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Flu season is starting earlier than usual this year, which I know from reviewing federal data. But I also know it because I woke up with body aches and chills last night, mere days before I’d planned to get my flu vaccination (!).

Already, some parts of the country are seeing levels of flu activity typically associated with late fall or early winter. In Washington state, for instance, doctors are reporting seeing as much flu now as they usually would around Christmas. 

Flu activity overall is still low, to be clear. But as of October 7, infections were rising in all 50 states. And flu is spreading before many people — like, say, me — have received their annual vaccine.

Epidemiologists don’t yet know why the flu arrived early this year, or why cases first started rising in Western states like Washington, California, and Nevada. It’s possible that a mutation is helping this year’s flu variants evade existing immunity, one virologist told NPR. International travel could play a role, too: Flu cases also spiked early in Japan and other parts of Asia.

We don’t need to know why the flu arrived early to take some basic precautions, though. So today, we’re talking through some practical tips for coping with an early flu season.

Go a little deeper

An early flu season doesn’t necessarily mean a worse season — but even a moderate season can do serious damage. Last year, influenza sent hundreds of thousands of people to the hospital and caused tens of thousands of deaths, including almost 200 among children.

The first and best way to avoid those kinds of harms is by getting the flu shot, which reduces the risk of serious illness by an average of 40 to 60 percent. In the US, people aged 6 months and older are typically told to get the vaccine by October’s end. 

In light of the early onset, however (it takes two weeks to build up full immunity), you might instead want to get your shot ASAP.

There are some everyday precautions you can take, too — many of them familiar from the Covid-19 era. Wash your hands thoroughly with soap and warm water, for slightly longer than feels appropriate. Mask when you’re sick or might encounter someone else who is. 

And don’t neglect the good habits that support your overall health: getting enough sleep, drinking a lot of water, and eating a balanced diet. (There’s very little evidence for trendier interventions, like supplements, saunas, cold plunges, or the infused herbal baths that my kooky former yoga teacher used to recommend.) 

If you do get flu symptoms, reach out to your doctor early — especially if you’re older, pregnant, immunocompromised, or otherwise at higher risk for complications. Prescription antiviral medications, like Tamiflu, prevent the flu virus from spreading inside your body so that your immune system can clear it. But they work best within 48 hours of symptom onset. 

To be clear, you needn’t take my word on any of this; I’m just another voice in the public health cacophony! Besides, recent polling suggests that my particular voice — that is, the voice of someone who works in media — is not quite as persuasive as it used to be. (Ditto medical websites and government health agencies.)

But if you have doubts or questions about vaccines, there is someone much closer to home you can consult: Ask your doctor (or nurse or pharmacist) about the flu shot’s risks and benefits. They’re best positioned to break the science down and apply it to your health. In hindsight, mine surely would have told me to stop delaying my shot for a more convenient weekend.

One link for later

➨ Get creative in the fight against inflation. The latest inflation numbers are out today, and they are pretty bad. The cost of many goods and services is rising more quickly than both consumers’ incomes and economists’ expectations. For me, this news brought to mind a question that Vox’s former personal finance columnist tackled a few years ago: Namely, am I cursed to keep spending more money on more things forever?! Her answer was essentially “yes,” but she offered a few ways to help offset those costs: things like moving to a cheaper area or pooling resources via initiatives like tool libraries and community gardens. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Colombia is home to almost 20 percent of all the avian species on Earth? That’s the most of any country, at nearly 2,000 birds.
• Today’s trivia: Which percussion instrument is famously played by Mississippi State University fans at home football games? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked you for the name of the 2025 Pixar film set in the “Communiverse.” That would be Elio, a movie you may well never have heard of: It had the worst opening weekend of any Pixar film, ever.

For some couples, surrogacy is a miracle: an opportunity to have a child even if they’re unable to conceive one naturally. But it’s also big business. Not only is surrogacy expensive — think six figures — but it’s also largely unregulated. And that last part is becoming a bigger problem. 

Just last week, a California couple was arrested on child abuse charges after it was revealed that they had over 20 children from different surrogate mothers living in a large mansion in Arcadia, a city near Los Angeles. Many of the surrogates are currently fighting for custody through the courts of the children they carried.

The Arcadia case, however, is only the most recent example of how surrogacy can go wrong. Every case is different, but every one illuminates how opaque — and often ripe for abuse or legal issues — the American surrogacy industry is. 

Emi Nietfeld is a reporter at Washington Sun who writes about surrogacy, IVF, and how we build families. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about what’s kept lawmakers from regulating the surrogacy industry, the recent high-profile cases bringing these problems to light, and why more regulation doesn’t necessarily offer a straightforward fix. 

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. 

The United States does not regulate the surrogacy industry seemingly at all. What is going on? Why not?

The lack of federal regulation is both political and financial. Politically, this goes all the way back to the start of IVF. Anti-abortion Republicans were not comfortable with the idea of creating and destroying embryos during IVF, and so they fought against efforts to regulate it. 

People on the left were worried that limiting what kinds of technology you could access would lead to the government controlling who could have families. You still see these arguments today. People who think that IVF is murder don’t want to have any surrogacy. And people on the left don’t want the government saying who can and cannot have a family.

One of the issues raised by the New Yorker story is that there are surrogacy agencies that connect parents and potential surrogates. And it makes you wonder who gets to do that? Who can own and operate a surrogacy agency in the US today?

Anyone.

Oh. Oh no.

Only one state, New York, requires a special license. And everywhere else it’s easier to open an agency than a hot dog stand or a nail salon. This has resulted in the rise of so-called pop-up agencies where businesses come onto the scene, and nobody really knows who owns them or who’s running them. That has led to many people who aren’t experienced, who sign up with these agencies, then feeling like they weren’t prepared or that they were deceived in entering the agreement.

Have we ever tried in the past to regulate this better? Have there been efforts made?

In the 1980s, there was the case of Baby M. That was called traditional surrogacy where Mary Beth Whitehead was the surrogate, but it was also her egg. So the child she delivered was genetically related to her. After she gave birth, she changed her mind. She kidnapped the child, went on the run for several months, and it was a national crisis where this was all over the news. 

Ultimately, a judge in New Jersey ruled that the surrogacy arrangement was unenforceable. Commercial surrogacy arrangements became illegal in New Jersey, and they stayed illegal in New York until 2020.

Part of why regulation looks the way it does is because in 1995, Congress passed a piece of legislation saying that there would be no federal funding for embryo research, which means no federal funding for IVF. That left all of the research, development, innovation up to the free market. And so while that could be seen as an attempt to regulate IVF, it actually meant that those things would no longer be under the government’s purview.

In the US, we’ve seen over the past few years some really high-profile cases that are making lawmakers reckon with the fact that we do not have laws around this. Tell me about some of those cases.

There’s the Mark surrogacy case in California, which is both a really unique case and also illustrates some of the fears around Chinese intended parents coming to the United States to have their kids. This is part of larger geopolitical tensions between the US and China, which are playing out in the surrogacy industry.

There’s the case of Xu Bo, the Chinese video gaming billionaire who is rumored to have more than 100 children via surrogacy in America. His story taps into fears of birth tourism and people from other countries, especially China, coming to the United States to do surrogacy so that their kids are American citizens. 

Republican lawmakers are talking a lot about the idea that people could come from enemy countries, have American citizens, and raise them with the intent that they might one day become spies or president of the United States and be double actors.

In Texas, there’s the case of McKenna West, where she learned at 20 weeks’ gestation that the baby was very sick. The intended parents asked her to get an abortion. She refused to do so. McKenna went to Texas and began fighting for custody to keep the baby while the parents objected. They wanted the baby, and she petitioned the Supreme Court, which declined to hear the case. 

And finally, there’s the case of Kyla Simpson in Florida, whom I wrote about for New York Magazine, and she gave birth for a single dad in China who wasn’t there for the birth. He hadn’t applied for a visa to come to the United States, and when he did apply, he was rejected. Kyla Simpson tried to adopt the kids and is now fighting for custody in a case that’s still working its way through the Florida courts.

These examples are extraordinary, and they point to just chaos. But how common are they? Are they outliers? Is this going on all the time?

Most of the time things go right. In the academic papers around surrogacy, surrogates are usually happy with their experience. Attorneys and surrogates tell me that it’s absolutely beautiful to hand people the baby that they’ve been working hard for. The issue is that when things do go wrong, there’s often not a lot of recourse or there’s a really big legal mess that parents and surrogates have to go through.

I wonder if there is a case against more regulation. As disastrous as some of these examples are, you said that most of the time, it does go right. And it seems like we could get into tricky territory if we start saying who can and can’t have a kid.

Surrogacy is already really time-consuming. It often takes several years, and it’s expensive, usually costing between $150,000 to $250,000 for a single pregnancy. Regulation tends to make things more expensive and take longer. A lot of people fear that if you introduce more requirements and more burdens, surrogacy will become even more out of reach to people. 

There’s also the fear of government overreach. If you ask the government how many kids a gay couple should have, the answer might be zero. And that libertarian streak is driving a lot of opposition to things that most people might consider common sense. 

For example, there’s a lot of talk around whether intended parents should go through background checks before they have kids via surrogacy. Right now, no state in America requires intended parents to go through a criminal background check before having a kid. Critics of regulation say heteros don’t need a background check to have sex in the back of a car and make a baby the old-fashioned way, so it’s unfair to require that from people who need to do surrogacy to have a family. 

Most people can agree that surrogacy could be better regulated, but like many things in our country, it’s almost impossible right now because of politics.

“We should look for love!” Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy bellowed while flanked by his nine children at the Great American State Fair in June: “Get married, and have lots of kids!”

In a brazen attempt to make Duffy’s ethos a matter of policy, the Trump administration announced a strange new plan earlier this month tying a huge tranche of federal funding for public transit to high fertility and marriage rates. 

If the plan goes into effect, then communities with a high number of traditional nuclear families could get a 10 percent funding boost to build new trains, bus routes, and ferry lines. “If you want federal funding,” Duffy’s Transportation Department said in a statement, then “your project needs to align with where communities and families are actually growing.”

Trump, who has dubbed himself the “fertilization president,” and his bevvy of neopatriarchal trad–pilled deputies have long nursed a fixation with the country’s declining birth rate. But dubious as this new policy may be, it stumbles upon a genuine pain point in the nation’s public transit systems: They are not nearly as family friendly as they should be. And regardless of whether these discomfitingly pronatalist guidelines ever go into effect as written — and they probably will — they raise important questions about how American families use our transit systems now, and the policies could actually make their lives easier in the long run.

The same woes that affect all riders — long wait times, inaccessible stations, inadequate reach, and crowded rush hours — often doubly affect families. That’s one reason why so many of them have fled the nation’s densest, most transit-oriented cities in search of suburbs where they need not lug a stroller up yet another broken escalator to reach a subway platform.

Families who can’t afford to trade in their MetroCards and bus passes for minivans may find themselves priced into housing served by especially substandard transit options, funneling them into brutal, hours-long commutes. According to one landmark study, the single strongest factor in predicting social mobility in the US is neither crime nor test scores nor the presence of “traditional” two-parent households, but access to adequate transportation. With every extra minute a child spends commuting to school, they become less likely to move out poverty as an adult.

And for that reason alone, American families with kids do deserve special attention when it comes to how and where and why we build public transit. On this, the Trump administration got something right, even if they got there for all the wrong reasons — ones that I, a childless woman of childbearing age, find vaguely ethnonationalist, and above all, personally creepy. 

But families often need public transportation most in the places where it’s otherwise hardest to raise kids — which is to say in dense cities rather than in already car-centric suburbs. In that sense, especially, In fact, it might make circumstances even worse for the families that really rely on public transit every day.

What family-friendly public transit actually looks like

Marriage and birth rates might sound like a reasonable proxy for where families live, but in reality, according to an analysis by the Urban Institute, the places with the most “traditional” nuclear families tend to be whiter and wealthier than the population at large, and are much more likely to get around by car, not trains or buses. 

We are talking about the suburbs here, which, while certainly deserving of their own transit infrastructure, rarely rely on trains or buses the way that a carless family living on the outer edges of a major city might. And yet the Trump administration has typically treated those very communities — some of which do, in fact, have high birth rates — with contempt or even outright antipathy. 

Consider Chicago’s Red Line, the busiest corridor of the city’s L rail system, which serves some 138 million people per year. The line has long been in need of expansion, and a $5.7 billion extension close to 60 years in the making finally broke ground earlier this year. It will add 5.5 more miles of track with four new stations in the city’s southernmost neighborhoods.

For over half a century, families in the far South Side of Chicago have cobbled together grueling commutes that force them to transfer from buses and trains to reach downtown Chicago, which helps explain why unemployment and poverty rates in the area remain so stubbornly high. Communities like Roseland, where many of the new stations will be built, are considered to be among the most challenging places in the nation to raise a child, but thousands of local families still find ways to do so.

Roseland has a much higher birth rate than the national average, meaning that in theory, Duffy’s transportation department should be itching to send extra funds to transit projects there. But first they have to be willing to fund it at all, and if past policies hold, they may be reluctant to do just that. Just last year, the Trump administration opted to freeze federal funds already allocated to the Red Line extension, plunging the long-awaited project into yet another prolonged period of infrastructural purgatory. 

That move plays into a broader pattern: The Trump administration has hampered dozens of transit projects like the Red Line, seemingly in its broader push to starve Democratic-led cities of federal infrastructure dollars. While a federal judge eventually intervened to allow the Red Line extension to proceed, if the Trump administration’s new guidelines go into effect after public comments close in November, then more projects like it in other urban communities will likely be deprioritized. 

Ultimately, it is the suburbanites who are most poised to benefit from the Trump administration’s proposed policy.

An example is FrontRunner 2X in Utah, a commuter rail project that will slash travel time for Utahns traveling across the state, and will also help Salt Lake City shoulder an influx of tourists when it hosts the Olympics in 2034. It received federal support through the same tranche of funding as Chicago’s Red Line extension. In stark contrast with that more urban initiative, FrontRunner 2X has been the rare public transit project to receive continued support under the Trump administration.

Utah has some of the highest birth and marriage rates in the country, so it’s not a stretch of the imagination to say that if the Trump administration has its way, then the United States will see more projects like FrontRunner 2X get funded, while others like the Red Line extension face bureaucratic bottlenecks and funding freezes. Roseland’s high birth rate notwithstanding, the neighborhood has some of the lowest marriage rates in the country, meaning that even if a project there did manage to eke out federal support, then according to this new calculus, it would still receive significantly less funding from the federal government than a place like the suburbs of Salt Lake City where married families with children are more common.   

Trump’s new pronatalist transit agenda is, at the very least, an indication that after two years spent twiddling their thumbs, firing Amtrak executives, and venerating cars big and small, he may finally be building a semi-coherent transit strategy. And his Transportation Department has allowed a few genuinely family-friendly upgrades for the country’s transit infrastructure to proceed, including grants to add space for strollers on trains and buses.

But you can’t claim to support American families while siphoning federal dollars away from the projects that could actually be transformational to their lives. I am not one to decry a commuter rail renaissance, but it shouldn’t come at the expense of places where American families — the ones Duffy says he’s so keen on having more babies — don’t have any other choice but to wait an hour for the bus to get to work. 

In late September, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna of California introduced the Free Child Care for America Act, an $80 billion-a-year proposal to make childcare free for nearly every family with kids under six. The bill would let families choose between sending their child to a daycare center, having a relative, friend, or neighbor paid a living wage to care for them, or taking a $1,000 monthly stipend to keep the child home for the first three years. It comes from a lawmaker who openly says he’s considering a run for president. “I want 2028 to be a big-ideas primary,” Khanna told ABC. “A contest on who’s going to have ideas of the future that meet the moment.”

Khanna’s is not the only big Democratic childcare proposal released in the last few months. In July, Project 2029 — a group of liberal policy experts developing an agenda for the next Democratic administration — proposed something similar to Khanna’s plan: giving families a choice between free daycare and $1,000 a month to provide care at home or pay a trusted caregiver. The group estimates that would cost about $200 billion annually. Third Way, a centrist Democratic think tank, unveiled its own universal childcare pitch, guaranteeing every family at least three affordable options within a 15-minute drive of home or work by expanding home-based, infant, and after-hours care, and leveraging employers as partners. 

Early childhood policy is quickly becoming a defining issue for 2028 hopefuls. On the right, Vice President JD Vance has staked out an early and controversial position, to pay married stay-at-home parents roughly $9,000 per child annually using existing federal childcare funds. On the left, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is spearheading a new House working group to develop a federal childcare plan. Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear has been pushing free pre-K for all 4-year-olds, something California Gov. Gavin Newsom has already enacted in his state. And New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who can’t run for president but is widely seen as an influential voice in the party’s future, has made universal childcare one of the top goals of his administration.

Michelle Lujan Grisham, the Democratic governor of New Mexico, recently told Semafor that any politician seeking to run for president in 2028 “absolutely should” run on universal childcare proposals. Last year New Mexico became the first state to offer free childcare to families regardless of income. Her advice echoed David Plouffe, a Democratic strategist who managed Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign, who said that universal childcare should be in the Democrats’ 2028 party platform.

This new wave of enthusiasm marks a pivot for an idea that has long been seen as a distant pipe dream in American politics. It wasn’t always that way: When women filled factories during World War II, the federal government funded thousands of daycare centers to watch their kids. In 1971, Congress actually passed a bipartisan childcare bill, though President Richard Nixon vetoed it, saying it would weaken the family. In the 50 years since, Washington lawmakers have focused their energies on other big battles, offering little on childcare beyond subsidies for some low-income families. Over that time, the US has fallen out of step with nearly all its peer nations around the world, which help parents pay for childcare, on top of offering paid parental leave after birth.

It’s not hard to understand why the idea is finally getting a serious look in the US. With voters citing affordability as a top concern, politicians are looking for ways they can bring down costs facing families. After paying rent or a mortgage, childcare often stands as many parents’ biggest monthly expense. Businesses have started to care too, as access to reliable care affects both people’s ability to hold down jobs and businesses’ ability to attract and retain workers. It’s why organizations like the Chamber of Commerce have taken up the issue and why red, blue, and purple states alike have been elevating childcare in recent years.

In Congress and in the Democratic campaign world, there’s a strong sense that childcare, long overshadowed by climate, infrastructure, voting rights, and health care, is now at the front of the line should Democrats regain power. Insiders credit both donor influence and a feeling that childcare advocates have duly waited their turn.

But as Democrats begin jockeying for 2028 and universal childcare becomes a rallying cry, it’s also become clear that there’s a big unanswered question at the heart of the politicking: No one yet agrees on what “universal childcare” actually means. Does it refer to care that’s totally free, or just affordable? Is it for everyone, like public school, or targeted at families below an income line? Does it start at birth, and include parents who stay home? Are employers involved, or neighbors and grandparents? 

The answers will determine who benefits, how much it costs, and whether the party’s next big promise to families is one it can actually keep.

What is universal childcare?

When I asked Rep. Khanna how he defines universal childcare, he said that it means “childcare should be free” and that families should have flexibility and choice of how to get that care. Workers, he added, should also be paid a living wage in a universal childcare system. 

Later, he described the vision for universal childcare as a public good, akin to public school. “From the time a child is born to the time they’re finished college,” he argued, America has the wealth to provide for kids’ education and development. 

Others, however, are defining the idea differently. Linda Smith, who leads Child Care Trust, a national policy think tank, helped design the military’s well-regarded childcare system and oversaw federal early childhood programs under Obama. Earlier this summer, she released a framework for universal childcare that emphasized it does not inherently mean free care.

Smith says she wrote it after realizing that even the legislative staffers drafting childcare bills didn’t mean the same thing by the term. “After some candid conversations with congressional staff this summer working on child care policy, it became clear that there are many interpretations of ‘universal child care,’” she wrote on LinkedIn. “If we can’t agree on what the term means, we can’t build durable policy around it.”

She argues the “universal childcare” slogan tends to blur three separate goals: universal access, universal affordability, and universal free care. To Smith, the urgent priority is access. Her vision for universal childcare policy would be a system where all families have access to “affordable, high-quality options” that reflect their needs. Her organization estimates that about 4.2 million children under six with all available parents in the workforce lack a childcare slot within a reasonable distance of home, and she warns that cutting costs without adding new supply could worsen shortages and leave families without available options.

Her answer is a mix of building more supply and sharing the cost. She recommends families paying what they can and employers and government covering the rest. Spreading the cost across several payers, she argues, is likelier to sustain the full mix of care families actually use — including home-based care — than leaning on government or parents alone.

Chris Herbst, a childcare policy expert and professor at Arizona State University, told me he agrees with Smith that there’s no consensus regarding what universal childcare means today. Even in New Mexico, he pointed out, which is regularly touted as an example of universal childcare, a light work requirement exists for families to be eligible. “These are fluid definitions, and as such they are a bit up for grabs at the moment,” Herbst said. 

His own view is that a universal childcare system should make the subsidy easy to get and be guaranteed by law, so eligible families get it automatically instead of landing on waitlists when funding runs short.

Another childcare expert, Elliot Haspel, has embraced a definition closer to Khanna and Sen. Elizabeth Warren, arguing that universal childcare means all families can easily secure the type of care they want, and pay no fees to do so. He acknowledged, though, that many things can be called “universal” and be technically correct. “The ambiguity of the term is both what lends it rhetorical power and what can present a major weakness,” he writes.

Some states are adding benefits — but avoiding “universal”

With federal childcare legislation stalled, many states have spent the past few years trying to patch the system themselves. Some states are investing in making care cheaper for families, others in paying childcare workers more, and most in trying to get more providers to open their doors.

The National Conference of State Legislatures has also aimed to get involved. Over the course of a year and a half, state lawmakers across 13 states worked together to hash out a bipartisan policy framework for strengthening childcare systems, a rare cross-party effort on the issue. The NCSL report, released this past summer, steers clear of the term “universal childcare,” but does describe state systems under strain and concludes that incremental fixes alone are unlikely to solve it. The lawmakers stressed there is no one-size-fits-all solution and offered a menu of options organized around seven priorities, from expanding access to investing in the childcare workforce.

In interviews with the working group’s two co-chairs, I asked why their cohort stayed away from the “universal” language. Jim Burgin, a Republican state senator from North Carolina, told me he doesn’t find it to be a helpful term because it could conjure up the image of public schools, which are mandatory and government-run. “I don’t like the term,” he said. “I think we ought to have safe, affordable childcare available to everybody and I don’t want everybody to immediately think we’re setting up government indoctrinated childcare…a lot of people would just push back from that.”

The Democratic co-chair, Washington state Sen. Claire Wilson, said her hesitation was more about precision. “When you say ‘universal’, I think that alone is a question about what do we mean by universal?” she said. In Washington, she explained, it means care open to all families regardless of income, employment status, or immigration status, “but for other states, universal may mean something different.”

Where the public stands

Polling suggests Americans do want to see lawmakers take action on childcare, even if it’s not voters’ top priority when asked to rank among different issue areas. An AP-NORC poll from last year found about three-quarters of Americans say childcare is a “major problem,” and majorities across both parties backed federally funded “free or low-cost” daycare. More recently, YouGov and the 19th News found 52 percent of Americans think the federal government should increase its spending on childcare.

The evidence that most Americans want childcare to be free rather than affordable is less clear. The recent YouGov/19th News found about 40 percent of Americans think parents and government should share in the cost of daycare, compared to 21 percent who thought the government should pay the full cost, and 26 percent who thought parents should cover it all.

A recent New America survey found similar results. When asked if K–12 public education should be a free, taxpayer-funded right, 60 percent of respondents agreed. But only 38 percent said the same of childcare. And among those who “somewhat” or “strongly agree” that childcare should be offered to families for free, paid by taxes, and considered a right, only 31 percent of independents agreed, and just 23 percent of Republicans.

Lena Bilik, a childcare researcher at the Roosevelt Institute, a progressive think tank, told me she thinks public opinion will shift more in favor of free universal childcare when public programs can demonstrate a track record of success, as the country saw with Social Security and more recently the Affordable Care Act. “If we build high-quality public goods that work, I think that with time that problem solves itself,” she said. “But they have to be well-resourced.”

The politics ahead

While states like New Mexico, Vermont, and Connecticut have taken major steps in recent years to expand access to affordable childcare, Bilik of the Roosevelt Institute said even those places vary in how explicitly they pursue the goal of universal childcare, or define it.

The last time Democrats went big on childcare, via the Build Back Better Act, they failed. The bill packaged much of the Democratic agenda into one piece of legislation — climate, healthcare, housing — with childcare bundled alongside paid family leave, elder care, universal preschool, and an expanded child tax credit. It collapsed in late 2021 after talks with West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin fell apart. 

When I interviewed lawmakers, advocates, funders, congressional aides, and policy experts in 2024 about what lessons they drew from that experience, I found the field divided over strategy. Childcare never got a vote of its own, and the argument ever since has been whether it should have been pulled out and pursued separately. Some argued activists should have narrowed their focus to one or two care priorities. Others saw that critique as premature capitulation, a sign of a limiting “scarcity mentality.” Many of those advocates emphasized that they had come very close to passing everything, losing in the Senate by a single vote, and pointed to the climate movement, which took decades of sustained organizing and spending to win major federal legislation. Care advocates, they said, just needed to keep pushing.

Two years later, the consensus view among Congressional Democrats and national childcare advocates has shifted, with far more now saying what’s needed first and foremost are “big and bold” solutions that the party can run on — even bigger than the ideas laid out in the Build Back Better Act.

Sen. Elizabeth Warren argued this year that childcare failed in Build Back Better because not enough Democrats were “willing to fight for it” and because the $400 billion proposed spending package for childcare and universal pre-K wasn’t nearly big enough. It was “an exercise in how weak and ineffective we could make the childcare program and still call it childcare,” she said. 

Bilik has watched the same change from the research side. The coalition she works with, she told me, has moved away from programs that help only families below a certain income. “What I’m excited about is that we’ve gotten more ambitious with our proposals across the board since Build Back Better,” she said. “We’re finally having conversations about whether implementing something halfway will cause more problems than solutions, so I think the field has moved really far towards being open to a true public program.” 

These sentiments are reflected in the recently released Khanna bill, the Project 2029 proposal, and comments over the summer from Democratic Rep. Sara Jacobs, who said free childcare for all should be at the top of the House’s legislative agenda if Democrats take control after the midterms. 

How that vision translates into legislation remains an open question. Some advocates I talked to for this story, who spoke off the record to describe private coalition conversations candidly, said they worried their allies were going to make the same mistake of over-promising and then failing to prioritize goals when faced with tough budget realities. Should Democrats take power, leaders will also face pressure to restore Medicaid and SNAP funding, expand ACA subsidies, and address housing costs, all while large federal deficits make new spending harder to finance.

Khanna told me his proposals could be funded by shifting priorities away from increased military spending, particularly the $200 billion increase in the Pentagon budget and the war with Iran. The Project 2029 proposal suggests financing through raising the corporate tax rate, repealing the pass-through business tax deduction, and reforming estate taxes and the “stepped-up basis” tax break on inherited assets. Third Way would also fund its plan partly through a corporate tax increase. But those same dollars could be claimed by other Democratic priorities, which means childcare advocates may end up competing for them.

“Everyone is excited to put out the biggest idea, but there’s no real conversation about how to get there, and I feel like that’s the frustration, where ‘how to get there’ just means electing Democrats and demonizing any incremental progress,” one advocate told me. “That is not a strategy.” 

For now, think tanks, presidential hopefuls, and congressional working groups are testing the waters, floating ideas that meet families where they are and, in some cases, go further than what voters say they want. The practical details are unlikely to get settled once the 2028 race is fully underway. If a Democrat wins, the window will narrow further, with unresolved details colliding with other priorities in the first months of a new administration.

“Universal childcare” may remain an amorphous term, meaning free care to one politician, shared costs to another, and a menu of state options to lawmakers who avoid the word altogether. But all of us voters should expect to hear much more of it.

This work was supported by a grant from the Bainum Family Foundation. Vox Media had full discretion over the content of this reporting.

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’s ambassador to Greece, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is out of a job after serious corruption allegations. 

What happened? Guilfoyle resigned on Tuesday after being shown the door earlier in the day by Trump’s brand-new White House press secretary, who announced at a briefing that Guilfoyle had been asked to resign. 

Her departure comes just six days after a bombshell Wall Street Journal story, which described Guilfoyle’s efforts to solicit money from a Trump donor, including $100,000 to pay down a credit card bill, in exchange for access to Trump officials and conservative media figures. 

Guilfoyle also attempted to conceal those efforts: In one text to the donor, Eric Deters, she wrote, “What a nightmare you’ll literally cost me my ambassadorship stop writing.”

Who is Guilfoyle? Fallen MAGA royalty. Guilfoyle, a former Fox News personality, is also the ex-fiancée of Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr. (and, more distantly, the ex-wife of current California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat).

There appears to be little love lost between Guilfoyle and Trump, however. On Tuesday, he told reporters that Guilfoyle “wasn’t a member of my family. She I guess dated my son a long time ago.” (The Don Jr.-Guilfoyle relationship is thought to have ended in 2024.)

Why was she forced out? Corruption allegations are not, generally speaking, dealbreakers in Trumpworld; the president and his children are all innovators when it comes to profiting off the presidency, and there’s plenty of self-dealing going on around them.

That being said, Guilfoyle may have crossed the line in two specific ways: one, her alleged corruption benefited her and not the Trump family. And two, the allegations are embarrassingly unsubtle even by the standards of the second Trump administration. The combination appears to have been too much.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

This New York Times story, about what a potential superhabitable world elsewhere in the cosmos could look like, was a very cool, very sci-fi read — and we may find out more about the existence of such planets soon, with new space telescopes planned for next year and beyond. 

You can read the full story here with a gift link. Enjoy, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow! 

On the first day of his second term, President Donald Trump issued an executive order requiring the Bureau of Prisons to “ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” Issued alongside a record 26 other orders that day, it was an unsurprising development, because Trump had made this issue one of the centerpieces of his 2024 campaign.

The fate of that executive order, as well as the US Bureau of Prisons’ (“BOP”) memoranda implementing the order, is now before the Supreme Court in a case called Trump v. Kingdom. And, while this case obviously has high stakes for incarcerated transgender people specifically, the Court’s resolution of this case could potentially have far greater reach — cutting off many cis and transgender people’s access to healthcare while they are incarcerated.

That’s because one of the central questions in Kingdom — though this issue is not yet before the justices — is when the Constitution requires prisons to provide medical care to incarcerated people. In Estelle v. Gamble (1976), the Supreme Court held that the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishments” imposes on the government an “obligation to provide medical care for those whom it is punishing by incarceration.” People in prison, after all, cannot simply drive themselves to the hospital if they get sick. If the prison does not give them adequate medical care, they will suffer untreated and potentially die.

For procedural reasons, the Court is unlikely to opine on whether Estelle requires prisons to provide gender-affirming care to trans people right away. But the question of when the Eighth Amendment requires prisons to provide medical care to incarcerated people is front and center in the Kingdom case, which means the Court could potentially use Kingdom to limit all imprisoned people’s access to healthcare — or even to undercut the Constitution’s protections against cruel and unusual punishments more broadly.

Ironically, this case also arises out of a famous political blunder by pro-trans advocates. In 2019, when then-Sen. Kamala Harris was seeking her party’s 2020 presidential nomination, the ACLU circulated a questionnaire to candidates that asked if they would use presidential authority “to ensure that transgender and nonbinary people who rely on the state for medical care — including those in prison and immigration detention — will have access to comprehensive treatment associated with gender transition, including all necessary surgical care?” 

Harris responded that she would, and also said that she “pushed the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation to provide gender transition surgery to state inmates” while she was state attorney general. 

Years later, during his 2024 debate with Harris, Trump claimed that the then-vice president “wants to do transgender operations on illegal aliens that are in prison.” And not long after, his opposition to gender-affirming care for trans people in prison became a key part of his campaign.

It’s unclear why the ACLU thought it was a good idea to shine a light on this issue in 2019 because, at the time, the BOP provided gender-affirming care to people in federal prison. The ACLU — which represents the pro-trans side in the Kingdom case — now argues that transgender people in federal prison have had access to at least some forms of gender-affirming care “since at least 1992.”

Indeed, Trump’s own administration concluded in a 2018 memo that the Bureau of Prisons’ “statutory mandate to provide basic medical and mental health care” to incarcerated people obligated it to provide “pharmaceutical interventions (e.g., cross-gender hormone therapy), hair removal and surgery (if individualized assessment indicates surgical intervention is applicable)” to transgender people in prison if their doctors determined that these interventions are “medically necessary care.”

In any event, regardless of why Trump fixated on cutting off trans healthcare for people in federal prison, Kingdom is now before the Court. That means that the fate of trans people in prison — and, if the Eighth Amendment issue eventually reaches the Court, all incarcerated people — is now in the hands of a Republican Court that is often hostile to trans litigants, and that has, at times, signaled that it wants to drastically roll back the scope of the Eighth Amendment.

What are the legal issues in the Kingdom case?

At least since Estelle, the Court has held that people who are incarcerated are not also sentenced to live and die without medical care. As the Court said in Brown v. Plata (2011), “a prison that deprives prisoners of basic sustenance, including adequate medical care, is incompatible with the concept of human dignity and has no place in civilized society.”

Under Estelle and Brown, transgender people often have a right to gender-affirming care during their incarceration. As the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held in Edmo v. Corizon (2019), such a person must show that they have a “serious medical need” for such care — typically by demonstrating that the care was prescribed to them by their health provider. But the Constitution does not permit prisons to deny medically necessary care to incarcerated people.

In Kingdom, the ACLU raised this Eighth Amendment argument in the lower courts, but those lower courts ruled in favor of transgender people in prison on different, much more technical legal grounds.

For over three decades, from at least 1992 to 2025, according to the ACLU’s brief to the justices, the BOP provided at least some gender-affirming care, including hormone therapy, to transgender people. This matters because, when a federal agency changes its policies, a federal law typically requires it to “examine the relevant data and articulate a satisfactory explanation for its action, including a rational connection between the facts found and the choice made.” This explanation often must explain the agency’s justification for “disregarding facts and circumstances” that justified the previous policy.

Both the ACLU and the lower courts that heard Kingdom argue that the Trump administration did not comply with this obligation when it cut off care for trans people in prison. 

Among other things, the district court that heard this case determined that the administration cited “zero evidence from its own medical or mental health care professionals to support its conclusions” against providing transgender healthcare. While the Trump administration argues that providing gender-affirming care makes prisons less safe, the district court also noted that “the government has not cited a single instance of gender-affirming care giving rise to safety concerns despite having provided such care for many years.”

Is this a persuasive legal argument against the Trump administration’s new policy? I think it is. And so did three federal judges that previously heard the Kingdom case. But the fate of trans people in prison is now in the hands of a Supreme Court that rarely rules in favor of transgender litigants, and that has a history of handing down legally incoherent opinions that are inconsistent with the Court’s own precedents, and that also deny legal rights to trans people.

The current Court’s uncertain commitment to the Eighth Amendment

Because the lower courts that heard Kingdom did not rule on the Eighth Amendment question, Kingdom should not currently give the justices an opportunity to roll back Estelle. But, in the likely event that this Court rejects the ACLU’s argument that the Trump administration did not adequately explain its new policy, the case will return to the lower courts and the Eighth Amendment issue will be fully litigated — teeing up the Eighth Amendment question for the justices to decide in the near future.

This issue could arise, moreover, at the exact moment that some justices are pushing for sweeping changes to how their Court understands the term “cruel and unusual punishments.” Indeed, at least some of the Supreme Court’s recent Eighth Amendment precedents suggest that the Republican justices want a wholesale rewrite of the Court’s previous precedents laying out what constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Since the mid-to-late twentieth century, the Court has held that, in Chief Justice Earl Warren’s words, the Eighth Amendment “must draw its meaning from the evolving standards of decency that mark the progress of a maturing society.” Thus, as certain forms of punishment grow more uncommon, they become more constitutionally dubious.

This “evolving standards of decency” framework is front and center in nearly every major Supreme Court decision interpreting the Eighth Amendment for the last five or six decades, including Estelle.

In Bucklew v. Precythe (2019), however, the Court’s Republican majority seemed to abandon this framework. Although decades worth of pre-Bucklew decisions established that a punishment is unconstitutional if it is considered cruel and unusual today, Bucklew suggested that a method of punishment is unconstitutional only if it “had fallen out of use” at “the time of the founding.” 

Bucklew did list some methods of punishment that fail this test, but they are things like “disemboweling” or “burning alive.”  

Thus, if taken seriously, Bucklew’s new approach to Eighth Amendment cases would dramatically expand the government’s power to impose harsh punishments. The late Justice Antonin Scalia, for example, argued that a Bucklew-like approach to the Eighth Amendment does not prohibit the government from executing most intellectually disabled offenders, and that it does not limit the government’s ability to impose excessive punishments for minor crimes.

In fairness, some of the Court’s post-Bucklew decisions are inconsistent with the framework the Court laid out in that case. So at least some of the justices who joined Bucklew may have since decided that it’s a bad idea to toss out the Court’s entire framework for Eighth Amendment cases. But Bucklew was one hell of a warning shot over the bow of the Eighth Amendment. And the mere fact that the Bucklew decision exists means that advocates for humane punishments must hold their breath any time this Court is asked whether a particular punishment is cruel and unusual.

In the worst-case scenario for people in prison, a case like Kingdom could inspire the Republican justices to overrule — or, at least, drastically limit — decisions like Estelle and Brown. That would mean that all incarcerated people, regardless of their gender identity, could lose access to medically necessary care unless the government decides to give it to them as an act of grace.

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

When life gives you lemons, make it rain. Or…something like that! On Tuesday morning, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar launched a fundraising drive in response to the Trump administration’s unusual predawn raid of her Washington, DC, residence.

The raid, which went down Monday, is reportedly part of a criminal investigation into Omar’s immigration history. The Democratic Congress member was born in Somalia and came to the US as a child, becoming a naturalized citizen in 2000 at age 17.

Omar has since become one of the most prominent progressive voices in Congress and a regular thorn in the side of President Donald Trump, who on Monday called her “terrible” and “totally crooked.” Vice President JD Vance has similarly claimed, without evidence, that Omar “committed immigration fraud.” On Monday, the New York Post reported that the investigation may have sprung from mistakes Omar’s late father made while filling out her citizenship application roughly 30 years ago. 

Needless to say, decades-old citizenship paperwork is not the kind of threat to public safety that typically commands the resources of the Department of Homeland Security’s investigations branch. (That same branch is charged with investigating transnational gangs and terrorists.)

And the raid is unusual for another reason, too: By longstanding practice, the Justice Department avoids taking any public steps in investigations involving political candidates within 60 days of an election. The midterms are just three weeks from now. 

This investigation is unlikely to affect Omar in the midterms, however. In the words of her longshot Republican challenger, John Nagel, Minnesota’s Fifth District is among “the ‘bluest’…in the country.” The raid may have even galvanized Omar’s supporters, dozens of whom rallied at a Minneapolis park on Monday afternoon. Some held banners that read “we stand with Ilhan.” Another sign read, simply, “see you at the polls.”

Go a little deeper

Omar now belongs to an unenviable and surprisingly populous club: political opponents of Trump whom his administration has threatened with criminal indictments and investigations. 

I initially planned to list them out for you here, but then realized that list would be perilously long. By my back-of-the-envelope count, there are at least 30 Democratic politicians, public officials, and Trump-world defectors who have been accused of, investigated for, or charged with crimes during the second Trump administration. 

It’s easy to forget the scale of that campaign, however, because many of these efforts have (thus far!) stalled out or collapsed. In several cases, the administration opened much-publicized and thinly supported investigations that have yet to yield charges. (See, for instance, the criminal probe into writer E. Jean Carroll or former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo.) 

In at least two cases — that of then-Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell and several Minnesota officials — federal judges tossed out subpoenas for lack of evidence. And in one high-profile instance earlier this year, a grand jury refused to indict six Democratic members of Congress who released a video reminding soldiers to refuse illegal orders. The legal bar for issuing such an indictment is actually pretty low — which makes this grand jury’s refusal a telling rebuke of the administration. 

But these judicial setbacks aren’t exactly reason for optimism. The federal court system is becoming increasingly partisan, and as long as Republicans hold the Senate, they’ll be able to stack it with ever-more conservative and deferential judges. And several of the most partisan judges already on the bench are “openly auditioning” for Supreme Court slots, as my colleague Ian Millhiser recently put it. 

In other words, in the not-so-distant future, the court system may provide a weaker check on presidential overreach. And that’s bad news not only for the Ilhan Omars of the world…but also for American democracy. 

One link for later

➨ Turn off your sleep tracker. If your sleep hygiene and underlying health are both good, but you still struggle to catch enough ZZs, then you might actually want to tone down your quest for better sleep. “What you see in people with insomnia is that they’re trying too hard,” one sleep scientist told Vox. Analyzing your sleep scores and timing your naps can create anxiety that further fuels insomnia. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Coke, Pepsi, and Dr. Pepper were all invented by 19th-century pharmacists? At the time, it was widely believed that carbonated water could cure illnesses. And sugary syrups made said water vastly more delicious. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the name of the 2025 Pixar film set in the “Communiverse”? (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 for the three-letter successor of tube TVs. That would be LCD, which stands for liquid crystal display.

Late last month, the state of Tennessee attempted to execute Christa Pike, a woman who has been on death row for decades after killing a classmate as a teenager. 

The execution failed: Pike survived two doses of the lethal injection drug pentobarbital, making her the first person ever to do so.

The botched execution comes at a strange moment for capital punishment in America. Support for the death penalty has been declining for decades. And for a long time, the number of executions was falling, too. But since 2021, executions have been increasing again. The recent surge has been driven largely by one state: Florida.

According to Pamela Colloff, who covers the criminal justice system for ProPublica and wrote about Florida’s use of the death penalty for New York Times Magazine this summer, 40 percent of the executions conducted in the US last year were in Florida.

“There are so many things that make the administration of the death penalty interesting and unique in Florida,” Colloff explained on a recent episode of Vox’s The Gray Area podcast. “Among active death penalty states right now, Florida is unique in that one person determines, from the hundreds of men on death row, who will receive an execution date, and what that execution date is.”

I spoke with Colloff earlier this month following Pike’s failed execution about what happened in Tennessee, what’s driving Florida’s recent zeal for executions, and why victims’ families are often unsatisfied by the death penalty process. 

Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to The Gray Area wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify. (This interview also appeared more recently on Vox’s Today, Explained podcast.)

We’re taping shortly after news came out that a woman in Tennessee who was on death row, authorities attempted to put her to death. They gave her two doses of lethal injection medication, and she survived. 

How much of the decline in the use of the death penalty has to do with, in your estimation, people feeling like there’s no way to do it that’s humane? 

This is the second botched execution in Tennessee this year, just to give you a sense of things. This is more common there than in other states. They’ve changed their drug protocols and we don’t know a lot about what went wrong with Christa Pike. In May, it was an issue with accessing veins, which can be an issue with lethal injection. 

I think it’s also important for people to remember that we had the electric chair as the method of execution through the ’80s and into the ’90s in some places. While [lethal injection] is considered a far more humane, quote-unquote, way to do this, we can see that nothing is perfect. 

I will say that while the issues of botched executions are very important, and I think there are some other ones coming up to be concerned about, I am more interested in how it is that other errors are made, that other people end up with the ultimate punishment when that perhaps was not the right punishment for what occurred.

You’ve also written that death penalty convictions are just expensive, right? And on top of that, DNA evidence has made it clear that many of the people who were being convicted were not guilty, or there wasn’t strong enough evidence to convict them. How do you think about that mix of factors?

Florida, which I’ve spent a lot of time writing about, is the leading place in America by a mile in terms of the number of executions, and has a very large death row. Florida’s also the leader in wrongful death row convictions. Just to give you a sense of things, Florida holds the distinction of 30 death row exonerations.

What that means is in the modern era — the past roughly 50 years — there have been 30 men who were given dates of execution who now walk free. And for anyone who pays any attention to how the criminal justice system works and how incredibly difficult it is to overturn a wrongful conviction, if we have 30 people in Florida who have that distinction, we know that there are many more.

What’s going on in Florida? When did you realize that something was different there?

It really ramped up last year. Last year, Florida executed 40 percent of the people who were executed in the US in the last calendar year. In this year, there have been 16 men who’ve been executed in Florida so far. 

Just to give you a comparison, Texas is the next state with the highest number of executions, and they’ve executed six men in that time. We already have outlier states, primarily southern states, and then we have Florida being the ultimate outlier.

There are so many things that make the administration of the death penalty interesting and unique in Florida. The thing that fascinated me the most is, among active death penalty states right now, Florida is unique in that one person determines, from the hundreds of men on death row, who will receive an execution date, and what that execution date is.

Who is it?

Gov. Ron DeSantis. I went back and looked at what were the patterns here, what were the things guiding Gov. DeSantis’s thinking in setting these dates, and was fascinated to see and very troubled to see that there are a number of men who’ve been there so long.

They’ve been there since the 1970s. These are men who were convicted when Gerald Ford was president, just to make this real to people. But the dates are not being set among the men who are what are called death-eligible, meaning that they’ve gone through all their appeals. They aren’t being done chronologically.

There’s no rhyme or reason to the process. And so there’s this speculation game among victims’ families, prisoners, their advocates about who will be next. And men can sit there on death row for decades with that hanging over them, and that is a Florida phenomenon.

You wrote about Florida’s death row turning from something like a purgatory where people stay for a long time into something closer to an assembly line, right?

I was so struck by the fact that in Florida, in order to have this pace of executions, there were people who were receiving their dates 30 days, sometimes fewer, from their execution dates. 

Just to give people a sense of why that is unusual, there are so many things that kick into gear when a death warrant is written. There are numerous legal maneuvers and next steps that happen in the courts. To give you a quick example, there was one defendant in Florida this spring who, five days before he was scheduled to be executed, was finally granted the ability to test DNA evidence in his case that had gone untested.

He had great lawyers who didn’t sleep to make that happen, but that it came as close as five days to his execution date. I think that should give us all pause about how fast this is moving. 

You have multiple people in the queue at the same time. There’s a place — a different unit than Florida’s death row — that you’re taken to once you get your date, called death watch.

Tell me about death watch. What does it look like and what does it feel like?

Death watch is roughly 30 feet from the execution chamber. There are three cells. When you receive your date, you are taken from death row to death watch where you’re put — I don’t want to say solitary because if there are one or two other men who are held there — but you’re in a far different situation than you would be on death row where there are guards and other people you know.

From that point forward, there are roughly 30 days where you are held within steps of where this will take place. To me, it was chilling that when I was doing my reporting in the spring on the story that I published this summer, all three cells were filled, and as soon as one person was executed, the pattern was that often the next day a new death warrant would be signed, and there would be a new person in place.

Why do they do that? Why do they put these people next to the place where they’ll die?

That’s one of the many questions I had about that. We talk about not wanting to have cruel and unusual punishment. Our Constitution does not uphold that. But it’s such a unique kind of mental torture, I think, to be 30 feet from where you’ll be put to death.

The other thing I was struck by was the waiting aspect. If you’re on death row, again, you always have this hanging over you. I talked about the way in which, when you’re in that kind of sensory deprivation, you become highly attuned to sounds and smells and things like that.

I interviewed someone who’s not on death row anymore, whose sentence was commuted, who talked to me about recognizing that jangle of keys and the steps that this group of people who come to deliver the death warrant take, and knowing that someone is about to be served with a death warrant, but not knowing, “Is it me? Is it the guy next to me? Is it someone down the hall?”

I just want to say, I understand that there’s a counterargument to all of this, which is that these are people who most often committed terrible crimes. Their victims did not know when they were going to be killed.

I do think, however, as a state that administers this thing, there has to be a rhyme or reason to this. Otherwise, you have total chaos, including for victims’ families, who never know. Are they going to wait one month? Are they going to wait 15 years? They don’t know.

In November, voters in Washington, DC, and Denver will cast their ballots to decide whether their cities’ restaurants and grocery stores can continue to sell one of the world’s more controversial foods: foie gras.

French for “fatty liver,” foie gras is made by briefly force-feeding ducks a corn slurry two to three times daily with a metal tube during the final two to three weeks of their lives. It can make their livers balloon to roughly six to 10 times their natural size.

The farming practice gives the liver its signature rich, buttery taste that made it a French delicacy centuries ago and ever since, a prized menu item at upscale restaurants, particularly in Europe, the United States, and East Asia. But the apparent cruelty of force-feeding ducks has also long made it the target of those concerned with animal welfare.

While forcing a lot of food through a metal tube into ducks’ throats may not look great, foie gras companies and high-end chefs contend that it doesn’t hurt the animals because — among other reasons — ducks’ unique physiology enables them to eat fish and other animals whole, and that they naturally gorge before migrations. (More on these arguments later).

Whenever the issue is up for a vote, it touches off fierce debates over animal welfare and fine dining. While foie gras production does harm animals, producers and chefs maintain the dish is unfairly singled out when there are arguably worse practices in animal agriculture, including many that impact a far greater number of animals. Banning a product largely consumed by the 1 percent might make some voters feel good, while ignoring the animal cruelty embedded in the production of vastly more common products, like chicken and eggs.

But to animal rights advocates, a potential ban in DC — which has more foie gras-serving restaurants than almost anywhere else in the US — represents a unique opportunity to hasten the end of what spokesperson Natalie Fulton of Pro-Animal DC, the group behind the DC ballot measure, calls a “uniquely cruel” practice.

What the science says about force-feeding ducks

Foie gras producers often argue that ducks can handle force-feeding just fine because of their long, flexible necks that allow them to swallow fish whole — spines and all — and that they’ve evolved to stuff themselves before seasonal migrations. Producers also commonly say that they have no gag reflex. 

But these claims, according to research, don’t mean that force-feeding is painless. They also leave out a lot of the other problems in foie gras production. Last month, a veterinarian at Ghent University in Belgium and a team of animal welfare research consultants published a literature review in the journal Animals looking at how foie gras farming affects ducks. 

For one, there’s a big difference between ducks swallowing fish and having a rigid metal tube inserted into their throat dozens of times. A duck’s throat and beak area are particularly sensitive, and repeated insertion can cause tissue damage and irritation and inflammation in their esophagus, according to the newly published research, which was funded by the Flemish government. And while wild waterfowl might gorge before migrations, the resulting liver enlargement in the wild doesn’t come anywhere near what it does on foie gras farms. 

Beyond the arguments as to whether ducks can be humanely force-fed, there are plenty of other welfare concerns in foie gras production. Eating so much makes the ducks overweight, which makes it harder for them to move around. Liver enlargement increases their internal heat production, which can make ducks pant more, and an enlarged liver can put pressure on their air sacs, also making it harder to breathe. 

“The available evidence indicates that force-feeding creates substantial risks of welfare compromise through repeated restraint and tube insertion, possible injuries to the upper digestive tract, progressive liver enlargement, altered hepatic [liver] function, increased metabolic heat load, and impaired mobility,” the researchers concluded.

Ducks raised for foie gras aren’t given access to water — like a pond or bathing trough — which in nature they use to clean themselves and forage. And the overwhelming majority of those reared in the US even lack access to the outdoors. 

Despite some of the documented welfare concerns in foie gras farming, Jordan Ginor — a director at Hudson Valley Farms in upstate New York — told me that they’ve got “really good, clean, smiley, healthy ducks.” The company is one of the two main commercial foie gras producers in the US and raises hundreds of thousands of ducks for foie gras annually.

Ginor also said that the aforementioned literature review focuses on European foie gras production, where birds are typically force-fed larger meals, twice daily, over two weeks. But at Hudson Valleys Farms, he said, the process is slower: smaller meals, thrice daily, over three weeks. “The slow process, with significantly less food per meal, lessens any possibility of stress or negative impacts,” he said. (Though one could argue that more insertions over a longer period is worse for the ducks.)

Earlier this year, a photojournalist who took a public tour of Hudson Valley Farms documented — during the force-feeding phase — ducks confined in small pens with no bedding. In one part of the video, the ducks gather in the corner of the pen, seemingly in a fruitless attempt to escape force-feeding.

When I asked Ginor for a response to the video, he was dismissive of the investigations into his company. “We’re proud of what we do,” he said. “Anyone’s welcome to go in and see.” (To its credit, the company provides free public tours, which is highly unusual for large-scale meat producers.)

In previous investigations of the company, animal advocates alleged they documented ducks injured, lame, bloodied, heavily panting, overcrowded in large barns, and confined in small cages prior to slaughter. 

The other main commercial US farm, La Belle Farm, also in upstate New York, did not respond to an interview request for this story. La Belle has received far less attention than Hudson Valley Farms, though a 2019 news story found that its housing and practices are similar to those of its counterpart.

Why single out foie gras?

Support for a foie gras ban neared 80 percent in a small 2023 poll of Washington, DC, residents, with similar support in a 2026 Denver poll. 

“We’ve tried to diversify, given everything that’s been going on” with foie gras bans over the last 20-odd years, Ginor told me. But foie gras is still the core of Hudson Valley Farms’ business.

Ginor said his operation is more humane than a lot of other poultry farms, so why single out foie gras? “As soon as we start comparing how things work at other farms, we look much more favorably,” he told me.

He may have a point, though it’d be difficult to crunch the moral math and determine whether foie gras is much worse — or perhaps even not as bad — as the factory farming of America’s chickens, egg-laying hens, and turkeys. Around half of US egg-laying hens live in tiny cages, while turkeys and chickens raised for meat have been bred to grow so big and fast that they have difficulty walking. And they all outnumber foie gras ducks by many orders of magnitude. 

I asked Fulton of Pro-Animal DC about singling out foie gras over other issues. “Just because some things are also bad doesn’t mean that foie gras production is good,” she told me. (Pro-Animal Future, its umbrella group, is also behind the Denver ballot measure.)

Much of the issue boils down to what’s politically possible. While there’s been some progress, it’s proven difficult and expensive for animal advocates to reform poultry farming in state legislatures. Foie gras, on the other hand, is sort of a low-hanging fruit; there isn’t a large lobby group behind the US industry, and since it’s a luxury product, most consumers won’t miss it. 

And Denver and DC are just the latest in a string of fights over foie gras. Its sale has been banned in California, along with Portland, Oregon; Pittsburgh, and New York City, whose ban has been held up in court in recent years. Over the summer, Brazil banned the sale and production of foie gras, too, and around 20 other countries — mostly in Europe — prohibit its production. (Chicago’s 2006 ban was overturned two years later.)

“We have no money to fight the story,” Ginor said. “People want to attack the 1 percent luxury food.”

Bart Hutchins, head chef at Butterworth’s in Washington, DC, told me he doesn’t want his town to ban what he considers a “great culinary tradition.”

“It is a miracle that we discovered this and that we cultivated it and that we can eat it,” he told me. For his part, Hutchins would rather see animal rights activists work to improve farming conditions for animals farmed on a much larger scale, like chickens and pigs, rather than ban one niche ingredient.

But he may soon have to take foie gras off his menu. Pro-Animal Future is especially confident about DC voters’ support for the ban, which would be a blow to the small US foie gras industry. But another incremental step in advancing animal welfare — and the issue in the minds of more voters.

As rents and homelessness climbed in San Diego over the last decade, leaders watched in frustration as affordable housing projects took months to get approved. The longer a project dragged on, the more expensive it became.  

Housing in America is notoriously slow and complicated to build, so San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria decided to use one lever he had available. In January 2023, he signed an executive order to speed up project approvals, so every fully affordable project now had to be reviewed in 30 business days or less.

To meet this new goal, San Diego had to overhaul how it had been handling permitting. The city streamlined work that had been spread across multiple departments and filled positions it had budgeted for but left vacant. Within a year, fully affordable projects were clearing review in nine days on average. Citywide, 2023 marked San Diego’s biggest year for housing permits since at least 2005, with 9,691 homes approved, or an 82 percent jump from the year before.

Austin, Texas embraced a different approach to tackling its housing shortage. After years of local zoning reform, the city legalized up to three homes on most single-family lots in late 2023, then cut the minimum lot size from 5,750 square feet to 1,800 in 2024. Those changes made it easier to add homes, including backyard accessory dwelling units (ADUs), and followed a broader construction boom that has helped bring rents down. Austin, which was becoming increasingly unaffordable, is now one of the few major American cities where asking rents have fallen since the pandemic.

Atlanta adopted a third housing strategy that didn’t require changing any laws at all. Mayor Andre Dickens rallied the heads of every public agency that affects housing, from the city’s housing authority and school system to the transit agency and land bank, and convened them in one room on a regular basis. He called it a “housing strike force” and it has helped advance the city’s broader effort to build or preserve 20,000 affordable homes by 2030. Every housing deal now comes to the mayor’s office, Dickens told me, and “I just start pushing buttons to push them out the door.” 

Seen as a nationwide issue, the housing shortage is an enormously difficult problem, sitting at the nexus of the economy, the financial system, and decades of local zoning decisions. But the fixes don’t all have to be complex. A mayor can do all three of these — faster permitting, ADUs, a housing strike team — without waiting on Congress or their state legislature to act. And now one major nonprofit is betting that other cities could adopt them too.

On Tuesday, Bloomberg Philanthropies is announcing that it will fund up to 30 cities to adopt one of those three housing ideas. Each will get between $450,000 and $750,000 directly and two years of help from Accelerator for America and the digital consultancy Public Digital, also funded by Bloomberg. The philanthropy has already selected the first 15 cities, including Albuquerque, Chattanooga, Cleveland, Durham, Louisville, Miami, Nashville, Pittsburgh, and San Jose.

By housing construction standards, the money doesn’t go very far. The grants are geared toward hiring city staff, buying new software, and helping cities quickly develop the expertise that let San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta do what they did.

“You don’t need everyone to be innovating everything all the time when there are good ideas in the world that are working,” said James Anderson, who leads Bloomberg Philanthropies’ government innovation program. “They need help adapting those ideas to local contexts.”

According to Anderson, the cities were chosen because their mayors had already taken hard political votes on zoning, and wanted help now to do more. Their timing is also intentional. On the federal level, the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act became law in July, and it creates competitive grants for cities that modernize their permitting, for preapproved housing plans, and that open up their public land. These are the same reforms Bloomberg is now funding, and cities that can show they’ve already done work around it will be better positioned to tap into new federal dollars.

Mayors say they’ve seen big federal programs pass before and then found that actually leveraging those new funding streams in practice can be quite difficult. “We saw that with the Inflation Reduction Act,” Cleveland Mayor Justin Bibb told me. “Even some of the aspects of the bipartisan infrastructure bill, there was a lot of red tape to get some of that stuff across the finish line.”

The Bloomberg bet is that figuring out what to do isn’t as hard as organizing the knowledge of how to do it. The philanthropy thinks that with enough money and hand-holding, good ideas can spread.

It’s an experiment worth testing, but even at the outset there are real limits to what kind of help a short-term infusion of cash can do in practice. San Diego, Austin, and Atlanta all had substantial housing staff in place before they started, and many cities don’t have the same depth to draw on. A two-year grant covers a few staff roles, but doesn’t guarantee they’ll stay long-term in a city where most of the local budget is already committed.

What a “housing strike force” actually is

Dickens had campaigned for office in Atlanta on building 20,000 affordable units in eight years. When he became mayor in 2022, his staff told him the city was on pace to fall 4,000 to 5,000 units short of this goal, and that the main federal subsidy for affordable housing, which gets rationed out by the state in fixed amounts each year, wasn’t going to make up the difference.

What Atlanta did have was land, spread across more than a dozen public entities, each with its own board and its own ideas about what the land was for. One 10-acre city site just northwest of downtown was being used to store trash cans before delivery to residents. “It’s not the highest and best use of the land, but we’ve been doing it for decades,” Josh Humphries, then Dickens’ senior housing adviser, told The Guardian.

So Dickens pulled the heads of those agencies into one body reporting through his chief housing officer. The transit system and school district both answer to their own boards, so his pitch was that they weren’t giving anything up by getting involved. “You are still in charge of your organization, these are your deals, but we are an accelerator,” Dickens told me.

They spent nothing setting it up and hired no new staff for the strike force itself — though when Dickens advises other mayors, he’s blunter about the pressure a mayor would need to exert in convening such a team. An agency that opts out of participating, he said, is “outside of the scope of the mayor’s vision” and “that’s not a safe place to be.”

“I didn’t need another task force,” Dickens added. “Task forces are good, but we know what we’re doing. We don’t have to describe the task. No, this is a strike force. We know the deals, we have the land, we know where the money is for most of these deals, and we have the political will.”

What Dickens did was create “a horizontal way of organizing otherwise vertical players,” as Anderson of Bloomberg Philanthropies put it.

As part of the strike force, agency leaders meet monthly, and quarterly with the mayor. Each one reports what they will produce in the next 30 days, whether that’s a signed agreement, bank financing, or a permit, in front of everyone else. The goal is to move everything as fast as possible to keep down costs.

“You’re in a meeting with 20 colleagues talking about your four or five projects, and everybody is aware of everybody’s projects,” Dickens said. “You don’t want to come back to that meeting saying nothing happened over the last 30 days.”

The limits of the model

Dickens was fairly blunt about where the model stops working. “It works best in cities that have a sizable amount of competent housing development people,” he told me. “A strike force is Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines. You all are capable.” A city still standing up its housing program, he added, should just focus on collaboration, because it would be hard for a small city without “the knowledgeable skills, the capacity” to operate like this.

Most cities can’t easily build that internal bench. Local governments pay less than state or federal employers for the same specialized work, and between half and three-quarters of a typical city’s operating budget is already locked up in salaries, pensions, debt payments, and basic services before the mayor makes a single discretionary call.

In Cleveland, they’re hoping to use the Bloomberg funding to bring in some new support. “Right now it’s a capacity game for us,” Bibb told me. “IT staff, planning staff, development staff, the list goes on. Policy staff as well.”

Cleveland also faces different challenges than Atlanta, which built its strike force for a growth market that already had projects lined up. Cleveland is an older, industrial city with an aging housing stock and a population that has only recently stopped shrinking, so Bibb needs code enforcement and rehab as well as new units. He plans to point the strike force first at a housing innovation district he launched earlier this year, an area spanning parts of three East Side neighborhoods where the city has concentrated its financing and permitting reforms.

Two-year grants can generally be a challenge for cities. Philanthropy often pays for staff long enough to prove a policy works, but when the foundation money goes away, cities can struggle to find the dollars to keep the positions going. While Atlanta’s strike force was organizing around people the city already employed, Cleveland’s will require new ongoing resources for a growing payroll.

Asked what happens when the money runs out, Bibb maintained he’s concentrating on the near term. “Right now we’re just focused on securing the grant, getting the team in place, and really seeing some positive results with the strike force team in our housing innovation district,” he said.

Can a good idea be scaled?

The 30 cities won’t be working alone. Bloomberg is running them as a cohort, meaning each city will pair with the city that pioneered the idea. The goal is to trade advice, mentorship, and opportunities for city leaders to visit and tour. Cleveland is one of roughly 10 cities that will take up the strike force model, meaning Bibb’s team will work with Dickens and his staff.

“One of the major reasons that good ideas do not spread is a lack of clarity around what it took in the original city to get the hard work done,” Anderson said. Adopting cities need to hear from the originals on both a political and a technical level, he told me, to understand “the trade-offs, the costs, the errors, and lessons learned” before they start.

Bloomberg has been testing a version of this model since 2024 through its Idea Exchange, which now includes more than 1,000 cities across 95 countries and has nearly 200 policy replications completed or underway.

Within two years, cities pursuing permitting reform are expected to cut their housing approval timelines in half, those pursuing ADUs to double their pipelines, and participants ultimately to post gains in citywide housing supply.

The housing shortage runs into millions of homes, and these proposed strategies don’t touch challenges like interest rates or the price of lumber. But across the country, they could show how quickly a good idea can spread.

To the average observer concerned with the future of American democracy, it might be easy to conclude that religion has been part of the problem — particularly over the last few years. Right-wing religious leaders, including the leading Southern Baptist televangelist Robert Jeffress, have endorsed “Christian nationalism”; other evangelical pastors and conservative Catholic intellectuals have been openly pondering if America should become more of a theocracy; Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, who once called for an “American crusade,” evoking bloody medieval religious campaigns, has referenced Christian theology in statements about the Iran war.

To critics, these examples show that American religion is becoming an active threat to pluralism and tolerance — the ideas that make American democracy work. 

But what if the solution to this anti-democratic slide is also religion — more religion than the US currently has?

A new book by two thinkers from opposing ends of the ideological spectrum argues that declining levels of religiosity across the board, but particularly among liberals, have deepened political polarization, which in turn has corroded democratic norms. Now, they argue, one of the most effective ways for liberals to stand up for democracy is to engage with religious communities and their scriptural traditions with more respect, openness, and curiosity. The authors also urge liberals who are believers themselves to embrace organized religion and return to it themselves.

Conservative evangelical Christian Matthew Kaemingk and liberal Muslim writer Shadi Hamid argue in Can Religion Save Democracy? that there’s a necessary and unique role that religious institutions and organized religion must play in American public life. Religion serves a fundamental regulating purpose, tempering emotions, fundamentalism, and nihilism. And when that fades away, those base instincts and emotions get channeled into our politics.

They write:

As Americans exit churches in droves, they’re not leaving behind their religious passions. Instead, they’re transferring those passions to the political battlefield. In this new post-religious context, Christian faith and Scripture function less as moral constraints within evangelical circles and more as political cudgels to use against one’s opponents.

“We’re not trying to convert [nonbelievers],” Hamid told me in an interview. “Believing is one thing, but believing that religion can play a positive role is another. And we want to encourage secular readers to embrace the second proposition, even if they don’t believe religion is true or don’t believe God exists.”

What happens when religion recedes from the public square

At the core of Kaemingk and Hamid’s argument is a simple case: There is an innate religion-shaped hole in people in the 21st century, which has been slowly replaced with politics, unbridled passions, and secular ideologies. The loss of religion hasn’t meant a loss of religious convictions, but instead has meant the rise of a new fanaticism, either secular or fundamentalist, while depriving everyone of the good things that organized and institutional religion can do.

It’s not a completely novel argument; it’s a combination of St. Augustine’s famous line that “our hearts are restless until they rest in [God]” and of the political scientist Robert Putnam’s modern case that churches and religious communities provided the third spaces that fostered civic partnership, trust, meaning, and belonging. 

But they also connect these lines of thinking to what the Dutch philosopher Abraham Kuyper used to argue around the turn of the 19th century: that all people are religious, and that something very similar to religious fervor quietly powers all political movements. Religion is “pervasive, public, and pluriform” — an essential part of being human, whose absence leaves nihilism, fear, and distrust in isolated, but still fanatical, individuals.

“If Kuyper is correct that all human beings desire ultimate belief and belonging, then erasing or sequestering religion won’t extinguish our spiritual passions. They will simply shift elsewhere,” Kaemingk and Hamid write. And that shift has been toward politics, candidates, elections, and secular “creeds” that provide identity, belonging, moral certainty, and salvific promises without the accountability, guidance, and caution that religious traditions can provide.

It’s not hard to find examples of what Kaemingk and Hamid mean here. From 2016 to 2024, many observed elements of quasi-religious fervor in movements powering Trump and Woke 1.0. Trump’s strongman appeal generated a cult of personality around him, while anti-Trump resistance efforts and progressive social movements often took on qualities people also found quasi-religious: in-group markers, language, and customs, BlueAnon theories. What’s left is a stalemate, with more conservative religious believers bunched up on one end, and nonreligious but equally passionate citizens on the other end.

Kaemingk and Hamid argue that people on the left often respond by denigrating religion and religious people, dismissing those who try to defend or practice it in the public square, or forcing them to adopt secular language and thinking instead of letting religious people bring their full selves to the public space. But the way out of this current stalemate, Kaemingk and Hamid suggest, is for people on the left to be open, curious, and respectful with the devoutly faithful, whether they’re neighbors or candidates running for office. 

“For that audience, my desire is to say, ‘Hey, you don’t have to believe in religion, but you can recognize the positive aspects of religion,’” Hamid told me.

That involves practical, daily activities and more high-minded appeals. In regular life, the authors recommend prayer, or prayer-like practices for nonbelievers, to help better understand and forgive opponents. They suggest there can be benefits for both nonreligious and religious people to meditate on scriptural and theological teachings about forgiveness, debate, disagreement, salvation, and why earthly politics shouldn’t be taken so seriously. 

And they urge liberals in particular to reengage with religious communities and congregations. Religious liberals should avoid isolation or solitary, individualized faith, the authors recommend, and instead return to congregations and specific churches or places of worship to become part of a community and find purpose. For nonreligious liberals, Kaemingk and Hamid suggest they reexamine their own ideological priorities and be open to the possibility of being wrong on some of them, and potentially engage with organized religion to better understand a religious worldview.

Kaemingk and Hamid offer a specific challenge for liberals and secular Americans that might seem a bit unsavory: They have to realize that they are not blameless for the polarization and radical religious fervor that exists right now through their dismissal of organized religion. Their earlier denigration of organized religion around the turn of this century (think of the New Atheist movement), combined with many leaving institutional churches or failing to participate in religious life, has all contributed to the capture of these institutions by unsavory political opponents, or helped in the decline of more moderate congregations. And any attempt to stop this continued slide away from pluralistic democracy hinges on a collective effort between religious and nonreligious Americans to reverse these trends.

This argument has its limitations

Here’s an obvious question: If religion is so good at moderating people, why hasn’t it been able to temper emotions among the religious already? The most loyal Republican voters over the past few cycles have tended to be evangelical and nondenominational Christians, followed by white Catholics — both of which tend to report above-average levels of religious participation. They’ve stuck with Trump and the GOP over the last decade, which has been defined by polarization, authoritarian policies, and even moments of political violence, that both Kaemingk and Hamid say religion can fix. 

Here’s an obvious question: If religion is so good at moderating people, why hasn’t it been able to temper emotions among the religious already?

More generally, while there is evidence to suggest that evangelicals who leave their churches become more cynical and individualistic — a point in Kaemingk and Hamid’s favor — there’s not much evidence to suggest that the converse is true: that religious participation has actually tempered emotions, passions, and politics. Instead, there’s a case to be made, as the writer Robert P. Jones laid out recently, that the opposite seems to be true: The most religious folks tend to still be the most likely to support harsher Trump-era policies.

Hamid acknowledged that this is a challenge, but argued this isn’t about the religion itself — rather a Trump-specific phenomenon: “Many evangelicals have let partisan loyalties take precedence over religious commitments,” he told me. “This is the distorting effect that Trump has had on the evangelical movement.”

He emphasized that evangelicalism has suffered because many of the most fervent MAGA supporters who identify with that religious movement are not actually very religious. “Evangelicals aren’t going to church as much as they used to on average,” he said. “There has been a kind of process of de-institutionalization in the kind of Protestant domain. And the people who tend to be more fervent MAGA supporters tend to go to church less.” He compared the level of evangelical support that Ted Cruz and Trump got in 2016: Trump had an upper hand among unchurched evangelicals.

Beyond this, the practical reality is that, as things stand today, religiosity does not seem likely to bounce back to the levels it was at two decades ago — at least, not without the help of secular Americans.

What the authors prescribe for politics and elections

Still, it’s an attractive idea, and it’s not hard to see why people might be open to it. Even Democrats themselves seem to understand that writing off religious voters for years was a bad idea. Some of the most promising Democratic candidates in red states in upcoming midterm elections are religious, including Texas Senate nominee James Talarico and Kansas Senate nominee the Rev. Adam Hamilton. A dozen other pastors or believers are running in down-ballot races across the country, while potential 2028 presidential candidates like Democratic Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear and Democratic Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro talk openly about their personal faiths, the role of organized, institutional religion, and seem comfortable doing so.

“It’s promising,” Hamid told me about this trend. “Part of what we argue in the book is that Americans should be able to bring their full convictions into the public arena. If they’re editing themselves or suppressing their religiosity out of fear of alienating constituencies, that’s not good for democracy.”

And Kaemingk and Hamid also have a very influential intellectual ally in this mission: Pope Leo XIV just made a similar case in France for secular liberals to reexamine their understanding of religious liberty and how to balance it against the rise of right-wing religious politics.

“A Christian engaged in public service and guided by the light of his or her conscience, illumined by faith, cannot be considered a proselytizer or a threat to the unity of the nation,” he said in Paris, appealing directly to France’s fiercely secularized civic leaders. “Indeed, authentic secularity does not exclude religion but is capable of valuing it as an educational resource.”

Aboard a plane back to Rome, Leo continued, arguing that religion must have a role in the public square and pointing to the decline of religion in Germany as something that may have facilitated the rise of a far-right movement that cloaks itself in religious language.

“It would be interesting to study, analyze if and how there may be a relationship, for example, between the growth of these groups on the far right,” Leo said mid-flight, “…with some expression of a combination of these far-right points of view with a certain kind of religion, which…is not an authentic expression of Christianity.”

This may be an unsavory ask for liberals and secularists most upset about creeping religious nationalism in the Trump administration and around the country. The recent creation of a new Office of Religious Affairs in the Pentagon, the invocation of God and Scripture to support military action and immigration enforcement, and the attacks on the wave of religious candidates running as Democrats this year all make it understandable why there may be hesitancy in accepting this challenge. But Kaemingk and Hamid are undeniably right about one thing: In a diverse and pluralistic nation, we have no choice but to live with each other.

In early October, Vivek Ramaswamy, the Republican candidate for governor of Ohio, went for a classic “politician on the stump” move: He picked up a kid. Or at least he tried to. Ramaswamy fumbled the boy a bit, producing a clip that quickly went viral on social media. 

The next day, Ramaswamy posted a picture of himself with his son in his arms on social media. It was a cute retort. But many of the responses were ugly — racist attacks against Ramaswamy that drew on anti-Indian stereotypes.

It was the latest example of a broader shift on the right, where Indian Americans and Indian immigrants have become a conspicuous target of online conservative anger.

“The people who had negative stereotypes about Indians in their mind said, ‘Hey, look, the guy can’t even pick up a kid…he can’t even act like a normal American family man,’” freelance journalist Zaid Jilani told Today, Explained co-host Noel King.

Jilani, who recently wrote about the surge in anti-Indian racism for Vox, joined the podcast for a conversation about how he sees the bigotry as rooted in status envy, how Indian Americans and Indian immigrants are responding, and his surprisingly hopeful outlook for the future. 

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.

American racism is very interesting, always has been. And there is a type that says, immigrants are dirty, they come here, they’re uneducated, they leach off the government, they’re taking our resources. 

The stereotype of Indian immigrants to America and Indian Americans is people who go to college, people who often have advanced degrees, people who often live in nice neighborhoods, make good money, are family-values people. 

Why do you think these values that seem as if they mesh with what Republicans want are so triggering to people these days? Is it just yes, but they’re brown?

I think that is a component of it. I spoke to one Indian American advocate who told me that Indians and South Asians more broadly are visible minorities, right? If you think about other minorities who are highly successful, that’s not always the case. 

For instance, I think that Jewish Americans have been known since the late 20th century as being a successful minority group, but they’re not necessarily highly visible. You can’t always identify someone. If [Texas Railroad Commissioner candidate] Bo French saw a bunch of white people in the stadium with the Longhorns, I’m not sure he would be picking out who’s Protestant, who’s Catholic, who’s Jewish. But with Indian Americans, they are highly visible.

That being said, I think you have to think about where Indian Americans are in society and the kind of feelings that can create among everyone else. If you look, for instance, at Silicon Valley, the major tech companies, Microsoft, Google — the head of [Microsoft’s] Xbox division is an Indian American woman now.

You have a group of people who I think are in many ways a very micro minority — we’re talking about 1 percent to 2 percent of the United States — visibly rising into so many positions that I think a lot of people have typically associated with white folks. White people generally run the Fortune 500, white folks run the universities, white folks are the most successful doctors and engineers. And that was true for the 20th century. 

But when you start seeing a much larger influx of Asian immigrants, starting with liberalization of immigration laws in the ’60s, but also when there was a rapid growth of the technology sector in the early 2000s, you start to understand a little bit more where the resentment comes from because it’s more, I would say, analogically similar to antisemitism than it is to the racism that Mexican Americans face or the racism that Black Americans face. 

“It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.”

It’s not that Indian Americans are necessarily being stereotyped as antisocial, criminal, coming here illegally, so on and so forth. It’s more that they’re being seen as a status threat to a lot of particularly middle-class Americans, people who want their kids to rise to the top of their school, who want their kids to have the corner office. They want their kids to be able to get the most prestigious positions. 

I think in the minds of a lot of these people, not only now does their kid have to compete with all the other normal white kids in their community, they have to compete against the entire world. It’s a much larger anti-globalization backlash on the right, not only when it comes to things like immigration, but also trade and tariffs and restrictions like that.

When you talked to Indian Americans for this piece, what did you hear from them that surprised you?

Probably the most surprising thing was how much pragmatism they responded to all of this with. Nine times out of 10, when you have stories about racism, the victims of racism are outraged — understandably and justifiably outraged. Nobody wants to be mistreated. Nobody wants to be denigrated. They certainly don’t want to see restrictions on the right to immigration, or other things to limit their numbers, which is the end point of a lot of this.

At the same time, I think a lot of the people I spoke to were very upfront. They’re like, “Hey, look, we have found a lot of success in America. We got the golden ticket to be able to come here, for our kids to study here, to be able to really seek these opportunities, but we understand what’s happening in the economy. We understand there’s a lot of people who are struggling and then they see us rising to the top of all these organizations. They see us with our kind of well-ensconced place in the economy. And I think it’s important for us not to flaunt our success that much.” At least a couple people said something to that respect. They almost empathize with the people who were hating on them.

It struck me as such a classic immigrant pragmatism that you see from the first or second wave of immigrants: people who realize that they are newcomers to a society or maybe their parents were newcomers to a society, and that there is a certain level of grappling they have to do with, “Hey, how can we continue to have success? How can we continue to grind and resist this racism, but also not rub it in people’s faces that we’re doing well because the more they do that, the tougher it can be?”

A number brought up Vivek Ramaswamy in the sense that Vivek happened to go on social media and talk about what he felt like were deficiencies in American culture when it comes to studying, when it comes to working hard.

I think that in bringing that up, they were saying that that wasn’t particularly helpful because whatever positive aspects there may be to Indian immigrant culture, we shouldn’t talk about them in ways that denigrate other people because that’s obviously going to rub people the wrong way.

You’re making the point that some of the surge in anti-Indian racism on the right is about status anxiety. I was listening to this podcast that Chris Rufo and Jonathan Keeperman did. These are two influential right-wing activists. They called it “The Indian Question” — a lot of people’s eyebrows shot up — and they seem to be making the argument that it is about status anxiety. 

They also were making less coherent arguments about how it’s un-American to study for the spelling bee, which is what South Asian kids do, and that white kids are more American because they play football, then they go to a party and get drunk, and then they get 1,500 on the SAT. 

I’m not saying any of this makes sense. I’m saying it was fascinating. I’m assuming you watched that exchange. What did you make of that?

There’s a certain level of coping mechanism being deployed there in the sense that they are trying to explain the success of Indian Americans as a deficiency: “Maybe they’re getting to the top schools, but that’s because they’re shut in all day studying.”

But it’s not really true that Indian Americans are necessarily cloistered into unhealthy habits. They’re actually finding success across society. For instance, I’ve tutored kids for five, six years. I just really enjoy working with kids. And something you’ll find with a lot of the Indian American kids, they are actually getting increasingly well-rounded. 

Part of that is because you have to, to have success, to get college admissions and so on and so forth. They almost always play sports. They’re involved in extracurriculars. You’re seeing a lot more Indian Americans go into the arts, into cultural fields, into Hollywood. I think that’s actually a very normal path for immigrants.

I think the first or second wave of immigrants has to be very pragmatic. They have to keep their heads down. They have to grind, study, and their parents encourage them to do the same thing. Indian American parents are always like, “You got to be a doctor. You got to be an engineer. Don’t be foolish and try to be a journalist or go to Hollywood.”

But as they establish themselves, as they build nest eggs, they have a little more breathing room, and so they can do different things. I know that Christopher Rufo, for instance, is an Italian American, and I believe I read one time that he even speaks Italian at home because he really values that culture so much and he wants to raise his kids in that. The first wave of Italian immigrants were no different than that. They cloistered into a few sectors where they felt they could find success that was necessary for their integration into the economy and to get their footing. But now we don’t think of Italian Americans as stereotyped into just a few parts of the country or a few parts of society — we barely notice, unless maybe you notice from someone’s name that there even are Italian Americans. 

What they’re describing about Indian Americans is very normal. It’s actually very normal for first waves of immigrants to cluster in a few areas and then they spread themselves out as they’re able to get that a little bit of breathing room and room to ground to stand on.

Barring a catastrophic midterm polling miss, Democrats are on track to win a majority in the House of Representatives next month. Come the new Congress in January, that will mean a new House speaker — and if all goes to plan, that will be current House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries. 

If elected, Jeffries, from New York, will be the first Black speaker of the House. Though Jeffries has been in Congress for nearly 14 years now — and many of those years have been spent in Democratic leadership — he also remains something of an enigma. 

The New Yorker’s Jason Zengerle profiled Jeffries back in May. He spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram about who Jeffries really is, his path to what would be a historic speakership, and what he really stands for.  

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.

In your profile of potential future Speaker of the House Hakeem Jeffries, you start with a story that people might find surprising. And I was wondering if you could tell us said story.

[Jeffries] was in Florida, raising money, which is one of his central responsibilities as a minority leader. And he was being driven to a Democratic donor’s house in Palm Beach. And while he was being driven there, he got an alert on his phone letting him know that Donald Trump had posted a message to Truth Social in which he rehashed a bunch of the 2020 election conspiracies. More significantly, [Trump] had included a depiction of Barack Obama and Michelle Obama as apes. 

Jeffries has this reputation for being a very calm, deliberate, not angry person, oftentimes to his detriment. I think a lot of Democratic partisans wish he would be more angry. But the way he told me the story, he was legitimately pissed off. And he realized that he needed to respond in some way. And he didn’t think that a tweet would be sufficient. 

He wanted to do an Instagram post, and he looked into his aide’s iPhone, and he said, “Fuck Donald Trump.” And as soon as he was done recording the video, I think he started to have second thoughts. And they sent the video up to Washington for a social media team to edit, and he told them, “Let’s bleep out the word fuck.” And for him, it was a smashing social media success.

I was in his office in the Capitol six days later, and he was telling me this story and basking in some of the reflected glory and talking about all the social media love and talking about the real-world love. But then he kind of paused, and he said something like, “You know, but I still haven’t heard from my mom, and I’m a little worried about that.” Which I thought captured him pretty well.

“I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before.”

Why did you want to start your profile of him with that story? What does it tell us about who this individual is?

I thought it captured the dilemma he faces in some ways, just in the sense that he is this very deliberate, calculated political figure, very conventional. And he is operating in a political space these days that doesn’t really reward or appreciate that approach. 

Oftentimes that approach is not successful. I think he’s trying to adapt to the new rules of the road, and he’s kind of doing it in fits and starts, and sometimes he’s more successful than others. But I still think, even when he is successful, he has some qualms about it. 

How long has Hakeem Jeffries wanted to be speaker of the House?

When he got to Congress, in 2012, he definitely wanted to become a player. He wanted to be in leadership, chair a committee, whatever. He was someone who had his eye on that. 

But at the same time, the Congressional Black Caucus had started to think a little bit differently about what they could achieve in Congress. For a long time, they wanted their members to get chairmanships and things like that, or maybe be majority whip. But by the time Jeffries got there, they started to think that we could actually get a speaker. And his arrival kind of coincided with this realization on the part of the CBC. And I think a lot of CBC members viewed Jeffries as a potential future speaker, and they started to groom him for that. 

Pretty soon after that, Nancy Pelosi started to think of him as someone who would be a good member of her leadership team. And I think by 2018, that’s when it really became apparent that he was going to be someone who could potentially be speaker. 

What does he actually stand for as the most powerful Democrat in the House?

I think, quite intentionally, he doesn’t stand for anything. I think that in some ways has been key to his success. He has managed for the most part to avoid being kind of pigeonholed or put anywhere on the ideological spectrum. He is very critical of the far left of the party, especially the DSA. He views the DSA as college-educated young white people who are coming to Brooklyn and displacing older Black working-class people. 

I was talking to this former Democratic congressional aide and basically asking this person the question you’re asking me: What does he stand for? And this person was trying to explain it and finally just was sort of exasperated, and he said he’s intentionally trying not to stand for anything. He’s sort of like hotel art. He just is, and it’s satisfactory.

We don’t have a lot of case studies for how he manages his caucus because they haven’t been in power. But I think maybe one of the most telling examples was the shutdown, because Democrats were, in a way, the power brokers there. Tell us how Hakeem Jeffries managed that.

That was probably his greatest success as minority leader.  When Trump took office for the second time, especially for those first few months, I think all of the congressional Democrats, and Jeffries especially, were really on their heels. They could not figure out how to deal with this guy and what they were going to do to stop him. Jeffries was even complaining that he didn’t have any leverage. But then he eventually realized that a shutdown would be at least a little bit of leverage. 

The real question was, what was the shutdown going to be about? And there were a lot of Democratic members of Congress who wanted it to be about authoritarianism or corruption. They wanted it to be at all these different issues. And Jeffries was really insistent that we need to make this about one issue, and we need to make it about healthcare. 

The Democrats were the ones who caused the shutdown. And normally, the way shutdowns have worked in the past, it’s the party that causes the shutdown that gets the heat from the public. But this time around, I think because Democrats were so consistent in saying that this is about healthcare, and Republicans were so scattered in their own messaging and their own explanations of what was going on, Democrats’ polling numbers went up, Trump’s and Republicans’ went down, and that was a real victory for Jeffries.

Did that whole incident put Jeffries on the president’s radar in a way that he wasn’t? 

It comes, and it goes. For a long time, he wouldn’t mention Jeffries at all. 

I guess the way to tell if Trump is thinking about you is if he posts about you on Truth Social, and he started to post about Jeffries a lot — all the usual kind of insults he lobs, especially at Black politicians, that Jeffries was low IQ and a thug. But yeah, he does seem to be paying a little bit more to Jeffries now than he was before.

And do we think Jeffries is ready to go toe to toe with the president of the United States if that’s what voters decide he’s to do this November?

In his mind, he’s ready. And I think in his own stilted, rehearsed, steady fashion, he will go toe to toe with Donald Trump. He will talk about affordability, and he’ll talk about corruption, and he’ll talk about the “so-called president.” 

I don’t think it will necessarily be satisfying for a lot of Democratic voters out there and Democratic partisans, but I don’t think you’re going to see a new Hakeem Jeffries if he’s speaker. I think he’s going to, especially rhetorically, perform the same way he has before. But I think it’s going to take him a little while to figure out how to do the job.

In theory, getting a donor liver in the United States when you need one should be an extremely equitable process: The sickest patients with the greatest chance to benefit from a donated organ should jump to the front of the line regardless of their gender, race, or other factors. 

But in practice, things look quite different. 

One study from 2020 showed that women were 8.6 percent more likely than men to die waiting for a liver transplant and 14.4 percent less likely to receive a deceased donor liver transplant compared to men. That gap may not seem enormous, but it still represents a significant disparity. As it turns out, it’s rooted in the very system that’s supposed to make the process fairer, a process that unintentionally ranks women lower on the waitlist for livers.

The system in question is known as the Model for End-Stage Liver Disease (MELD). The scoring model has been used since 2002 to rank candidates on the waiting list based on how likely they are to survive without a liver transplant in the short term. The higher your score, the reasoning goes, the sicker you are and the more urgently you need a liver transplant.

One of the values used to calculate the score is creatinine — a waste product made by muscles as they break down proteins or other compounds to release energy. In medicine, the creatinine levels in your blood are used to determine how well your kidneys are functioning because they process and remove creatinine. 

And this is where the system designed for equity gets a little less than equitable for some patients. 

Creatinine levels are affected by muscle mass, and women typically have lower muscle mass than men. A man and woman experiencing the same level of kidney dysfunction will therefore have different levels of creatinine in the body. The MELD model doesn’t take this difference into account — and so lower levels of creatinine in a woman’s blood can make her seem healthier than she is, bumping her farther down the liver waiting list. 

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In 2023, Dr. Ray Kim, a transplant hepatologist at Mayo Clinic in Arizona who developed the original system, debuted a new model called MELD 3.0. The model not only seeks to address the sex disparity in liver access but also improve the accuracy of scores for all patients. Among other changes, it takes into account the sex of the transplant candidate and uses it to adjust the MELD score by 1.33 points for women. This is meant to address the difference in creatinine levels between men and women and provide a more accurate understanding of how sick a female patient really is.

Simple fix, right? Even though MELD 3.0 took the sex disparity in liver access seriously and developed changes to combat it, early research on its efficacy found that even this new and improved system hasn’t yet brought men and women to parity on the liver waitlist. 

And the problem may lie less with what MELD 3.0 did than with what it did not do, prompting the question: Are we focusing on the wrong problem? 

Sex matters…but so does size

Before the MELD score, liver transplants were largely conducted on a first-come, first-served basis. Those who were added to the waiting list first, received livers first. If a really sick candidate was added to the waiting list late, say because of delayed diagnosis, they would almost certainly die while waiting for a liver to become available.

The original MELD fixed that problem by creating a measure of urgency that was easy to calculate. The initial model used three main blood test values — bilirubin, creatinine, and a measure of blood clotting time — and later improvements also took into account the sodium level. 

Traditionally, the MELD model assigns a score between 6 and 40 to liver transplant candidates. MELD 3.0 adds 1.33 points to women’s scores to account for the differences in creatinine levels between the sexes. The new model also measures albumin, an additional biomarker, and adjusts for interactions between the different variables.

Sommer Gentry, a professor at NYU Grossman School of Medicine and contributor to the paper on MELD 3.0, said that using sophisticated algorithms with more biomarkers not only helps to better predict risk for women, but using a more accurate model also benefits the whole population. The researchers estimate that this fine-tuned MELD 3.0 model will reduce at least 20 waiting list deaths per year. Last year, around 800 liver transplant candidates died while waiting for a liver. 

But creatinine is only one of the two main problems that create a disparity in liver access for women. The second, Gentry says, is body size, an issue that’s not addressed by MELD 3.0. A transplanted liver has to physically fit inside the body of a recipient, and women are typically smaller than men, so a very large liver cannot be offered to a small woman. But the reverse is not necessarily true because receiving a liver that is small for the potential recipient doesn’t typically harm the candidate.    

“The smaller you are, the less likely you are to be offered something that’s actually going to work for you,” Gentry said, adding that women end up waiting longer to receive a liver that will actually fit their body. 

Part of the conversation on sex disparity in liver access is based around which of the two problems — creatinine or body-size interventions — to fix first, and whether it is possible to create equity by addressing just one of the two, Gentry said. MELD 3.0 was an attempt to remove the former barrier. 

“I think that some other papers are coming out that suggest that perhaps the other aspect of size matching is still a concern and still possibly not addressed by the resulting liver transplant system,” Gentry said. 

Why is the new model still falling short?

Gentry believes that MELD 3.0 has increased liver transplant rates for female candidates since its adoption in 2023. But early research, however, suggests that the new model falls short of fixing the problem. 

Studies done on MELD 3.0’s impact on liver transplant rates for women indicate that the model increased the number of liver transplants for female candidates — but the gains were short-lived. 

An analysis published in July of nearly 10 million daily records from over 60,000 candidates on the US liver transplant registry found that rates of completed liver transplants for women increased in the period immediately after MELD 3.0 was implemented, but the increase was temporary. Women’s estimated odds of receiving a transplant drifted back to pre-MELD 3.0 levels by the end of the study period, 15 months after the new model was implemented. Women on the waiting list and women who had received a transplant also had higher scores in the three months right after MELD 3.0 took effect, but their scores later fell back to levels comparable to those of men.

Both the successes and shortfalls of MELD 3.0 demonstrate how rethinking existing policies and standards can help reduce inequities in organ access and healthcare.

The authors think that the early surge in liver transplant rates for women was a onetime catchup. MELD 3.0 pushed a group of women who had been stuck on the list — sicker than their old scores suggested — over the priority threshold all at once, leading them to receive liver transplants. 

Notably, the one effect that did persist was that under MELD 3.0, women received more “organ offers” than before. Every time a deceased donor liver becomes available, the system generates a ranked list of the patients suitable to receive that organ. Under MELD 3.0, the number of times an available liver was offered to a female candidate increased, probably because their (more accurate) MELD 3.0 scores better reflected how sick they were. But they’re not necessarily receiving those livers, presumably because of organ size issues. 

These findings suggest that revising the MELD criteria alone may not be enough to eliminate the sex disparity, especially if the body-size disadvantage is part of the problem. 

The authors say that a patient’s sex is merely a poor proxy for the real issue — we don’t have allocation systems in place to ensure that candidates with smaller body sizes also have the same robust access to livers.

Toward liver donation equity for all

If we could figure out how to better address questions of body size in organ donation, the benefits could be enormous. According to Gentry, body-size disparity affects the organ allocation system in general. Similar issues arise with heart and lung transplants too, where the size of the organ relative to body size has to be taken into consideration during organ allocation.

She says that a size-aware organ allocation system would therefore benefit patients on the waiting list across the board. Whether an available organ is the right fit for the potential recipient should be weighed heavily in allocation algorithms, rather than just a list of ranked waitlisted candidates. 

“That should be a larger consideration in sorting the patients who will be offered a certain organ — to ask if this organ is especially suited to one kind of patient over another,” Gentry said.

Under such a system, she said, smaller livers could be offered first to the smallest candidates on a ranked list of those who are also sickest. The assumption is that a smaller candidate will have to wait longer for a viable liver that fits them, even if they have a very high MELD score. 

For such a policy to be instituted, the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network – a nonprofit that oversees the distribution of donor organs — would have to approve it. And before such a system could be presented to the regulatory organization, more research is required.  

It is often the case in medicine that our definition of what counts as a healthy body is measured against the average white male. This too often lowers access and quality of care for both women and people of other races. For example, the standards for creatinine levels in blood reduced access to kidney transplants for Black transplant candidates for years until recent efforts were made to start correcting it. 

In that sense, both the successes and shortfalls of MELD 3.0 demonstrate how rethinking existing policies and standards can help reduce inequities in organ access and healthcare. The conversations and critiques that followed its rollout have exposed a clear gap in organ allocation strategies, one that disadvantages a large group of patients. Closing that gap, not just in liver transplantation but across the board, could bring us a step closer to equity while also making more efficient use of the organs available to save lives.

“There’s no mechanism right now, if a small liver is available, for offering it preferentially to the small women who might not be able to accept lots of other organs that are becoming available,” Gentry said. While fixing the model to rank women more accurately on the liver waiting list is a start, including body-size considerations in the organ allocation system might be the real bottleneck to address.

Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.

My child, age 9, has decided she’s vegan. Neither of her parents are even vegetarian — we’re “free range chicken/grass fed beef” types. She has learned about veganism from friends at school, and seems to have come to her position more or less on her own. I want to encourage her ethical choices, but her mother and I agree that children should be introduced to new foods and flavors at this age. She has no allergies or intolerances that we know of. I worry that making accommodations for her dietary restriction may lead to a lifetime of picky eating, even if hers is a reasonable and ethical approach. She seems to be uncomfortable when her mother or I cook meat for meals we share, even if we make her another option. What should I do to support my daughter?

Dear Hold the Beef, 

When I was around your daughter’s age, I went to Hawaii with my parents. One night, we ate dinner on the beach, and we watched as a pig was dug up from an underground steam oven. I was horrified to see its face and nose; most of the meat I had eaten so far in my life didn’t resemble the animal it came from. A few years later, I became a vegetarian, and then in my 20s, a vegan. 

I share this story to reveal my slight bias in answering your question, but also my understanding of the ethical awakening your daughter might be experiencing. As you figure out how to talk to your child about what she decides to eat, we can at least table discussing the pros and cons of veganism itself. Instead, you should think about what amount of autonomy your child should have, and whether the moral decision-making she wants to engage in matches with her current stage of development. 

People don’t turn 18 and then suddenly start engaging morally with the world. As we grow up, we try to understand right and wrong in fits and spurts. Lawrence Kohlberg, a 20th-century American psychologist, is best known for attempting to track a person’s moral development throughout their life. 

Kohlberg presented people with hypothetical dilemmas in order to come up with six moral stages. In one example, he asked people of different ages about a dying woman who could be cured by a drug that was cheap to make, but that a manufacturer was charging an exorbitant fee for. The woman’s husband ends up stealing the drug. Is that right or wrong?

Kohlberg observed that in answering questions like this, young children have what he called a “preconventional morality”: Their notions of right and wrong are dictated by what their parents think, and the avoidance of punishment when breaking those rules. For instance, the main reason not to throw your dinner on the ground or hit your brother was to avoid consequences from parents, not a feeling that there’s something wrong about that action. 

Kohlberg thought this stage lasted until around age 9, and in the next period, children began to understand that there isn’t just one correct action, but that people could have different moral ideas based on their social context. To sum up the rest of the stages quickly, each one progresses to encompass more views — like the moral agreements necessary to make a society function — and more complexity — like the realization that a seemingly immoral action can ultimately be moral, like stealing medicine for one’s wife. 

It’s useful to pinpoint where your daughter finds herself on Kohlberg’s timeline. It sounds like she’s in the shift from the first stage and into the later ones. What you’ve decided — that it’s okay to eat meat if it’s free-range or grass-fed — is no longer sufficient for your daughter in terms of guiding her own actions. That can be a jarring moment for a parent, but at least, according to Kohlberg, it’s a sign of maturation. Your child should, at this age, start to consider her friends, as well as the experiences she’s had without you, when making an ethical choice. 

But I’m her parent, you may protest. That doesn’t necessarily mean that your job is to exclusively provide black-and-white directives. 

Alison Gopnik, a psychologist and philosopher at the University of California Berkeley, has written about the unique perspective and personhood of children (including babies). In her book The Gardener and the Carpenter, she questions how people have come to define the act of parenting as having specific goals in mind for their children. This approach is like being a carpenter, she writes, who follows instructions to assemble a predetermined piece of furniture. She argues that parenting is more like gardening: You cultivate the soil and the environment and realize that you could produce any number of different flowers, fruits, or vegetables. Growth is the point, not a by-the-book final product. 

I see Gopnik in alignment with Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the 18th-century philosopher whose novel Émile, or On Education surprised its readers by advocating for a freer and child-centered approach to teaching. Émile, a young wealthy boy, is tutored — in high contrast to the expectations of the day — without strict rules. Rousseau thought you couldn’t make a child turn into an adult any faster, and it was foolish to try. He also thought that children had to learn by having their own experiences out in the world, and learning from those, rather than just overly didactic lessons. 

As your daughter dips her toe into the morality of eating meat, Rousseau would also remind you not to expect her to have the most mature ideas about veganism or her meal plan. She is still young, and may just have come across an idea that feels ethically important to her. Your role as her parent is to help her develop her nuanced morality, a process Kohlberg suggests will continue, and not steer her towards one way of eating over another. Be Gopnik’s dietary gardener, not carpenter. 

Of course, parents do have rights over their children, and an obligation to keep them safe. When we’re young, we’re not always equipped to make the right choice (some would argue this continues into adulthood, too). If your daughter decided to take up smoking cigarettes, for instance, you would step in because her choice would negatively affect her health. As her parent, you should still guide her to build healthy habits. 

You say you’re worried about your daughter becoming too picky, or not being exposed to enough foods if she becomes a vegan. But rather than push back on the choice itself, you can explain what else her choice entails. You can do so in an age-appropriate way. Talk about the nutrients that she might be missing out on if she stops eating meat, dairy, and eggs, and find books or videos about what foods might be a good substitute. 

For me, becoming vegan actually exposed me to all kinds of foods that I might not have eaten otherwise: from Asian and Indian cuisines that are very veggie-friendly to many other protein- and iron-rich plant-based foods. You could collaborate with your daughter to cook vegan meals for the whole family; no challenge sparks a budding home cook more than making delectable tofu. 

I should add that I’m no longer a vegan. I learned a lot from committing to a diet that wasn’t always convenient or tasty, in support of my values. Then, after more than a decade, I incorporated eggs and fish back into my diet. It’s likely that your daughter will continue to change the choices she makes as she tries to align her actions with her maturing moral views about the world. 

Whether or not she eats grass-fed beef with you in her teens, you should be glad that she seems to care about what impact she’s having in the world. It means you’re raising a person whose ethics are developing strongly, even as what’s on your dinner plate may change while she figures it all out.  

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Speaking of tofu, I revisited an essay that George Stiffman (a self-proclaimed “tofu guy”) wrote for Asterisk Magazine about how soybean curds are prepared in China. Warning: This article will make you hungry! He dives into all the creative culinary preparations of tofu that are tragically absent in the West. 
• Several years ago, I bought a plant-based cooking book especially for children, The Vegan Cookbook for Kids: Easy Plant-Based Recipes for Young Chefs. It was a present for a non-vegan family, but the kid in question was interested in learning how to cook, and when kids cook vegan, parents don’t have to worry about them handling raw meat! Looking over these snacks and meals again, I see several tasty things that I wouldn’t mind making for myself, even as a non-vegan, and non-child. 
• When I was a vegan in New York City in the 2010s, I wasn’t constrained to sad tofu and sprout sandwiches. It seemed like every week a brand-new vegan restaurant opened up, covering every cuisine, and with star chefs at the helm. But lately, all my favorite vegan restaurants have been closing. Turns out I’m not imagining it, as Vox’s Marina Bolotnikova wrote in her article: “Where did all the vegan restaurants go?” She investigates why these establishments have become rarer, and what we’ll miss out on if they completely disappear. 

Whenever I have dinner with friends, the conversation always ends up on one of three topics: how hard dating is, the hunt for affordable housing, or an update on everyone’s pets. The last on that list includes cute photos and veterinarian updates. I love hearing about my friends’ cats and dogs. But I also have to admit that I just don’t get it. I don’t have a pet. I never have. (We won’t discuss the ill-fated caterpillar in elementary school.)

I’m in the minority: Over half of American households have pets. Which means that over half of American households have also seen the cost of pet care go up in recent years.  

Helaine Olen is the proud pet parent of a Havanese poodle mix named Barney Rubble. She’s also the managing editor at the American Economic Liberties Project, an antitrust organization, and she says people often aren’t prepared for how expensive it can get. 

Some of it is inflation, Olen says, but veterinary care is a major factor. “The same medical advances that have kept us alive longer and we consider miracles — whether it’s cancer drugs or stem cell therapies or various pharmaceuticals — the same is true for your cats and dogs,” Olen says.

Decades ago, a cat having an MRI was unheard of; now, it’s common. But it’s not just expanded access and improved technology that’s driving prices up. Olen says that who’s behind that healthcare is a factor. “Big corporations and private equity have seen all of this, know that people say they will do anything for their pets, know that they think of their pets as children, and they have rushed into the sector,” she told Vox.

So how did private equity get involved in the lives of our pets? And what happens when the prices keep climbing? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with Olen, edited for length and clarity. You can listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you’d like to submit a question, send an email to askvox@vox.com or call 1-800-618-8545.

What kind of costs are we talking about?

When your pet is young, you’re probably spending several hundred dollars a year for various vaccines, spay and neuter, annual checkups. But the real costs start coming in as they get older and they need maintenance. 

For tooth cleaning, pets need to be put under anesthesia. You’ll spend a minimum of $1,000. That will be even higher if a pet’s tooth has to be removed. 

I’ve spoken to people whose pets have back legs that have collapsed or disc herniations. You can easily be out over $10,000 on a surgery. You can easily spend four figures on a 24-hour overnight. I spoke to somebody who was quoted $3,500 a night for just an observational overnight.

You mentioned that some of this comes down to who owns pet clinics and how that’s changing. Who owns them now?

Traditionally, it was an independent practice. But in the past 10 to 15 years, big corporations and private equity have moved into the space. The largest owner of vets in the United States right now is a group called Mars. And if Mars sounds familiar to you, that’s Mars as in Skittles. 

They own around 2,500 vets under the names of VCA, Banfield, and Blue Pearl. I’d say somewhere between a third and 50 percent of vet clinics are owned by corporations. It was 10 percent or less than 10 percent a little over a decade ago.

What caused this spike and why is a candy company behind it?

As people realize how much can be done to help their pets, the corporations and private equity basically saw what one analyst described as low risk, high reward. I’ve spoken to employees of some of the larger chains who have told me that prices went up routinely every six months or every nine months or once a year. 

In Britain, there was a recent government investigation into all of this by the Competition and Markets Authority, their equivalent of the Federal Trade Commission. They determined that private equity and corporate ownership is responsible for a billion pounds spent on pets over a five-year period that otherwise wouldn’t have been spent, and that people were paying about 16 percent more at vets owned by large corporate outfits versus independent vets.

How are people paying for this if it’s so expensive?

I live in Los Angeles, and I wrote a piece for New York magazine a few months ago about all the people here who are now driving their pets down to Tijuana because it is so much less expensive down there. 

Pet insurance is a very mixed bag. It is extremely expensive in many cases. It goes up at very high rates. My own pet insurance increased by 30 percent from last year to this year. And by the way, my dog Barney Rubble is 2 and a half years old.

Wow. He’s still so young.

He has had no issues that I am aware of that would account for a 30 percent increase. 

The other thing with pet insurance, unlike human health insurance, is there is no preexisting [conditions] clause. I have lost count of the number of people I’ve interviewed over the years who discovered too late that their pet health insurer deemed something a preexisting condition.

What do people do when they get to the point where this costs too much? 

In some cases, they run up debt. Buy now, pay later services are increasingly moving into the veterinary area as well.

In other cases, they surrender the animal. If you talk to people at shelters, they will say that they believe that part of the uptick they’ve gotten in surrendered animals has to do with the increase in costs of veterinary care.

I imagine that just feels like such an impossible choice, like choosing between this money you don’t have and the quality of life for something that you love.

The emotions are huge. This is in part why private equity and corporations have moved in: They know people are going to feel very emotional about their pets and that they’re going to want to do anything they can to keep them alive or keep them healthy or keep them pain-free, and that they will pay almost any price. 

When my last dog was diagnosed with heart disease, I was determined to keep her going for a couple of years. I had her on one medication that cost $300 a month. I was like, “I can’t lose my Katie.”

The tragic thing about pets is they are both better than us — in my opinion — and they live shorter lives. You are going to lose your pet eventually. It’s just the most heartbreaking thing in the world.

On his first day back in office in January 2025, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “restoring freedom of speech and ending federal censorship.” More than a year and a half later, his administration is instead busy using government power to go after speech it dislikes. 

Last year, Federal Communications Commission chair Brendan Carr urged broadcasters to take action against Jimmy Kimmel over his comments following Charlie Kirk’s killing, and in September, Kimmel said the FCC again intervened to stop Kimmel’s late-night show from airing an interview with James Talarico, Democratic Senate candidate for Texas.

Also last month, Trump barred three news outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House over their coverage. That ban was quickly blocked by a federal judge, but both CNN and Politico have since been banned from traveling with the press pool on Trump trips.

Outside of the White House, the fight over free speech is also raging on college campuses. In states like Texas, Republican lawmakers have restricted when students can protest and given governor-appointed university boards more say over what gets taught. In 2025, 15 states passed laws that restrict what can be taught or weaken protections for free expression on college campuses.

To break down what all of this means for the state of free speech in the US — and the future of our First Amendment rights — Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Greg Lukianoff, president and CEO of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE).

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. 

How would you describe the kind of status of free speech on campus these days?

The status of free speech is in great peril, both on and off campus. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and it’s about as bad as I’ve ever seen it. 

When it comes to the Charlie Kirk backlash cases, we saw about 90 of them. It’s a remarkably high number. We saw an ex-cop go to jail for 37 days just for forwarding a Trump meme in response to a request to go to a candlelight vigil for Charlie Kirk. It’s not good.

If you look at the last two years, we’ve done so many episodes about free speech concerns. There was Jimmy Kimmel; there’s CNN being banned from the White House. 

There’s student protesters who are protesting what’s going on in Gaza. 

It really does seem like we’re at a moment where so many different types of people claim that their speech is being restricted in so many different types of ways. What is happening in the country?

My worry is I’m very much a small-L liberal. I come from an old ACLU background. That’s where I interned in law school. I went to law school to do First Amendment law. I hyper-specialize in it. This is my passion. 

For most of my 25-year career, you could rely on a civil libertarian aspect of the left and a libertarian aspect of the right that would often agree on almost nothing except for things like freedom of speech. And right now, I think we’ve become all culture war all the time, and we have more of a progressive left and more of a populist right. 

The only way that you show you believe in freedom of speech is by saying, “I hate that guy, but I think you should have freedom of speech.” If you’re saying, “I think my side should have freedom of speech,” that’s just self-interest. That doesn’t even count. 

All the worst people in history wanted free speech for their side. So I’m afraid we’re losing — or maybe even, I hate to say this dramatically, but maybe even have lost it as a shared value as a society.

Well, that’s quite grim.

Yeah. I’m feeling a little grim. 

The Trump administration came into office with a promise. And I remember it sounding something like this: “The woke left went too far. They canceled people. They restricted speech. They got out of control. President Trump is going to come back in, and we are going to restore sanity to the country. And as part of sanity, that will include your right to freely express yourself.” 

How do you square the promise versus what we’ve seen?

I think Trump is constantly frustrating everyone around him by being Trump. I think there probably were people in the administration who were like, “Yeah, we’re going to be pro-free speech.” And then Trump decides to declare — I mean, I think the recent White House press pool case is hysterical in a lot of ways because he had to get his team to give a sort of constitutional justification for why he was kicking out the press pool. But on Truth Social, he’s like, “It’s because of their viewpoint,” which is, by the way, something you can’t do under the Constitution. 

“I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.”

His instincts are very authoritarian. They’re very top-down. So maybe there were people in the administration who, in their heart of hearts, are good on free speech, but Trump isn’t. And it’s the reason why when it came to the new administration, there were a lot of people on the right, but also people on the sort of heterodox left who were like, “Oh, this is going to be good for free speech.”

I was like, “Don’t kid yourself, guys. This is going to be bad.” Although I will say, it’s even worse than I was expecting.

President Trump at some point will be out of office. And what happens then? What do you think? Is there an optimistic scenario where we’re like, “Okay, we’re kind of tired of this crap. Let’s just go back to the way it was in the ’90s”?

It has been cyclical, to a degree. American society gets out of whack, and usually one of the things that does bring us together is that we were lucky enough to have…I’ll just say it, we have a brilliant Constitution. It is unusually clever about human nature, and the Constitution itself — you can have whatever opinion you want about the founders, but it is something to be proud of. And a lot of times those values kind of bring us back together. 

That’s my hope. But another thing I will say about Trump: He has played havoc with my ability to predict anything. So what it’s going to look like over the event horizon of 2028, I hope it will be better, and we will fight like hell to make sure it’s better here at FIRE, but will it be better? I’m not sure, and it definitely won’t be better if we think of free speech as something that belongs to my side, not yours.

One of the reasons why I do have hope for free speech in the long term is that free speech works really well. It’s how you know what your fellow citizens think. It’s how you get ideas out there. It’s how you actually be your authentic self. 

Societies that actually have freedom of speech are always going to have advantages, real and serious advantages, over ones that don’t. So I’m hopeful for the long-term future of free speech, but in the short term, I’m worried.

The Wisconsin gubernatorial race was one of the most closely watched Democratic primaries in the country this year, pitting a democratic socialist, state Rep. Francesca Hong, against Milwaukee Democrat David Crowley, who received the endorsement of the state’s sitting Democratic governor, Tony Evers.

Hong lost the race, setting up Crowley to face Republican Rep. Tom Tiffany in the general election this fall. But she’s already back on the campaign trail, this time trying to help Democrats win a trifecta in the state: the governor’s race and both legislative chambers.

Unifying the state’s voters to achieve that won’t be easy, though. Hong spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about her own loss, Evers’s role in it, and whether or not the voters who felt so passionate about her own campaign would find enough to love in Crowley’s campaign — in particular on the increasingly important issue of data centers. 

Astead and Hong also talked about what Wisconsin means for the Democrats nationally, and what lessons the party should take from her race, including her loss.

“I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around,” Hong said. “But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign. I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic.”

Below is an excerpt of Astead’s conversation with Hong, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full show, so listen to America, Actually wherever you get your podcasts or watch it on Vox’s YouTube channel.

Part of the reason we wanted to come here was because we saw you were getting back on the campaign trail, and specifically around that idea of energizing Wisconsin toward a trifecta.

Now, just tell me the difference in terms of the importance of Democrats winning it all — not only the governor’s mansion, but both houses of the state legislature — versus just the governor’s mansion. How does that change the possibilities of what the party could do?

For the last 16 years, a Republican majority in the state legislature has meant that passing the types of policies that we know can drastically improve the lives of everyday folks here in Wisconsin stalled. And we have a historic opportunity to flip the assembly and the state Senate and hold the governor’s mansion and the entire executive branch to a Democratic majority, meaning the opportunity to pass the policies that the majority of our state supports — things like increasing minimum wage, things like legalizing marijuana, codifying abortion. 

We also need to repeal Act 10 [which dramatically restricted collective bargaining rights for public-sector employees]. Wisconsin is where workers’ rights, things like unemployment insurance, Social Security were born, and we moved backwards with the Republican majority. That’s all on the table with the Democratic trifecta.

It also, though, raises the political standard of what Democrats would have to do to achieve that, and some of it goes through these more rural communities.

Why do we think the party has fallen behind in more rural communities, and what could be done to reverse that?

I think it’s important to look at what’s happened in the rural communities when we’ve seen manufacturing jobs leave the state, when we’ve seen fewer and fewer supports for our small farmers.

And so much of this — what connects it — is actually the growth of massive wealth and corporate control and corporate greed, and more people feeling the impacts of that. There’s an opportunity right now to say, ‘Hey, Republicans have been in the legislature, they’ve been in power, and things have not improved for you or your community … Now’s the opportunity to make sure that we’re actually able to see our shared Wisconsin values of working hard and taking care of our kids be reflected back in Madison through laws.’

So much of your campaign was focused on data centers, stopping data centers. Should I think of that as a rural issue?

I think the issue around data centers is an everyone issue. It’s a democracy issue. It’s people wanting to feel like there are folks who care about what happens to communities, and that they have control and an actual say in what happens in their communities.

To that point, is it a mistake for David Crowley, the Democratic nominee, to have not gone as far as you did and say, “We won’t be building more data centers for a period of time”?

He’s fighting for communities and community control when it comes to data centers.

But it’s not a moratorium.

But it’s not a moratorium. It isn’t, but he’s also committed to 100 percent renewable energy, clean energy to power data centers.

And achieving that is going to be incredibly difficult, and it is going to be the developers having to pay their own way, and these are things that he’s committed to that we know can slow down the growth and development of data centers. 

Have you had time to reflect on your primary loss? If you had to diagnose, why do you think you lost?

I’m still doing a lot of reflection. But I think that I want to continue to look forward. And what I’ve learned from our election is that it’s so important to continue to stay grounded in becoming accessible to people. I think that as an organizer and an elected official, it’s my responsibility to continue to go to the people and remain very in touch with what’s going on on the ground.

I have a couple more questions about the nature of the loss. Evers’s endorsement changed that race, so much so that your opponent David Crowley was able even to win in some smaller communities, like places where you were pitching yourself as the voice of more rural communities.

Does that disprove any of this thesis around, say, data centers? If that was the top priority for Wisconsin voters, wouldn’t you be the nominee?

I think it wasn’t all rural communities. It wasn’t all suburban communities. We saw certain demographics but also ZIP codes where we outperformed David significantly.

And I think that where the governor’s endorsement played a bigger role was areas where he was also more popular. 

Did it surprise you when Evers endorsed Crowley?

I was disappointed.

Why?

I was disappointed because I was getting a lot of feedback from folks who hadn’t committed to any candidate yet that this felt like the governor was putting his thumb on the scale.

I wanted to ask about electability, because it seemed as if Evers’s endorsement was about a fear that maybe you couldn’t win in November.

So much of the primary concern was around the DSA label, even campaigning with folks like Hasan Piker. In retrospect, was any of that a mistake?

We knew going in that we would have to encourage new voters to come out, folks who typically do not come out for primaries, quote-unquote low-propensity voters. And we knew that we would have to campaign in places where folks weren’t expecting to see a gubernatorial candidate. And those included Twitch streams.

Those also included going to dive bars and bowling alleys and making sure that we were accessible and shaping our policies based on what the people were telling us they wanted to see happen and also what they wanted to see out of their governor. I think electability… I said this, and I will continue to say it — the person who is most electable is the person who ended up getting the most votes, and that was Crowley this time around.

But I think there’s a disservice when you have the most powerful Democrat in the state choosing to ignore a lot of voters and people who were inspired and energized and coming out to participate in politics for the first time through our campaign.

I think it was shortsighted to use electability almost as a fear tactic, when Democrats need to be inspiring and project a vision where everyone can see themselves in it as everyday working-class folks.

When you’ve got a party that has struggled with elitism to then cave to an establishment narrative … being more afraid of labels when I’m hearing from people on the ground that they’re interested in solutions and solving problems, maybe somebody who knows the hustle of the service industry and running restaurants and has worked across the aisle to pass bipartisan legislation. There are ways that we can maneuver around labels and what the loudest narrative might be.

I wish our governor hadn’t fed into that.

To be fair, to your point, the establishment label doesn’t fully fit even someone like Crowley, who comes from a working-class background. But am I hearing that you think Evers’s move made your life in the general election more difficult?

Is it harder to re-inspire if young people who are invested in the Hong campaign think that the establishment squashed them out?

We still had over 300,000 votes. We lost by fewer than 4,000 votes. I had more votes than Evers did during his primary. That’s not squashing our voices.

We’re still here, and it’s so important that people find avenues to continue to exercise their voice and their new organizing power. And I’m definitely going to continue to work to make sure that we get results and that we win the trifecta, and that’s the most important thing we should be focusing on right now.

I hear why a trifecta matters in the state context, particularly the state policy.

If I’m someone, though, who’s not in Wisconsin, who’s just worried about Donald Trump running amok in Washington, why should I care if Democrats win the governor’s mansion and the state legislature? Does that matter for folks outside of the state?

Because we will start to see that when you feel government actually working and you see change happening in your lives, these are then voters who are going to continue to come out and vote for Democrats.

We’re a pivotal state when it comes to the federal elections as well. We’re actually in a swing district right now. 

We have an opportunity, through Wisconsin, to actually start improving the brand for Democrats. And if we do that here, this trickles out to the rest of the country.

The premise being that delivering creates a connection for Democrats that is helpful in the presidential election, and it’s helpful in all these other ways too.

Yeah. We’re not going to be fighting every single midterm and presidential for our lives based on what’s happening in just one state.

But I think if we can start showing durable power for Democrats in a state like ours because of the policies that we’re prioritizing, and you have more folks coming out to vote for Democrats, that’s good for the health of democracy.

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: The Trump administration is planning a public killing. 

What’s happening? On Thursday, the Pentagon announced that it would execute Nidal Hasan, a former Army major sentenced to death for a 2009 mass shooting on a military base, publicly and on livestream. 

The execution, if it happens, would be unprecedented: The last widely reported public execution in the US was 90 years ago, in Kentucky, but to stream a death live would be something else entirely. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has promoted the announcement with something approaching glee, telling a reporter that “we’ll make sure that people are able to watch it.”

What’s the context? According to the Pentagon, Hasan will be executed via firing squad on December 3 — the first such execution by the military in more than 80 years.

Hasan, a former Army psychiatrist, was sentenced to death in 2013 by a military jury following a court-martial for the 2009 shooting, when he killed 13 people and wounded more than 30 at Fort Hood in Texas. The execution is set to be carried out at the same Army post.

Will the Pentagon go through with this? It’s unclear, for multiple reasons. The Pentagon’s announcement that Hasan’s death will be livestreamed has generated a great deal of bipartisan pushback, as well as condemnation by religious groups, though that is unlikely to stop the execution itself. 

The head of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops decried the decision to livestream the execution as “a barbaric promotion of a culture of death,” and retiring Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) called it the decision “beyond disgusting.” 

“Public executions are what oppressive dictatorships like Iran and Afghanistan do,” Tillis wrote in a post on X. 

On Friday, Vice President JD Vance also said that he was unsure if the livestream would take place. 

Hasan’s legal team could also delay the execution substantially — potentially for multiple years — by challenging his detention in federal court, though he has exhausted the military appeals process.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The driest (non-polar) desert in the world, the Atacama in South America, was in full bloom late last month after record-setting rainfall. You can read more about the science behind the wildflowers here, or just enjoy some spectacular photos here (it’s a gift link). Either way, I hope it brings you some joy. 

The Logoff will be off on Monday for Indigenous Peoples’ Day, so we’ll see you back here on Tuesday. Have a good long weekend! 

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 first hurricane of the fall season is expected to strike the Gulf Coast overnight, marking the latest onset of hurricane season in living memory. As of early Friday afternoon, Hurricane Isaias had grown to a Category 3 storm, with sustained winds of 120 miles per hour. It will strike along the shores of the Florida Panhandle, Alabama, and Mississippi, posing a threat to life and property for millions of Americans. Weather forecasters anticipate between 8 and 12 inches of rain in the areas near where the storm makes landfall.

Isaias’s imminent arrival signals the end of a period of unusual good luck when it comes to hurricanes striking the United States. Last year, no hurricanes reached the US mainland at all. And this year, Isaias is breaking a more than 100-year-old record: October 9 is the latest date since 1905 for the first Atlantic hurricane of the season to take shape. August and September have historically been the busiest periods of hurricane season.

Not lately, though. It’s a strange recent phenomenon, and it’s been even more fortuitous than it would ordinarily be. That’s because the Trump administration has slashed weather forecasting and emergency relief funding over the past two years, leaving us less prepared for a disaster. 

And now our luck seems to be running out — with even more rough weather on the way.

Hurricane season may be quieter than usual — but El Niño is on the way

Here’s the secret ingredient that’s pushed off hurricanes even as warming planetary temperatures raise concerns about more extreme weather events: El Niño. This notorious shift in global wind patterns, which occurs every two to seven years, moves warm water around the oceans, disrupting traditional weather patterns and leading to intense rain and sometimes disastrous flooding, as well as droughts. If there is an upside, however, it’s that this temporary change in ocean conditions prevents hurricanes from forming as frequently as they otherwise would.

The downside is, well, El Niño is still on its way. Forecasters expect this year’s version to be historically bad — using words like “super” or “Godzilla” to describe it. The worst of the bad weather is projected to arrive in December: The southern half of the continental US is expected to see unusually rainy and stormy weather, while areas of the Great Lakes and Pacific Northwest could see extreme dry spells. 

It will also serve as a crucial test of our reduced capacity for predicting and responding to disasters. Trump’s “big beautiful bill” cut funding for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s weather forecasting and public alert programs by $200 million, and 17 percent of FEMA’s workforce left the agency in 2025 amid the administration’s DOGE purge. 

For now, if you’re in the danger zone for Isaias, please pay attention to local and national weather alerts this weekend. If you’re not, count yourself lucky — but there are storm clouds on the horizon.

One link for later

➨ These days, it feels like we’re all swimming in a sea of AI hype and hysteria — all the ways this technology will make our lives better, all the ways it could kill every single one of us. But what if the two are more related than we think? Eric Levitz’s new piece asks whether the AI companies themselves warning us about the apocalypse is part of their own marketing strategy. It’s a useful guide for how to think about all of these existential conversations.

Before you go…

• Did you know…the world’s largest penguin colony has declined by two-thirds since 2011? Scientists pin the blame on climate disruption and warming sea temperatures.
• Today’s trivia: What’s a three-letter abbreviation for the successor of tube TVs? (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 which fruit kills more people than sharks each year, according to long-standing urban legend. That would be the coconut, and the claim (which is unprovable, since there’s no systematic tracking of coconut deaths) appears to have been started by shark scientists.