how psychology and emotion shape our judgments, and his latest book offers a sweeping account of how suffering structures human life. 

That might sound very bleak, like the opposite of a fun read. But the book itself isn’t distressing — it’s a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive. It emerged from a period of profound suffering in his own life, one where, he writes, he “thought about suicide constantly.” Writing it, he told me in a recent interview, was “kind of a silver lining for my own misery.” 

In Loewenstein’s own words, The Opposite of Happiness is not a self-help book. To him, understanding is its own reward. Though he adamantly refuses to dispense life advice, I still think the book offers much that can help us live more wisely, a little less at war with our emotions.   

“Misery is inescapable,” Loewenstein writes. “It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system.” Negative emotions are “more powerful, persistent, and pervasive than positive ones.” That is because, he argues, unpleasant feelings — hunger, pain, anger, loneliness — are how evolution motivated us to do the things we need to survive and pass on our genes. They still heavily shape our conscious experience, however mismatched they may feel to our modern circumstances. 

Some version of that insight, that dissatisfaction is woven into the human condition, has been known to humans for eons, of course, captured in philosophical teachings like Buddhism’s Four Noble Truths. The father of economics himself observed that people work hard to earn riches, only to discover the result offers no lasting contentment. “It is this deception which rouses and keeps in continual motion the industry of mankind,” Adam Smith wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. “It is this which first prompted them to cultivate the ground, to build houses, to found cities and commonwealths, and to invent and improve all the sciences and arts.” 

Loewenstein puts this understanding into the language of modern psychology, speaking to a current of anxiety and unhappiness running through American life today. It also points to enduring questions about what the purpose of human progress and prosperity is, anyway. 

Many of us could particularly benefit from the concept of negative “meta-emotions,” or the judgmental feelings we have about our negative feelings. “At the heart of so many of our miseries is not the fact that we feel bad, but the belief that we should feel otherwise,” he writes.  That line immediately rang true to me — merely acknowledging to myself that it’s not a big deal if I feel terrible from work stress, or my cat’s deteriorating health, or whatever else happens to be weighing on me, helps to lighten the load. What if we really tried to wryly embrace the reality that it’s extremely normal for life to suck sometimes? The reward might not be happiness, exactly (an elusive and poorly understood state anyway, Loewenstein points out), but a little less misery.  

I recently spoke with Loewenstein about his book — he had a gentle, faintly melancholic air, and took a surprisingly generous interest in some of the choices I was weighing in my own life. Part of our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below. 

Americans seem pretty unhappy right now. There has been endless discourse about that. Do you think that your book adds something to that conversation?

I do — I was just an expert on the Meta case that recently settled. I was an expert on the side that was against Meta. I think one of the causes of declining mental health is, in fact, social media. It really exacerbates the types of social comparisons that lead to envy and loss of self-esteem. I would like to think that I provide some new insights into how these modern technologies help to exacerbate the mental health crisis. 

One analysis of that, based on what I’ve learned from your book, might be: We as humans are so guided by negative emotions, and often those emotions are relational in nature and have to do with how we compare to other people.  Social media is then quite naturally going to tap into and amplifying negative emotions that we’re easily manipulated by.

That’s right. I think of it in two ways. One is there’s kind of a mismatch between the circumstances in which we evolved and the modern environment. And the other is that in the capitalist economy, there are, especially in the internet age, all these entities that are trying to exploit our evolutionary programming for their own good and not for our good. 

The premise of the book, as you write, is that “misery is inescapable. It’s not some malfunction or a bug in the system. It is the system” — it’s like our default state. Can you unpack what that means? 

I agree with everything you said until “default.” Different people have different set points, and there are some happy people around. I happen to be a glass-half-empty person. My natural state is a little bit below zero. But there are very few people who don’t experience some form of misery frequently and intensely. 

The evolutionary function of most negative emotions is pretty obvious, whereas the evolutionary function of happiness is sort of murky. And misery is so dominant that all it takes is a little bit of misery, a little bit of negative emotion, to wipe out any positive emotion. You go out to a really nice dinner at a fancy restaurant with your significant other, and you say something thoughtless and they get offended or they say something thoughtless and you get offended. All of a sudden you can’t even taste the food or appreciate the beautiful surroundings. 

Paul Rozin at the University of Pennsylvania referred to this as the “roach effect”: If you drop a roach into a vat of fine French wine, you don’t want to drink the wine. But if you take a roach, you can add as much wine as you want to it and you’re not going to want to eat the roach.

One of the strongest positive emotions is relief — which is interesting and not a coincidence, because it’s relief from negative emotions. It’s telling that maybe the strongest positive emotion involves the elimination of negative emotions.

You can think of misery as a stick trying to get you to do things that evolution thought were good for you; the stick is very immediate, and you know exactly what it’s telling you. If you are hungry, it’s time to eat. If you’re in pain, you’re injured, you’ve got to do something about it. But the carrot is different. The carrot, which is positive emotions, you have to think ahead, Oh, if I did this, then I would experience this positive emotion. It requires a kind of second-order thinking, whereas misery is just immediate. Evolution figured out probably very rapidly, probably when we were single-cell protozoa or something, that sticks are a way better way to get an organism to do what it needs to do than carrots.

How confident are you that the evidence base we have about the psychology of negative emotions generalizes to humanity as a whole and that it’s not culturally biased?

“What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings.”

Emotion researchers have looked across cultures, and they tend to observe the same basic emotions in a very, very wide range of cultures. What does vary across cultures is what induces the emotions. For example, shame — something that we would be unashamed of, somebody in a different country might be very ashamed of, and vice versa. A lot of these emotions are self-conscious emotions. They have to do with how we interpret the world and whether we’re living up to some kind of standard. Often we get it from culture, from religion, things like that.

But I think the emotions themselves are not universal, but pretty close to universal. My guess is that all 12 negative emotions that I write about are manifested in pretty much all different cultures, from those that have very little connection to Western civilization to advanced economies. 

Another timely thread that your book is in conversation with is this idea that American culture has become intolerant of ordinary negative emotions in a way that’s maladaptive. Suzanne O’Sullivan’s recent book The Age of Diagnosis, for example, covered our obsession with medical labels and how they might make us prone to thinking that feeling bad means that there’s something medically wrong with us. What do you think about that? Have we gotten bad at feeling bad?

It is striking to me how it seems like all the young people I meet talk about their therapist, and a lot of them talk about the drugs that they take. Young people also talk about anxiety and depression almost like one word, “anxiety-and-depression.” In my generation, anxiety and depression were two entirely different things. 

I think it’s good that younger generations are more comfortable talking about these things and getting help. I do worry that it can be, to some degree, pathologizing. There’s an awful lot of self-focus there. And I kind of worry that if you are dealing with your mental health problems by taking drugs, that it reduces your motivation to figure out things like how to reorganize your life to feel better. But I don’t want to sound too much like a dinosaur.

There’s a contingent of people who might read your book and think, “Yes, isn’t it terrible that humans are built to be unhappy and our evolved instincts don’t serve us well anymore? And that’s why we should engineer humans in such a way that we don’t feel this way all the time.” Someone with a strong utilitarian philosophy might think that if your life sums up to more negative feelings than positive ones, then it’s not even worth living. But that’s not really the vibe that I get from you. 

No, yeah. And one of the things I talk about in the book are what psychologists call meta-emotions. These are emotions that one experiences about emotions. I think the single best example is envy. If you envy your friend — almost everyone has friends that they envy, but they’re still your friends. But you might feel that you’re not supposed to envy your friend, and you feel guilty — the guilt is a meta-emotion. Or you can also have meta-emotions about a lack of emotion. So something bad happens to someone, or even somebody dies, and you don’t feel all that bad, and you feel guilty because you’re not grieving. 

I think all the societal focus on happiness creates a kind of a meta-meta-emotion, which is that we think we’re supposed to be happy. And then we feel ashamed and guilty about the fact that we aren’t happy — we feel like we failed. That compounds and adds another level of depth to our misery. So I think it can be liberating at some level to understand that misery just is a constant in human existence. 

I also think that my book is militantly anti-self-help. There’s no self-help in it whatsoever. But I don’t think it’s a depressing book to read, and it wasn’t particularly depressing to write, though some of the stories that I wrote about were a bit wrenching. 

I like that — but what, then, ought people to do with the information that you’re presenting?

What I’d really like people to get out of the book is insight — into their own negative feelings, their own types of misery, and other people’s negative feelings. To me, insight is valuable in its own right. 

The reason I read sad novels is not because they make me happy, but because I feel like I gained some kind of insight into people and into the world. Tess of the d’Urbervilles is the saddest book you could ever imagine, but it’s very meaningful to read, and it definitely feels like you’re a different person after you read it. I love novels, but I have no skill as a fiction writer. So this book was almost like a surrogate for me. Instead of writing a novel, I wrote this book.

I think the lack of self-help drives some people crazy. I did a podcast where the podcaster kept asking me questions about how reading the book would improve somebody’s life. And I kept saying it’s not a self-help book.

I’m just very skeptical of self-help talks and books and things like that. And I know that there’s certain things you are supposed to do to feel good, like you’re supposed to wake up and think of three things that you should be thankful for. And maybe if I did that, maybe I would get happier, but I’ve never been able to actually get myself to do that.

But you do have some insights that people could apply in their lives, like the idea that striving intentionally for happiness or meaning doesn’t really work, and that meaning often comes to us in unforeseeable spontaneous moments. On one hand, that implies a kind of randomness, and maybe there’s not a lot we can do about it. On the other hand, I can predict that I’m more likely to feel a deep sense of meaning in some scenarios than others, and I can put myself into those situations more, like choosing to be social on a weeknight.

A lot of the time the good things in life are just surprising, and sometimes you have to get dragged kicking and screaming into things that ultimately end up being the most fulfilling things in your life. So much of parenting is trying to get your kids to do things that they don’t want to do that you are absolutely convinced that if they started to do them, they would end up loving.

You argue, drawing from economist and philosopher Adam Smith, that human beings are constantly striving to achieve the next thing because we imagine it’ll satisfy us, though it never does. That helpful delusion is what leads us to build cities and cure diseases and all the rest. 

Adam Smith is best known for the invisible hand, which is the idea that each person single-mindedly pursuing their own well-being inadvertently promotes the public good. But if you read Adam Smith’s other book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, he didn’t believe at all that people pursue their own personal interest. He believed that people are driven by this illusion that the next raise, the next accomplishment, will bring happiness, and it never does. I love that contradiction between the conventional interpretation of the invisible hand and what Adam Smith really believed.

So civilization is powered by this dissatisfaction that never resolves itself. But I don’t think you would say the lesson we ought to take from the book is that we’ll always revert back to being miserable, so there’s no point in doing anything.

That’s absolutely not the point of the book. Misery evolved for good reasons, and the whole point of misery is that we’re supposed to take actions to lessen our miseries. That’s what we should be doing, because who wants to be miserable? 

For many Texans, the second weekend of September was a moment for the state to shine. The Texas Longhorns, the University of Texas at Austin’s storied football team, upset the No. 1 Ohio State Buckeyes in a dramatic comeback win. 

But for Bo French, the Republican candidate for railroad commissioner, a powerful position that was born to regulate railroads but today oversees the state’s sizable oil and gas industry, the most notable part was the number of South Asians in the crowd. 

“I heard UT graduation this year looked like this. I didn’t believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined,” he posted on X over a picture of celebrating students. In case there was any ambiguity as to the problem, he added that images like the one he shared showed “how many Americans have been displaced by foreigners.”

At least some of the students in the viral photograph were US citizens. And the post — and French’s candidacy — have since become a major political flashpoint, even weeks later, pushing a growing far-right campaign to demonize people of Indian descent into the national conversation. 

“He assumed every brown person in that picture is not American, which is scary because he is a politician running for statewide office,” said Sidharth Ram, the founder of the Indian American Advocacy Council and a technology consultant who lives in San Antonio.

This phenomenon has become especially prevalent in Texas, which has one of the largest concentrations of Indian Americans in the country — over half a million people, according to one estimate by Pew Research Center. Many community members there have been shocked by the rise in prejudice in a state that has long been a haven for South Asian immigrants seeking a better life with few incidents. 

Karthik Soora, a Houston-based entrepreneur and former candidate for state senate, said that his experience in Texas has been mostly positive.

“I’ve just never experienced any of this in real life,” he said of the online hate.

But over the past two years, he’s seen a marked change in the discourse and a shift toward what he called “vitriol and hatred.” 

Much of this vitriol has been boosted by online influencers who have descended on bustling Indian American communities like Frisco, a suburb of Dallas. They’ve trained their cameras on South Asians, warning about a desi takeover of Texas.

Ravi Kapur, an Indian American and the founder of the South Asian television network Diya TV, said that social media incentives are helping drive the influencers to embrace anti-Indian messaging online.

“You are inciting rage,” he said. “You are inciting the public to engage on your post, and thus you become a bigger figure online.”

Some of the videos are completely banal; one viral post just features Indian Americans walking peacefully around a Costco doing their shopping like anyone else. 

It would be easy to dismiss all of this as a purely online phenomenon. But as French shows, far-right nativists, who are broadly hostile to immigrant and minority groups, are increasingly finding a footing in electoral politics. And while a few GOP dissidents like the outgoing Sen. John Cornyn (who lost his reelection primary bid) have said they will not vote for French, the state’s most prominent candidates like Gov. Greg Abbott and Senate candidate Ken Paxton have not pulled their support.

Meanwhile, parts of the right-wing coalition turned one immigration debate — access to the H1B visa — into a lightning rod, highlighting it as a pathway for Indians to immigrate to the United States. The late Charlie Kirk singled out Indians, once saying that “America does not need more visas for people from India.” Turning Point USA, the organization Kirk led, is one of the organizations deploying influencers to scandalize the Indian community in Texas.

But the question remains why Indian Americans have become a target. 

In the Trump era, the minorities who’ve faced the brunt of right-wing attacks tend to be working class: think Trump’s false claims about Mexicans deploying rapists across the border or Haitians devouring people’s pets. A typical MAGA critique is that immigrants soak up safety-net funding or that their “third world” culture — another Bo French obsession — is dangerously incompatible with American life.

Some influencers on the far right, like Laura Loomer, do point to poverty in India to denigrate Indians in similar ways to other immigrants. But, broadly speaking, this attack has little resonance in America. 

Indian Americans are among the most successful diaspora groups in the United States. The stereotypes about Indians typically revolve around Tiger Moms and small business owners. They have some of the highest incomes and strongest families while disproportionately being represented in the ranks of elite professions like doctors and the tech sector. And the community is widely seen as well-integrated — the cheering students at the Longhorns game were, after all, doing exactly what every other UT college football fan was doing that day.

Swapan Dhairyawan, a Houston-based Indian American who has long participated in GOP politics, has always seen his community fitting into American life with ease. He posed the hypothetical of asking his daughter whether she was Indian.

“She would say no — I’m an American!” he said.

So why then are we starting to see this white nationalist backlash against immigrants who are by all indications rapidly assimilating — the very thing conservatives often say they want?

The roots of anti-Indian hate 

A 2024 study conducted by a team led by Yale immigration researcher Leah Boustan may provide one part of the answer: Indian immigration is helping provoke the latest wave of middle-class status anxiety. 

Boustan and her colleagues examined the composition of high-income suburban school districts in California between the years 2000 and 2016. What they found was that as more Asian students arrived in a school district, white enrollment started to go down. Essentially, they found a new form of “white flight” — the phenomenon that originally described white families leaving areas that were populated by African Americans and Hispanics.

Why might white families be fleeing from Asian students, who are often stereotyped as studious?

Boustan said in an interview that her paper could not deduce exactly why the white flight was occurring. But she offered a theory, pointing to the fact that the University of California system offers admissions benefits to some applicants who are in the top of their high school class.

“What we saw is that when Asian students arrive in one of these high-income school districts, overall test scores go up, but white test scores do not. They just stay flat,” she said, suggesting that this might be one factor driving white families to leave these districts.

Asian Americans’ success in top state schools was a sensitive political issue in the run-up to the period covered by Boustan’s study. California voters passed a ballot initiative banning consideration of race in public colleges and universities admissions in 1996 over the objections of critics, who sometimes warned schools would be overrun with Asians if it were enacted, and that it would keep out other minority students. Without some form of affirmative action, President Bill Clinton warned in one 1995 interview, “there are universities in California that could fill their entire freshman classes with nothing but Asian Americans.”

Although Boustan’s team studied California, not Texas, it’s worth mentioning that for almost 30 years Texas has had a law in place guaranteeing entry to its public colleges and universities to eligible students in the state who graduate in the top 10 percent of their high school class (the law works differently for UT Austin, which for fall 2026 automatically admitted students in the top 5 percent of their class).

This sets up a potentially fierce competition between the high-performing children of ambitious Indian American immigrants and the rest of Texas.

With that finding in mind, maybe what bothered French and like-minded nativists so much is not that Indians are refusing to integrate into American society as much as their rapid rise while other groups are left behind. The more uneasy that middle-class families feel about their own prospects, the more they’ll see successful newcomers — like, say, students at the state’s most competitive school — as a threat. And while those conditions have existed in prior eras, the rise of far-right influencers who can prey on those fears for an audience of millions — and link them to explicitly nativist or racist views — adds a new dimension.

How immigration became a target  

The policy fight over the H1B visa reflects how these tensions can play out in public in similar ways to other immigration debates. While labor advocates have often raised economic concerns that H1B visas — like immigration more broadly — can loosen labor markets and reduce worker power, many of the far-right influencers are combining these economic concerns with a broader culture war against Indians themselves. They make up the largest share of H-1B visa beneficiaries, with Chinese workers being a distant second.

Sara Gonzales, for instance, a Texas-based right-wing pundit, has simultaneously waged war on H1B visas while also targeting the Indian community as a whole, claiming that they are “mass immigrating here” and “scamming” Americans. The H1B program has become a lightning rod for nativists, while its defenders — including business elites on the right like Elon Musk  — argue it’s another case of meritocracy in action, with American companies scouring the world for the very best talent wherever they can find it.

When Abbott responded to French’s viral tweet, he tried to split the difference between nativists and more traditional business-oriented Republicans by pointing to his restrictions on H1Bs. Abbott has long been close to the Indian community in Texas, but he is feeling pressure from the right of his party.

“A selective picture of Longhorn fans celebrating our biggest home victory-ever-actually shows a way that Texans unite. We all support our college football teams. The way we win the state is the same way we win football games. We unite under the brand of Texas,” he said. “That doesn’t mean that Texas cannot also lead in having the toughest immigration laws of any state in America and freezing H1B visas at our universities.”

Exploiting economic fears 

Ashish Agrawal, the founder and board chair of the Hindu American civic organization Disha and a resident of the Greater Houston area, said that economic woes may be leading to scapegoating of Indians. 

“I believe it’s more of an economic pressure. As people lose their jobs…if they see someone else that doesn’t look like them, right, is still living comfortably, I think that’s causing some of [this resentment],” he said. 

Suhag Shukla, who serves as the executive director of the Hindu American Foundation, likened anti-Indian resentment to antisemitism, which often targets Jews for being too successful, with one important distinction. 

“For the most part, we’re physically identifiable,” she said. “And then you add all the other elements that the Jewish community has had in terms of economic and educational success…the success and the cohesiveness of their communities, in spite of assimilation, is what’s made them a historic target. And I think you see the same sort of thing with Indian Americans.” 

Another factor is that the Indian and broader South Asian community itself has many divisions that can make it difficult to respond to nativist hatred. A plurality of Indian American adults are Hindu, but substantial minorities are Muslim, Christian, and Sikh. Religious differences between South Asian groups have sometimes led to intragroup prejudice.

Yet to many far-right activists, all of these groups are seen as foreign and undesirable. But when influencers target a Hindu temple in Texas or campaign against non-existent Sharia law in the state, it’s harder to generate a united response from South Asians, with each community struggling to defend itself in a silo. 

Imran Ghani, Houston’s director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations in the state and the son of South Asian immigrants, said that these divisions stem from South Asia’s history and are reflected in far-right strategy in the present.

“It was first the British who used divide and conquer, and now it’s the far right,” he said.

How Indian Americans are responding

In the interviews for this piece, one of the things that stood out was how many people proposed responding to the far-right with pragmatism and good-faith community outreach. While they have zero sympathy for nativist hatred, some also believe that Indian Americans themselves can help counter misunderstandings by getting more involved in civic life and presenting positive examples. 

“You have worked hard. We have worked hard,” Dhairyawan, the Houston Republican, said, reflecting on the status of Indians in America. “We have achieved. But don’t flaunt.”

Soora, the entrepreneur, pointed to a controversy that broke out in late 2024 when Vivek Ramaswamy, a prominent Indian Republican who is today running for governor of Ohio, took to X to blame American culture for promoting mediocrity, contrasting it with other cultures that promote excellence. The post set off an explosive fight on the right, with some conservatives siding with Ramaswamy’s praise for self-starting ambition, and others (including fellow Indian American Nikki Haley) decrying his remarks as an unnecessary dig at American values. 

“Obviously, Vivek’s Tweet did not make it easy for anybody,” said Ram, the San Antonio tech consultant.

But while they think Indians should be careful about how they talk about their community’s success to the rest of America, they also believe that they should forcefully participate in public life so politicians can’t afford to disregard them.

Dhairyawan, for instance, made the case that Indian Americans like him can continue to show that, like himself, they’re natural conservatives who share similar values with Republican voters.

“The family, faith, God, low taxation…those are the things that I say that we align with,” he noted. 

(Surveys suggest that a plurality of Indians consider themselves to be Democrats, but substantial minorities identify as Independent or Republican.)

While he plans to vote mostly for Republicans in the upcoming election, he won’t be giving his vote to French. He’ll likely cast a write-in vote instead.

Others, like Agrawal, intend to continue to work toward boosting Indian American voter turnout to pressure local politicians to take them seriously as a voter bloc.

“If you’re [not] at the table, you’re at the menu,” he said.

Indian American comic Aziz Ansari put it more humorously a few years ago when he said we need a “brown Al Sharpton.”

For Shukla, who works in anti-hate advocacy, there is a reason for Indian Americans to be optimistic. In her view, they’re walking the same path as many other minority groups before them, like Jews, Latinos, Chinese, Italians, and others.

“We have just as much a right to be here and consider America home and protect it in the way we think serves our greater good,” she said. “And we have a brilliant constitutional framework that has allowed pluralism to grow and flourish, and one that empowers each of us to ensure that the promise of America is one that all Americans can enjoy regardless of the color of our skin, where our ancestors came from, or to whom and how we pray.”

If President Donald Trump had his way, the Republican Party would be top-to-bottom the party of AI — or, in his preferred branding, “super intelligence.”

But down in the very state where Trump has his “winter White House,” two Republicans have put forth a very different vision for the party’s future — and have been far more eager to take on the artificial intelligence industry.

Most notable is the term-limited Gov. Ron DeSantis, who devoted much of his final year in office to a failed effort to pass an “AI bill of rights,” which would have imposed tougher restrictions regarding child safety and other topics. He’s warned that AI could “set off an age of darkness and deceit,” blasted “tech oligarchs” for putting people at risk, and called Anthropic “very creepy” for exploring whether AI could be conscious.

“He clearly understands what the risks are, and I find he’s also very good at calling bullshit on disingenuous arguments from the Silicon Valley lobby,” Max Tegmark, an MIT physicist who co-founded the Future of Life Institute, an AI safety nonprofit, told me. (DeSantis hosted Tegmark at two events in Florida this year.)

The other is DeSantis’s handpicked attorney general, James Uthmeier, a longtime close ally who is now trying to win the AG’s office in his own right — and who filed a high-profile lawsuit against OpenAI in June. Last week, Uthmeier asked the judge in the case to block OpenAI from developing new models unless they had “independent third-party guardrails and approval.”

“The danger of these AI systems is real and growing,” Forrest Saunders, a spokesperson for Uthmeier, told me. “Florida and the nation have seen case after case of violence, child exploitation, and models that operate beyond their developer’s control.” He added that Uthmeier “welcomes innovation, but Floridians will not be the test subjects.”

With AI cresting as a national anxiety — or a national opportunity, depending who you talk to — both major parties are still finding their footing on the issue. And though Trump is clearly trying to get Republicans in lockstep behind the industry, a very strong current is pulling the other way, responding to populist concerns and parents’ complaints to stake out a much more skeptical position. Florida has emerged as a bellwether for what Republican policies might look like if conservative America turns decisively against AI, especially as Trump’s political clock runs out.

DeSantis and Uthmeier aren’t unique in the GOP for having concerns about AI — a handful of House members and senators want further action, and populist opposition to data centers has bubbled up in races around the country.

But the two have gone furthest in taking on the industry directly — and they’ve done so even though it puts them on the wrong side of Trump. 

In recent days, I spoke to several Florida political observers and advocates on the AI issue. Most believe that DeSantis and Uthmeier are affirmatively trying to stake out what the GOP’s position on AI should be in a post-Trump future, and to better align with an electorate that’s turning sharply against the industry, despite what the president may say. 

“He’s trying to skate where the puck is going,” Jeff Brandes, a former Republican state senator, told me. (DeSantis’s office did not respond to a request for comment.)

Beyond the quest for political advantage, the stakes are very real. Will there actually be a significant and influential force on the right that takes the concerns about advanced AI’s harms seriously — and is willing to act to try and rein them in, before they do great damage? 

DeSantis and Uthmeier are hoping the answer is yes — and that they will be the ones leading that charge.

Ron DeSantis’s quest for an AI bill of rights

In this case, the politics and the personal are intertwined. DeSantis occupies a unique place within the party at this particular moment that’s given him an incentive to buck the national consensus on the right, especially when it comes to Trump, and explore an independent approach.

In his first decade in politics, DeSantis had a charmed rise. In 2012, he embraced the Tea Party to win a seat in Congress; in 2017, he bear-hugged Trump to get his endorsement for governor. He then became a national conservative star for opposing pandemic-era public health restrictions and waging war on “wokeness,” winning his 2022 reelection in a nearly 20-point landslide.

“He is always out front, even ahead of other Republicans, on issues that he makes more important,” Peter Schorsch, editor of Florida Politics, told me. “I would joke with people that I didn’t know how to spell ESG or DEI before he brought these to the forefront.”

But what followed was a failed presidential primary campaign that put DeSantis on the wrong side of Trump and then sent him back to Florida with an uncertain political future. 

Early last year, just weeks after a report that DeSantis’s wife Casey was considering running to succeed him as governor, Trump publicly urged Rep. Byron Donalds to enter the race, promising his “Complete and Total Endorsement.”

Also early last year, DeSantis, who had long run roughshod over Republican legislators, was faced with a new thorn in his side: an ambitious new state house speaker, Daniel Perez, who was more interested in cultivating the Trump White House than the governor. Perez took a far more assertive stance in shaping legislation and rejecting some of the governor’s demands than his predecessors; he also publicly blessed an investigation into a charity tied to Casey DeSantis. A bitterly personal feud between Perez and DeSantis ensued.

In the midst of all this, last summer, DeSantis got AI-pilled. 

In July 2025, DeSantis announced that he was going to develop a state plan to deal with the rise of artificial intelligence. “We can’t just turn the reins over to a bunch of tech overlords,” he said. (DeSantis had long been a critic of major tech and social media companies on the grounds that they are too “woke” or politically hostile to conservatives and their ideas.)

At another event that month, DeSantis said: “I think this is, like, the biggest issue that’s facing our society.” He mentioned AI’s potential impacts on the economy, on jobs, on students, and on the spread of “false narratives” as troubling to him.

“I welcome technologies that will enhance the human experience. I do not welcome things that are going to supplant the human experience,” DeSantis said in September.

His interest in state action put him on the opposite side of the Trump administration, which was advocating for a 10-year moratorium on state regulation of AI — arguing that forcing the industry to abide by a patchwork of state regulations would slow its growth. (David Sacks, a key Trump adviser on AI, championed this argument.)

Last December, at the Florida mega-retirement community the Villages, DeSantis rolled out his proposed “AI bill of rights.” It did not focus on existential or civilizational risks, but instead more practical concerns around child safety. Megan Garcia, a Florida mother whose 14-year-old son died by suicide after conversing with a chatbot “companion,” appeared at the press conference.

As introduced in the Florida state senate, the bill would have required that parents consent to minors speaking to companion chatbots and forced companies to disclose when users weren’t speaking to a human, among other provisions. The state senate passed it in March.

But it was dead on arrival in the Florida House of Representatives — where Perez had aligned himself closely with the White House. “We do believe that the federal government should take care of AI, and whatever legislation or policy has to pass on a national level,” Perez said. 

Brendan Steinhauser, who heads the AI safety advocacy group Alliance for Secure AI, told me that he saw Perez at a Mar-a-Lago fundraiser around this time, and asked him about safety risks. “He leaned to me and whispered, ‘We’re with you, but the president has made it clear not to move forward on this stuff,’” Steinhauser said. “So, the White House basically put the kibosh on that effort.” 

DeSantis complained publicly that Perez was pursuing a “personal agenda” and thwarting badly needed legislation. It was to no avail — the bill didn’t move. But Perez did — Trump nominated him as ambassador to Brazil in June, and he was confirmed in August. (A request for comment from Perez, submitted to the State Department, received no response.)

James Uthmeier’s lawsuit against OpenAI

Though DeSantis hit a wall in the legislature, his attorney general was soon waging his own battle against OpenAI in court.

The attorney general is an elected position in Florida, but when Marco Rubio vacated his Senate seat to become secretary of state, DeSantis filled the seat with the state AG, Ashley Moody.

Then, to fill the newly vacant AG job, DeSantis chose one of his closest aides, who had served as his general counsel, chief of staff, presidential campaign manager, and chief of staff again — Uthmeier. 

Uthmeier is a Florida native who had worked in Rubio’s Senate office; he graduated from Georgetown Law School in 2014. After that he joined the firm Jones Day and worked with Don McGahn; when McGahn was named White House counsel in Trump’s first term, Uthmeier went with him to the new administration, ending up at the Commerce Department. Then, in 2019, he headed back to his home state to work for the new governor, DeSantis, and has been close by his side ever since.

Now, though, DeSantis is term-limited, and Uthmeier is trying to get Florida voters to elect him for a full term as AG on his own. (Trump’s allies had reportedly urged then-Speaker Perez to challenge Uthmeier in the GOP primary, hoping to supplant a DeSantis ally; Perez demurred, and Uthmeier won the nomination unopposed.)

To make his mark, Uthmeier has filed several high-profile and politically charged lawsuits — for instance, he sued Starbucks over its corporate diversity politics (the company recently settled), and Pfizer about the safety of its Covid-19 vaccine. He’s also subpoenaed the NFL over its “Rooney Rule,” which requires teams to interview minority candidates for top coaching and operations jobs.

He’s also become the face of the administration’s challenge to the AI industry. In April, Uthmeier stood in front of a podium with an “Investigating OpenAI” sign, announcing he’d opened a criminal investigation into the company.

The impetus was a shooting at Florida State University last year that killed two people and injured six others; the accused shooter had consulted ChatGPT about various topics related to his plans hours before the attack.

“If ChatGPT were a person, it would be facing charges for murder,” Uthmeier said then. “This criminal investigation will determine whether OpenAI bears criminal responsibility for ChatGPT’s actions.”

There have been no criminal charges yet. But in June, Uthmeier filed a wide-ranging civil lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging deceptive business practices, negligence, fraudulent misrepresentation, and other legal violations, because the company marketed ChatGPT as safe when they knew it could be quite dangerous. The suit also named OpenAI CEO Sam Altman personally as a defendant. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

Like DeSantis’s AI bill of rights, Uthmeier’s lawsuit originally focused on practical concerns and real-world harms that have already occurred, like the shooting. “Since its release in 2022, ChatGPT has advised teenagers on how to kill themselves, mix unsafe combinations of drugs, become anorexic, helped plan one mass shooting and one multiple homicide in Florida alone,” one filing in the lawsuit reads.

But after the summer’s ominous parade of AI headlines — such as OpenAI agents autonomously hacking the company Hugging Face, and new statements from current and former AI lab employees warning the technology could cause human extinction — Uthmeier turned up the heat, asking the judge in the suit for an injunction blocking OpenAI from developing new models without independent third-party safety evaluation.

“Defendants claim they cannot stop barreling forward with their potentially civilization-ending endeavors unless they are forced to do so by the government. They have asked the government to tie them to the mast” he wrote in a filing last week. “Plaintiff brings good news to the Defendants: The Florida Attorney General is answering your cry for help with a motion to enjoin you from harming Floridians with your reckless, unacceptably risky product.”

“Though a reasonable person would say there is no amount of money worth a 10% chance of the extinction of the human race, Defendants see it differently. They are intent on growing their $1 trillion valuation,” the filing continues. “It is only by the grace of the Almighty that one of Defendants’ AI agents hasn’t compromised a water supply or shut down a power grid — yet.”

OpenAI has not yet filed a response on the merits in this suit, but a company spokesperson has previously said that, in the case of the Florida State University shooter, ChatGPT “provided factual responses to questions with information that could be found broadly across public sources on the internet, and it did not encourage or promote illegal or harmful activity.”

The future

Uthmeier, age 38, is viewed in the state as a potential rising star with a talent for getting headlines, who could well have a long career in state GOP politics — if he wins in November, that is.

While DeSantis has been credited for changing Florida from a swing state to a solidly Republican one, some recent polls have raised the possibility it might swing back. A September survey by St. Pete Polls found Uthmeier ahead of his Democratic challenger, Miami attorney and former state Rep. José Javier Rodríguez, by just a single-point margin. 

And though DeSantis and Uthmeier have become major AI critics, the Floridian topping this year’s GOP ticket, Rep. Byron Donalds, is currently being hammered with attacks about his statement last year that the state needs to “embrace” data centers. He’s been nicknamed “Data Center Donalds” by his Democratic opponent, former Rep. David Jolly, who has also been close in some recent polls.

As for DeSantis, few expect the 48-year old to go quietly into retirement. When asked over the spring whether he’d run for president in 2028, he told reporters, “You never know.” 

Brandes, the former Florida state senator, told me that he thinks DeSantis’s AI push is about “looking for wedge issues where he can have a different opinion from Trump’s successors as he prepares for whatever future ’28 or ’32 provides for him.”

That is: The Republican Party of 2026 might still be too influenced by Trump to go fully anti-AI. But if Trump’s influence ebbs, if the populist backlash against AI spreads further, and especially if there are more worrying AI-related reports or incidents with real-world harms, perhaps there could be an opening on the right for a leader who’s taken the problem seriously, even when it meant going against powerful figures in his party.

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: Donald Trump is trying to fix the diesel crisis he caused. 

What’s happening? On Monday evening, Trump signed an executive order intended to lower diesel prices by temporarily expanding access to red-dye diesel. 

What’s red-dye diesel? A kind of diesel usually reserved for farm and construction equipment and other off-road uses — and marked with a little bit of red dye to distinguish it from other diesel sold for use in on-road vehicles. Ordinarily, it’s tax-exempt and not available to on-road vehicles, but Trump is expanding access in a bid to bring down the overall cost of fuel ahead of the midterm elections. 

Trump’s order defers payment on — but does not actually suspend — the federal tax on red-dye diesel for on-road vehicles through the end of the year, while also directing his Cabinet “to explore pathways to eliminate the obligation to pay the deferred taxes.” 

What’s the context? Diesel prices are way, way up because of the Iran war. Currently, the national average price per gallon is $6.32, compared to $3.68/gallon one year ago. 

Will this do anything to lower prices? Not very much, in all likelihood, for a whole slew of reasons ably explained here — including that the order can’t change the underlying reality of a global diesel shortage.

Why does the price of diesel matter? Most people don’t use diesel to fill up their tank, but semitrucks shipping food and other goods around the country rely on it. That means that when diesel gets more expensive, nearly everything else does too, sooner or later. 

Why does Trump care? This is best explained by the fact that Trump signed the executive order while on the campaign trail in Nebraska — ordinarily a comfortably Republican state that instead looks potentially in play for independent Senate candidate Dan Osborn. 

High diesel prices have hit hard in Nebraska and other agriculture-heavy states like Iowa and Kansas, jeopardizing Republican Senate seats in all three.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Here’s a story worth clicking for the cover photo alone: Scientists have discovered two new challengers for the title of world’s loudest bird, the bare-throated bellbird and the red-legged seriema. Both can top out at more than 120 decibels — louder than a jackhammer, according to 404 Media. 

If you’re curious, there are videos of both bird calls in the article, though I have not played them out of respect for the sleeping dachshund on my lap.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

A woman’s death last week near a Russian facility studying the plague immediately put the world on alert. This is the plague, after all, responsible for the deaths of some half of the humans in Europe during the worst outbreak in the 1300s. And it happened in Russia, a country with a long history of bioweapon experimentation.

After the Covid-19 pandemic — which many people, including many scientists, genuinely believe started with the virus escaping from a Chinese laboratory — the worst-case scenario was obvious: What if this is another lab leak that seeds a global outbreak?

That’s not likely, for a number of reasons (the facility is very isolated, plague is not nearly as infectious as Covid, it’s easily treated if caught early). But that doesn’t mean our work with such dangerous pathogens has gotten any safer; in fact, it may be betting less so. The anxiety about the Russian outbreak is a window into two trend lines that do worry global health experts: In the six years since the Covid-19 outbreak, the world has been building even more bioresearch facilities, some in places where that kind of work has never been done before; meanwhile oversight of the science and the security measures at those facilities is struggling to keep up.

Every day, humanity is playing with fire, studying and tinkering with deadly viruses, bacteria, and parasites in laboratories all over the world. And despite the recent debates over rogue AIs or AI-assisted humans intentionally developing bioweapons to wipe out humanity, the Russian incident is a reminder that a simple accident — human error — could pose as much of a threat as malice. While it is hard to confirm the details, local reporting suggests the worker may have been infected after breaking a test tube. And if that’s true, this would, of course, not be the first time that a mistake at a highly secure lab has put people’s lives at risk.

“We are rolling back any progress we made post-Covid, in ways that are going to have long-term effects on our ability to respond to any kind of outbreak.”

Gregory Koblentz, co-founded the Global BioLabs project

Since the pandemic, there has been a dramatic uptick in facilities being built to handle some of the most dangerous pathogens in existence. At the same time, there is still no global authority in charge of oversight for these sites. The US, once the world’s public health leader, has pulled out of the World Health Organization, which issues security guidance for labs around the world and helps coordinate a response when there is a possible emergency, and cut funding for the federal agencies responsible for overseeing US biosecurity facilities. And even after something as global as Covid, the world is still struggling to cooperate and rapidly share information during a health crisis; even now, it can be hard to be sure what is happening in Siberia. Our only sources of information are a Russian government prone to withholding and distorting information, and local news reports that are difficult to verify.

Even if this Russian plague threat fizzles out as expected, one day, we may not be so lucky. 

“We are rolling back any progress we made post-Covid, in ways that are going to have long-term effects on our ability to respond to any kind of outbreak, whether it’s natural or deliberate or an accident,” Gregory Koblentz, who studies global biosecurity at George Mason University and co-founded the Global BioLabs project, told me. 

But there are clear things that can be done, before our luck runs out. 

Countries are building more high-level biolabs, but oversight is falling behind

One of the side effects of the pandemic was a biological laboratory building boom that followed in its wake. Global BioLabs, the research initiative Koblentz helps run, has sought to create a comprehensive survey of high-level labs around the world. Take Biosafety Lab, Level 4 facilities, for example; these are built to handle the most dangerous pathogens in existence, like ebola and smallpox. Global BioLabs noted in its 2023 report that “the number of BSL4 labs is rapidly increasing.” 

This is not the first time that a public health emergency has led to a biolab buildout: The post-9/11 anthrax scares and the first SARS outbreak in the early 2000s both led to countries constructing new facilities. In the late 1990s, there were fewer than 10 BSL4 labs in the world; by the late 2010s, there were almost 40. 

But the pandemic accelerated construction once again. In 2021, there were 59 BSL4 labs either in operation, under construction or actively being planned worldwide; by 2023, 10 more facilities had been completed or were in the works, according to Global BioLabs.

Part of the reason for the buildout is a harsh lesson of the pandemic: Developing countries realized they could not depend on wealthier countries to also prioritize their needs during a serious crisis. So they wanted the capacity to handle deadly biological material themselves in case, for instance, they have a local outbreak and want to be able to safely identify the cause. India alone is planning four new BSL4 facilities; at least five countries — including Brazil, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, Singapore, and Spain— have started building or recently opened their first BSL4 lab. As a result, this construction is happening in places with less institutional experience doing this kind of work, where government oversight and stability have been weaker. 

“The more facilities that are working on this raises concerns about whether all this work is necessary,” Koblentz said. “And do they have the appropriate biosafety and biosecurity management systems in place?” 

That could raise the risks of unsound safety protocols — and ultimately of more high-stakes accidents. On top of that, according to the 2023 Global BioLabs report, about 75 percent of the existing operational BSL4 labs in the world are located in city centers, having at least 50,000 people living within 2.5 miles of the lab, “where dense populations could exacerbate the impact of an accidental release.”

And yet, even as lab construction takes off, national and international standards for governing these facilities and the research conducted there remain lax. There is no global organization that inspects or regulates these sites. One key voluntary group — the International Experts Group of Biosafety and Biosecurity Regulators — has actually gone defunct in recent years, Koblentz said. And national laws are patchy: Only one of the 27 countries with a BSL4 lab has comprehensive national legislation regulating “dual-use” gain-of-function research, in which scientists can tinker with pathogens to make them more transmissible or more virulent — and better understand how they work.

The WHO’s pandemic treaty initially included stronger biosecurity protections, but those were watered down during the debate over the document  — and either way, the treaty has still not been finalized. The US has of course also withdrawn from that and other international efforts to improve pandemic preparedness, further examples of the failure to forge more global cooperation in the wake of Covid. 

We need a more transparent approach to dangerous — but potentially life-saving — science

It could be easy to say we should simply stop studying dangerous viruses or enhancing them, even in highly controlled laboratory settings — but the situation is not that simple. Scientists do this kind of work to prepare for the next pandemic, to better understand how the viruses and bacteria that pose the biggest threat to humanity actually function, so that we can beat them back as quickly as possible. 

If you told somebody on the street that scientists are tinkering with a virus to see how it could become more dangerous, they would probably want the scientists to stop. But if you told them those scientists are doing work that could lead to faster therapeutics or vaccines during the next pandemic and avoid the need for lockdown and save millions of lives, they might be more open to this kind of research.

“The real question is: ‘What are the risks and what are the benefits?’” Beth Cameron, senior adviser to the Brown Pandemic Center at Brown University, told me. “We need to have a more rational conversation about what we’re actually talking about,” she said about these sorts of threats that are poised to have, as she puts it, “large-scale societal consequences.” 

And some of those are still circulating today. The reason Russia has this Siberian lab dedicated to plague research is because plague is still endemic in Russia.

“The dangerous pathogens are there already,” Koblentz said. The question is, he said: “How do you do it safely and securely?”

A starting point would be individual labs adopting new safety protocols, such as those from the International Organization for Standardization that were introduced shortly before the pandemic, Koblentz said. Additionally, as countries are building out their lab facilities, they need to develop strong oversight standards at the same time; the buildings may be flashy and have state-of-the-art equipment, but governments also need to address the mundane work of how to inspect and maintain safety once work begins as an equally important part of the process.

“If this is their first lab, in some cases, they don’t have very strong national legal and regulatory mechanisms for biosafety and biosecurity. They might not have the human capital,” Koblentz said. The regulatory side of the project unfortunately gets “short shrift,” he said.

Ideally, the world would have an international mechanism for auditing these sites, Koblentz said, something like an International Atomic Energy Agency but for biosecurity. There would be more transparent debates about what kind of research is done at high-security labs and whether it is truly important.

Better worldwide biosecurity will also likely require the US once again becoming a global health leader. The withdrawal from multinational groups like the WHO and cuts to government science funding have left everyone more vulnerable. Politics has consequences — including for our risks of a biosecurity catastrophe.

“Our level of preparedness for an outbreak, whether it is a lab accident or a natural outbreak of plague or anything else has been dramatically reduced in the last two years,” Koblentz said. “We’ve got a whole lot of problems that are self-inflicted at this point because of what the Trump administration is doing.”

The pandemic should have been a lesson in how important biosecurity really is. Instead, we’re unlearning its lessons in less than a decade. The Russian plague incident could be an essential wake-up call.

With 28 days until the midterms, polling suggests that Democrats have an excellent chance of taking back the House in November. Flipping the Senate, once considered a long shot, is starting to look realistic. Come November, the party may have majorities in both chambers that will give it far more leverage than in the first half of this Donald Trump presidency. 

If voters entrust them with power, though, how will Democrats use it? Their legislative options will be limited, with Trump still in the White House, but party leadership has gestured at a platform focusing on affordability, healthcare, and investigations into the Trump administration. 

Still, many of the particulars are missing — which Puck News congressional correspondent Marianna Sotomayor says is by design. As Sotomayor explains, House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York, the likely next speaker of the House, will want to present a unified front ahead of the election, which means no infighting over the messy details of policy. The real work can start after they take the House.

To break it all down, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Sotomayor about how Democrats are feeling ahead of the midterms, the prospect of a Speaker Jeffries, and the Democratic to-do list.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

What are the vibes in the House around these midterms?

The vibes, if you ask Democrats, are incredibly strong. If anything, it’s mostly Democrats trying to tell each other, “Don’t oversell how amazing of a night we’re going to have.” Genuinely, in the number of conversations that I’ve been having with strategists, lawmakers, those seeking office themselves, the question isn’t, “Will Democrats flip the House majority?” anymore. It’s “Democrats will flip the House majority. How big is that majority going to be?”

They want to play in deep Trump districts, and they’ve been doing that in Trump +5, Trump +10 districts that he won in ’24. Now they’re like, “What about Trump +21 districts?” And some people are like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, guys, let’s not get too overly excited” because everybody kind of has some PTSD from the ’22 midterms — that’s when Republicans ended up taking up the House. 

[In 2022], Republicans were in the same place around this time where they were like, “Oh my gosh, we’re going to flip 30-plus seats.” And then they only gained a five-seat majority. And we saw how difficult that [majority] was for Republicans, and frankly, it continues to be.

You would think that the Democrats would be trying to sell themselves based on, “Here’s what we’re going to do if we flip the House and the Senate.” But I don’t hear a ton of that. What are this party’s priorities if they take back the House?

You’re totally spot-on. It’s more or less vague. I’m sure Democrats would argue, no, we’re being really specific. And sure, we do know that if they take the majority, there’s three planks, and this is what Jeffries outlined even a year ago, and [Senate Minority Leader Chuck] Schumer, to some extent, has also adopted these planks. They want to tackle affordability, healthcare, and corruption.

Affordability means a number of different things. And the way that Jeffries is looking at it is you have your first 100 hours, your 100 days, and then your first year. And we don’t really know what is going to come up in those 100 days and in the first year, but within those 100 hours, he’s starting to give us some hints. 

There are some issues where they could easily, probably very quickly, pass. Those Medicaid tax credits that are going to expire just in the next couple of months because of the one Big Beautiful Bill, [for example].

You also have the corruption part of this where a number of committee Democrats have been taking notes. It’s like, oh, the Trump admin did that? Okay, going to write that down so I can remember to circle back when we have the majority. 

I’ve been told to expect subpoenas to start being sent out to administration officials, to Cabinet officials, to potential corporations that have cozied up too close to the Trump administration, pretty much after the House majority is declared.

Is it all but certain that Hakeem Jeffries will be Speaker if the Democrats win?

From inside of the Capitol, all that I’ve heard is that he is going to be speaker.

That being said, a number of progressives like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Delia Ramirez, a number of those members are already talking to a number of the progressives who are coming in, who are kind of being a little coy with whether they’re going to vote for Jeffries. 

Their message has been, look, Democrats need to stay united. We have differences of opinions on a number of fronts, but we need to be united, we need to govern, and we can’t get to any of that until we elect a speaker.

I remember Nancy Pelosi didn’t really want to spend the years of Trump’s first term investigating and impeaching, but the nature of Trump forced her to ultimately do that. Do you think Jeffries has learned anything from how his predecessor approached the president? 

To your question about impeachment, it is fascinating to see where House Democrats are right now versus where they were back then. I do not hear “let’s impeach Trump” that much from the 200 and something Democrats that are currently in office. And the reason why is because, one, there is the thinking that, okay, the Constitution says he can only be a two-term president, and probably the Supreme Court’s going to rule that he can’t run again [if he tries]. So let’s not get into that. 

But because Democrats are already thinking, planning, strategizing all of their investigations, I think we should expect possible impeachments against Cabinet officials. [Defense Secretary] Pete Hegseth is a name I keep hearing a lot, because there’s a number of Republicans who are incredibly upset with him. 

Democrats are thinking a little bit more strategically in terms of if we are going to impeach, or if we’re really going to try to subpoena or hold people in contempt of Congress, will we have Republicans backing us up in those certain cases? 

These three planks — affordability, healthcare, and holding the crooks accountable — those could have been the planks in month one or month two of the second Trump term. 

I wonder how much motivation there is in the caucus to take on some of the issues that have come up in the last year or so. ICE comes to mind, Iran, spending billions of dollars on vanity projects around DC, making billions of dollars off of his own name and brand while in office. How much are Democrats pushing for the issues that maybe have struck a chord more recently?

Behind the scenes, actually, they’ve been pushing those things a lot. But my understanding is that Jeffries doesn’t necessarily want to broadcast anything that could show any divisions among Democrats right now. He really just wants to project that Democrats are united on these three issues. 

Everybody else is like, okay, but there’s so many more things that we have to prove, and we should get done and we should show contrast with Republicans moving forward. And my understanding is his idea of it is we will get to those issues after the election. They’re not even worth debating pre-election because first we have to win.

No one is trying to sugarcoat how hard it is going to be to tackle a number of these issues where Democrats aren’t united. And there’s conversations about how the size of the majority affects that, right? Because if you have a bigger majority, that means Democrats flip seats in districts that Trump won by a whole lot. So you’re going to get a lot more centrist Democrats in the caucus. If it’s a smaller majority, that’s really going to help a number of those Democratic socialist candidates coming in have a much stronger voice. 

All of those dynamics are going to be on full display and it all, again, is determinative on what happens in November.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The Trumpy tech billionaire Larry Ellison has wrapped his tentacles around the US branch of TikTok, an entire Hawaiian island — and now, officially, a very large share of the world’s news and entertainment production. 

On Tuesday, the media behemoth Paramount — which is headed by Ellison’s son — completed its $110 billion mega-merger with Warner Bros. Discovery, in a controversial and hard-fought deal backed by the elder Ellison. 

The merger combines a sprawling collection of brands, including HBO, CBS, and Paramount Pictures under one rebranded umbrella. It also concentrates much of the US film and television business in the hands of just five companies. Unions, theater owners, media watchdogs, and several state attorneys general were accordingly concerned: Combining two major competitors in any industry inherently concentrates power over what gets made, what consumers pay, and what workers earn. 

Critics of this deal argued that, in the media industry, the fallout could be particularly intense. In addition to layoffs, opponents warned the new company could produce fewer, more boring movies, raise subscription prices for its combined streaming services, and inject political bias into news programs on CBS and CNN. (We’ll review the evidence for some of these claims in a minute.) 

The new company agreed to address some of these concerns in a September 21 settlement agreement with 12 state attorneys general, which let the merger proceed. A group of consumers also launched a last-minute bid to block the deal, but the Supreme Court declined their emergency request on Monday.

Go a little deeper

One of the conditions of that September AG settlement was a minimum film guarantee: The merged company agreed to release at least 30 films a year for the first two years after the merger, then 32 films a year for three years after that. The requirement was designed to address one of the major fears around the deal: namely, that mergers can result in fewer films. 

Recent history, and the basic economics of acquisitions, help explain the concern. Debt-financed acquisitions, like this one, can leave companies under pressure to cut costs. There are a few ways to do that, such as producing fewer new films or cancelling unreleased films that they don’t want to promote. According to Cinema United, a theater industry group, Disney and 21st Century Fox put out about half as many theatrical releases after their 2019 merger as they did before it, excluding 2020 and 2021.

But that doesn’t mean the new Paramount/Warner Brothers (formally rebranded Skydance) would do the same thing. Disney, for instance, makes a lot of its money from properties and products that aren’t movies. When the European Commission took up the question of whether this new merger would reduce output earlier this year, it concluded that Paramount and Warner were comparatively more dependent on film revenue. In other words, cutting back the number of movies they make post-merger “would not make economic sense” the way it did for Disney after its acquisition. 

Still, consolidation could certainly change which movies get produced. Critics argue that fewer studios mean fewer opportunities for Hollywood creatives and less pressure on the remaining players to take creative risks.

In a report released over the summer, academics with the Media and Consolidation Research Organization at UC San Diego warned this particular deal would likely result in less diverse and more formulaic films. I, for one, won’t be holding my breath for a Larry Ellison biopic.

One link for later

➨ Resist the temptation of the Prime Day “deal.” Today marks the start of Amazon’s twice-yearly discount days, which have spilled over to many other retailers. But before you load up your cart, double-check that the sale is actually a good one…and that you truly want or need the item in question. The psychological rush of scoring a deal is so strong that it can lead you to buy things you never planned to purchase.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Hollywood (and communism) brought the Reagans together? The pair met when Ronald was the president of the Screen Actors Guild and Nancy was a young actress trying to prove she wasn’t a communist sympathizer. 
• Today’s trivia: What is the 24th and final letter of the Greek alphabet? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the name of the Indian Ocean island where the UK displaced inhabitants roughly 55 years ago. That would be Diego Garcia, which was forcibly cleared to make way for a joint US-UK naval base. 

A grove of coast redwood trees is a forest of forests. Individual trees can live for thousands of years, and as they grow, their canopies develop mats of soils and ferns, creating something like a second forest floor hundreds of feet above the ground.

These elevated ecosystems are home to creatures like the wandering salamander, which can spend its entire life cycle on top of a single tree, and the marbled murrelet, a seabird whose nesting habits were a mystery until one day in 1974, when a tree-trimmer stumbled upon a nest 150 feet above the ground. Sometimes a stray seed — a sitka spruce or oak or even another redwood — finds its way up a massive redwood and grows into another tree entirely, nestled among the branches of a giant. 

For millennia, redwoods have been the anchors of this incredibly stable ecosystem; they can even survive wildfires that devastate other tree species. They’ve also been the source of plenty of human inspiration and drive millions of dollars to California’s tourist economy. But like other living things, they aren’t immune to warming temperatures, and it turns out these trees have a particular weak spot. 

A new study from researchers at University of California Davis, using measurements taken twice a month for two years, found that coast redwood leaves essentially dial down their photosynthesis during periods of extreme heat. This means trees are slowing their “breathing” and “eating” because they can’t cool down fast enough when temperatures rise. It’s a problem that’s only going to get worse as climate change continues to drive global temperatures up, and it raises urgent questions about the future of these iconic trees and the layers of life that live on and around their shadow-dappled lengths. 

How a redwood fasts

To understand what’s happening to the redwoods — and what that may mean for the species that rely on them — first we need to take a quick foray into tree anatomy. Trees use the pores in their leaves, stomata, to do two things: take carbon dioxide in, and let water out. Open stomata mean the tree is “breathing” in carbon dioxide and photosynthesizing, but probably also letting water out. Closed stomata mean the tree is conserving water but also slowing down its photosynthesis, since it isn’t taking in any carbon dioxide. 

“Because leaves are a physical, light-absorbing object, they heat up just like asphalt would in the sun,” said Lily Klinek, a PhD student at UC Davis who was the lead author on the study. 

“They’re heating up faster than the air around them,” she said. “And one way that they can cope with this is by opening their stomata and allowing water to transpire out of the leaf, which is kind of like the way that humans sweat. When water evaporates off our skin, it cools us down, and it’s the same for leaves. But they can only really do that if they have enough water to lose.”

Klinek and her colleagues studied coast redwoods in Mendocino County, near the southern part of their range, where the researchers used specialized instruments to measure whether or not individual leaves were photosynthesizing. During heat waves, they found, coast redwoods hit a point where they can’t cool down fast enough, and they just keep their stomata closed. While that saves water, it also means the tree isn’t taking in more carbon — which means it’s not “eating” or building up energy stores it can use to keep growing. 

This may sound like a technicality of tree physiology. But it could have a big impact on these forests, creating a vicious cycle where trees don’t have enough carbon stored to replenish their leaves in the future, which means they won’t be able to photosynthesize as efficiently, which will starve them even further, repeating until trees eventually die. And while this sort of behavior has been observed in tropical trees, it’s the first time anyone has studied how coast redwoods respond to the same heat stress. 

“The term people use is carbon starvation,” said Chris Still, a forest ecologist at Oregon State University who didn’t participate in the study. “Leaves can be expensive to build for a plant.” 

Most of the redwoods in California and the Pacific Northwest nowadays are new-growth forests planted in the last couple of centuries. That means the trees are relatively hungry, like growing adolescents, compared to their old-growth cousins, so they need to suck in lots of carbon dioxide to grow taller. 

Redwoods are also incredibly good at storing carbon. Thanks to their bulk and long lives, they store more carbon dioxide per acre than any other forest in the world. “Not only is it negative feedback on the climate system itself, with less carbon sequestration from these trees and forests, but the trees themselves are going to obviously not grow as big,” said Anthony Ambrose, a plant physiological ecologist and co-founder of the Ancient Forest Society. So even if the trees survive, they might not have as much space for fern and soil mats, which means less habitat for the creatures that live in them, and they may not grow as tall as they once used to, which could hurt them in another way. 

The fog of old forests

A central threat to these trees, Klinek explained, is that in addition to the heat stress, they may also lose a crucial source of hydration and protection: Coast redwoods have an intricate relationship with the fogs of their native Northern California and the Pacific Northwest. The trees are so tall that their canopies reach high into fog layers, where they can sip water directly from the sky. The fog also shades the trees from the sun and helps coast redwoods create their own microclimate, which is why these forests are noticeably cooler than the areas adjacent to them. But warmer oceans and drier air are making fog more sporadic, which means the trees are missing a crucial source of relief from heat that is only getting more intense. 

“It’s kind of a double whammy,” said Todd Dawson, a plant ecophysiologist at the University of California Berkeley, who also didn’t participate in the study. “They’re running out of water and also getting this heat stress,” he said. “They’re used to living in a very narrow temperature range of 8 to 27 degrees Celsius (about 46 to 80 degrees Fahrenheit). California, like everywhere, has been getting long periods of much warmer days than we’ve ever experienced, and now the fog, which is normally kind of like an air conditioner, has also declined between 30 and 40 percent.” 

These temperature swings also impact the organisms living high up in the trees. “If they experience really excessive heat throughout the summer,” Ambrose said, “then the soil mats and ferns will probably dry out much faster. And then those salamanders and birds might not be able to live there. So we’ll see cascading effects through the whole ecosystem at that point.”

Klinek said, the trees seem to be doing okay after the heat passes; while the leaves she and her team looked at over their two-year study didn’t acclimate to the heat, they also didn’t lose their capacity to photosynthesize after the heat passed. While that’s a bit of hopeful news, it doesn’t reduce the urgency of the need to better understand the impact of climate change on these trees, and to reduce the warming itself. 

“Right now the temperatures are coming back to normal in the fall and winter and letting the trees recover,” Klinek said. “But in five or 10 years, if temperatures are even hotter and heat waves are even more frequent, we don’t really know if there would be a recovery.”

For now, the salamanders and seabirds still have their homes high atop the coast redwoods. But we’re a part of the redwoods’ larger ecosystem too, even if we don’t live near them — they, like all trees, are key to keeping our planet hospitable. The trees Klinek studied have the potential to live for more than a thousand years. The question is if we’ll let them. 

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: Donald Trump is trying to bribe his way out of a midterm disaster. 

What’s happening? Over the weekend, Trump announced a plan to send $90 payments to more than 20 million Americans 65 years and older, drawing from a pool of money called the Medicare Improvement Fund. 

Trump, in a post, described the payments as part of a strategy to “substantially LOWER costs for our Seniors” — but the money, a single nonrecurring payment set to go out this month, was reportedly already earmarked for other programs before Trump decided to redirect it. 

Why now? Trump, facing a potentially catastrophic midterms for his party, has been looking for any way to turn out (Republican) voters — up to and including offering them cash, either implicitly or explicitly, in return for their support. 

In the implicit category: these $90 payments and a smaller number of $500 Affordable Care Act refunds (fewer than 1 million) that began going out last week. 

Much more explicitly, however, he’s also promising Americans $5,000 if they reelect Republicans in the midterms.

Trump has directly linked Medicare payments with the promised checks: “Because I delivered on this very important issue for the American People,” he wrote in a post, “they can also rest assured the highly popular $5,000 Trump Dividend will be distributed to every U.S. Citizen if, and when, the Republicans win the Midterm Elections!”

Will it work? It’s hard to say for sure, but it feels unlikely: The Medicare payments are relatively small, while the ACA payments are going out to relatively few voters. Polling suggests that voters are not fans of the promised $5,000 checks, and even fewer believe that they’re going to happen (they’re almost certainly correct). 

What else should I know? Direct payments to Americans — real or promised — are not the only way Trump is trying to sway the midterms in his favor. He’s also continuing to spend taxpayer dollars on a propagandistic ad campaign, which he personally directed.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Vox’s Unexplainable podcast team is back with a deeply controversial new question: What color are tennis balls? Personally, I think yellow, but whatever your opinion, it’s a fascinating conversation. You can listen here, or read a partial transcript here.

Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

The death of a 28-year-old lab tech halfway around the world is not typically the sort of thing the White House monitors. 

But when that tech dies of severe pneumonia…while working at a Siberian plague research lab…foreign governments (and pretty much everyone in my timeline) tend to pay more attention.  

The World Health Organization says that there’s little cause for concern, to be clear. Testing has turned up no connection between the woman’s work and her cause of death. 

And even if she did contract pneumonic plague, that’s hardly a doomsday scenario. The plague comes in three flavors — bubonic, septicemic, and pneumonic — and they all crop up from time to time, particularly in places like Central Asia and Africa. If caught early, pneumonic plague is typically curable with common antibiotics. A man in Arizona caught the disease from his cat in 2025, for instance, but didn’t spread it to anyone else. 

Of course, the real fear (and the reason so many people are talking about this today, I suspect) is that Russia has, at various times in its history, worked to develop more deadly and contagious forms of plague for use as a biological weapon. 

There’s no evidence linking that program to this lab or this death in Siberia. Still, the general threat of biological warfare is so ominous and urgent that now seems like a worthwhile time to understand it a bit better.

Go a little deeper

In her very recent and slightly spooky book, Biological War: A Scenario, journalist Annie Jacobsen lays out how world governments and health authorities are poised to respond to the hypothetical leak of a weaponized pneumonic plague from a Russian lab. At the risk of being euphemistic here, let me say that she concludes things would not go well. 

But wait! There’s even more doom and gloom where that thought experiment came from. AI chatbots have made it hypothetically possible for more-or-less ordinary people to grasp the research and techniques they’d need to hack together their own biological weapons. 

Just last month, the AI giant Anthropic disclosed five cases where scientists had tried to use its software on research that could have been used in weapons development. And while the company apparently shut those attempts down, their mere existence is fairly frightening.

Can anything be done about these risks, now that they’re here? My colleague Noel King asked Jacobsen that very question in early September. Jacobsen essentially said that the public needs to demand policies aimed at avoiding the “nightmare scenario,” whether that’s an inadvertent lab leak or terrorist attack. Such policies might include things like independent testing of AI models or stricter licensing requirements for high-risk labs. 

But it’s unclear what authority could rein in bad state-level actors. And it’s hard to imagine a public upswell for such niche scientific regulations, particularly at a moment when we don’t lack for other doomsday threats. For now, I suppose, I’ll take (partial, provisional) solace in the fact that this Russian situation doesn’t look like one of them. 

One link for later

➨ Curtail your catastrophizing. Catastrophizing is a common thought pattern where you assume the worst possible scenario. (For instance, perhaps you read about a quarantine in Russia and began to fear for the end of the world!) Catastrophic thinking can help prepare us for difficult or frightening situations, but it can also be a major source of stress. Try interrogating your doomsday thoughts and noting when the worst case doesn’t come to pass. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that, according to some physicists, glass defies categorization as a simple liquid, solid, or gas? It looks like a solid, but its molecular structure is more like a liquid. 
• Today’s trivia: Between 1968 and 1973, the British government forcibly removed the native inhabitants from which Indian Ocean island? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you what musical note is equivalent to a G sharp. That would be A flat. 

Inside Chief Justice John Roberts are two wolves.

The first wolf is a staunch conservative who spent much of his career litigating on behalf of corporate interests. This wolf looks at a series of climate change lawsuits that could potentially cost the oil industry billions of dollars or more, and recoils in horror.

The second wolf is a judge tasked with following the law wherever it leads. And that wolf seemed baffled by the oil industry’s arguments in Suncor Energy v. County Commissioners of Boulder County, a Supreme Court case where two oil companies are asking the justices to shut down dozens of climate change lawsuits.

The Court’s decision in Suncor is likely to shape the future of climate litigation in the United States. If the oil industry prevails, that will probably shut down climate change-related suits in state courts — and it may shut them down entirely because it is unclear whether federal law allows these suits to proceed in federal court. If the oil industry loses, by contrast, it could face dozens of suits in state courts across the country seeking billions of dollars or more.

And the outcome in Suncor is likely to turn on which wolf shows up to the justices’ conference on how to decide the case. Roberts, who asked the most ambiguous questions at Monday’s oral argument in Suncor, clearly wants these lawsuits to disappear. But he also appeared doubtful that the oil companies’ weak legal arguments will allow him to make that disappearing act happen.

Notably, Justice Samuel Alito, who owns stock in oil and gas companies, is recused from hearing the case. So, in the likely event that all three of the Court’s Democrats hold together against the oil companies, Roberts would split the Court 4-4 if he decides to join them. That would leave the Court unable to render a decision, and a lower court opinion, which rejected the oil companies’ bid for lawsuit immunity, would remain in effect.

That said, at least two other justices asked questions suggesting that their votes may potentially be in play. Justice Clarence Thomas, who otherwise appeared sympathetic to the oil companies, repeatedly asked whether his Court has jurisdiction to hear Suncor in the first place. Meanwhile, while most of Democratic Justice Elena Kagan’s questions seemed to favor allowing the climate change lawsuits to proceed, she did ask some questions at the end that indicated that she may be looking for a narrow reason to hand the oil companies a win.

The bottom line is that it is difficult to predict how this case will turn out, as more than one justice asked questions that suggest that their vote is, at least, in play. But the outcome is likely to hinge upon the tension within Roberts — who both signaled that he wants the oil companies to win, but who also expressed deep skepticism of their primary legal argument.

So what is Suncor actually about?

Suncor is one of many lawsuits brought by state or local governments (in this case, the plaintiff is Boulder, Colorado) who’ve sued oil companies claiming that those companies should be liable for the harms caused by climate change within those governments’ jurisdictions. In this particular case, the defendants are Exxon Mobil and Suncor, a company that operates two oil refineries in Colorado. 

The lawyer for these two companies, Kannon Shanmugam, told the justices that there are about 60 similar cases brought by municipal governments throughout the country. And, in one of his more pro-oil moments during Monday’s oral argument, Roberts predicted that if Boulder wins in the Supreme Court, there will be numerous other copycat lawsuits filed by other municipalities.

The question in Suncor is whether state courts, including Colorado’s own courts, are forbidden from hearing these sorts of climate change lawsuits.

As Roberts pointed out in one of his less pro-oil moments during Monday’s argument, “there are a lot of familiar situations where conduct outside of a state has broad effects on other states…and yet we allow the state courts in a particular state to bring litigation.” He pointed to “mass tort” suits and “complaints about operations of the internet” as two examples where state courts hear lawsuits involving harms that arise across state borders.

The oil companies’ primary argument is that suits involving air and water pollution are special. But their evidence supporting this argument is confusing and difficult to parse. 

Briefly, the oil companies point to several cases, many of which were decided more than a century ago. These cases held that, before Congress enacted the Clean Air Act in 1963, states could sometimes sue other states for cross-border pollution, even though no federal law forbade such pollution. The Supreme Court created “federal common law” permitting these suits, and the oil companies claim that this federal common law preempted any state lawsuits that covered a similar subject matter.

This federal common law, they now argue, has itself been displaced by the Clear Air Act and its partner statute, the Clean Water Act, but the principle that state suits involving air and water pollution are preempted is somehow still in effect. Although there is no provision in the text of the Constitution that supports this argument by the oil companies, those companies claim that their argument is implicit in the “structure of the Constitution.”

The oil companies’ primary legal argument is difficult to understand

If you are confused by all the arcane history and logical leaps contained in the oil companies’ argument, don’t worry. So were most of the justices. Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who repeatedly claimed that his Court’s precedents bar Boulder’s lawsuit, seemed to buy what the oil companies are saying without reservation. Most of the other justices expressed at least some reservations.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, for example, argued that even under the older “federal common law” regime, states still retained some authority over environmental lawsuits, although she noted that the Court’s previous decisions do not really define the scope of that authority. Kagan pointed out that the many suits challenging climate change are similar to past litigation against tobacco and opioid manufacturers. But those suits were heard by state courts.

Many of the justices appear bothered that these lawsuits exist, but the most skeptical justices couldn’t agree on a legal theory they could use to shut them down.

It seems unlikely, in other words, that there are five votes for the oil companies’ convoluted claim that the “structure of the Constitution” somehow bars state courts from hearing climate change lawsuits. But several of the justices did appear troubled by what could happen if dozens of state courts reach conflicting judgments on who is responsible for climate change and who should receive compensation because of it. And some of these justices floated alternative theories for how to hand the oil companies a win. 

At one point, for example, Barrett floated the possibility that, if the plaintiffs lose in Suncor, they might file a new suit under the now-defunct federal common law that existed prior to the Clean Air Act. Kagan, meanwhile, suggested that perhaps the Clean Air Act could be read to preempt these suits like Suncor. According to Kagan, that law “sets up an extremely complicated scheme about how regulations of emissions should operate,” and allowing states to hear lawsuits like Suncor would “get in the way of how Congress decided to regulate greenhouse gases.”

And Roberts didn’t so much offer a legal argument in favor of the oil companies’ position as express incredulity of what would happen if those companies lose. “Presumably if you prevail,” before the Supreme Court, Roberts told Kevin Russell, the lawyer for Boulder, “the next day a municipality in every single state will file a lawsuit, copy your pleadings, and then there will be at least 50…how do you think that will work out on the ground?”

All of which is a long way of saying that the outcome in Suncor is uncertain. The oil companies led with a weak legal argument, and only Kavanaugh seemed to fully embrace that argument. Many of the justices appear bothered that these lawsuits exist, but the most skeptical justices couldn’t agree on a legal theory they could use to shut them down.

For what it is worth, the oil companies actually do make a strong policy argument that it is a bad idea to allow state courts to do so. As they argue, climate change is a global problem caused by many polluters (and companies like Exxon that supply the oil burned by polluters) throughout the world. It could be impossible to determine which specific companies caused the specific problems caused by climate change in Boulder, Colorado. And even if this obstacle can be overcome, there are many thorny questions about which state’s law should apply when pollution from one state crosses over into another, not to mention the difficult diplomatic issues that could arise if a state court orders a foreign company to pay a large sum of money.

But under our Constitution, the proper solution if the oil companies want federal law to preempt state court suits like Suncor is that they can lobby Congress, and Congress could then draft a statute that balances these companies’ interest in avoiding many conflicting legal decisions with the interests of plaintiffs like Boulder who say they are experiencing real harms from climate change. Congress has the power, for example, to combine all of these state lawsuits into one grand federal lawsuit, where a single proceeding could determine how to portion out the costs of climate change to various energy companies, and how to divide whatever these companies are ordered to pay among the various plaintiffs.

But that solution would undoubtedly require compromises that companies like Exxon will not like. So, instead, they’ve asked the Supreme Court to give them the legal regime that they want, despite the fact that they could not articulate a persuasive legal argument for that outcome. It remains to be seen whether this Court will give the oil companies a win anyway.

A while back, I was at physical therapy, and the topic of tennis came up. Someone said something about yellow tennis balls, and I was like… “What? They’re green.” And then someone else chimed in, “No, they’re yellow!” And then someone across the room hollered, “No, they’re obviously green.”

There was basically a physical therapy uproar. And when I started asking other people how they saw them — yellow or green — they told me they couldn’t even believe there was a debate. So I called up Bevil Conway. He’s a neuroscientist who heads up a lab at the National Eye Institute. He’s working on a book called Color Coded, which is due out next year. And he’s also a working artist — which is actually how he got into studying color in the first place. 

Conway told me there’s a pretty good reason for why so many people disagree about tennis balls. He said it’s simple: “There’s no such thing as a color.”

In the latest episode of Unexplainable, I talked with Conway about what color even is, the viral dress fight (black and blue or white and gold?), and why we get so upset when people don’t see color the same way we do. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. Listen to the episode anywhere you get your podcasts or you can watch on Netflix.

So you are an artist. You are also a neuroscientist. You study color. You’re also working on a book about color. Are there still color mysteries? Are there things science doesn’t know about color? 

There are lots of mysteries about color. For a long time, people thought that color was a little bit like a filter, that everything that’s really important is in black and white, and then there’s a color filter you put on top of it. 

But a bunch of years ago, my lab were blown away to discover that there’s as much brain involved in processing color as there is in face recognition.

The same amount of processing power?

Yeah, there’s tons and tons of tissue [and] pretty fancy bits of brain that are doing pretty high-level things — parts of brain we think of as being involved in social cognition and in high-level reasoning and visual memory. Color must be more than just this little add-on. It’s doing something much deeper. So we’re trying to understand what those bits of brain are doing.

So what is color? How does it work? How do our brains and eyes perceive it? 

The classic definition would be: Color is the visual feature that you get from wavelength properties of the light entering your eye. People typically see the long wavelength end as red light, and then going through short wavelengths, you know, following ROYGBIV: red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet.

If color were just wavelength, then an object under blue light would look blue, and the same object under yellow light would look yellow. And that wouldn’t be very helpful — because what you want is a signal that tells you about objects, immune to the lighting condition. You want them to always have that color. 

A perfect example is a peach. If you look at a peach outside and you look at it inside, it’s always gonna look like a peach color. But if you looked at the pattern of wavelengths that are coming off of the peach, they’re very different under different lighting conditions. They should be different colors if color were just wavelength, but they’re not. Those two different compositions of wavelengths look the same color. 

What I think is so cool about color is it’s so fundamental for how we need to experience the world — but the mechanics of how it does it teaches us a lot about the brain.

What we’re talking about is color constancy. That is, an object’s color is constant despite the viewing conditions. 

So if the peach is fundamentally a different color inside and outside, and our brains are telling us that it is still, you know, peach colored, how are our brains deceiving us?   

So it’s not fundamentally a different color. It’s the same color. That’s the cool thing. The problem is that you are carrying around, Noam, in your head an idea that color is wavelength, and that is the mistake.

Color is not wavelength! And we’ve known this for a long time. But the problem is that we want something that is an empirical, measurable number that’s outside of an observer, that’s a thing out there in the world, that would be the same number regardless of who looks at it. And color, at its core, is not that. 

Color is dependent on your own visual system interacting with the world. And that doesn’t mean it’s any less real. It just means that its reality is dependent on psychological neural brain processes. And that’s what makes color fascinating. 

Color is, you’re saying, something that is essentially created in the brain. 

Absolutely, yes. Color is a generative product of the brain that gives us reliable, useful, true, meaningful, objective information, but it itself is not [those things].  It’s some generative product of  your brain in order to come up with this information that’s useful and meaningful about the world.

[Your brain is] actually creating that thing that is a color. Colors don’t exist out there in the world independent of a viewer to see them. 

Is this related to “the dress” — you know, like 10 years ago when that photo of a dress went viral, and a bunch of people on the internet thought it was blue and black, and a bunch of other people thought it was white and gold, and everyone got super upset? Is this the same type of thing, of seeing something in different lighting or different contexts and perceiving a different color? 

It is. So the dress was fascinating because people with normal color vision looking at exactly the same thing were asserting very different perceptions. 

And, you know, from a deep kind of philosophical point of view, it’s important because they weren’t saying, “Yeah, it kinda looks different to me, but I understand how you could see it as different.” They were like, “No, it is white and gold.” And other people were saying, “It is different colors.” That was, for me professionally and personally, a really big deal because it underscored this fact that color is this generative, constructive thing that your brain is doing, making all kinds of assumptions, filling in the gaps about lighting, about what you think you’re seeing.

In the case of the dress, it’s such a crappy little photograph, very blurry. It doesn’t give you a lot of context. And your visual system, your own brain, has to make a guess about what the lighting is. And if your brain guesses that the lighting is nice, warm, direct sunlight, then it implicitly subtracts out a little bit of the yellow from the image, and you see it as blue and black. Whereas other people looking at exactly the same pixels on the same monitor who assume that the lighting is cool, indirect, shaded light from blue sky, their brains color-correct the image, subtract out some of the blue, and they see it as white and gold. And so you have these two groups of people whose brains have just made different assumptions. 

Why do you think that left people feeling so unnerved? When this happened, people could not possibly believe someone else could look at that dress and see a different color. 

It was amazing! And, you know, it’s still, to date, I think, the most viral image in the history of the internet. Right when it came out, my initial reaction too was like, “Huh, that’s weird. I wonder what’s going on there.” And a lot of my colleagues thought, “Well, maybe it’s got to do with proportions of rods and cones, or people are looking at different displays, or maybe people are just silently color blind.” 

But I think the idea that your own brain could play such a fundamental role in determining what the pattern of wavelengths means, even for vision scientists, wasn’t sitting front of mind. 

I think the reason that it played so deeply, if I could wax poetic, it’s that our contemporary society depends on a shared experience, right? Our laws depend on a common idea of what’s right and wrong.

Yeah, like whether my red is your red; we still need to be able to point at something and agree that it’s red. 

Yes, and here was an example where it was like: “That isn’t white and gold, that’s blue and black, clearly. Do we live in a shared reality?”

And if you can’t trust your eyes, what can you trust? I think people genuinely felt like, “Is this the beginning of the end?” Like, “Is our whole society collapsing?” I mean, look at Twitter, there were all sorts of expletives flying around. 

Have you ever gotten into an argument about a color? I once got into an argument about tennis balls and what color they were. 

Yeah, what color are they? I’m curious. 

I couldn’t believe anyone thought they were yellow! I always thought they were green.

They’re totally yellow. I mean, we can get into one now. You’re wrong. It’s so funny — I really thought that they were definitionally yellow.

So what is going on with tennis balls? 

Tennis balls are funny. I mean, if you ask people to pick their best example of green and blue and red and orange and yellow and so on, there’s a lot of variability. Green and blue is the most variable. Some people’s best example of green is another person’s best example of blue. 

Meaning, you could ask me  to pick a color that would be perfectly green, and then someone else would be like, “No, that’s blue.”

Yeah, exactly. And this isn’t language-based. This is true across all cultures. 

We just perceive blues and greens kinda badly or vaguely? 

Yeah, and one of the ideas that we have about that is that blues and greens aren’t really the colors that are tied to objects.

So if I ask you what colors are objects, it’s a weird question! It’s like, objects can be any colors. But it turns out, if you actually go and measure, you know, the colors of things that you choose to label in the world, most of them are, like, yellow, brown, red, pink, some purples, not many.

Yeah, I guess green and blue is the background. Like green’s the forest, and blue is the sky. 

Yeah, exactly. And, and even in nature, there are very few natural blue objects, and that’s partly what made blue as a pigment so desirable. So what’s weird about yellow is that yellow, if you just ask people in the rainbow to pick where yellow is, people are incredibly consistent.

So people really know yellow. 

They really know yellow. And I think what’s going on with the tennis ball is that it is a little bit fluorescent. It’s actually emitting a little bit more light than it’s taking in because it’s reprocessing it, short-wavelength light in the visible spectrum.

So they’ve picked this bright yellow, which is right at the peak of our visual system sensitivity. So the color of the tennis ball is the optimal wavelength that we can detect with our eyes, and it’s right in that range where it’s technically probably closer to green than it is to yellow. But because it’s so bright, and yellow is considered a bright color, the brightest color, people could be persuaded to see it in a yellow direction.

What I hear you saying is that I’m right — and it’s green. 

Yeah, yeah. Although, I still like it as yellow.

There’s no place like Kansas, a state whose howling winds are so fierce that in the 1800s, the roaring soundscape drove local farmers into madness. It is so windy in Kansas that every so often, trains get swept off their tracks or trampolines get hurled into the air and flung into neighbors’ trees. 

But today, the same gusts that whisked away Dorothy’s home have made Kansas the third-most wind-powered place in the country, its great plains dotted with thousands of twirling turbines responsible for generating over half of the state’s energy. 

And for years, Kansas has been trying to share. 

But that’s easier said than done in the US, where building power lines across state borders can be an onerous, litigious, and bureaucratic slog. The Grain Belt Express, a proposed 800-mile high-voltage line carrying Kansas’s windy riches across Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, has been trying to get built for the past 16 years. When completed, it will allow Kansas to pump five times as much wind power into Missouri as it does now. But though the project received its first approval in 2013, it will likely not open until 2029 at the earliest, beset by regulatory hurdles across multiple jurisdictions and an endless stream of legal challenges that immediately halt progress every time a new injunction is filed. Alas, the express — which only broke ground this year — was forced to run oh so local. 

But other projects like it might soon enjoy far more reasonable timelines. On Wednesday, a bipartisan group of Senators announced a deal called the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act, or BAAJA — an acronym that’s led to a slew of cringeworthy euphoric Baja Blast references from abundance Democrats, clean energy advocates, and oil industry lobbyists alike. If passed, it would significantly curtail Americans’ ability to endlessly litigate against energy projects they don’t like, and empower the federal government to push critical multistate projects forward even if one state or municipality drags its feet. That could remake the way the nation’s energy infrastructure gets built, including its interstate transmission lines, for decades to come. 

But the bill also suggests that easing the way for clean energy in the US may require simultaneously creating the conditions for more oil and gas infrastructure in a country that already has a lot of it. It would also mean defanging some of the landmark regulatory norms that for decades have, for example, given Americans a say over developments that could contaminate their drinking water and helped tribes protect sacred heritage sites. These laws were necessary in the first place because prior to the 1970s, American communities frequently found themselves both literally and figuratively steamrolled  by developers singularly focused on building things quickly with little regard for the oil spills, river fires, and bifurcated neighborhoods they left in their wake.

And yet today, half a century later, that same dilemma has, in some ways, turned on its head. America builds things too slowly, and in particular, it builds the kind of infrastructure desperately needed to usher in a transition to clean energy with little of the urgency you’d expect from a world in the throes of climate change-related disaster. Exasperatingly, some of the same protections that have played a critical role in making this nation safer may also be standing in the way of building a nation that is more affordable and sustainable in the long run.

There are still plenty of reasons to feel hopeful about the world’s transition away from fossil fuels, even in the US, which has lagged behind our peers while still building an extraordinary number of solar and wind farms, particularly in Republican-led states like Kansas and Texas. And yet, many of these projects have languished in never-ending Ticketmaster-esque queues to connect to the nation’s decrepit power grid, a direct result of the permitting hellscape that prevents much-needed high-voltage cables like the Grain Belt Express from coming online.      

This new bill aims to ease many of the bottlenecks that stymie clean energy, but it also throws a bone to fossil fuels, which, like renewables, would benefit from less onerous environmental reviews and quicker permissions. This is, after all, a bipartisan bill in a Congress that, at least for now, remains Republican-led, under the tutelage of an aggrieved president who has sabotaged some of the nation’s most promising clean energy projects with an often petty and relentless fervor. Some Democrats in Congress, along with other environmentalists, have raised serious concerns about the bill. Those initial objections may prophesize an uphill battle for it when it comes to a vote, likely after the November midterms. 

Even so, with American electricity bills spiking to frightening new heights, and a data center buildout that could all but snap the power grid in half, this ambitious deal is, at the very least, an indication that some of the nation’s representatives are finally listening. And if it passes into law in the months to come, it could very well remake how Americans get their energy for a generation. 

So why are environmentalists mad?

By most accounts, the Bipartisan American Affordability and Jobs Act almost didn’t happen. 

For months, the proposed permitting deal has been stalled by the Trump administration’s failure to assure Democrats that the president would lay off his attacks on “windmills” and other clean energy projects. But in recent days, lawmakers appear to have come close to a fragile détente on the back of a “very reasonable opening proposal” from the White House, according to Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI), the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee. 

If the BAAJA is passed, it will codify new protections that legally prevent presidents like Trump from meddling with already-permitted energy projects or singling out specific forms of energy, a prohibition that will also apply if a Democratic president attempts to halt an approved gas line or a petroleum refinery. The Biden administration’s freeze on approvals for new natural gas export plants, for example, would not be allowed. 

It’s this element of the proposed bill that worries many environmentalists most. According to a transcript obtained by Punchbowl News, during a coalition call on Thursday, dozens of advocates from prominent environmental groups — including the Sierra Club, the National Wildlife Federation, and the Environmental Law & Policy Center — expressed their misgivings about the bill and strategized about how to lobby Democrats against it.

Most environmentalists acknowledge, however, that we need to spruce up the power grid and fix how permitting works for clean energy projects and transmission lines. As clean energy advocates know all too well, the projects they support are, paradoxically, more likely to be hampered by environmental reviews than fossil fuel projects are, because renewables usually require more space and represent the bulk of new energy developments. But many advocates understandably take issue with the idea that reforming this overcomplicated process may require weakening the right to challenge other projects, a right affirmed by the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and the National Historic Preservation Act. 

The bill’s fate may ultimately depend on whether this trade-off is worth it. The BAAJA still does leave some room for court challenges if they’re filed within 150 days of an approval. But it will still place a much larger burden for determining these damage thresholds on federal agencies, which are, of course, currently controlled by Trump.

“The question’s not whether that would be a good idea — it’s one of the basic building blocks for converting more of our energy system to renewables,” the environmentalist Bill McKibben wrote of grid expansion and permitting reform on his Substack this week. “It’s how many pounds of flesh the fossil fuel industry would demand in return, and how close to vital organs that flesh would be located.”

The problem is, no matter how many Congressional seats Democrats seem poised to scoop up in November, they will still need to get Republicans on board if they want Americans to be able to really see the benefits of solar, the cheapest energy source of all time, reflected on their power bill. And for most of the nation, if not Earth itself, that transition can’t come soon enough. 

Socialism is breaking through to the mainstream this year, with surveys showing most Democrats, and plenty of independents, now view the term positively. 

The shift is being led by young people in particular, who have also helped left-populist candidates win high-stakes primaries this year. A Cato Institute poll from June found that over half of Gen Z are more supportive of socialism (53 percent) than capitalism (45 percent). And more than half (57 percent) of people ages 18 to 34 have a positive view of socialism, according to a Gallup poll from August — versus just 34 percent of people over 55. 

Figures like these are inspiring socialist organizers and frightening Republicans, who are accusing Democrats of sliding into “communism” in their midterm messaging.

But here’s a little secret I’ve been hearing in the focus groups I run through my research, media, and strategy company focused on Gen Z — it’s not “socialism” that’s attractive to young voters. In fact, there’s little agreement on what the word really means. 

Instead, it’s the social policies these candidates are running on that resonate — things like affordable housing, healthcare, education, a higher minimum wage, and higher taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals.

All summer long, I asked Gen Z voters to define socialism. There was no consensus answer, but much less talk of “workers controlling the means of production,” as one 22-year-old woman from New Jersey referenced, and much more of a focus on what a 21-year-old man from Florida described as a “social safety net.” 

Understanding where they’re coming from is important to both critics and supporters: Revolutionaries and reactionaries alike who think young people are signing up for a specific ideology are misreading the moment. When it comes to the rise of “socialism,” young people want what they’ve always wanted: to be heard, and to be helped.  

Why socialism is resonating with Gen Z

Gen Z’s interest in the term was closely tied to the myriad ways their economic outlook has deteriorated in the past year. 

“I feel like over the last year things definitely have changed. You see it generally even with gas prices. … A lot of it has to do with the fact that our country has involved itself in a lot of different conflicts around the world at this point,” the 21-year-old from Florida said. 

“During the school year I am relying on my refunds from school to pay my rent, to pay my car payment and car insurance, phone bill, internet, stuff like that,” said another 21-year-old man from Pennsylvania. 

“I haven’t been able to financially plan for my education in the way I thought I was going to and have been needing to save more of my own money from jobs I’m working to help account for those differences,” said a 21-year-old woman from North Carolina. 

As economic anxiety reshapes Gen Z’s politics and life feels harder and harder to afford, young people are looking for the government to provide social support. 

Consistently, I asked groups of young people this summer what they’re looking for in an ideal political candidate — and the government more broadly. Overwhelmingly, they told me they’re in favor of politicians who understand everyday people and a government that provides social services for its constituents.

“A political candidate who understands the common person. Someone that’s not financially out of touch, who doesn’t take money from different corporations. Someone who understands the struggles of an everyday American and knows what’s going on with the economy and can understand the struggles of students, children, families,” said a 21-year-old woman from Michigan.

“Providing a higher safety net with welfare, especially with hospitals because of the ‘big, beautiful bill’ and its effects,” said a 19-year-old from New York City, citing the impact of the Trump administration’s recent tax bill that slashed healthcare spending.

“A candidate who isn’t afraid to say that we deserve more as citizens,” said another 19-year-old woman from Michigan.  

According to many of the young voters I spoke to, in their eyes, this is what socialism means: a more ambitious, generous, and equality-minded government. And when I asked them to tell me about the policies they associate with democratic socialists, they said things like “Medicare-for-all,” “help with college tuition,” and “social safety nets like healthcare, public education, public housing.” 

Where young people see socialism working

In pushing back against socialism’s rising popularity, critics often invoke history, pointing to Marxist governments where equality was instituted by force and coercion and associated with poverty and deprivation. 

“They’ve gone communist, but we’re not going to let that happen,” President Donald Trump said at a South Carolina rally in August. “It’s never worked in 1,000 years with different names, lots of different names. It’s never worked once.”

Just as Gen Z was presumed to be “woke” Democrats four years ago and then swung hard to Trump and MAGA in 2024, the socialist turn is just as conditional.

On the whole, however, young people I spoke to were less likely to tie socialism to “communism” or to places like Cuba, Venezuela, or Soviet Russia. Instead, they gave examples where they perceive socialism to work well, often mentioning wealthy Western countries and the social support systems associated with these kinds of governments.  

“I think Scandinavian countries and those countries have had socialist policies in place and people end up having universal healthcare and people are able to live more comfortably and receive more money from the government to support them,” said a 21-year-old woman from Massachusetts. “I know in Canada there’s some socialist policies that I think have benefited people in regards to healthcare and welfare and social security.” 

This shouldn’t be surprising. With years of distance from the Marxist governments that our parents and grandparents may think back to (even the oldest Gen Z were born well after the Cold War ended) young people are more focused on social policies than the core tenets of socialism. 

“The first thing that comes to mind is the government’s involvement in making sure that everybody is cared for and everyone’s health remains a priority despite their income,” said that 21-year-old woman from Massachusetts. “And I think that is something that makes me view socialism in more of a positive light because some people obviously don’t have the same financial situations as others. That doesn’t mean that they should be undervalued in society.”

Liking socialism doesn’t mean identifying as a socialist

But just as socialism’s detractors are misunderstanding its appeal among young voters, its supporters should be just as wary of assuming voters are signing up for their movement. 

I’ve heard anecdotes like the ones above shared over and over again. And yet, very few young people I’ve spoken to in the past few months have been willing to call themselves a socialist.

This is consistent with a broader Gen Z skepticism toward political parties. While they’re leaning into the policies associated with “socialism,” they still largely reject labels — whether that label is Republican, Democrat, or…socialist. 

Asked if she would consider herself a democratic socialist or a socialist, the 21-year-old from Massachusetts said she “would definitely lean that way.” A 19-year-old woman from Colorado said, “I would say I lean towards it, but I haven’t completely been with that party.” 

And a 23-year-old woman from Arizona said: “I would say I’m in between democrat and democratic socialist.” 

And while a 19-year-old from Michigan said she appreciates that democratic socialists are “going to help get baseline needs for people across America met in ways that aren’t going to happen if we have someone who is taking money from PACs and corporations making money off of people going into medical debt and things like that,” but asked if she would label herself that way, she said, “I feel like I don’t know enough about it.”

This isn’t universal. Polls suggest a sizable number of young Democrats identify as democratic socialist when asked. But when it comes to organized political behavior, the Democratic Socialists of America only recently passed 120,000 official members, even as they’ve had unprecedented success in raising their profile and nominating candidates this cycle.

Just as Gen Z was presumed to be “woke” Democrats four years ago and then swung hard to Trump and MAGA in 2024, the socialist turn is just as conditional. They’re looking for concrete solutions, not dogma, and if they don’t see results, they’ll look elsewhere.