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Editor’s note, August 9, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published in April.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

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I’m trying to decide whether to keep my elementary school-age kid in the neighborhood public school or move him to a more exclusive private school. Our public school is okay, but my partner and I feel that he might be more challenged and ultimately better off moving to a private school.

But I’m very aware of the increasing flow of students around the US out of public schools, and the effect that is having on the children who remain there. For one thing, since public schools get more funding the more students they have, every family that leaves effectively takes money with them. I worry that by taking my child out of public school, I’m contributing to that problem, but I also don’t want my child to bear the personal burden of my politics.

Dear Public School Parent,

The way you’ve framed the question makes it sound like keeping your kid in public school means imposing a burden on him. And if that were the case — if we really were talking about sacrificing your child’s well-being — I know exactly what I’d tell you.

I’d tell you not to be bullied by utilitarian philosophers. They argue we have to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for our own kids, so they’d probably say it’s wrong to give your child a fancy education while consigning other children to a school with fewer resources. But the 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams argues that this sort of total impartiality is an absurd demand — and I agree.

Williams points out that moral agency — the capacity to act on values and commitments — always comes from a specific person. And as specific people, we have our own specific, individual, core commitments. These “ground projects,” as Williams calls them, are the commitments that give a life its meaning and continuity. A parent has a commitment to ensuring their kid’s well-being, over and above their general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Williams would say any moral theory that requires you to ignore such personal commitments severs you from the very things that make your life recognizably yours.

So if keeping your kid in public school really meant hurting him, I wouldn’t say you have to do it.

But you said your neighborhood school is okay. It sounds like it’s not bad and not unsafe. So I don’t have reason to think that it is actually hurting him. In fact, it might be helping him in ways you’re not fully accounting for. 

Education is complicated. If I were to get into all the details about school choice and vouchers and charter schools and magnet schools, I’d have to write a whole book. So let me just stick to the main points relevant to your dilemma, starting with this: There’s a popular narrative that says private schools are better than public schools, but the evidence does not support that — especially if we take a broad look at what we mean by “better.”

Although studies do show private school students outperforming their public school counterparts on tests, the studies also show that private school advantages disappear mostly or entirely once you control for family background. 

Longitudinal research led by Robert Pianta and Arya Ansari at the University of Virginia tracked more than 1,000 children from birth to age 15 in 10 locations nationwide. After controlling for family income, parental education, neighborhood socioeconomic makeup, and other background variables, the private school advantage…vanished.

“If you want to predict children’s outcomes — achievement test scores, the things we care about socially — in high school, the best thing you can use to predict that is going to be family income — regardless of what high school you go to,” Pianta said.

Pianta’s was a modest-sized study with some methodological limitations. But another analysis of two large, nationally representative datasets also found that public school kids did just as well in math as private school kids — or even outpaced them — after accounting for demographic differences. (Math is considered a particularly robust indicator of school quality writ large because, unlike reading, it’s a subject learned mostly at school and not at home.) The researchers suggested that might be because public school teachers have to do stricter certification and can be required to do more frequent professional development, so they may be more reliably up-to-date on the latest pedagogical approaches, like those developed by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics.  

Admittedly, the very fanciest of private schools do offer some special advantages. Network effects are real. Maybe you want your kid rubbing elbows with a future senator. And maybe if you send your kid to ultra-elite Andover or Exeter, he’ll have a leg up if he applies to a fancy private college. 

But that is not the same as ensuring your child actually thrives. I’m sure you also care about your child’s psychological well-being. And here, some of the evidence about exclusive, high-achieving schools is worrying. 

The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.

The unrelenting pressure to compete and achieve can be brutal in those schools. When students constantly compare themselves to others and peg their self-worth to achievement, the results are alarming. Studies conducted over decades by psychologist Suniya Luthar and colleagues found that students attending high-achieving schools are at significantly higher risk for anxiety, depression, and substance use. (These are often private schools, though hyper-competitive public schools can also fall into this trap.) In fact, the National Academies of Sciences now names these students an “at-risk” group for mental health problems, alongside kids who live in poverty or in foster care or who have incarcerated parents.

In addition to potentially providing a less stressful environment, public schools can confer other important advantages. For one thing, your local public school can help you and your child be part of the neighborhood community, which is incredibly valuable for social development and countering loneliness. And being in an environment that’s more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, or class can teach your kid to empathize and get along with a wide variety of people. 

As the American philosopher John Dewey pointed out, these are essential skills and capacities for a flourishing adult life and for a flourishing democracy. Democracy is a way of being in community with people unlike yourself; that’s a mode of life that has to be cultivated, and public schools are great grounds for learning to navigate a shared world.

Plus, public education is free! (Well, “free” — you’ve already paid for it with your taxes, whether or not your kid uses it.) So you could save all the money you’d spend on private school and instead use it on enriching opportunities to expand your child’s horizons. Personally, I’d take my kid to Italy and teach them about Ancient Roman gladiators and Renaissance art and the many flavors of gelato! Or you could collaborate with your child to decide where to donate some of that money to fund education resources for kids elsewhere. 

On balance, since the evidence suggests that a child at a decent public school, with involved parents, probably won’t gain meaningful advantages from switching to an exclusive private school — and may face real psychological risks in a hyper-competitive environment — I don’t see a compelling reason to make the move. If you’ve got the resources to even consider private school, then your home life will probably play the biggest role in your kid’s academic trajectory, regardless of which building he sits in during the day. The most important educational institution in your kid’s life is you.

That said, I’m not arguing that parents should never pick private school. To some extent, this depends on the unique needs of your kid and your family. Maybe your kid is absolutely in love with music and the private school nearby has an amazing music program. Maybe your kid is being bullied at his current school but has a couple great friends who attend the private school. Or maybe a religious education is very important to you, so a private parochial school makes sense. 

If you do make the choice to send your kid to private school, you’ll have to grapple with the collective action problem you hinted at: Any single family’s departure from a public school barely registers, but when every family with options reasons the same way, the cumulative effect on the school’s funding — and on the kids who remain — can be devastating.

Here, the American political philosopher Iris Marion Young can help you. She points out that our usual model of responsibility — the “liability model,” which says that when something bad happens we should assign blame to a particular individual — is inadequate when we’re dealing with situations of structural injustice. In these situations, it’s a whole system that’s producing predictable patterns of disadvantage. 

Just look at the complex web that breeds educational inequality: Historical housing segregation has concentrated poverty in certain neighborhoods. Poorer neighborhoods generate less property tax revenue, which means less money for local schools. States can try to offset that, but schools in poorer areas still tend to end up with fewer resources. Families with options leave for better-resourced schools, enrollment drops at the local public school, and the school loses even more funding. The kids who remain get less of the materials — from textbooks to counselors — that would have set them on the path to success. There’s a clear downward spiral, but no one person or decision is the villain.

So instead of blaming any one individual for their personal lifestyle choices, Young says that in cases of structural injustice, we should adopt the “social connection model” of responsibility. Under this model, you don’t bear blame if you send your kid to private school, because systemic problems shouldn’t rest on one family’s shoulders. Young doesn’t think you need to discharge your obligations through personal lifestyle choices. 

But that doesn’t mean you owe nothing. 

You do still have a political obligation: to work toward changing the structure that produces injustice. As a participant in the political system that shapes education in this country, you have some power to act on it. You can vote and organize and advocate. You can pressure decision-makers and support reform movements. The more power you’ve got, and the more privileged you are by the current system, the greater your obligation to take action.  

Make the effort to act on that obligation. Let your child watch as you do. Better yet, involve them in the process. Kids learn from seeing what their parents do: Show them that you’re bent on enacting your values, and you’ll be giving them an education for life.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This is a fun piece in Asterisk about how high-school science fairs have become so ridiculously competitive that they no longer give students a chance to do real independent research.
  
• This week’s question prompted me to listen to the podcast series “Nice White Parents.” It’s a fascinating look at what happens when parents think that choosing public school would mean sacrificing their child’s prospects on the altar of their own political ideals. Spoiler: Practically no parent is willing to sacrifice their own child. But they often don’t realize they’ve constructed a false trade-off.
  
• Living life requires making choices. It’s unavoidable that we’ll feel regret about some of the paths not traveled. But this Aeon essay explains how “living in closer alignment with our values and authentic preferences may help us avoid the worst pain of regret.”

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

Well before he became CEO of one of the most valuable startups of all time, Dario Amodei was a 26-year-old PhD student studying biophysics at Princeton, obsessing over how his money would leave its mark on the world. 

On what one might assume was likely a fairly modest academic stipend and with no discernible inheritance from his parents, an Italian-American leatherworker and a project manager for libraries, Amodei gave $10,000 in 2009 to a relatively new charity evaluator called GiveWell. Founded by two ex-hedge funders before effective altruism was even a phrase, GiveWell ranked charities primarily by a single dispassionate metric: dollars per lives saved. 

It was the kind of approach that clearly appealed to Amodei — though it may not have gone far enough for him. In 2010, he wrote a guest blog post for GiveWell dissecting the effectiveness of two of the group’s top global health charities: VillageReach and StopTB. Both charities could save a life at roughly comparable costs — around $545 — but while StopTB treated or prevented tuberculosis in adults, VillageReach’s interventions mostly saved babies and children. Most people would probably feel that saving a child trumps saving an adult; indeed, even effective altruists often agree on the grounds that children have more life to live left. 

Amodei, though, viewed that as a liability for VillageReach. An adult death, he wrote, is “perhaps 2 or 3 times worse than an infant’s death,” because adults “are capable of deeper and more meaningful experiences.” As uncomfortable as such a calculus may be, he wrote, “on a practical level one is forced to make difficult decisions with limited funds.”

Though he declared StopTB to have “superiority on cost-effectiveness,” Amodei ultimately gave VillageReach higher marks for their tightly controlled “chain of execution” — the full sequence of steps between a dollar of donation and a vaccine reaching a child. That was important enough to Amodei that, despite his initial reservations, he ultimately gave VillageReach his entire $10,000 donation in 2009 — enough to save, he estimated, the lives of 20 babies across rural Africa. 

But Amodei hoped the ultimate impact would be even greater. “The money I give out is not just a one-shot intervention,” he concluded, “but also a vote on what I want the philanthropic sector to look like in the future.”

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The future, it seems, has arrived. Amodei is now a multibillionaire, his fortune poised to skyrocket further if and when Anthropic goes public, as many expect it to do later this year. He is one of dozens of new billionaires and millions of new millionaires minted virtually overnight by the AI boom. 

There have already been plenty of aftershocks to this emerging AI megawealth, like the stratospheric San Francisco housing market, the nerdmaxxing of sex work, and the proliferation of all-you-can-biohack peptide raves. 

But the most consequential, and perhaps weirdest, way this burgeoning AI-ristocracy plans to burn through its cash is by giving a huge chunk of it away. Amodei is one of several AI multibillionaires — alongside his co-founders at Anthropic and OpenAI’s Sam Altman — who have pledged to donate most of their wealth in their lifetime. But even their obscene degree of collective wealth — they are worth $111.8 billion as of this writing — is only one slice of an AI bonanza that seems poised to balloon into one of the most consequential waves of American philanthropy of all time, one deeply shaped by the same utilitarian impulse that guided one of young Amodei’s first big donations. 

“I am having thousands of conversations with people who are perplexed by their own fortune and determined to give with thoughtfulness and urgency in a way that I haven’t, frankly, experienced before,” said Nick Allardice, CEO of the effective-altruism-aligned anti-poverty group GiveDirectly, whose work is grounded in research on the efficacy of unconditional cash transfers. “It’s just really important that people get started, that they don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good.”

This is neither your father’s, your grandfather’s, nor your great-great-grandfather’s philanthropy. If Gilded Age industrialists like John D. Rockefeller, a devout baptist, gave in service of their religiosity or, as was the case for Andrew Carnegie, their reverence for civic duty, then most of today’s AI barons carry forth their own spiritual tradition, one at the very least informed by the vigorously optimized commandments of the effective altruism movement. They appear far less likely to fund Carnegie-style works like opera houses or libraries than they are to put their faith — and their billions — in what they believe they can measure, calculated on the cost benefit analysis of a life saved or an apocalypse averted. 

In some cases, as Amodei did as a grad student, they’ve already begun the process. “These are people who have committed themselves to giving back even before they were very wealthy,” said Sjir Hoeijmakers, CEO of Giving What We Can, an organization that developed a campaign popular with effective altruists to give away at least 10 percent of their yearly income, “people who have been building the habit of giving for a very long time.”

And it is, to be clear, a very particular kind of giving. Amodei was the 43rd person to sign the 10 percent pledge the year after it launched in 2009, and its roster has since swelled to over 11,000 people, including more than a dozen current or former Anthropic employees. Donations made through Giving What We Can’s platform are on track to grow by 40 percent this year, Hoeijmakers told me, and support for animal welfare charities — a cause particularly and unusually popular with effective altruists — has already exceeded its 2025 total. 

“We have the resources available to tackle things that we should have tackled a long time ago,” like eradicating malaria or putting an end to factory farming, Hoeijmakers said. “I hope this funding wave, if it comes, will show that we can actually solve global problems at scale if we put our mind to it and our resources.”

Devoutness has long been a virtue in philanthropy, which largely originated in religious tithing, and there are plenty of worse things to have faith in than numbers. Having a communal guiding philosophy will undoubtedly help effective altruism’s newly flush disciples follow through on their promises far more prolifically and consistently than they would without it. And despite its high profile, less than 1 percent of total philanthropy came from effective altruism last year, according to Hoeijmakers. Most rich people prefer to give to the normie causes, like their alma maters, not to the sort of chronically underfunded global problems — like protecting animals or fighting lead poisoning — that effective altruists justifiably care most about. 

Now, quite suddenly, there’s about to be much more money to go around for these causes, which as Hoeijmakers hopes, could help finally address some of the enormous, entrenched global problems that more traditional philanthropists have all but ignored. 

But such piety also carries its own risks. In a viral Substack post from May, Stripe executive Nan Ransohoff argued — rather dismissively, but not incorrectly — that “traditional philanthropic orgs and people won’t cut it” in this new wave of AI-funded effective philanthropy, that these donors “will have an affinity” for “tech-caliber talent and execution” and will be “by default wary of folks who come from traditional philanthropy.” Ransohoff called instead for Silicon Valley to build its own new ecosystem of funds and “philanthropic startups” to cater to this new wave of wealth, emboldened with the “speed, intensity, and execution of a top technology startup.” Many of those old-school philanthropic people wrote indignant rebuttals to Ransohoff’s piece, arguing against their own obsolescence at a time when a number of the organizations they support are increasingly starved for funding. 

Those responses are, in aggregate, also correct, after their fashion. The new AI philanthropists will likely aspire to new models and approaches, as Ransohoff rightly argues. But they reinvent the wheel at our collective peril, not least of all because ignoring past efforts and steamrolling over existing infrastructure might make even the most optimized giving less efficient, and certainly less informed, than it would be otherwise. 

“Acknowledge what’s here and what’s working — don’t just ignore it,” said Nicole Taylor, president and CEO of the Silicon Valley Community Foundation. “These folks are transforming our daily lives with their technology, and they have the opportunity to be as transformational with their philanthropy. My fear is that they think that they can do it alone.”

How much money are we actually talking about?

As Ransohoff pointed out in her piece, a lot of money is on the line here — and, along with it, a lot of cautious hope about how it might get spent. 

Ransohoff posits that if you add up the promises of Amodei and his fellow co-founders, the worth of the OpenAI Foundation — the nonprofit that owns a big chunk of OpenAI’s profits — and rumored contributions from Anthropic employees, then the AI wealth boom could, in theory, lead to at least $37 billion and as much as $100 billion in total annual giving, a sizable boost to the roughly $617 billion that was given in the US in total last year.

“These folks are transforming our daily lives with their technology, and they have the opportunity to be as transformational with their philanthropy. My fear is that they think that they can do it alone.”

Nicole Taylor, Silicon Valley Community Foundation president and ceo

This projection should be treated with cautious skepticism. For one thing, hundreds of billions in cash are not just sitting around in some Bay Area money vault; much of today’s AI wealth is wrapped up in potentially volatile equity, and many lofty philanthropic pledges ultimately fail to reach their full potential. 

“What people say before they become extremely wealthy, and then how they behave after they become extremely wealthy, sometimes diverge,” said David Goldberg, founder and CEO of Founders Pledge, which recruits tech leaders to donate a portion of their future earnings. It doesn’t help either, he said, that some tech luminaries — namely, Elon Musk and Peter Thiel – have come to treat most philanthropy with disdain in recent years, an ethos that has permeated some parts of the sector. Musk, it’s worth noting, actually pledged to give most of his wealth away himself back in 2012, though, like many other ultra-wealthy signatories of the Giving Pledge, he seems quite unlikely to keep that promise.  

That’s not to say AI money isn’t already flowing. Coefficient Giving, a grantmaker that evolved out of GiveWell, is poised to steward a large portion of the coming philanthropic bonanza. For most of its history, the group operated essentially as the private grantmaking operation for Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and his wife Cari Tuna. But it recently made a significant pivot towards operating pooled, multidonor funds for anyone interested in causes like lead exposure, farm animal welfare, or questions of AI safety. Just last month, Coefficient Giving announced it would donate $1 billion to GiveWell alone this year, more than five times the $175 million the group initially pledged seven months ago. They chose to do so explicitly, because Coefficient Giving expects to receive much more funding very soon.

There’s also the OpenAI Foundation, which has already begun pumping $100 million into Alzheimer’s research, and Anthropic, which recently announced a partnership with the Gates Foundation to invest $200 million worth of grants, API credits, and technical support into global health work. And plenty of Silicon Valley elites have begun making promises of their own. Earlier this summer, David Silver pledged to donate 100 percent of his equity proceeds from his UK-based $1.1 billion startup Ineffable Intelligence — the largest commitment in Founders Pledge history — and many signers of the Founders Pledge will see their portfolios skyrocket in response to the coming wave of AI IPOs. 

But Goldberg does believe there’s a risk that as people get rich fast, they will donate money “much, much slower” than they intended, simply because they get “too busy, they don’t have the right support, or there’s some form of analysis paralysis.” 

All of this is to say that the biggest beneficiaries of the AI boom are not going to function as some sort of charitable monolith. Some, like Musk, probably won’t give much or anything to charity at all. Others may park their money in donor-advised funds — a kind of secretive charitable investment fund — or, eventually, a private foundation, both of which tend to dole out their money gingerly, meaning donors can enjoy the tax benefits of charity many years before they actually opt to help anyone with their money. 

Effective altruism is about to have its big break

While its name recognition may be relatively high these days, the effective-giving movement is still on the margins of American philanthropy. But if this new wave is anywhere near as big as everyone says it will be, then that won’t be the case for long. 

For the uninitiated, my ex-colleague Dylan Matthews has written plenty on what effective altruism is, but, in sum, it is a movement that believes in goodmaxxing, in the idea of using rigorous research to save the greatest number of lives possible, including future human lives and farm animal lives. Once an EA poster boy, Sam Bankman-Fried sullied the movement in 2022, which may help explain why some prominent adherents — like Amodei and his sister and co-founder Daniela, whose husband Holden Karnofsky co-founded GiveWell — have distanced themselves somewhat from the movement in recent years. 

But even when donors shy away from the term, the causes and principles of utilitarian evaluation that have defined effective altruism from its early days still permeate the new moneyed corners of Silicon Valley, particularly among those most poised to give a lot — and to give a lot quickly. 

Ask any animal welfare or global health nonprofit — or, better yet, an expert-led pooled fund with a reputation for rigorous charity evaluations — and they will tell you that they are preparing for, and possibly even beginning to see glimmers of, a windfall. 

“We are very much anticipating a significant influx of funding,” said Dan Shannon, CEO of the Humane League, which fights to end factory farming. “I am cautiously optimistic that this could be a real sea change for us,” because “even if it’s a fraction of the big numbers being bandied about,” it could do a lot for a movement that operates on less than $300 million per year. 

He said he’s been speaking with other leaders about the possibility of creating a pooled fund to absorb more cash, which has become an increasingly popular solution for donors who want the rigor of a 2010 Dario Amodei-style deep dive on a charity’s methodology and effectiveness without having to do the math or thinking themselves.

Among the more idiosyncratic elements of their ethos is their fixation with existential risk, as in, how likely is this thing — this mirror bacteria; this nuclear war; this asteroid; or, of course, this artificial intelligence — to destroy humanity? Amodei left OpenAI to start Anthropic in the first place because he believed OpenAI had failed to take the safety risks of AI seriously enough. 

Much of the new EA wealth will likely go toward efforts to make life on Earth better now or in the near future through donations to causes like medical research, animal advocacy, or anti-poverty interventions. But another, more controversial chunk of it will go toward mitigating existential risks, especially that of Silicon Valley’s own Frankensteinian creation: AI itself.

“If you’re breaking the world and making money by breaking it, should you just not break it? I wrestle with the question myself.”

David Goldberg, Founders Pledge founder and ceo

It’s that last cause that has proven most controversial. If these billionaires are so afraid that AI will break the world, then why, you might ask, would they not just stop building it in the first place? Is there not an inherent contradiction, a conflict of interest perchance, in the sense that those tasked with making sure AI does not, let’s say, build a bioweapon, take your kid’s job, or make everyone dumb, are doing so with money made from the very thing they’re trying to regulate? 

In other words, “If you’re breaking the world and making money by breaking it, should you just not break it?” asked Goldberg of Founders Pledge. “I wrestle with the question myself.” In the end, “this is a technology that’s coming, regardless of who’s building it,” he reasoned, and it is better that the presumably good guys — the ones bothering to think about the consequences at all — build it first.

If you broke the world, can you fix it?

Even if the AI bubble pops, and if the much-discussed giving boom ends up smaller than many anticipate, it could still lead to significant changes for some of the world’s most neglected problems. And if it is close to as big as it’s expected to be, then what happens next could be gravitationally transformative, reshaping how the world lives, considers animals, and adapts to its most disruptive technological breakthrough in a century. 

“I don’t think most people think about factory farming as something that could actually be eradicated. Full stop,” Shannon said, but “my grandparents lived in a time without factory farming, and I think my grandchildren could live without factory farming,” and “that could ultimately be the legacy of this wave of philanthropy.”

Ending the pervasive use of cages — “probably the cruelest way that animals are treated on industrialized factory farms,” says Shannon — could cost as little as $500 million over 25 years, or less than 1 percent of the $60 billion that Ransohoff estimates Anthropic employees may have sitting in donor-advised funds, thanks to Anthropic’s generous early gift-matching policy, which could quickly turn into real cash once the company goes public. 

“There’s so much needless stupid, preventable suffering in the world. We live in this time of so much abundance, so much wealth, so much technological development, and yet, there are so many people who have been left behind.”

Nick Allardice, GiveDirectly CEO

Developing a new vaccine costs an average of $886.8 million, which may sound like a lot, but it is equivalent to less than 6 percent of Amodei’s newfound fortune. It is less than what the OpenAI Foundation has pledged to invest in disease research and other causes next year alone. 

Then, there’s, perhaps, the biggest target of all. Ending extreme poverty everywhere would cost just over $300 billion annually, according to one analysis — which is a hefty price tag, but less than one-fifth of what the wealthy spend on luxury goods each year. “There’s so much needless stupid, preventable suffering in the world,” said Allardice of GiveDirectly. “We live in this time of so much abundance, so much wealth, so much technological development, and yet, there are so many people who have been left behind.” If this new wave of giving is wielded well, he said, then “we have the potential to collectively raise the floor of human experience.”

That’s a lot of responsibility to place on the shoulders of a bunch of bustling young tech workers still processing what it means to be quite suddenly, dazzlingly wealthy. It is also a lot of faith to place in an industry that has left more Americans feeling scared than hopeful about what a future flush with AI portends. 

If you aim to fix global poverty, but the technology that made you rich also threatens to make everyone else poor, then whose side are you really on? To be clear, many of the AI-ristocracy have fretted, often apocalyptically, over the implications of their creation long before most of us knew we had anything to worry about. But that doesn’t mean they know how to fix this, and, at the very least, they will not do so alone.

The last time the ground shook from such a supermassive earthquake of wealth was arguably during the Gilded Age, when robber barons and industrial tycoons turned American charity — until then, mostly almsgiving and poorhouses — into big business. They seeded enormous philanthropic empires like the Rockefeller Foundation and beloved institutions like Carnegie Hall. But, even as their exorbitant fortunes made life indisputably better — birthing the modern library, the yellow fever vaccine, and many social services — they were often built atop systems of vicious exploitation. When those systems changed, as they did eventually, it did not come from the benevolence of industrial barons, but from sustained public pressure for better labor protections.

Effective giving was born out of the conviction that many of the world’s most important causes go vastly underfunded, which, in turn, demand relentless prioritization of the limited funds that exist. If those causes are no longer underfunded — a plausible scenario if AI wealth continues to grow at the pace many expect it to — then that might change the calculus of how effective altruists decide what’s worth funding. It might even open up some wiggle room for new causes, including somewhat less measurable — but not necessarily less impactful — approaches. “Now we’ll be thinking more about what we can do with a lot of resources; which larger problems can we solve?” said Hoeijmakers. “You’ll put slightly less relatively into evaluating every small dollar on the margin.” 

This already seems to be happening, to some extent, at places like Coefficient Giving, which, in recent years, has begun adding new funds for causes like housing policy reform that fall out of effective altruism’s traditional purview. “We don’t want to be only appealing to the subset of people who happen to be interested in effective altruism,” CEO Alexander Berger told my colleague Bryan Walsh last year. “Our aim — and so far we’ve seen some success — is being a resource to people who have never heard of effective altruism or are not interested in it or don’t find it very motivating or welcoming. And I think that’s good.”

The optimal outcome here is not that Silicon Valley wealth edges out everything else, but that the siloes begin to break down altogether and that there is enough money to go around that the sector no longer needs to make overly intellectualized trade-offs, like young Amodei sitting in his dorm room, ascribing a number on the relative worth of a parent versus a child. 

“It’s tough to find the right balance between caring and hard-nosed realism,” he wrote at the time, “but it is possible, and it is, as far as I know, the only way to truly change the world.” He’s about to search for that balance on a much bigger scale.

At first, it seems innocuous. You’re burned out at work, and an influencer video promising the five steps to find the career you’ve always wanted catches your eye on Instagram. Perhaps you’re also anxious about a big birthday approaching, so while commuting home, you listen to a podcast host explain the seven essential habits you should start today to extend your lifespan by 20 years. Later on, you ask AI assistant ChatGPT to help resolve a debate with your partner. 

In all of these moments, you are temporarily relieving your stress and anxiety. You might even be getting some answers. But with each path you go down, you’re also losing something important: the opportunity to sit with, and tolerate, uncertainty. 

Being able to keep it together when an outcome is unknown is critical to enjoying your life. It’s what helps us manage friction in relationships, allows us to make considered decisions as opposed to acting on impulse, and empowers us to eventually take big leaps. But we’re collectively losing our ability to bear uncertainty.

The proliferation of the internet and smartphones kicked off the trend of reduced exposure, which a 2019 study suggested was linked to an overall decline in our ability to tolerate uncertainty. Now there’s emerging evidence from multiple studies suggesting that AI systems could be weakening our uncertainty muscles further. AI systems not only supply instant answers, but remove the need for us to make meaning of ambiguous experiences. They convert interpretation from something actively done to something that is outsourced, then passively consumed. 

When we strengthen our uncertainty tolerance, what we’re really learning is a new definition of what it means to feel safe and secure.

One study comparing the responses of mental health professionals and chatbots found that the bots were more likely to provide advice than their human counterparts. Perhaps this is because they are designed to give us what we want, rather than what we need: Other research has found that people are more satisfied when their AI therapist provides advice instead of encouraging reflection, and are more likely to continue using it when it’s solution-oriented.

“It’s a skill to manage ambiguity and uncertainty, and if you’re not exposed to it, if you don’t know how to deal with it, you never learn that capacity,” Llewellyn van Zyl, a Netherlands-based wellbeing researcher and AI systems designer, told me. As LLMs supply immediate and sycophantic companionship, validation, and answers, they slowly replace the need to, for instance, practice ambiguity tolerance in the messy context of a human relationship, or to muddle through your own interpretation of an experience. “Friction, effort and struggle are not barriers to wellbeing but are the main ingredients needed for development to take place,” Van Zyl wrote in a paper.

Indeed, tolerating uncertainty often feels like a struggle, and for some people manifests as consistent anxiety or depression over being unable to control or predict the future. It is a state characterized by fear-based decision-making, where the ultimate achievement is avoiding discomfort and surprise at all costs.

But this way of living has an unexpected cost. If you’re especially anxious about a question or decision, that could indicate that you’re wedded to a single idea of what your future could look like, which could mean you close yourself off to other meaningful opportunities. 

If you’ve increasingly found yourself looking for certainty and definitive answers, here’s how to get more comfortable sitting with unknowns. 

How to strengthen your uncertainty muscles day-to-day 

If you’re lifting weights for the first time, you wouldn’t go in and try to deadlift 200 pounds; you’d work your way up to it. Similarly, building uncertainty tolerance starts by integrating small, safe, and low-stakes moments of practice — think of these ideas as your 5-pound dumbbells.  

Identify the small opportunities.

First, look for ways in your daily life to live with short bursts of uncertainty and break out of your routine: For instance, try going to a restaurant without looking at the menu if you typically scour it first. Attend an exercise class with a new instructor if you never stray from your favorite, or grab a coffee with that new potential friend you’ve been meaning to hang out with. 

Choosing uncertainty might lead to discomfort: The cafe could serve food you don’t like, the yoga teacher might be too intense, the new pal could turn out to be dull. 

But as in weight lifting, comfort isn’t the point. It’s about enduring discomfort and getting stronger. 

Find a simple phrase to bring you back to the present.

If you are feeling anxious as you attempt to practice this, you can try a couple of strategies from psychiatrist Judson Brewer’s book Unwinding Anxiety. He recommends learning to weave curiosity into our most stressful moments, asking questions like, “How is this feeling serving me right now?” Even a simple, “Hmmm…” when you feel anxiety can bring you into the present moment, and create the space for curiosity.

In her new book, Prophecy, Oxford philosopher Carissa Véliz also identifies curiosity as a salve for our obsession with answers. “If anxiety about the future is the main driver behind our craving for prediction, curiosity is one of its most powerful antidotes,” she writes. “… the more curiosity you can manage to conjure about the present, the less apprehension you’ll feel about the future, because your attention will be in the here and now.”

Learn to ask the right questions 

Curiosity is fueled by questions. But not all questions are created equal. 

A good question, the Zen Buddhist teacher Joan Sutherland told me for my recent book, “will always make the room bigger, or open a door in the room to let something else in, or blow down the walls of the room entirely.” Obsessing over finding fast, easy answers to your biggest life questions can give you tunnel vision, eliminating possible futures by keeping fear and anxiety at the wheel. 

From the stories and research I explored in my book, I’ve learned that great questions — the best curiosity fuel  — have a few key attributes:

Avoid yes or no questions in favor of something more expansive.

First, as Sutherland explained, the best questions grow your set of possible solutions and futures. Sometimes, a binary question — e.g., Am I in the right relationship? — can make you feel stuck because it’s artificially limiting the options. A better question opens up possibilities, so instead you might instead ask yourself, “How would my partner and I both need to change in order for us to stay together?

Make sure your question is your own.

A great question serves as an internal GPS leading you back to your own needs and values, not what someone else might want or expect of you. 

Take, for instance, a question like, Am I ever going to get married or Should I have a second kid? Not only are these binary questions, but they also could be questions that a family member is pressuring you to answer. 

The best questions are the ones you create. They are rooted in self-compassion, allowing you to build yourself up rather than tear yourself down. Try to ask yourself questions that take the pressure off, that give you space to breathe.  

Find a question that propels you forward.

Ah, regret. It plays an important role in our lives, but should be used sparingly, if at all, as question fuel. Think about questions like, What if I had just done it differently? or Why did we break up? If great questions open up a window or a door, these kinds of queries board them up. They keep you stuck in a stale, ruminative loop, rehashing the past rather than moving on and considering possible futures. If what you’re seeking is clarity or answers, these kinds of questions won’t provide them.   

Take the pressure off

The last way to get comfortable with uncertainty is more subtle. It’s a mindset shift rooted in a 120-year-old piece of advice that the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke offered to an aspiring poet, Franz Kappus. 

Kappus had written to Rilke asking him all kinds of questions about how to live his life. Rilke responded:

I want to ask you, dear sir, as best I can, to have patience about everything that is still unresolved in your heart; try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms, like books written in a truly foreign language. Don’t look for the answers now: they cannot be given to you yet because you cannot yet live them, and what matters is to live everything. For now, live the questions. If you do, then maybe, gradually, without your realizing it, some far-off day you will live your way into the answer.

Part of what can make uncertainty so uncomfortable is the sense of urgency it creates in us. We treat questions like problems that need immediate solutions. Rilke offers a powerful reframe: Questions are not tormentors, but teachers. And finding answers, especially to our most challenging questions, is not something that can happen instantly. Questions must be lived. 

This advice is an invitation to pause and take a breath. You do not need to have all of the answers today, tomorrow, or next week. In fact, when it comes to the big questions of our life, it’s better if you don’t seek the answers immediately. 

It is also a reminder to go out and live your life. It’s easy to let anxiety about uncertainty stop us from pursuing new experiences — even seemingly small steps into the unknown can feel very scary. When we strengthen our uncertainty tolerance, what we’re really learning is a new definition of what it means to feel safe and secure. Instead of defining security as being protected from challenge, we can define it as being ready to face whatever the future holds. 

As homeownership slips further out of reach in America, more people are spending more of their lives as renters. Millennials and Gen Zs are less likely to own homes than older generations did at the same age, and the median age of a first-time homebuyer recently reached an all-time high of 40, up from 28 in 1991. 

That need not be a bad thing. Renting offers many benefits — flexibility, far lower upfront costs, never having to figure out what a “sacrificial anode rod” is — and homeownership is overrated as a savings vehicle. 

But being a renter in America (as roughly one in three people here are) can also be a very undignified experience. In most states, your landlord can kick you out when your lease ends for no reason at all, even if you haven’t done anything wrong. Many tenants live in fear of receiving their next lease renewal, not knowing if they’ll be displaced by the next rent hike. 

Some progressive policymakers, buoyed by the growing influence of democratic socialism and a resurgent tenant movement, are reviving an old, highly controversial answer to renters’ lack of security: simply ban steep rent increases through rent control. 

In June, New York City, under Mayor Zohran Mamdani, froze rents on rent-stabilized apartments, which make up about 40 percent of the city’s rental housing stock. Rent control laws have been passed or tightened in recent years in places from Washington state to Los Angeles to Montgomery County, Maryland, and tenant advocates this year have pushed similar measures in Massachusetts, Washington, DC, Providence, Rhode Island, and Redwood City, California. 

Rent control’s advocates argue that the policy not only moderates prices, but also offers tenants stability and a firmer claim to their homes. It helps put “the landlord-tenant dynamic on different and more equal footing,” as Siraj Sindhu, executive director of Reclaim Rhode Island, which backed a Providence rent-stabilization ordinance that passed the city council before being vetoed by the mayor, told me. 

Those are really important goals. I’m a lifelong renter, having literally never lived in an owner-occupied home, and I hate that I can’t predict what my housing costs will be less than a year from now. But is rent control the best way to achieve stability? 

Housing economists have long hated rent control; the Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck famously called it “the most efficient technique presently known to destroy a city — except for bombing.” Decades of research have found that it can have many unintended negative consequences, including depressing housing construction by making it financially impractical to build new rentals. And as we know from today’s crippling housing shortage, nothing is worse for long-term affordability than a scarcity of homes. More recent research, however, suggests that better-designed rent control laws can protect some tenants without having catastrophic consequences for housing supply. 

That rent control keeps coming back as a centerpiece of our housing politics reflects just how impoverished our policy ideas are for providing renters what they lack most: predictable costs and secure tenure. The US has an elaborate policy infrastructure to privilege and subsidize homeownership, while treating renting as an afterthought, like a condition of poverty or at best a waystation on the path to buying a house. That makes ever less sense in a country where millions of people will rent for life, whether by choice or necessity.  

The truth about rent control is somewhere between both extremes. It can, in some cases, certainly be worthwhile. But it remains a highly limited tool, and others can furnish some of the same benefits without fueling the very affordability crisis that they’re meant to address.   

Why economists (mostly) oppose rent control

Rent control polls favorably, and it’s not hard to imagine why — voters despise high prices. Capping rents might intuitively seem fair and costless: The tenant is protected from ridiculously high prices, the landlord profits a bit less, and society as a whole is no worse off. Who could object to that? 

In fact, though, many economists vehemently oppose rent control precisely because it isn’t cost-free — it merely moves costs onto others and makes them less visible.

In uber-expensive cities like New York and Boston, rents are so high because demand to live there far outstrips the supply of homes. In a healthy housing market, high prices signal to developers to build more homes, which then brings prices down and, just as importantly, grows the city’s population and economy by providing homes to people who want to move there. We’ve recently seen this happen in Austin, Texas: The city experienced a rapid run-up in rents during Covid, and builders responded (after the city eased some of its building restrictions) with a flood of new apartments. Rents have since fallen well below pre-Covid levels in real dollars. By contrast, policies that cap rents would diminish the incentive to build rental homes at a time when the US needs many more of them. 

Meanwhile, if rent caps fail to keep pace with landlords’ rising costs, owners may neglect maintenance or even pull apartments from the rental market if they no longer pencil out. One widely cited economics paper documented this dynamic in San Francisco, where the majority of rental housing is rent-controlled and annual rent increases are capped well below inflation. The city’s 1994 expansion of its rent control law, the researchers found, shrank the supply of rental housing among newly covered properties by 15 percent, largely because landlords converted rentals into owner-occupied units. The expansion made tenants 10 to 20 percent more likely to remain in their homes, but at the cost of making San Francisco’s rental housing scarcer and raising the rents of non-rent-controlled apartments. 

Rent control programs are generally not means-tested, meaning that tenants in eligible apartments receive it regardless of their incomes. So a higher-income tenant who happened to secure a regulated apartment can remain indefinitely at a steep discount, while a lower-income newcomer is left to compete for market-rate units, which are exorbitantly priced in part because of rent control.

As a result, rent control laws bear part of the blame for why San Francisco and New York City are so unaffordable, Arpit Gupta, a housing economist at New York University, told me. Trying to suppress rents in cities like these is like trying to hold the lid down on a boiling pot — the pressure inevitably spills over somewhere else. Gupta, who sits on the New York City Rent Guidelines Board, which sets maximum increases for the city’s rent-stabilized apartments, cast the lone “no” vote on the rent-freeze measure this summer. 

The freeze creates “a severe risk of financial distress” for many buildings, he told me. It could prompt landlords to leave apartments vacant after a tenant moves out if the cost to rehabilitate it cannot be recouped through the legally permitted rent. The number of vacant rent-stabilized apartments in the city has already been rising, and Gupta has argued that New York state’s 2019 overhaul of its rent-regulation laws, which further constrained landlords’ revenues, may be partly to blame.

Many leftists don’t like arguments like these because they’re uncomfortable with the idea that housing must be kept financially worthwhile for private owners. I sympathize with that instinct — housing is a human need, and it feels wrong for its availability to depend on profitability. But it doesn’t do us much good to ignore the structure of the economy we actually live in, where housing is overwhelmingly provided by the private market. 

Housing markets can be very good at providing for people’s needs, if we allow them to work better by legalizing more housing construction and pair it with targeted rental subsidies to people with low incomes. 

How rent control got smarter 

One of the clearest ways to understand rent control comes from Shane Phillips, a housing researcher at UCLA. It should be viewed not as a long-term affordability strategy, he has argued, but as a targeted stability tactic. For affordability, there’s no substitute for building enough homes. But in already broken, unaffordable markets, like many of America’s superstar cities, rent control can be a stopgap that lets some residents remain in their homes. It’s reasonable to expect that people’s homes shouldn’t be treated as crude commodities that they can be priced out of at any moment. The question is how to balance security for existing residents against the structural harms rent control can cause to the overall market.

Not all rent control policies are created equal. Old forms of it appeared in places from ancient Rome to imperial China to the Jewish ghettoes of Early Modern Europe. When describing modern rent control, however, researchers distinguish among a few different types. “First-generation” rent controls arose largely as emergency measures across Europe during World War I, becoming very widespread in the US during World War II. These typically froze each unit’s rent at a fixed dollar amount, with few avenues for adjustment as costs rose; over time, they tended to push homes out of the rental market and discourage maintenance, reducing both the quantity and quality of rental housing.

By the 1970s-80s, a “second generation” of rent control laws, often called “rent stabilization,” was adopted in New York, Boston, Washington, DC, municipalities across New Jersey, and numerous California cities. These introduced some important innovations: They allow modest annual rent increases, set by a formula or regulatory board and often pegged to the rate of inflation. They exempt new-construction buildings from price controls, which reduces the disincentive for developers to build new apartments. 

They also often include “vacancy decontrol,” which allows landlords to reset an apartment’s rent to its current market rate after a tenant moves out (after that, the unit remains subject to the annual rent increase caps). Vacancy decontrol is especially important for preserving rental housing supply, experts told me. But it also creates an incentive for owners to try to push tenants out so they can raise the rent. To combat this, most rent-control programs include “just-cause” eviction protections, meaning that landlords cannot arbitrarily evict tenants or refuse to renew their leases; they must cite a serious lease violation (or another legally recognized reason, such as removing the unit from the rental market). 

Second-generation systems remain in place in major US cities, including New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. They tend not to distort housing markets as severely as first-generation laws, but they can still, as seen in the evidence from San Francisco, meaningfully damage housing supply. And Gupta has warned that New York City’s system has been regressing back toward first-generation rent control, with the recent rent freeze and the removal of vacancy decontrol under New York state’s 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act.

Meanwhile, the recent revival of interest in rent control has produced some laws whose design may magnify the policy’s worst impacts. Montgomery County, Maryland, which includes some of Washington, DC’s most expensive suburbs, implemented a rent-control law in 2024 that lacks vacancy decontrol, while St. Paul, Minnesota, voters approved a 2021 ballot measure that initially lacked both vacancy decontrol and an exemption for new construction. Both places subsequently saw sharp declines in apartment construction, though the timing alone does not prove rent control was the sole cause. (St. Paul has since added partial vacancy decontrol and a permanent new-construction exemption.)

In a recent working paper, a pair of UCLA economists identified a “third generation” of rent control that is less restrictive than second-generation laws. California passed a statewide rent stabilization law in 2019, for example, that set a high ceiling on allowable annual rent increases: 5 percent plus inflation, or 10 percent, whichever is lower. It exempts new buildings for their first 15 years, and includes vacancy decontrol and just-cause eviction. Oregon passed a similar law the same year, as did Washington state in 2025. Using data from San Diego, the new paper found no discernible loss in housing supply there under California’s law. The implication is pretty intuitive: “The laxer the policy, the fewer the negative consequences,” as Phillips put it. 

The flipside, of course, is that the least restrictive laws also do the least to protect tenants — a 10 percent cap mostly just amounts to an anti-gouging measure, and landlords rarely raise rents by that much anyway. Still, double-digit rent increases do happen. And even a loose cap can offer renters peace of mind and insurance against a life-upending rent hike. 

We need a broader renter stability agenda 

Some current proposals may soon play out the tradeoffs of rent control. This November, residents of Redwood City, located between San Francisco and San Jose, will vote on a ballot measure that would cap rent increases at 60 percent of inflation, with a maximum increase of 5 percent.

Clara Jaeckel, a renter in the city and an organizer with the campaign, told me that the proposed law would allow landlords to petition for higher increases if it’s necessary to cover operating costs. It’s “designed to strike a fair balance between letting landlords have a fair return on their investment and keeping things affordable for renters,” she said. Under California law, the city would still be required to include vacancy decontrol and exempt housing built after 1995. “We believe building new housing goes hand-in-hand with rent control — so we want both of those things,” Jaeckel said.

Limiting rent increases so far below inflation, which is similar to San Francisco’s rent cap, has the potential to meaningfully reduce the quantity and quality of rental housing. But it’s also possible that its negative impacts remain muted. Gupta and Phillips both told me that vacancy decontrol substantially limits the harms of rent control, regardless of the exact percentage rent increase permitted, and the proposed Redwood City rent cap would apply to a smaller share of its rental housing than San Francisco’s law does. 

Voters and policymakers might decide that this tradeoff with housing supply is worth it if it can allow longtime residents to stay in their homes. The Bay Area has become so unaffordable that such laws right now represent one of the few ways that communities in the region can maintain some measure of class diversity. 

But it’s worth considering how to deliver the same stability and affordability without rent control, which for too long has been the fallback that expensive cities and towns reach for after allowing their housing markets to become dysfunctional. It can ultimately only offer tenants a cramped kind of security, trapping them in homes that may no longer suit their needs because leaving would mean surrendering their only affordable option. 

A better stability agenda for renters would give them genuine choices in where to live, and how long to stay. In places with broken housing markets, that means, first and most importantly, repealing exclusionary zoning laws and other barriers to building enough homes. That’s the foundation of affordability for everyone, but especially for renters, whose housing costs rise unpredictably with the market rather than remaining relatively fixed by a long-term mortgage. Renters with low incomes, meanwhile, need help affording housing even in a balanced market, and that ought to be provided far more consistently (Section 8 vouchers and other federal rental-assistance programs currently only reach a fraction of people who qualify).

Other policies can offer the long-term stability that rent control provides, too. “The ultimate issue that a lot of [rent control] interventions are trying to target is the challenge of being a renter and being faced with these cost shocks year after year,” Gupta said. Most American residential leases are one year long, but policy could encourage longer terms, which are common in some peer countries like Germany and Japan, and, Gupta noted, widespread in US commercial leases. 

Another step is to give tenants a presumptive right to remain in their homes — in the vast majority of states, landlords can refuse to renew a lease without any cause because the law simply defers to their private property rights. That is a bigger deal than it might sound like: If you’re a renter in one of the 40-odd states that don’t have a right to renewal, and you have, say, loud young children who irritate one of your neighbors, you can be forced out when your lease ends without any recourse. I’ve seen this happen firsthand as a renter in Wisconsin, and it’s one of many ways that cities can be hostile to families. Protection from arbitrary eviction would benefit renters regardless of whether their units are rent-controlled.

These sorts of policies also need to be balanced with reliable processes for removing tenants who seriously damage property, endanger their neighbors, or repeatedly violate their leases. “Sometimes landlords are taken advantage of. Sometimes they are lied to,” Phillips said. It’s rare to find a jurisdiction in the US that’s both “very concerned about tenants and very concerned about landlords,” he said. Instead, US housing policy tends to oscillate between either extreme, but protecting the rights and interests of both need not be mutually exclusive. 

America will remain stuck with a housing shortage for the foreseeable future, which not only makes housing unaffordable in our highest-demand cities and suburbs, but also gives landlords a structural advantage over renters because they’re shielded from competition. Until that changes, a limited form of rent control can redistribute some of that power back to renters. That may be a bargain worth making, but, Phillips said, cities should make it knowingly: with a clear idea of which renters they intend to protect, and who will bear the cost.

GLP-1 drugs promised to usher in a new era of treating obesity as a disease. We could leave behind the anti-fat biases of the past, which blamed obesity on moral failing or personal weakness. Instead, these drugs would allow us to approach it as a medical condition, a complex matrix of genetics and other forces which could be changed with the right dose of these powerful new medicines. 

Or so the thinking went. 

While the clinical potential of these drugs remains immense, they have yet to change how the broader US culture perceives and engages with weight and weight loss. Even as millions of Americans shed pounds in bulk for the first time, they are also contending with fierce stigma and shaming from others — instead of being criticized for being fat, they are being criticized for using GLP-1s. 

The social media communities that have blossomed around GLP-1s are filled with tales of awkward conversations and much worse. Partners who berate a significant other who wants to go on Wegovy or Zepbound. Coworkers who blame the drugs for their rising insurance costs. Even dismissive and unsympathetic doctors and nurses. 

Some people who take GLP-1s must contend with an uneasy sense of living behind enemy lines: Many people describe being at work or out in public and overhearing people talking about GLP-1s and passing judgment on people who they think are taking a “shortcut” to lose weight.

“It’s like you’re being stigmatized without the person who’s [saying] it even realizing it, necessarily,” said Adriana, a 33-year-old GLP-1 user who lives in the Chicago area. (Vox agreed to identify the people we spoke to by their first name, to protect their privacy when discussing stigma.)

“There’s a lot of internalized stigma and judgment we have from the culture about our bodies and ourselves.”

Erin Standen, psychology professor who studies health and behavior change at Rice University

This is not just evident from anecdotes. Researchers have put the question to the test. And they have found that Americans not only feel more negative stigma toward somebody who lost weight with a GLP-1 than somebody who lost weight through diet and exercise — they also feel more negatively about the GLP-1 user than somebody who never lost weight at all.

“It seems like people are really reacting negatively to the idea that somebody who has lost weight with a GLP-1 might be, quote-unquote, ‘taking the easy way out’ or cheating the system,” said Erin Standen, a psychology professor who studies health and behavior change at Rice University and led one such study. “There’s a lot of internalized stigma and judgment we have from the culture about our bodies and ourselves.”

Americans have internalized the message that being overweight is a personal failure so thoroughly that, now that the kind of extraordinarily powerful weight-loss shots and pills long hoped for are here, many people struggle to see it as good news. They see it as cheating.

GLP-users feel damned if they do, damned if they don’t 

GLP-1 users have found themselves in a trap. They’ve felt judged for years for their bodies: Studies have found that up to 42 percent of adults with obesity have experienced some kind of weight discrimination; and between 40 and 50 percent have internalized weight bias. One survey from this year found that 81 percent of people taking GLP-1s said that they had felt social pressure to be thin, and more than half said that those attitudes influenced their decision to take one of the new weight-loss drugs.

And yet, now that they’re cutting weight, they’re being judged for how they lose it. In the same survey, 69 percent of GLP-1 users said other people saw the drugs as a cheat code, 23 percent said that it was hard to handle other people’s feelings about the meds, and 43 percent said that they didn’t like talking about their GLP-1 use for fear of judgment.

“Culturally we have a widespread belief that weight isn’t complex — it’s simply energy in versus energy out,” Susan Persky, a behavioral scientist at the National Institutes of Health who has studied GLP-1 stigma, told me in an email. “If everyone ‘should’ be able to manage their weight through diet and exercise, engaging willpower and hard work, using GLP-1s is seen as a cheat or a hack. So someone with higher weight who uses a GLP-1 is not only seen as lazy or weak, they’re also seen as cheating to achieve weight loss that other people have ‘earned’.”

Perhaps the most extensive study on GLP-1 stigma so far is from scholars at Rice University, UCLA, and the Mayo Clinic, published in the International Journal of Obesity in April. It followed an earlier paper, published in April 2024 in the same journal, that suggested people had more negative views of a woman who lost weight with a GLP-1 versus somebody who lost weight with diet and exercise.

The new experiment sought to replicate those findings and extend them. How did people feel about somebody who took a GLP-1 versus somebody who never lost weight at all? How would people feel about somebody who regained weight? They gave more than 600 participants short profiles of hypothetical patients who were all alike except for one thing: One had lost weight with diet and exercise, one had lost weight using a GLP-1, one didn’t lose weight. They were asked to rate the person on various positive and negative metrics, to measure how they perceived the person and whether they’d want to associate with them socially.

What they found revealed how deep the bias against GLP-1 users seems to run.

When comparing the two hypothetical people who lost weight, study participants offered far more negative traits and far fewer positive ones to the people who had used a GLP-1, Standen told me. “That really stuck out,” she said. They also ranked the GLP-1 user as more unhealthy. 

But even beyond that, people actually rated the person who didn’t lose weight at all more positively than the GLP-1 user. “People were more likely to say they were willing to connect socially with the person who hadn’t lost weight as compared to the person who was a GLP-1 user,” Standen said.

The study didn’t ask the participants to explain in detail why they felt the way they did about GLP-1 users. But Standen and other experts attributed the attitude to those cultural norms around body weight that have turned obesity in the minds of many into a matter of personal morality rather than the medical and socioeconomic issue that most clinicians view it as.

“Stigma toward GLP-1 use reflects deeply rooted cultural beliefs about effort, discipline, and personal responsibility for weight and health,” Stacy Post, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University who authored the 2024 study on GLP-1 stigma with Persky, told me over email. “In this context, it is not surprising that GLP-1s are often viewed as a ‘quick fix’ for a problem that many believe should be solved through willpower and lifestyle changes alone.” 

And the consequences of stigma go beyond straining someone’s personal relationships. People can feel shame and stress when they think they’re being judged, and that in turn can have direct physical effects that are bad for their health. 

“These small little moments where people feel discriminated against do accumulate in the body,” Standen said. “Experiencing stigma or feeling judged for having used or not used a GLP-1 is directly harmful to your overall physical and mental health.”

Feeling judgment “also might lead you to either avoid health care or be less open when seeking healthcare in ways that could long-term harm your health as well,” Standen said. We know how much GLP-1s can improve the health prospects of somebody who is obese, so if somebody decides not to take a weight-loss med for fear of being judged, that is a net loss to their health. 

What it’s like to be a GLP-1 user when society shames GLP-1 users

The Rice study affirms something GLP-1 users have been saying in online communities since these drugs hit the market a few years ago. I have spent the past few months reading these stories on the various Reddit communities dedicated to GLP-1 drugs and weight loss, and the frustration that users experience in being judged for medications they feel are approaching a miracle drug is palpable.

One poster described her boyfriend becoming “extremely upset” when she said she was considering going on a weight-loss medication; another person also detailed their fight with an unsupportive partner. Others have contended with rude comments from coworkers. People have faced judgmental questions when they were visiting a hospital’s emergency room for something unrelated. One person even encountered the stigma at their cross-stitch club.

I spoke with two people, Adriana and Mike, who had shared their experiences of GLP-1 stigma on Reddit.

Mike, 50, and living near Boston, says he had been big his entire life, but after seeing an unflattering vacation photo a couple years ago, he decided he wanted to get serious about losing weight and thought a GLP-1 could help him. After losing some weight through Weight Watchers, he went on Zepbound; all told, he’s shed about 170 pounds.

He and others have encountered judgment for his weight loss in surprising places. Mike told me the story of going to visit an old friend from college, after he had started taking Zepbound. 

His friend’s mother was there and she inquired about his evident weight loss. He told her he was taking a GLP-1 medication. And for the rest of the weekend, she badgered him about whether whatever he was eating fit with his “diet.”

“It was eye-opening because when I first went on it, I’m like, ‘I don’t understand why people don’t want to tell anybody. This is a good thing. The world should know,’” he told me. “And then you realize, ‘Oh, God, this is affecting my ability to enjoy myself this weekend because I have to answer for it every two seconds.’ That’s when you’re like, ‘Okay, I understand why people don’t want to tell.’” (He added that the incident has, fortunately, become a running joke between him and his friend.)

Adriana from Chicago had been naturally thin for most of her life, never developing particularly good diet or exercise habits. But a couple of years ago, she had a bad mental health episode and started to cope by overeating, she says; she gained 50 pounds in a year. She had a family history of diabetes, and her doctor told her she was prediabetic. She felt an urgency to do something, she told me: “I just need to go on this medication before I do irreversible damage to my health.”

The medicine has revitalized her she said. She hasn’t experienced serious side effects and the food temptations that led her to binge-eat have been quieted. She says she’s seeing a therapist and a dietitian and feels as good as she has in years.

But she’s experienced stigma at every stage of her journey too. Adriana said that growing up, she was often praised by her family for being thin. Then when she gained weight, her family nagged her about it and friends started cutting her out of more physical activities.

Since she started taking Zepbound, she hasn’t told a lot of people — but she has still felt the prejudice toward GLP-1 users in unexpected ways. Many people in her life just assume that she is reverting back to her previous body type and compliment her for looking slim, then turn around and judge somebody else who’s on a weight-loss drug.

“My coworkers will say, ‘Oh, you look so good,’ and then they’ll mention some other person who was maybe always bigger, and they’ll say, ‘But she’s on the shot,’” Adriana said.

And online spaces, where so many of our health and wellness conversations take place these days, are filled with people expressing hurtful opinions about GLP-1 users, often fixating on reports — both credible and not so credible — of dangerous side effects. That was what prompted Adriana to post her frustrations on Reddit.

“What really bothers me is the fake concern for our health, which is the thing that always comes along when people are policing other people’s bodies,” she said. “When people are overweight, people say, ‘Well, I’m just concerned for their health.’” she said. But “now that there is this medication that’s helping, the stigma is: ‘Well, what about the side effects?’”

Will the GLP-1 stigma ever go away?

As GLP-1 use continues to rapidly expand across the country, there are signs that this stigma could eventually be broken down.

It starts with sheer numbers: The more people who take a GLP-1 or know somebody who has, the more likely they might have a more charitable view of GLP-1 users. About 12 percent of Americans said in an August 2025 survey that they had taken a GLP-1 drug. As of May 2026, one in five US households had at least one GLP-1 user, according to data from PricewaterhouseCoopers. This growth may be the best hope for breaking the stigma that is a nasty asterisk on what is otherwise a remarkable moment in medicine. 

“As these medications become more prevalent and more people have either used them themselves or have a close loved one who has used them, it is possible that that will help to reduce the stigma and increase acceptance,” Standen said. “We know that in general, one of the more robust findings in social psychology is that as people have more contact with folks who have identities or situations that might be unfamiliar to them, bias tends to go down over time.”

It is expected to be one of the largest prescription drug rollouts ever.

Mike said he has confronted acquaintances who spoke badly of GLP-1s, explaining how they have worked for him and the hard work he has put into the process. “Your perspective always changes when you suddenly know someone,” he said. 

The number of GLP-1 users is probably as low as it will ever be. Medicare launched its $50 GLP-1 prescription program in July, and millions of Americans will be eligible to receive these medications cheaper. It is expected to be one of the largest prescription drug rollouts ever.

And access should continue to expand. Pharmaceutical executives say they are making inroads with the private employer-based insurance plans that cover about half of the US population; at a health conference — Aspen Ideas: Health — in late June, Laura Steele, group vice president of US cardiometabolic health at Eli Lilly, said the company has seen large employer coverage increase significantly, from about 20 percent covering the medications in 2025 to 67 percent. 

In a decade, 50 percent or more adults in the US may be taking one of these drugs, Alison Furman, partner and US consumer markets industry leader at PwC, said at the Aspen panel. 

As bad as things might still feel to people taking GLP-1s right now, social attitudes do seem to be evolving. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers data shared with Vox, 23 percent of current GLP-1 users openly share that they are on the drugs, compared to the 2 percent who say they haven’t told anyone. People who are considering going on a GLP-1 are even more open-minded. More than half of those considering the drugs (53 percent) say they would share their use with their immediate family members, versus 42 percent of current users.

“The stigma is subsiding,” Furman said. “You see an increase in just openness around this drug. All those signs we believe point to increased adoption over time.”

Adriana has even seen hints of it herself. She has opened up to a few friends who had asked about her weight loss. “Once you start that conversation,” she said, “it’s kind of shocking how many people are like, ‘You know what? I’ve been thinking about going on.’”

GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro have been wildly successful. But as popular as they are, Americans still have very negative feelings about the people using them. In this month’s Highlight cover story, Dylan Scott explains why ‘Ozempic stigma’ hasn’t gone away, how it’s impacting GLP-1 users, and whether it could begin to fade as more and more people take the drugs. Also in this issue: How to tolerate uncertainty. What rent freezes could mean for renters. Good news about declining road deaths. And the coming AI wealth boom.

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Can knowing less make you happier?

By Shayla Love

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The simple idea that helped prevent millions of traffic deaths

By Bryan Walsh

Coming August 4

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The one thing Ozempic still can’t fix

By Dylan Scott

Coming August 4

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How to tolerate uncertainty in a world that’s full of it

By Elizabeth Weingarten

Coming August 5

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The truth about rent control

By Marina Bolotnikova

Coming August 5

---

Rise of the AI-ristocracy

By Sara Herschander

Coming August 6

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Some countries built their identities on their land. Some countries built their identities on a shared ethnic heritage. America, however, began with an idea on a piece of paper. 

“America was an enlightenment experiment, and so that means we have to make our own identity,” said Mark Graybill, a professor of English at Widener University who specializes in American literature. To do so, we need books: novels that articulate what it’s like to live in this strange new land. 

Lawrence Buell, the Powell M. Cabot Professor of American Literature Emeritus at Harvard, wrote a definitive study on this problem called The Dream of the Great American Novel. Buell said that the calls to produce and recognize a national literature began in 1776, but they intensified throughout the 19th century. That was especially the case after the War of 1812, when America reaffirmed its independence from England. The widespread belief, said Buell, was that “now we are a mighty political entity, we should be a cultural force as well.” 

In 1868, the novelist John William DeForest coined the phrase “great American novel” in an essay that feared the genuine article had not yet been written. 

Over time, readers, critics, scholars, and the people who build school curricula have developed a loose consensus on some of the books that might aspire to the title — books that are certainly great, certainly interested in America, and certainly novels, but which may or may not be the great American novel. Buell has identified a collection of “recipes” that they all tend to follow. Among the key ingredients for one of the recipes, he said, are a “democratic collective that’s in distress in one way or another. A collectivity of people that are operating under great pressure, great anguish often. And in that collective crucible, you see national themes of one sort or another played out.” 

I talked to literary scholars and critics about five major contenders for the great American novel, all of which follow Buell’s recipe. I wanted to understand what it was about these books that spoke to so many people, who decided that they were so important, and what their vision of the United States is. 

Taken together, the national portrait these novels offer is darker than you might expect or than the people who helped canonize these books might have wanted. If they’re united on one thing, it’s the idea that America is not an innocent country. 

The Scarlet Letter (1850): An American origin story

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 1850 novel The Scarlet Letter has long been a mainstay on school syllabi and is a perennial pick for the great American novel. “It first became acclaimed, almost overnight, as the first serious topnotch piece of long fiction yet written by an American,” said Buell. 

The Scarlet Letter tells the tale of virtuous adulteress Hester Prynne, forced by her 17th-century Puritan neighbors to wear a red “A” forever to mark her for her crime, even as she insists on her own dignity and integrity. It is endlessly useful as a metaphor for talking about American tendencies toward mob-mindedness and our prudishness around sex, a censorious impulse that keeps recurring — and, on the other hand, for talking about Hester’s very American independence and self-determination. With its early colonial setting in the first days of Puritan Boston, it speaks to an America that had not yet become modern, and it functions as a kind of origin story. 

What the novel seems to insist upon most strongly, though, is the gloomy, dour Puritanism that began the American experiment. “The founders of a new colony,” Hawthorne wrote in the opening paragraphs, “whatever Utopia of human virtue and happiness they might originally project, have invariably recognized it among their earliest practical necessities to allot a portion of the virgin soil as a cemetery, and another portion as the site of a prison.” In The Scarlet Letter, that is the United States: a utopian idea, a prison, and a graveyard.

To say that The Scarlet Letter is the great American novel, then, is to fear that our Puritan roots are inescapable, that we can never transcend the tomb and the penitentiary — and to hope that we can still, like Hester Prynne, redeem ourselves from our sins.

Moby-Dick (1851): A democracy at sea 

Herman Melville was close friends with Hawthorne, whom he considered a mentor and to whom he dedicated his 1851 opus, Moby-Dick, the story of a sea captain obsessed with the titular white whale. Yet, Melville, unlike Hawthorne, was not revered in his own lifetime. 

Moby-Dick wouldn’t have its revival until the 1920s and ’30s, when critics at Columbia University took it up. “Melville emerges as this voice speaking to the middle of the 20th century like a prophet,” said Jennifer Greiman, a professor of English at Wake Forest University and editor of Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies. With its swirling, perplexing structure of digressions and asides — some chapters rendered as theatrical scripts and others as encyclopedia entries full of whale facts — Moby-Dick hadn’t made much sense as a 19th-century realistic novel. But it made a lot of sense to ambitious, boundary-pushing modernists. 

Greiman argued that Moby-Dick’s late adoption speaks to what is so American about it: the way it seems to have been written for a time that hasn’t yet arrived. “It’s that sense of it as a book that is speaking to something that’s going to come in the future,” Greiman said. 

Also distinctively American is Moby-Dick’s crew, made up of white and Black Americans, Native Americans, Africans, Indians, and Pacific Islanders. They make their collective fatal mistake early on in the novel, when Captain Ahab informs the men that he has no plans to fulfill the ship’s mission to harvest oil from whales. Instead, Ahab said, he wants to enact vengeance against Moby-Dick, the great white whale that took his leg — and the crew willingly signs on to his monomaniacal quest.

“It’s often read as a democratic tragedy,” said Greiman. “Because you have this multi-racial crew, and one of the first things they do together is hand over all of their power to Ahab and doom themselves.” 

In the crucible of Moby-Dick, we see the weakness of democracy under the sway of a charismatic despot. We see the enormous and chaotic forward-seeking ambition of America, and the possibility that it may yet find that its great experiment is impossible, and its quest will end in tragedy.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): Taking on America’s original sin

Like The Scarlet Letter, Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was an immediate hit. Twain was a literary celebrity, and his books were widely popular. But Huck Finn, the tale of troublemaking 13-year-old Huck rafting down the Mississippi with a runaway enslaved man named Jim, wasn’t considered especially important. “It’s not singled out until after his death,” said Matt Seybold, scholar in residence at the Center for Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College.

It would be Ernest Hemingway who enshrined it in the canon, writing in 1935 that “all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” By the 1970s, said Seybold, it had become “probably the single most assigned work of literature in American classrooms.” 

Today, Huck Finn is assigned less often, especially at younger grade levels, Seybold said, in large part due to Twain’s frequent use of the n-word. Yet, it remains active and alive in the American imagination, enough so that Percival Everett won both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer for his 2024 novel James, which re-imagined Huck Finn from Jim’s point of view.

Huck’s relationship with Jim is, for most readers, the heart of the novel. Huck believes it to be his duty to return Jim to the elderly woman who enslaved him, but he also loves Jim and wants him to be free. In the novel’s most celebrated passage, Huck decides to go against what the world has taught him is right and help Jim escape, announcing boldly, “All right then, I’ll go to hell.” 

Seybold said this scene is frequently read as “America overcoming the sins of its inception;” Huck’s redemptive love for Jim is enough to help him transcend the hypocritical moralism of the slave-owning south where he grew up. But, Seybold notes, Huck Finn doesn’t end with that glorious moment. It goes on for another 50 pages and features a lengthy episode in which Huck toys with Jim’s freedom as though playing a game, while Jim is re-enslaved and dehumanized. 

Seybold agreed with Toni Morrison’s read of the ending as a metaphor for Reconstruction — the promise of freedom abruptly reduced and turned into something contingent. Twain, Seybold said, was radicalized by a Frederick Douglass speech in which Douglass describes sharecropping as being nearly as bad as slavery. 

In this context, Huck Finn is a bold statement on one of America’s great failures. “Twain takes us back into the cruelty, the absurdity of antebellum America,” said Seybold. “That’s also America, right?”

The Great Gatsby (1925): A bleak look at the American dream

Like Hawthorne and Twain, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a literary celebrity. When he published Great Gatsby in 1925, it was a critical success, but its sales were modest. “I always tell my students, if you want to be a writer, just think about the fact that Fitzgerald’s last royalty check was for $13.13,” said Maureen Corrigan, book critic for NPR’s Fresh Air, Georgetown professor of literary criticism, and author of So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures.

It took steady campaigning from Fitzgerald’s friends and publisher for Gatsby to be remembered. It started to become an institution during World War II, when the US army shipped copies of the book out to soldiers for morale and, then, was further bolstered by its widespread adoption as a high school text. Now, generations of American school children have grown up reading about Jay Gatsby, the poor boy who became a millionaire by mysterious means, all to win the love of the untouchable Daisy Buchanan.

This was around the same time that academics stopped talking about the idea of the great American novel singular, but it remained an effective marketing tool for publishers and an aspiration for authors, said Buell. Gatsby benefitted greatly from that marketing tool, in large part thanks to its status as a book that took seriously America’s class divides. 

In The Dream of the Great American Novel, Buell writes that the idea of the American bootstrapper stretches back to the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Gatsby makes that ideal sinister through Gatsby’s mysterious and ill-gotten gains and hollow as untouchable Daisy proves unable to live up to Gatsby’s image of her. Yet, Fitzgerald’s writing is at its most lyrical and lovely when he describes Gatsby’s longing. One of the indelible images of the novel is that of Gatsby standing alone at the end of his dock, stretching out his hands toward the green light of Daisy’s house. You know the things Gatsby is working for aren’t worth it, but Fitzgerald makes it beautiful to watch him try.

“It’s that idea of aspiration, of yearning, of trying even in the face of knowing that sometimes the game is rigged,” said Corrigan. “This is a novel that deeply questions the idea of an American meritocracy.” 

To say Gatsby is the great American novel is to say that America is a place of capitalist striving and that the dream of striving is beautiful. It’s also to posit that there is no clean way to make money, and whatever redemptive power you think you’ll claim at the end of your hard work will disappoint you.

Beloved (1987): The haunting of America

Starting in the 1960s, rebellions from within the academy started to break the canon apart. Feminist scholars were pushing for recognition of books by women; scholars of African-American culture were pushing for recognition of works by Black people. “That theory of a canonicity being bogus really gets rolled out in the 1980s,” said Buell.

Into this atmosphere came Toni Morrison, a Black woman who made it impossible to interpret her writing as an apologia for America. 

In Morrison’s books, it is clear that America has never overcome its sins. Never is that more the case than in her 1987 novel Beloved, about a formerly enslaved woman who is haunted by the ghost of the baby she killed to save from slavery. 

Beloved was published to enormous acclaim, but it did not win that year’s National Book Award, despite being a finalist. The Black literary scene rallied around Morrison in response, with 48 critics, writers, and activists publishing an open letter in the New York Times in praise of Morrison’s accomplishment and registering their disappointment with the National Book Foundation. Later that year, Morrison would win the Pulitzer.

“For a lot of novels that become these cultural touchstones, there has to be a campaign behind them. There have to be people who are making cultural arguments for why it matters,” said Jeffrey Lawrence, an American literature scholar at Rutgers University. “And in Morrison’s case, this happened relatively quickly.” In 1993, five years after Beloved was published, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature. That, said Lawrence, is when Beloved “starts to be considered the classic work of the late 20th century.” 

In Beloved, Morrison was able to “unpack the difficulties of slavery…in so many different ways,” said Dana A. Williams, a professor of African American Literature at Howard University.  “It showed the history of the institution, yes, but it showed it from so many different perspectives.” Morrison depicted the way slavery left scars on both Sethe, her heroine; on Sethe’s entire family; and even on Sethe’s enslavers. Even the land seems haunted. There is not a part of America that isn’t damaged by the horrors of both slavery and by the effort to disavow, deny, and forget it ever happened.

“Ultimately, I think it also forced us to think very seriously about how we have articulated humanity in this country,” added Williams. “Like who’s alive, who’s dead.” Sethe is based on a real woman named Margaret Garner, whose case involved a debate over whether to charge her with murder or destruction of property for the killing of her baby. “It really did question: What is humanity and who has the right to it? Who has access to it?” said Williams. “Is it really an unalienable right?”

Part of Morrison’s project is to show that slavery has haunted America’s legacy from the beginning — that no matter what we say about ourselves, we are not an innocent country. In Beloved, that becomes painfully, inarguably clear. 

Closing the book

Let’s return to Buell’s idea that the great American novel is often about a democratic collective in peril. In the books we’ve talked about here, the threat is always a problem embedded in America’s national character: a mob-minded censoriousness; a weakness in the face of a charismatic leader; the sin, trauma, and whitewashing of slavery; the emptiness of capitalist striving. These are texts that tell us that America is a nation of ideas — beautiful ideas — and that it constantly struggles and fails to live up to those ideas. 

“The novel as a genre really exists to critique the society that it is writing about, in a way that allows us to ask questions and to answer questions that only fiction can allow us to do,” Williams said.

But what’s sort of lovely is that, as critical and merciless as they can be, and as imperfect as America still is, these books are still the ones we have enshrined and celebrated and cherished over the past 250 years. We teach them in schools and turn them into movies. We make sure that our people know about them, are warned at an early age that America’s innocence is a farce.

So, perhaps, the great American value that these novels enshrine is clear-eyed self-knowledge. Every country is prone to self-propagandizing and empty puffery, especially around an occasion like the 250th anniversary of one of its founding documents. But it’s comforting to know that the centuries-long American quest to define our national identity through texts has led to a canon of novels that tell us the ugly truth about who we are. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

America’s housing supply was built for a world we no longer live in. But what will replace it? 

As the nation turns 250, that is one of the most important questions we face in the coming decades. Building enough homes, of the right kind, and in the right places is a prerequisite for economic opportunity and growth. Our crippling housing shortage is upstream of many of the problems that ail the US, from our cost of living and increasingly zero-sum politics to our seemingly intractable national bad mood. 

The root of the problem is that the United States governs housing under a nearly century-old paradigm that’s been cracking under growing strain. Since the end of the Great Depression and World War II, when the baby boom massively increased the country’s population and millions of Americans sought relief from derelict urban housing, suburbia has been the country’s default blueprint for development. Big single-family homes, two-car garages, and giant strip malls were not merely consumer preferences. They were also written into law by rigid zoning codes — the rules that dictate what kinds of things can be built where — incentivized by midcentury lending standards, and absorbed into the professional common sense of planners and builders. 

The system shaped not just the suburbs, but also many cities, and has kept homes scarce, expensive, and sprawling, resulting in a housing affordability crisis that has come to dominate politics. And in the decades ahead, this pattern will become even more misaligned with the reality of American life. Households are getting smaller, and Americans are getting older. If today’s low immigration rates continue, the US Census Bureau projects the country in 2076 will have fewer families with children and working-age adults, and far more seniors — the inverse of the demographic transition that drove the great suburbanization. Climate change and new technology, such as driverless cars, will also force cities and suburbs and populations to adapt.

US history offers reasons for optimism, showing repeatedly that we can reorganize ourselves with extraordinary dynamism when the occasion calls for it. Our cities have already lived many lives, growing from tiny outposts into world-leading metropolises, before receding again in the wake of suburbanization and de-industrialization, and then more recently gaining new life with influxes of younger generations.

The transformations ahead may not be as physically dramatic as those of the American past, but they call for equally monumental cultural and political shifts in our approach to housing. We’re already making progress: The ascendant “yes in my backyard” (YIMBY) movement has persuaded states and localities to roll back restrictive policies that make it essentially impossible to build enough homes. The effects of those reforms are slowly making themselves felt in more affordable neighborhoods. 

But there is still far more to do. Housing reformers will need to turn their attention not just to removing bad regulations like single-family zoning and minimum lot sizes, but also toward reviving a role for government in shaping our communities through real, big-picture planning. Doing so would supply a missing piece in America’s housing agenda — making US cities and suburbs not just more affordable, but more vibrant and livable and helping us better use our existing infrastructure. That will matter even more as a shrinking working-age population makes endless outward sprawl harder to sustain.

A more abundant, more varied, and even more fun housing future is not inevitable, but it is decisively within reach. Here is what the future could look like by America’s 300th birthday, if we commit to making ourselves anew. 

Suburban retrofit abundance

Arthur Nelson, a professor emeritus of urban planning and real estate development at the University of Arizona, has a few words of warning for anyone trying to report on what cities might look like in a half-century: “You’re not going to be right.” 

Urban planners tend not to project many decades into the future because what that future will look like invariably hinges on factors we couldn’t possibly imagine today. The most important unknown for our future population and housing needs will be whether the US opens its doors to many more immigrants, as it has done at times in the past. Assuming immigration rates remain low, however, US population is projected to peak somewhere around the mid-21st century and fall thereafter; by 2076, it will have dropped back to today’s size, on the way to declining further. 

Despite that uncertainty, many of the housing abundance advocates, policy experts, and urban planners I spoke to for this piece expressed striking optimism that the future of housing will be better than the present, and enthused about how much can be transformed in 50 years. Start with the suburb, where the majority of Americans live today, and where the future of American housing will be decided. 

Imagine that, in 2076, you’re walking through a residential neighborhood in La Mirada, California, a midcentury, southeastern suburb of Los Angeles, one of the regions at the epicenter of today’s housing crisis. The bones look much like the suburbs we know today — gently curving streets, sun-baked yards, low-slung buildings set back from the sidewalk — but the old single-family monoculture in many neighborhoods has loosened: Houses built during the region’s mid-20th-century building boom now have small cottages, also known as accessory dwelling units (ADUs), tucked beside them. Some bigger houses have been subdivided into two homes. Other lots now hold triplexes, fourplexes, and small apartment buildings that sit comfortably among single-family homes. A few houses have become shared homes for seniors who want support and companionship without being cordoned off into a retirement community. (In 50 years, that will include people born in the 1980s, 1990s, and ’00s — me, and perhaps you, too.)

Even as the overall US population has plateaued, this late-21st century Greater Los Angeles might be home to millions more people than today, but it has not had to push all of them farther into the arid desert or the fire-prone hills. Because as many as two to three times more people are living on each acre of land, housing costs have eased. Many people rely on shared driverless cars, freeing up the space that would be needed for car storage, so land that had been parking can be put to better uses.

Perhaps most strikingly different from today’s suburbia, the hard wall between home and commerce — which is near-universally mandated by local zoning codes today — has softened. Near the neighborhood’s edge, where local streets meet a larger main road, a neighborhood grocery and clinic have opened on what used to be strictly residential lots. And, yes: That is a donut shop running out of a neighbor’s garage. A few doors down, an old three-bedroom has become a small co-working space, and a converted garage houses a bicycle repair shop. Housing has not only become more affordable, but with more of the rituals of daily life mixed in, the suburb has gained a richer, more connected public sphere. There are simply more people around — walking, talking, and lingering. 

Could we get there? Some experts I consulted predicted that simply easing regulations on what can be built in these neighborhoods will unlock a long-suppressed capacity for creative adaptation, allowing suburban areas to evolve in precisely this way. In the suburbs of superstar cities like LA, San Francisco, and Boston, land values are so high that property owners have strong incentives to redevelop single-family lots into more economically valuable uses, like multiple housing units. They just need to be legally allowed to do so. 

The YIMBY movement’s recent legislative successes have already put much of the country on that path. More than a dozen states, including California, have passed laws to allow building ADUs on residential home lots, and many others have new laws allowing denser housing, like townhomes and small apartment buildings in these areas too.

“I suspect it’s just a matter [of time] before the rest do the same,” M. Nolan Gray, senior director of legislation and research for the advocacy group California YIMBY, told me in an email. The upshot for the far future of housing is that “detached single-family zoning is dead,” predicts Gray, who is also an urban planner by trade. “I think the typical lot in a (non-HOA) suburb of a typical US city in 2076 will have at least a second unit; perhaps a manufactured ADU plopped in the back, perhaps a McMansion that has been converted into a duplex.” 

Such reforms also offer important tools for a graying population. As Nelson has argued, the number of senior households in the US is already growing faster than younger ones, and without zoning flexibility to redevelop single-family homes into smaller units or adapt them to the changing market in some other way, older homeowners would face the prospect of being stuck with large, hard-to-maintain houses. 

Even more dramatic suburban retrofits might come in commercial districts — think aging, abandoned malls, strip malls, and “power centers” built around big box stores and even bigger parking lots. As Vox’s Rachel Cohen Booth has written, there is a growing movement to turn those sites into housing. 

An increasing number of states have started allowing apartments in commercial districts, where building multifamily housing is an easier sell politically than allowing it in residential areas where neighbors might resist. 

Meanwhile, Gray added, communities across the country have been very rapidly repealing parking minimums — the fixed number of parking spots required at every residence and business. As minimums are phased out, parking lots can be redeveloped  into housing and other uses better than acres of underused, heat-trapping asphalt.

“I expect most of today’s strip malls and shopping malls will gradually be converted into mixed-use pocket neighborhoods,” Gray predicts — a distinctly American version of a much older human pattern of development, where homes, shops, services, and public life are allowed to coexist. 

Maybe we need an urban planning revival

Despite early signs these reforms are nudging American housing toward a better future, the national rate of new home construction has barely moved, and forecasters expect little change in 2026. That owes less to the reforms than to the broader economy: mortgage rates largely stuck above 6 percent since 2022, which raise borrowing costs for builders and freeze existing owners in place; rising material and labor costs; and a thinning construction workforce worsened by President Trump’s immigration policies. Where YIMBYs have passed new laws, many local governments prove adept at finding ways to flout them. Housing advocates will have to commit themselves to a long fight, until change exists not only on paper, but also in the real world.

Even then, unleashing the free market alone won’t solve every problem with how American cities and suburbs are built and organized, or how they feel to live in.

Those failures are visible everywhere: Have you ever wondered why so many residential streets wind around in aimless, circuitous patterns, disconnected from the town around them? Or why you are forced to endure a nightmare commute to drive just 10 miles? These are all failures not just of too much regulation in the form of rigid zoning, but also of an absence of coherent urban planning. 

Robert Goodspeed, an associate professor of urban planning at the University of Michigan, points to good planning as an essential missing element in today’s housing reform movement. “I think that the YIMBY movement has completely missed the importance of planning,” he told me. “Even if we repealed all zoning, it still doesn’t realize a well-designed, well-planned community that has high quality of life.”

The zoning approach works so poorly because it micromanages what can or cannot be built on any given parcel of land. It’s a set of prohibitions on what the private market is allowed to do (made without regard for how people actually want to live): No apartments can be built on this street, even if there’s an enormous amount of demand to live there; no coffee shop may be opened on that corner, even if it would fill up with neighbors delighted to make it part of their daily routine.

Urban planning, on the other hand, at its best is concerned with the public realm. It oversees the larger body of a city or area and provides the connective tissue of its infrastructure — roads, transit, parks, sewers, and other utilities — that links up the space, something the private sector can’t provide. It allows cities to function as a cohesive whole and has the potential to give the public access to what a community has to offer. 

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, American planners were animated by real civic ambition, laying out future-minded street grids that could continue to grow and connect the residential and the commercial. One reason more recent development has been so poorly designed, Gray argues, is that planners have become so bogged down enforcing the tedious minutiae of zoning codes. “Zoning has utterly consumed planning, to the point that many city planning departments now do little that would resemble what a normal person might think of as planning,” he writes in his book Arbitrary Lines. Gray calls for abolishing zoning altogether, and freeing up municipal planning offices for more useful work that can accommodate the changes we know we need to make to our housing stock. 

Easier said than done, of course. The US comprises thousands of individual cities and suburbs, each with its own zoning code, and they will not surrender that authority willingly. 

But it’s not crazy to imagine that, in 50 years, planning in the US looks very different from today. Local governments derive their authority to zone from states, Gray points out. And just over the last few years, states from Montana to Maine to Oregon have been wresting certain zoning powers away from cities and suburbs. That shift could provide the seeds for a future where planning is run on a more unified, regional level, much like it is in peer countries like France and Japan. Local planners might then be empowered to focus on what matters — facilitating humane growth in places that people want to move to, and creatively solving the challenges that will arise from retrofitting a built environment that was not designed to accommodate that sort of evolution. 

Could we just…start over with all-new cities? 

One of the country’s most audacious attempts to revive American urban planning is unfolding in Solano County, California, roughly an hour north of San Francisco. There, a controversial, billionaire-backed company is advocating an iconoclastic solution to the Bay Area’s housing affordability crisis. 

Instead of fighting through red tape to get permission to add a few homes in Palo Alto or Marin County, the startup California Forever wants to build a new city from scratch. Forty years after construction begins, the company hopes, it would be more populous than the St. Louis, Orlando, or New Orleans of today, providing homes to around 400,000 people and jobs in advanced manufacturing, shipbuilding, and other industries. 

The project has not yet broken ground, and, ironically enough, likely won’t be able to for several more years, as it moves through environmental review and other required regulatory steps. But it eventually hopes to prove that it’s still possible to build physical things in the world’s tech capital, the place that has transformed everyday life at extraordinary speed but still struggles with the elemental task of making room for people to live. The project has won support from many prominent housing reform advocates, who welcome it as a bracing challenge to an untenable status quo that has meaningfully damaged the US economy. (According to one widely cited study, restrictive housing policies in superstar metro areas, including San Francisco and San Jose, lowered overall American GDP growth by around 36 percent between 1964 and 2009 because they prevented more people from moving to those highly productive cities.)

Despite its Silicon Valley provenance, California Forever’s most interesting ambition is less futuristic than throwback. It hopes not merely to add a mass of badly needed housing stock to the Bay Area, but to deliver it in the form of a pedestrian-centered city of the kind that hasn’t been built in the US in a hundred years. Its architectural renderings show handsome mid-rise townhomes, apartments, and single-family homes along shaded, walkable streets with a bus rapid transit system, all organized around a traditional grid network of streets. Gabriel Metcalf, the head of planning for California Forever, told me he predicts the city will eventually have the lowest per capita rate of car travel anywhere in the US other than New York City.

Of course, the project in its full form might not get past regulatory hurdles. Even if it does, it could end up being too expensive for the people who work in its schools, grocery stores, and coffee shops to live in, especially with California’s high labor costs, environmental review, and other expenses baked in. It’s also very difficult to build a successful city from the top-down. 

But whatever becomes of this movement to build entirely new cities, it is tapping into a real gap that already exists in the US housing market: Despite our reputation for being car-loving suburbanites, many Americans want something different. A 2026 Pew Research Center survey, for example, found that 44 percent of respondents say they prefer to live in a walkable area — even if the homes are smaller (other estimates actually put the number higher). The surest prospect for making that a reality might not be new cities, but repairing existing ones. 

Alicia Pederson, a Chicago-based writer, researcher, and founder of the organization Courtyard Urbanist, predicts that, with good urban planning, we could in 50 years see a “golden age of American city-building.” With a graying and eventually shrinking national population, many cities will have to work harder to attract and retain residents by offering a better quality of life, she told me in an email. That might mean providing better housing options that make vibrant, walkable life accessible to more Americans without sacrificing the benefits of suburban single-family homes: spacious, sunny housing units and abundant green space. The kind of courtyard blocks common in some European cities offer one elegant solution: They occupy an entire city block, with a perimeter of mid-rise buildings and an interior yard. And they can accommodate homes in a range of sizes, which are more flexible and easier for aging people to maintain than detached houses. 

The future is still up for grabs

It’s entirely possible that sheer inertia keeps the US on its current sprawling trajectory as it approaches its 300th birthday, with reforms producing only a scattering of ADUs and boxy apartment buildings often derided as “gentrification buildings,” rather than any deeper transformation of the American built environment. 

Arpit Gupta, an associate professor of finance at New York University who I consulted because of his talent for poking holes in urbanist orthodoxies, predicted that the US by 2076 will actually see “a dramatic increase in sprawl” thanks to the future adoption of autonomous vehicles. That’s because he and many other transportation researchers believe many people would be willing to tolerate longer commutes in self-driving cars than they do in cars they have to drive themselves, providing one more reason to push housing ever outward. Minus the self-driving cars, that’s what’s happening in the hyper-sprawling and still growing Sunbelt, where new housing continues to be built farther and farther from city centers. 

But there are many other paths we might take. Domestic migration may begin shifting northward in the coming decades, amid a warming climate and water scarcity in the Southwest. Many Midwestern cities are showing signs of renewed growth (may I recommend moving to Madison, Wisconsin?), offering a chance to build more and better housing on the region’s extensive pre-war urban bones. And it’s much too early to assume that AVs will massively increase the amount we drive, Michael Manville, a professor of urban planning at UCLA, cautioned me. Different policy choices could lead to shared self-driving systems that encourage less car ownership and more density.

The future won’t vindicate every utopian blueprint — nor should it. Our housing system ought to be open and capacious enough to accommodate the country’s diverse and evolving preferences. The way we’ve organized housing for much of the last century has given us not only pervasive unaffordability, but also too few choices, too few versions of the American dream. That very scarcity is part of why Americans today are so angry at one another: It feeds the sense that we’re fighting over scraps. 

But if we make room for more ways of living together and think big about how to get there, we may find ourselves less trapped by the failures of the present than we think. Cities often surprise us: Fifty years ago, who could have predicted that places like New York City and Boston, then battered by population loss and disorder, would recover so dramatically? 

The trajectory we take in another 50 years will surely confound our predictions, too. And that’s reason enough to build something less brittle than what we inherited — a housing approach with enough room, variety, and imagination to enable American life to change again.

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Derek Lam has more than 31,000 followers on TikTok and nearly 40,000 on X as of this writing. He is shirtless a lot, he dances a lot, and he is shirtless dancing a lot, which may explain how he got so many fans. His comments are filled with compliments (“beautiful”) in different languages (“hombre bello y sensual”) and superlatives (“this might be the finest man on the internet”) accompanied by different emoji (red hearts, crying laughing, lips). Their responses make it seem like Derek Lam is the first and only beautiful man they’ve ever seen, which may explain why he is also selling “exclusive,” seemingly adult, content. 

He is also, possibly unbeknownst to his many admirers, AI-generated. 

To be fair, there were some signs that this man was not real: Despite the multiple videos, Derek never speaks. His videos are also rather brief, just seconds long. A real hot person probably would have parlayed a following of this size into brand deals or “get ready with me” videos. And the selfies on his X account show a completely different man just three years ago. 

Still, the followers of Derek I talked to didn’t even notice he was AI because he seemed to blend in so seamlessly with the other hot men on the internet.

Derek isn’t the only AI thirst trap showing off defined abs for likes and money. He’s one of an increasing number of completely fake, AI-generated figures sinking their fangs into the real models, influencers, and porn stars who populate our feeds, sucking up their beautiful faces and bodies, and using them to profit, without a penny going to the real humans they fed from. 

When it comes to the damage AI could wreak on society, an army of Dereks tricking horny people into giving him likes — or, worst case, money and Amazon gift cards — doesn’t exactly sound like the singularity doomsday scenario that we’ve been warned about. It’s clearly unfortunate for the adult entertainers competing with deepfakes and a fraud risk for their fans, but one might believe if they don’t fall into one of these two groups, they’re relatively safe and unaffected. 

But there’s something more going on here. History shows that porn and sex drive innovation in the tech industry. The way tech platforms treat sex workers is typically a glimpse into the future, and a warning about how tech platforms will eventually treat all of us. If human desire demands the capability to steal, loot, and turn anyone and everyone into something for sale — possibly into hot Dereks — is anyone safe?

The Dereks of the internet are a bleak look at what’s happening in the real world: nothing belongs to us anymore — not our looks, our beauty, our sex, and our art. Our most human desires are slowly being synthesized, with or without our consent. And AI is making it all possible.  

Deepfake technology has gotten alarmingly good in recent years

Artificial hots like Derek are considered “deepfakes,” an umbrella term for AI-generated media (audio, video, or both) that resembles a real-life person. 

When deepfakes first started appearing in late 2017, they were fairly low-quality, making it easy to tell when someone had used a rudimentary app to paste a celebrity or politician’s head onto a different body. Still, it wasn’t very long until people started wielding this technology to be nasty. 

“The first set of deepfakes were actually used to create pornographic videos. They replaced the subjects in those videos with the faces of celebrities,” Siwei Lyu, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies digital forensics, told me. 

Because the quality of those videos was bad and the content was often absurd or unrealistic, it was easy to tell they weren’t real. Those clunky apps needed a lot of data — videos, images, etc. — of real people to produce crappy videos; Lyu explained that this is why you mostly only saw deepfakes of politicians and celebrities at the time.

As the technology got better, it became less reliant on having a huge amount of data. Instead of needing a whole archive, the new versions of these apps can pretty much run on nothing. “They do not need that much data to train a model anymore. Some of the most recent algorithms just need a single picture — just a single picture of someone,” Lyu said. And the quality is better too. Lyu said that there are AI programs that can now change a person’s appearance and voice in real time, like in Facetimes and Zooms or on live broadcasts.  

Given how many of us are constantly posting photos and videos online, it is now extremely easy to create a convincing social media presence for a person who is not real, and to use it to catfish unwitting people on the internet. 

“This is the problem. It’s becoming more and more challenging to visually tell deepfakes apart,” Lyu said. “Seven years ago, when I started working in this area, checking them was not this difficult,” he added. 

Lyu is an expert in digital media forensics and machine learning, and he went through one of Derek’s videos frame by frame and pointed out some obvious AI tells. There was a distorted watchface with weird swirls instead of numbers and a moment in the video where all of Derek’s fingers on one hand were the same length. Lyu also pointed out that Derek’s chest hair fluctuates, appearing dense in one frame and then dissipating in another.

Through social media, I attempted to contact the owner of Derek Lam’s account with evidence from Lyu that these videos are artificial; I did not hear back.

During my deep dive into Derek Lam’s social media presence, I looked at the accounts he was following. I noticed that of those accounts, someone who goes by the name Vance Ford also had tens of thousands of followers and had nearly identical videos to Derek. The flexing, dances, movements, and music they were set to were all the same, but with what appeared to be a different man performing them. 

I attempted to contact Vance through DMs on social media and did not get a response. I also e-mailed two models who appear to be the actual people that the Derek and Vance AI personas were trained on, but they didn’t respond. 

I sent two of Vance’s videos to Lyu, who analyzed them manually and with AI-detection software. He confirmed that “their movements are nearly identical — consistent with generation from a shared motion source,” and noted that the Vance videos had moments of distortion, unintelligible text, and facial warping. 

 “Young Magnum PI…Tom Selleck,” commented one admirer.

What happens when real people follow fake hots 

“Wow I’m a boomer,” said Patrick, one of Derek’s followers on X, after I told him that he might be following an AI-generated thirst account. (Vox agreed to let Patrick, and Derek’s other followers, use a pseudonym so they could speak frankly about being thirsty for a fake guy.) Prior to our chat, Patrick had no idea Derek was likely a deepfake, and maintains that he didn’t even know he was following the account. Patrick is 33 years old, roughly 30 years younger than the youngest boomer, but being fooled by a hot AI man has made him feel old and vulnerable, susceptible to scams and perhaps light financial crime. 

“This was probably some smut account I followed before I moved all that over to an alt,” Patrick said, noting that in daily life, he’s only ever used AI to help organize and write emails. Wielding AI to create fake videos and photos does not thrill him, nor does the potential of seeing more of Derek. 

“A person being real, someone you could run into at a bar, is half the fun,” Patrick told me, explaining some of the accounts he follows. “AI porn is not of interest, to me, anyway.” 

Not being able to tell the difference between the real beautiful men on the internet and the AI-generated beautiful men on the internet not only makes Patrick feel old, but also a bit “hollow.” The fact that the people we are attracted to are so unrealistically hot, so perfect, that machines can step in for them and go relatively undetected is a reflection of the current state of unattainable desire, which is just as scary as how good these programs have gotten at mimicry. 

“Black mirror shit,” Patrick said. 

The guys I DMed about Derek felt ashamed once they found out the truth. 

“It’s embarrassing and he’s not my type,” said Chris, 33. “I’ve come across several AI accounts, and this one is really good, I have to say. But you can see there’s like no life in his eyes.”

Chris made clear to me that the humiliating thing isn’t that he follows attractive men on the internet. That isn’t a big deal. 

What irks him that he got duped. Chris works in digital marketing and has seen AI used professionally to tabulate calculations for campaigns, and has used it privately for silly things like memes. “AI can do a lot of things, things we probably should not want it to do,” he told me. “I think what’s also scary…is that everybody has access to it. And yes I already unfollowed this person.”

Chris believes there’s something more nefarious afoot. He thinks that whoever is running Derek may have hijacked the username (i.e., the original person Chris was following) and then populated it with AI to drive up follower counts — a scam he’s seen online before.  

“This is super concerning and super scary because you eventually could be texting with this person,” he said, describing a hypothetical situation where unknowing users could be lured into subscribing to fake content and, ultimately, giving the account their personal information, whether that’s photos or perhaps even passwords. 

“This person could be selling your nudes,” he said, explaining one extreme end point of a possible scam. “But you were like jacking off to AI content and that’s embarrassing.”

AI deepfakes are bad for real thirst traps too

While flirting with or masturbating to a fake person is awkward but ultimately manageable and private, Cherie DeVille has an even more complicated problem with AI manipulation. If DeVille is scrolling social media, there’s usually a chance that she’s running into an AI version of herself saying things she’s never said and doing things she’s never done.   

DeVille, an adult star who calls herself “The Internet’s Stepmom,” has roughly 4.5 million followers on Instagram. But her account is often down, which she says is the work of fraudsters  that are determined to send traffic to DeVille’s AI imposters and get her actual account removed. 

“It’s almost always the fake accounts of me reporting me,” DeVille said. “They want to be the biggest me. They want to be the biggest scammer. They want to use my altered AI images to scam fans without my real account getting in the way.” 

DeVille and others I spoke to explained to me that deepfakes have been an annoying reality in the adult entertainment industry for years. The way the scam goes is that someone would fake photos or videos of DeVille (or any star), create an impostor profile, and then trick DeVille’s fans (e.g., through social media DMs) into following that copycat. Later they’d squeeze them for money, payments through Paypal, or Amazon gift cards, perhaps by offering unique content. 

“If you made a fake me and I don’t do double anal, but my AI can, they could have all kinds of ‘exclusive’ stuff,” DeVille said, explaining that double anal is grueling work. 

The lack of protections becomes even clearer when you consider that not every deepfake is a carbon copy. Some personas may borrow a face from one actress, a torso from another, or a pair of legs from a different star. This can make fakes tougher to track down and prove, and more difficult to fight from a legal aspect. 

“Who owns your face once it’s scraped into AI systems? Who profits from your digital clone? How do performers protect themselves from unauthorized replicas or manipulated content?” Rachel Steele, an adult star and the CEO of Red MILF Productions, said to me in an email. “Those questions are still very unanswered.”

Like DeVille, Steele worries about how many of the people using AI to create and consume content don’t seem to consider the artists, models, writers, performers, etc. that these engines have been trained on. It’s bad enough to watch AI slurp up and regurgitate your written work or your digital art. Some people also have to contend with LLMs that have been trained on their own faces and bodies.

“Real creators are competing against characters that can be flawless in every image, never age, never have bad lighting, never get tired, and can appear available 24/7,” Raissa Bellini, an OnlyFans creator who touts gymnastics and firebreathing among her unique skills, told me of the impossibility of keeping up with a machine. She explained to me that she’s seen people create AI-generated personas with the looks of popular models or influencers, only tweaking small details like hair color or eye color. 

A spokesperson for OnlyFans told Vox via email that the company’s terms of service prohibit deceptive or inappropriate content, and said that all content posted on OnlyFans must belong to a verified 18+ OnlyFans content creator: “This means that you can only share content which has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI if it clearly features the verified OnlyFans creator and the user can tell that the content has been generated, altered or enhanced by AI.”

Bellini explained to me that while OnlyFans has measures to protect its creators, some smaller subscription and adult-content platforms do not have the same kind of guardrails. She also noted that most social media sites do not have strict rules or enforcement when it comes to AI, and that she’s seen the algorithm appear to favor AI over human creators.   

“AI raises questions not only about competition, but also about likeness rights, authenticity, audience expectations, and what happens when fans can no longer easily tell the difference between a real person and a generated character,” Bellini added. 

What’s stopping a stranger from creating an AI thirst trap of you? Nothing, really. 

For Deville, Steele, Bellini, their cohort, and even you and I, there are minimal protections stopping someone creating an AI us and making money off of these fake variants. 

According to Jason Schultz, a law professor and director of NYU’s Technology Law & Policy Clinic, humans have, for the last couple of centuries, generally been protected by copyright and right of publicity laws. 

AI obviously didn’t exist when these laws were written, and courts now have to interpret the laws in the context of all of this new technology, in combination with other existing rights (like free speech). Schultz told me that there are more than 100 current cases pending about training AI with copyrighted material. 

He also explained the difficulty of determining whether or not an AI-generated persona constitutes a violation of someone’s right of publicity. It’s more clear-cut when the human involved is a celebrity, because their public persona and appearance is so distinct. It gets murkier when the humans aren’t well known, and the AI creates a persona that’s more of an amalgam than a one-to-one copy. 

“It would raise this question of whether these avatars are based on a particular entertainer, or are they more of an aggregate?” Schultz explained to me. But even if courts side with the humans whose likenesses are being used to create fake personas, Schultz cautions that the technology will always accelerate faster than court decisions are handed down. “I think that the thing that worries me a little is we’re going to get these sets of decisions in two years, but we’ll be dealing with the next three generations of technologies,” he said.  

DeVille, who has been working in the industry for nearly two decades, told me that without better legal protection, she isn’t hopeful for the future of porn or, more broadly, any type of art.

“If my income started tanking and their theft was at the point where I couldn’t compete with literally myself, there might be no choice but to retire,” DeVille said. 

But she also wants to make it extremely clear that she isn’t against AI; she would just like to be in control of it. That means being able to own her likeness, her voice, her image, and the ability to choose whatever she wanted to do with it — or at least get some compensation or have some legal protection if someone’s using Cherie DeVille without her permission. 

“It would be a beautiful way to extend my career beyond what my knees can take,” DeVille told me. But, she added, “if someone’s making an AI of me doing double anal, I should be making the money.” 

This story was originally published in The Highlight. To get access to member-exclusive stories like this every month, become a Vox Member today.

Emily Hoffman was walking home from lunch in the Pittsburgh neighborhood of Squirrel Hill in February 2023, when a driver turning left struck her on the crosswalk.

Hoffman was 34. By the time paramedics arrived on the scene, she had gone into a traumatic cardiac arrest. They strapped her onto a machine that delivered automated chest compressions and rushed her to UPMC Presbyterian, a major trauma hospital in Pittsburgh.

Over the next several days, doctors performed multiple surgeries, kept Hoffman on a ventilator, and waited until she was stable enough for an MRI. The scans showed multiple strokes and severe traumatic brain injury. She was alive, but her family understood that she was not going to make a meaningful recovery to a life she would have wanted.

The next Thursday, a week after the crash, Emily’s parents and her sister Beth Hoffman met with the care team and decided to remove ventilator support to allow her to die naturally. Organ donation came up only afterward. Emily was already a registered donor, and Beth knew it was what her sister wanted.

For most of the short history of organ transplantation, Emily would not have been the usual kind of organ donor.

Almost all transplanted organs once came from patients who died in one specific and rare way called brain death, in which the brain has irreversibly stopped functioning, even as machines keep the heart beating and the organs supplied with oxygen. Brain death is extraordinarily rare,  but it happens often enough to create a workable — though far from sufficient — supply of life-saving organs.

But Emily was not one of the brain-death donors. Even after the strokes and brain injury, she still had some reflexes. She was dying, but not brain dead.

Her donation followed a different path, one that has transformed American transplantation in the last decade. It is called donation after circulatory death, or DCD. Instead of death being declared because the brain has stopped functioning, in DCD, death is declared after circulation ceases and the heart stops beating. Many more people die this way than by brain death.

Death by circulatory criteria has been legally recognized since the 1980s, but for decades, doctors rarely recovered organs this way, because, once blood stops moving through the body, organs begin to deteriorate within minutes. In recent years, however, new machines and surgical techniques have helped change that, giving doctors the ability to preserve organs outside the body, making DCD far more viable.

↗ Explore the interactive version of this chart.

Hoffman’s donation is hardly an outlier anymore. In the last decade, DCD has gone from a rare practice to something that now accounts for nearly half of all organ donors who have died in the United States. In 2000, DCD donors supplied just 219 organs (kidneys, livers, lungs, hearts, and pancreas combined) to the transplantation system in the US. In 2025, DCD brought in close to 17,000 organs. (Most transplanted organs, about 85 percent, come from dead donors, though some organs, most often kidneys, can also come from living donors.)

That growth has saved lives, but it has also pushed transplant medicine into an unusually sensitive moment: the time after a family has decided to let their loved one die but before death has actually occurred.

In brain-death donation, a patient has already been declared dead before the possibility of donation is raised with the family. Because most brain-dead donors are on ventilators, with machines supplying oxygenated blood to their organs, transplant teams can take their time with the donation process.

DCD doesn’t offer that same cushion. Because organs deteriorate so quickly after circulation ceases, the work of donation — the testing, matching, surgical teams flying in — has to be set in motion once the family has decided to withdraw life support but before the patient has died.

This is where the tension in DCD begins. The process pushes transplantation into the narrow interval between that decision to let someone die and the moment death occurs. It creates a situation with almost no parallel in medicine: one set of hands caring for the dying, even as another prepares to recover and transplant their organs.

The medical system tries to manage that complexity with a strict procedural sequence. First, hospital doctors and family conclude that no treatment will bring the patient back to a life they would have wanted. Only then, and only from a separate team, does the word donation come up. The firewall is in place so that the need for organs never shapes the decision to let someone die. 

“Ethically, you want to make sure that those two are uncoupled,” said Wade Smith, director of the Neurovascular Service at the University of California San Francisco.

But as DCD has scaled up, more weight is put on that narrow interval. What was once a rare event is now routine in hospitals across the country, carried out by teams with different levels of experience and overseen through rules that can vary from one place to another. At the same time, the organizations that handle organ donations are under new federal pressure to acquire and distribute more organs from eligible donors.

DCD has saved thousands of lives by making donations possible from patients who once wouldn’t have been donors. Hoffman’s donation improved several lives at once: Her kidneys went to two men, her liver to a third recipient, and her corneas helped give sight to a nine-month-old baby. 

But its growth has also made the fragile period before death more consequential: how families are told, which steps can be taken while the patient is still alive, how consistently hospitals and organ donation teams follow safeguards, and who has the authority to stop the process if something feels wrong.

When DCD was still rare, these questions stayed at the edges of transplantation. Now, they are moving towards its center, as a lifesaving practice becomes a routine part of how Americans die and donate.

The breakthrough

Modern transplantation is a relatively young field, only about 70 years old. And from the beginning, transplantation has depended on the novel medical achievement of keeping organs functional after a person had been declared dead.

The mechanical ventilator, developed in the 1950s, made that possible. It could keep a body breathing, and its heart beating, even after the brain had stopped for good. That created, for the first time, a situation where patients were deceased by every older measure, even as their organs were still functional.

Surgeons were initially wary of recovering organs, largely because the legal lines between life and death had never been clearly drawn. Then, in 1968, a Harvard committee proposed a definition of brain death. By 1981, a model law gave states the language to recognize two ways of legal death. Your heart and lungs could stop for good (circulatory death) or your entire brain could (brain death). Today, every state recognizes some version of that framework.

With those lines in place, transplant teams could work with more confidence, and brain death turned out to be close to ideal for them. Because a ventilator kept the heart beating and blood moving through the organs, even after death, there was no ticking clock to race against. The hospital staff had time to evaluate the organs, sometimes convince families to donate them, find the right recipients, and bring in surgical teams before recovery began.

The problem was always with the math. Brain death is rare — only about three in 1,000 deaths happen in a way that leaves organs usable for transplant. That puts a hard biological ceiling on how many ideal donors there could ever be.

But demand for the organs had no such ceiling. Nearly a million Americans are diagnosed with heart failure each year, while surgeons performed just 4,636 heart transplants in 2024, after DCD became a widely used part of transplantation, up 81.5 percent from 2013. There are “just not enough organs to go around,” said Ashish Shah, chief of cardiac surgery at Vanderbilt University. The kidney numbers are even bleaker. Over 500,000 people are on dialysis in the US, but only a fraction will ever reach the waiting list, and even among those who do, many will die before receiving a transplant offer, said Dorry Segev, a transplant surgeon and researcher at NYU Langone.

The modern DCD boom grew out of this desperation, presenting the possibility of donation in far more common cases of death that transplantation surgeons had rarely been able to draw on before: catastrophic strokes, car crashes, cardiac arrests, and other injuries that left patients with no meaningful chance of recovery but short of brain death. But with DCD, the clock suddenly became a factor. Once circulation stopped, the organs deteriorated fast, and, in many cases, they were ruined before surgeons could recover them. 

Because of those challenges, DCD stayed marginal for decades, at well under a tenth of all donations. Those numbers ultimately spiked because of several things that happened almost simultaneously.

The first was technological. New machines, like TransMedics’ Organ Care Systems — which were first used in 2015 in the UK — could keep a recovered organ alive outside the body, pumping it with warm, oxygenated blood instead of packing it in ice, allowing a heart to beat and function as normal inside a box. This meant that even if there was delay in recovering an organ, that damage could be limited, even reversed, once the organ was put in the machine. 

Other teams found ways to use machines originally developed to support failing hearts and lungs to restart circulation inside the bodies of donors after death had been declared. Transplant teams in Spain and the UK began adapting that technology before American programs picked it up for DCD hearts around 2019. Both approaches helped extend the time to successfully perform DCD.

“As soon as the results were good, the big American centers took it on,” said John Dimarakis, a cardiac transplant surgeon at the University of Washington.

Policy changes also helped push DCD further. In Hoffman’s case, the donation process was coordinated by CORE, the nonprofit responsible for organ donation in the Pittsburgh region. Organ procurement organizations, or OPOs, cover a particular region in the US, and they work with hospitals in that region to evaluate potential donors, speak with families, arrange testing, and offer organs to transplant centers. There are 54 such OPOs in the US, which are certified and regulated by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). 

For years, critics argued that OPOs were judged according to weakly defined standards based on numbers they reported themselves, and poor performers were rarely penalized. But in 2020, new federal rules began ranking them against one another, with a mechanism to strip the worst performers of their territory. Facing the threat of losing their monopolies, many OPOs began pursuing harder cases they would’ve earlier passed over, according to Greg Segal, who founded patient advocacy group Organize. A larger share of those more complicated donors were DCD.

Still, no single force explains the speed of DCD’s rise. “Technology plays a big role in it,” said Nader Moazami, a cardiac surgeon at NYU Langone who helped pioneer one of the new techniques. “But it doesn’t explain how suddenly 50 percent of our donors are DCD.” In 2000, there were only 118 DCD donors in the United States. By 2025, there were 8,137. Brain death donation grew over that same period but far more slowly — from 5,867 donors a year to 8,416.

↗ Explore the interactive version of this chart.

Whatever the mix, it’s clear that DCD has led to more organs, shorter waits, and saved thousands of lives that otherwise would have ended on a list. “People who have been waiting now wait less,” Dimarakis said.

On a chart, it looks like an unambiguous triumph — until you step into a hospital room.

The passage

Beth Hoffman remembers her sister Emily’s last morning. She read aloud an email from Bradley Whitford, Emily’s favorite actor from the TV drama The West Wing, who had written after hearing what had happened. Then, a playlist of Emily’s favorite songs played as the breathing tube came out. Within about 10 minutes, while “For Good” from Wicked filled the room, her sister was gone.

What Beth mostly didn’t see was the second sequence unfolding around her: the referrals, tests, calls, and scheduling that would turn Emily from a dying patient into an organ donor. 

Federal rules require every hospital to alert their organ procurement organization whenever a person may be nearing death. The OPO screens those referrals, and most go nowhere. Alexandra Glazier, who runs the OPO that covers most of New England, says hers get about 50,000 such referrals a year. Only 2 or 3 percent turn out to have any medical possibility of donation at all. 

Emily was one such possible case for her Pittsburgh hospital’s OPO. The organization had to reach out to her family; explain what DCD would involve; and, then, start the work that had to happen while she was still alive: reviewing her medical history, testing whether her organs could be used, matching them to recipients, and arranging the surgical teams who might fly in to recover them.

Most families never see much of that work, but some do. Smith, the UCSF neurologist, watched a family agree to withdraw life support and donate, set a time, and gather relatives for a final goodbye, only to learn that the withdrawal had to wait because the OPO still needed more tests. Some families, after being told their dying relative must stay on machines longer for donation’s sake, walk away.

For the Hoffmans, things proceeded more quietly. When the time came, Emily was wheeled into the operating room, and the breathing tube was removed there. The surgeons who would recover her organs were kept away from the withdrawal and death declaration. They often fly in from their own hospitals — sometimes several at once for different organs — but they’re walled off from everything that comes before. “We are not involved in that process,” said Dimarakis, the cardiac transplant surgeon at the University of Washington, “because it’s not ethical for us to be involved.”

That separation is the line DCD depends on. One team cares for the dying patient, withdraws support, and declares death. The other waits outside that decision and recovers the organs only after. The OPO stands between them, coordinating the donation without letting the firewall be breached.

Then comes the waiting. Once the ventilator is out, the clock starts ticking. If the heart doesn’t stop within a window — often about two hours — the organ recovery may be called off, and the patient is returned to end-of-life care. But when circulation does stop, as it did for Emily, the team counts exactly five more minutes to make sure it won’t restart on its own. Only then can a hospital physician declare death, and only then can the transplant surgeons begin.

DCD rests on a simple promise: The need for organs never causes the death. The death is already coming, and donation only changes what can come from it. 

But a new frontier in DCD complicates that promise.

The reversal

Normally, after death is declared, most DCD organs are removed and preserved outside the body, either on ice or on machines that circulate oxygenated fluid or blood. The goal is to slow the damage that begins the moment circulation stops.

Then, around the mid-2010s, transplant teams in Spain and the UK began using a newer technique that restores circulation inside the dead donor’s body, before the organs are removed. It’s called normothermic regional perfusion, or NRP.

In one version of NRP, called abdominal NRP, blood is meant to be restored only below the diaphragm to preserve organs such as the kidneys and liver. In a more controversial version called thoracoabdominal NRP, it runs through the chest, as well, and the heart starts beating again.

For the transplant team, especially heart surgeons, the appeal is clear. Kidneys and livers can survive a stretch without circulation, but a heart is harder to preserve. Once it has stopped, there’s no easy way to know whether it will beat reliably again. NRP helps answer that question by restarting it inside the donor’s body after death has been declared, where surgeons can watch it work before deciding whether to recover it.

Shah, the Vanderbilt cardiac surgeon, says the technique lets doctors take hearts from donors who otherwise would not be able to yield a workable one.

But this kind of NRP is unsettling for the very reason that it is useful. If a death is declared because the heart has stopped, what does it mean to start it again inside a donor’s body, often only minutes later? Is that still death? Or something else?

The controversy isn’t simply that the heart beats again. A beating heart is not, by itself, the same as a living person. The heart of a brain-dead patient can beat, too, can be kept going by machines, and that doesn’t mean the person is alive. The deeper concern is whether restored circulation in the body could reach the brain, which could potentially restore consciousness.

To prevent blood from reaching the brain, surgeons clamp or cut the vessels that carry blood to the head before circulation is restored. That distinction is central to the defense of NRP, and it lets surgeons say they are restoring circulation and restarting the heart, not the person. 

But those safeguards haven’t always worked. In a safety notice last November, the Organ Procurement & Transplantation Network (OPTN), the federal system that oversees transplant policy and data, said it had received “verified reports” that blood had unintentionally reached the brain and brainstem during NRP. Such events are extremely rare, the notice said, but can occur when a clamp fails or blood reaches the head through an unrecognized route. The notice asked transplant programs using either form of NRP to strengthen their safeguards and report any failures. But those recommendations were not national requirements and as of May 2026, the OPTN was still developing formal standards for NRP. For Claire Morgan, a transplant surgeon from North Carolina who has criticized NRP’s rollout, that is a central weakness. “It’s a bulletin. It’s not a policy,” she said. “There’s no punishment for not reporting.”

But even if blood never reaches the brain, NRP can still introduce deeper ambiguity into our understanding of circulatory death. In the first few minutes after a heart stops, it can often be brought back, an event that happens every day in a busy emergency department. In conventional DCD, however, doctors don’t try to restart the heart, because a patient or family has already decided against being revived. It is that decision, not just the stopped heart itself, that turns the moment into a death. The same goes for anyone who dies under a do-not-resuscitate order.

NRP puts pressure on that logic. The circulation declared permanently gone is deliberately brought back. “There’s a misalignment between NRP practices and the legal standard for how death is defined,” said Glazier. You cannot, critics argue, pronounce someone dead because the circulation will never return — and then return it.

Robert Truog, professor of Medical Ethics, Anaesthesia, & Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, supports NRP but thinks the possibility of blood returning to the brain is the issue that matters most. “The only questions are, is there a risk of pain or suffering in the procurement of the organs?” he said. And there’s a possibility of that if the circulation is restarted in the brain.

None of this is settled, which is why some hospitals refuse to perform NRP at all. Moazami pioneered the NRP heart technique in the US and practices it at NYU Langone. “But you cannot do it at Columbia,” he said, “just five miles away.” Glazier’s OPO, one of the country’s largest, said her organization has done roughly 650 NRP cases since adopting the practice — but only the abdominal kind, holding off on the heart version until the national protocols are better standardized.

Claire Morgan, a transplant surgeon from North Carolina who has criticized the rollout of NRP, is more worried about what happens if something goes wrong. The donor cannot complain, families may never know if there was a concern, and clinicians who speak up may have limited protection if they challenge what happened in the operating room. 

All of that matters, because NRP is already far from marginal. The Organ Procurement & Transplantation Network (OPTN), the federal system that oversees transplant policy and data, only began collecting data on whether NRP was used in a DCD recovery in October 2025. In the first five months of that reporting, from October 1, 2025, through February 28, 2026, 3,463 DCD donors were recovered nationally, according to data shared by the OPTN with Vox. More than half of those involved NRP; though, OPTN doesn’t collect data on which kind.

Vox’s analysis also found that NRP cases were concentrated among some organ procurement organizations. The top 10 OPOs accounted for 47 percent of all DCD recoveries that used NRP.

The patchwork

The core safeguard in DCD — that the decision to withdraw life support must come before questions about donation — is widely accepted. But many of the details around that sequence that shape a family’s experience, or a patient’s protection, are still handled differently from hospital to hospital, OPO to OPO.

“The entire process of DCD or donor withdrawal is not very standardized across the United States or even within states, even within different hospitals in the same city,” Moazami said.

That can mean differences in what families are told about the donation process, what medications are considered appropriate before death, whether NRP is allowed and how it is performed, and who has the clear authority to pause or stop the process if someone believes something is wrong.

That unevenness matters more now, because the transplant system has been trying, with good reason, to recover more organs. For years, many in the field, and those who depended on it, argued that the organ procurement organizations were leaving transplantable organs on the table. Greg Segal, whose advocacy group Organize helped push for stronger OPO accountability, compared the old system to a canvassing campaign where you only knock on the easiest doors. “The problem with OPOs is they were only doing the much easier ones,” he said.

A 2020 rule from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, the federal agency that oversees OPOs, was meant to change that. It ranked OPOs against one another and created a path to penalize low performers by stripping them of their territories. That policy appears to have had some impact, but it is hard to separate from other forces driving DCD’s rise including new preservation technology, like NRP and broader clinical adoption. Jeffrey Trageser and Charles Strom from the Association of Organ Procurement Organizations, the trade group that represents OPOs, argued that the metrics are too broad, evaluating OPOs partly on whether transplant centers ultimately accept organs and not fully accounting for regional differences such as age of potential donors, local rates of cancer, or how far organs must travel to reach transplant centers.

This pressure to recover more organs has also made some OPOs seem more aggressive to the clinicians working besides them. “Some people view them as vultures, which is horrible,” said Smith, the UCSF neurologist who has experienced the tension from the hospital side. “They’re trying to do their job.” Still, he added, “when you impose that [pressure], then it changes how aggressive they are.”

Both things can be true. The old system needed pressure to perform better. And pressure can create risks, or perceived risks, in a process that depends on careful judgement around a dying patient.

And the safety question isn’t a theoretical concern either. A March 2025 investigation from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), the federal agency that oversees the national transplant system, documented what can happen when those safeguards fail. In a review of attempted DCD cases at Kentucky Organ Donor Affiliates, an OPO that covered Kentucky and parts of Ohio and West Virginia, HRSA found recurring problems about staff missing vital signs in patients that raised concerns, failed to work collaboratively with hospital medical teams, failed to respect family decision-making, and documented medical data poorly. HRSA said the pattern suggested “organizational dysfunction” and a weak safety culture.

One OPO’s failure does not prove that DCD is broadly unsafe or that OPOs across the country behave the same way. But the Kentucky review showed how badly things can go when the line between patient care and organ recovery is not honored.

Since then, federal officials have been trying to close some of the gaps. HRSA has pushed for clearer family education around DCD and more standardized reporting on ventilated patients referred to OPOs, as well as opened up a reporting channel that sends misconduct concerns directly to HRSA. In a separate case, the Department of Health and Human Services also moved to shut down an OPO in South Florida after finding unsafe practices, underperformance, and paperwork errors.

Organ donation is a touchy subject, because it relies so much on the goodwill and the trust of the people who agree to give their organs so they can live on in others. But the procedural issues also matter, because there are lives at stake on both sides of the process. 

Around 13 people die each day in the US waiting for organs. In that desperate landscape, the rise in DCD has led to many lives saved and helped several more live better, fuller lives. The dearth of organs even compelled my former Future Perfect colleague Dylan Matthews to sign up as a living donor and donate his kidney to a complete stranger. (You can read his story here).

And the value of the donation is not just measured in recipients saved. For the Hoffmans, the knowledge that Emily’s organs helped others offered a solace they had not expected. Emily “gave the gift of life in her death,” Beth told me.

That is the highest ideal organ donation — and DCD – can achieve: a death already coming that still changes the lives of others in need. The case for DCD is clear, but its future depends on its proponents’ ability to protect both patients and public trust.

Clarification, July 1, 6 pm ET: A previous version of this post described how the NRP process intends to stop blood from reaching the brain, but did not acknowledge cases where that does not go according to plan. The post has been updated to include a safety notice from the Organ Procurement & Transplantation Network, which said it had received “verified reports” that blood had unintentionally reached the brain and brainstem during NRP. The post has also been updated to clarify that Dorry Segev and Nader Moazami are doctors at NYU Langone. 

Update 1.7.26: Die erforderliche Unterstützung von mindestens 2.000 Vorbestellungen wurde zum 30.6.26 erreicht – wir werden in Kürze die Planung zum Spieletest-Sonderheft “Die 80er Jahre” beginnen. Das Erscheinen ist für Ende November/Anfang Dezember geplant. Alle Crowdfunder können im Juli den ersten Newsletter erwarten. Wer noch upgraden will, kann das direkt in seinem Konto (die Sonderheft-Bestellung anklicken) machen.

Und wer bislang noch zögert: Wir lassen das Crowdfunding noch eine Weile offen, aber irgendwann in der mittleren Zukunft wird es die höheren Stufen nicht mehr geben, und der Preisvorteil durch die reduzierten Versandkosten fällt weg.

Dieser Link führt euch direkt zum Crowdfunding.

Vielen Dank, dass ihr uns die Verzögerung des Crowdfundings um zwei Wochen (ursprünglich war der Start am 16. Mai geplant) nicht übel genommen habt! Heute früh ist nun das Crowdfunding zum Spieletest-Sonderheft Die 80er Jahre gestartet. Der Hauptgrund für die Verzögerung war die Erweiterung auf fünf Stufen und das Abtesten mehrerer physischer Beilagen. Am Ende haben wir uns nun aber dafür entschieden, den “Firelefanz-Faktor” sehr gering zu halten und nur das Poster zu machen ab Stufe 3, das wir dafür aber von DIN/A3 auf DIN/A2 vergrößert haben. Die Hauptunterschiede liegen nun beim Heft selbst (es gibt drei Varianten: normales Cover, anders layoutetes Cover mit Prägedruck, und das feste “Buch”-Cover für Stufe V) und etwaige “besondere Würdigungen”.

Sicher fragt ihr euch, was es mit der Abstimmungsteilnahme ab Stufe IV auf sich hat: Wird das Spieletest-Sonderheft Die 80er Jahre nun etwa durch Schwarmintelligenz erstellt? Das natürlich nicht. Aber es ist beim vorherigen Sonderheft in seltenen Fällen zu knappen Entscheidungen gekommen (etwa, welches von zwei wichtigen Spielen noch in ein Genre aufgenommen wird), bei denen wir auch eine Münze hätten werfen können. In solchen Fällen werden wir dieses Mal die Vorbesteller der Stufen IV und V abstimmen lassen und uns an das Ergebnis halten.

Und jetzt zur Beschreibung des Hefts – die einzelnen Stufen und ihre Unterschiede findet ihr beim Crowdfunding.

Das Sonderheft 80er Jahre

Unser 2. Sonderheft liefert etwas, das ihr im normalen Retro Gamer nicht findet: Retro-Spieletests. Und zwar gleich 100 davon – mit jeweils mindestens einer Seite Umfang, und von erfahrenen Spieleveteranen-Autoren wie Anatol Locker, Heinrich Lenhardt, Michael Hengst, Hardy Heßdörfer, Roland Austinat und vielen anderen. Gebündelt ergibt das den perfekten Überblick über das wichtigste Spielejahrzehnt überhaupt, denn in den 80ern legten 8- und 16-Bit-Spiele den Grundstein für alles, was danach kam!

Beim 80er-Jahre-Sonderheft steht weniger die Kaufberatung im Vordergrund als vielmehr die Zeitberatung – sind die Klassiker von damals heute wirklich noch eure Freizeit wert? Aber natürlich geht es auch um Einordnung und Würdigung, ihr erhaltet einen guten Überblick über das komplette Spiele-Jahrzehnt. Bei den Tests nutzen wir das altbewährte “objektive” 100er-System und bewerten aus heutiger Retrofan-Sicht: weder durch die rosarote Brille, noch als pingelige Erbsenzähler. Wir erwarten für eine hohe Wertung einfach, dass das Spiel heute noch Spaß macht. Zur Abrundung gibt’s auch noch unsere streng subjektiven Wertungsgesichter zu den Tests – subjektiv kann auch ein mit 71% bewerteter Klassiker noch “Super!” sein.

Wieso der Fokus auf Spieletests statt unserem normalen Mix aus einer Vielfalt von Interviews, Making ofs und Co.? Weil wir euch eben nicht nur „mehr vom Gleichen“ verkaufen wollen. Und weil wir in der RG-Redaktion wehmütig an Magazine wie die Happy Computer Spiele-Sonderhefte zurückdenken, die gekonnt Bekanntes und Unbekanntes zusammenfassten, Marktüberblick und Lesespaß vereinten. Das Sonderheft stammt vom bekannten, leicht erweiterten deutschen Retro-Gamer-Team.

Wieso “Crowdfunding”?

Aktuell ist das Sonderheft ein zwar konkreter Plan, aber noch keine Realität – erst mit euren Crowdfunding-Vorbestellungen stellt ihr sicher, dass wir wirklich loslegen können und uns über den (Früh-) Sommer und Herbst hinweg mit viel Liebe um die 80er Jahre und ihre Klassiker kümmern. Wir werden Ende Juni 2026 Bilanz ziehen, ob wir bereits genügend Geld einnehmen konnten, um als kleiner Verlag bei diesem Projekt finanziell halbwegs abgesichert zu sein. Und da wir das Interesse an den 80er Jahren für etwas geringer einschätzen als an den 90er Jahren, sind die zusätzlichen Crowdfunding-Stufen noch wichtiger als beim ersten Sonderheft. Sollte das Projekt je nicht finanziert werden, erhaltet ihr euer Geld natürlich zurück.

Apropos Geld: “Wieso verlangt ihr so viel Geld?”, fragt sich vielleicht der eine oder andere von euch, gerade in wirtschaftlich schwierigen Zeiten wie diesen. Doch wir haben beim Sonderheft höhere redaktionelle Kosten als beim normalen Retro Gamer, wo etwa die Hälfte der Artikel Lokalisierungen sind (die uns günstiger kommen als neu geschriebene Beiträge). Zudem ist die Seitenzahl höher, und wir haben (vermutlich) keine einzige Anzeigenseite im Sonderheft. Vor allem die deutlich geringere Druckauflage (im Vergleich zu den etwa 18.000 beim Hauptmagazin) erhöht die Kosten pro Heft deutlich, weil es viele Fixkosten gibt. Die bessere Papierqualität kostet zusätzlich.

Dieses Sonderheft gibt es nur hier im Shop, nicht am Kiosk – die Entscheidung, ob wir wie beim 90er-Jahre-Heft wieder in den deutschen Bahnhofsbuchhandel gehen, steht noch aus.

Passend zur Titelstory in Retro Gamer 3/26 zu Shadow of the Colossus (PS2) spielt Hagen Gehritz für euch das auch dort gelobte Remake von Bluepoint Games von 2018, das dieses faszinierende Werk gekonnt auf PS4 gebracht hat. Viel Spaß!