Are you mad about everything?

Another needless, endless war. Rising living costs and gas prices. The fact that the richest 1 percent of Americans own more than the bottom 90 percent combined, or the straight-up corruption happening in the White House. As the old saying goes, if you’re not mad, you’re not paying attention. 

But what does spirituality teach us about how to respond to our anger? Is it wise to try to let it go? Should we practice imagining clouds floating gently by and take a deep breath?

I don’t think so. For one, it’s not that simple! There’s way too much happening inside my heart when I’m pissed off to pretend that I’m full of calm and kindness. Plus, this kind of spiritual bypassing is as insulting as it is ineffective. When we try to force a feeling, we fundamentally misunderstand the gift that anger has to give us: a deeper insight into our pain and a genuine compassion that enables wise action for justice.

That said, I don’t want to walk around like a fire-breathing dragon or endlessly stew in my resentment either. So I reached out to some trustworthy religious voices to see what spiritual traditions can teach us about effective responses to our rage — and how it can give us insight without overwhelming us.

Underneath your anger is a broken heart

Lama Rod Owens is a Buddhist teacher in Atlanta and the author of Love and Rage: The Path of Liberation Through Anger. The first thing he tells me is that we have to acknowledge our anger. “A lot of us actually don’t know what anger feels like. We’re just reacting to it,” he says. And that rings true. I’m still learning to notice the physical signs of rage: My head gets hot; my stomach tight; my throat fills with the scream that I’m only just able to contain.

That physicality is central to Owens’s definition of anger: The mental and physical tension out of which aggression arises. And that aggressive response is what gets me into trouble — when I snap at my husband or give demon eyes at those who surely have headphones but are choosing not to use them. If I’m not careful, I won’t even notice how rageful I am until my simmering pot of fury suddenly comes to a boil. 

Noticing that tension can be tricky, Owens says, because “a lot of people get gaslit around their anger, particularly women and femme folks.” It can be radical to simply admit that anger is arising in you. Owens is very careful with language here. Instead of saying that we are angry, he encourages us to say that we feel angry. “I know it’s very nuanced,” he explains, “but when people start thinking about an experience rather than being something, it really opens up space.” 

And that space gives us what we need to take the next step. Which, surely, is to move past our anger?

No, he argues. The path of liberation is through anger — not to “get over it.” Owens learned this through personal experience, as well as through the wisdom teachings of his Buddhist lineage. As a Black, queer man living in America, he’s had plenty to be angry about (while also having to navigate the harmful stereotype that as a Black man he’s inherently angry). But, he writes in his book, “I wasn’t pissed off because of racism or homophobia or something else. I was actually deeply, deeply hurt.” Through disciplined meditation, Owens realized that his anger was a secondary emotion. Meaning, there was a primary experience that sat underneath the anger. And that primary experience was pain and sadness and a deeper sense of heartbrokenness. 

“It’s like you’re not just angry, experiencing anger about the world. You’re hurt by the world, you’re saddened by the world, you’re grieving the world,” he says. 

Learning to sit with that anger shifted things over time. As Owens practiced noticing and naming his rage instead of trying to push it away or acting out in aggression, he found a way to be with it instead. 

His Buddhist lineage taught him to think of anger simply as energy. And like any energy, he learned to experience it rather than to react to it: “In Buddhism, we would consider the essence [of anger] to be empty…it’s just energy that can be shaped or misunderstood by consciousness.” 

To be clear, he says, “It’s not like the anger disappeared,” but rather that Owens experienced enough space around the anger that allowed him to name the heartbreak that was underneath it. 

And once he could do that, he noticed a completely different feeling flooding in. 

Moving through anger to tender compassion

Nate DeGroot has seen the same connection. DeGroot is a rabbi based in Detroit and the director of the Shalom Center. In his Jewish tradition, anger isn’t just something only humans experience — God gets angry, too. Think of the flood sent to punish humankind that Noah avoids by building the ark, for example. But, DeGroot explains, God’s anger only lasts a moment.

In fact, in Jewish tradition, the Talmud records people questioning exactly how long God’s anger lasts — with some claiming that it remains only for a 15,888th of an hour (which comes to just under half a second), and others saying God’s wrath lasts as long as it takes to say the word “moment” in Hebrew, a word with two syllables. Either way, it only lasts a short while, because a deeper, more enduring compassion quickly emanates from God’s being.

As the parent of two small kids, DeGroot empathizes with both God’s anger — and the love that supersedes it. When his kids mess around, he says, “I’m frustrated!…why did they fling the blue toothpaste on the white shade in the bathroom and now it’s forever stained? I’ve got to bring the rug into the rug cleaner for the fifth time in two years because they peed on it in the middle of the night!” he says, laughing. But those temporary flares of frustration sit within a wider circle of parental care. “I really relate to… this notion of the moment of anger [being] situated within a broader, more expansive, everlasting love,” he tells me.

Once we’ve properly noticed our anger and named the heartbreak it masks, what will (hopefully!) follow is waves of compassion for ourselves and everyone else that is hurting. And it is from that place that you can actually take action.  

From compassion comes a community for justice

Najeeba Syeed is the executive director of Interfaith at Augsburg in Minneapolis and has a long history of doing conflict resolution work. She explains that in Islam, too, the Prophet Muhammad experiences anger. Early in his mission as he travels from one place to another, he’s stoned by angry villagers who reject him. “He was given a choice,” she tells Vox. “Should the divine force go and destroy this community, or should this community have reprieve for what they’ve done?” 

The Prophet Muhammad chooses forgiveness over revenge. But there’s both spiritual wisdom and strategy at play in that choice: Anger can separate us from the very people we need to be connected to when seeking justice, Syeed says. “It makes us incapable of seeing the experience of others,” she says. And it is precisely the experience of other people we need to be aware of when building coalitions that will be able to solve the problems that make us angry. Inequality and corruption and rising health care costs are not going to change if we remain atomized and mad. We have to work together.

“Okay, you’re angry,” Syeed affirms, “But who is the you? Who is in the collective? Who is impacted? If we don’t have a larger identity than our political affiliation — by that I mean the neighborliness, some sense of community that transcends that identitarian political affiliation alone — then we may actually destroy ourselves in the process.”

“If you [take action] by yourself, is it really going to change at the social level?” she asks. “You still have to be able to build allies, and you still have to be able to build connection.”

That’s what the Prophet Muhammad was doing in exhibiting restraint with the angry villagers. In leaving them unpunished, he was later able to build an alliance with them in his campaign to spread his message through the region. 

In the Muslim tradition, a judge is forbidden from making a ruling when angry because it is understood that justice cannot come from rage. Anger helps us cut through distractions and focus on the work that needs to be done — but that work for justice must come from a deeper place of love. 

So, how should we think of anger? Not as something to indulge — but nor should we try to avoid it. Anger is like an alarm bell, telling us something is wrong. When we notice it arising, we must inspect the heartbreak that lies underneath and allow for our innate compassion to emerge. And then guided by that love — and a dash of strategy — we can decide how to act. 

And act we should! Syeed shares a popular saying in the Islamic world: One must tie their own camel. It means that we humans have to intervene in the world; it isn’t just up to the divine to act for us. So: Have hard conversations guided by your morals! Vote in the midterms and in local elections! Call your electeds! Organize your neighbors and your workplace! But do it out of that deeper compassion that guides wise decision-making. 

With two weeks until the midterm elections, Democrats are comfortably favored to take the House. Their path to Senate control, though, is harder — and it could run through Maine, where longtime Republican Sen. Susan Collins is in a tight race against former state Senate president Troy Jackson, a Democrat.

When Collins first ran for Senate in 1996, she pledged to serve only two terms in the Senate. But 30 years later, she’s still in office despite the odds, as Maine has grown more blue around her. 

One secret to her political durability is her success in “bringing in the bacon” for Mainers: Her official Senate website features a map of projects that she says she helped fund as chair of the Senate Appropriations committee, including hospitals, bridges, affordable housing, public transportation, and water systems.

This year, though, all of that money might not be enough for Mainers to look past their frustration with another Republican: President Donald Trump.

To learn more about what Maine voters are thinking as they prepare to head to the polls, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Washington Post reporter Dan Merica, who’s on the ground reporting from Maine, about why some Mainers who backed Collins before are now reconsidering their support.

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

Tell me how this race got to be so fascinating.

Maine this cycle was going to be interesting no matter what. Susan Collins is the only Republican senator who is running for reelection in a state that Kamala Harris won in 2024 this cycle.

But since the outset, it has really defined, I think, these midterm elections. The rise of Graham Platner, the oysterman turned politician, really hinted at the populist anti-establishment fervor that was in the Democratic base. That fervor was so strong that it prevented the sitting incumbent Democratic governor from winning the primary here in Maine to challenge Susan Collins. I think that said a lot about the Democratic Party. 

Obviously Graham Platner’s campaign then flamed out and he ended his campaign because of the allegations of sexual assault against him. 

But then you have the Collins angle of it, and she is really the poster candidate for a Republican who, in this election where Donald Trump’s approval rating is so low, is having to basically suspend political gravity in a state that really does not approve of the job that he’s done as president.

I want to ground this conversation in how voters in Maine feel about him right now because I know you’ve been talking to voters. What is the vibe out there? Are people mad? 

There’s a lot of anger for the president here. Maine is in a unique position where it’s been on the receiving end of a lot of what those people who are mad at Trump would say is harm that he has caused. 

It’s a border state. It borders Canada. There’s a ton of cross-border relationships. And so his attacks on Canada, his suggestion that it’s going to be the 51st state, has really hurt the state of Maine because it’s hurt tourism in the state. Many Canadians come down south to vacation in Maine. And there’s been a drop in tourism because of that fight with Canada.

The tariffs have hurt Maine because so much of the wood and the lumber that is grown and cut here in Maine is actually shipped up north to Canada to be processed, and then what it is processed as is shipped back across the United States. The tariffs have been incredibly harmful for the state. 

And then you have ICE. I’m in Biddeford. There was a shooting of an individual here in Biddeford. That has been an issue in this race as well. 

So there’s a lot of anger at the president, and it’s very easy to feel that when you’re talking to voters. I actually just spoke with a voter who voted for Troy Jackson, dropped his ballot in an early voting box. And I just asked him, “What did you vote for? Who’d you vote for? Why did you vote?” And he got visibly emotional when he started talking about the Trump administration and how scared he was for the future of democracy and that was why he was voting for Troy Jackson.

I’ve also talked to voters who supported Susan Collins just six years ago at the end of the first Trump administration. They voted for her back then and they feel like the last six years have made it impossible for them to vote for her again. And then on the other side, you have people who are hardcore die-hard Trump supporters and they actually think that Susan Collins has been too hard on the president. 

She’s in a really tough spot politically where on her left, there are a lot of voters, including some who have voted for her recently, who are furious with her, who don’t think she stands up to the president enough. And then on her right, there are voters who think that she stands up to the president too much.

It’s funny to think about these two figures representing the same political party because while they might agree on a few issues here and there, they couldn’t represent more different brands of Republicanism. What’s the truth of how much Susan Collins sides with Donald Trump?

She has sided with the president at times. She has voted against the president at times. I was struck that, in the debate on Thursday, she said, “I have been a senator under five different presidents.” I don’t exactly remember what her number was, but she noted that she had only endorsed one Republican president and that was George W. Bush.

I was just in Kennebunk, which is right next to Kennebunkport, which is a historical location for the Bush family. They have a large home at Walker Point. There is some relationship between the Bush family and Maine, [and it] makes sense that Susan Collins really does kind of line up more with the Bush-style Republican Party than she does the Trump-style Republican Party.

What’s her actual relationship with the president like? And surely he’s well aware that she was one of the few Republicans who voted to impeach him over the January 6 insurrection. Does that get in the way of their relationship?

I think he’s very well aware when somebody breaks with him. I would have to imagine he’s aware of that. 

“It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.”

I was actually told by a Republican early in the campaign that President Trump demands loyalty from people that he supports, but this person actually said that there are rules for Republicans and that there are rules for Susan Collins and that Republicans were willing to kind of give her some leeway, which is actually an acknowledgement that they know the bind that she is in. 

They know that she’s running for reelection in a blue state, in a state that the president lost, in a state that is very hostile right now to the president. It was a fascinating comment that there are rules for Republicans who are running across the country, but that maybe Susan Collins doesn’t exactly have to adhere to those rules.

Affordability is a huge issue in Maine, right? And Donald Trump hasn’t exactly helped…

That has really heightened the competitiveness of this race. The same race is always going to be competitive, but the fact that gas prices are where it’s at, the fact that we’re going into winter, it’s starting to get cold up here. Home heating oil prices are above $6 a gallon. 

I think about 80 percent of homes that are heated by home heating oil are in the Northeast, a large portion of them probably in Maine and New Hampshire, two states with Senate races in November. It’s been a huge issue up here. 

The Trump administration has actually tried to get rid of a low-income program to help with home heating oil that helps a lot of folks in Maine. You’ve seen Republicans, from the gubernatorial candidate to congressional candidates, break with the president on that because they know it’s a huge issue. 

So when you talk about affordability, yes, we’re talking about the price of beef, the price of groceries, the price of gas, but there’s also these localized issues in a state like Maine, in particular. And I think home heating oil actually could be a really fascinating, underappreciated issue in this race. If you grew up or live in Arizona or Nevada or California, you’re not thinking about the oil that you need to heat your home. That could be a real issue here in a state like Maine.

Collins is a political survivor. For all of it to come crashing down because of, essentially, who the president was — is that a bit of a sad ending to this political story for her? Do you think she’d maybe have regrets about how she approached Donald Trump?

It’s certainly possible. And you’ve seen other senators who have bucked the president and have then retired and not run for reelection. I’m thinking of Thom Tillis, for example, in North Carolina. There is this fascinating case study in how the Republican Party has changed when you look at Susan Collins and you look at Donald Trump. 

Someone like Susan Collins in an earlier iteration of the Republican Party would’ve had a lot of success and would’ve probably stayed onside the Republican Party in a way that she just hasn’t done under Trump. She represents a different kind of era of the Republican Party. 

I think there was a time when bringing home the bacon to a small state really worked politically. I’m thinking about Harry Reid, for example — he represented Nevada. In 2010, he faced a really difficult reelection campaign and his entire campaign was bringing home the bacon to Nevada, a similarly small state, and he won reelection in 2010.

I think if Susan Collins wins reelection in 2026, it’ll prove that there’s still a lot of goodwill for politicians who can deliver funding projects for states like Maine, states like Nevada, smaller states that maybe don’t get the kind of national attention that others do. 

If she does lose, a lot of it will be put at the feet of President Trump. I’ll be fascinated to talk to her if she does lose, because I do think she will have a lot to say that she probably hasn’t said yet, but I think that’s an if, and I think we have two more weeks to find that out.

The Ebola virus is spreading at an unprecedented rate this year. 

In the first five months since the outbreak began in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), the World Health Organization (WHO) has reported 9,415 confirmed cases and 4,536 deaths in the country. While the virus has remained relatively contained by the DRC’s borders, case counts in neighboring Kenya and Uganda are also climbing (albeit more slowly). There are 20 confirmed cases in Uganda and eight in Kenya, and much of central and eastern Africa has tightened its borders. 

The last major Ebola epidemic of this scale began in 2014 and continued through 2016 in West Africa. Over that period, it ultimately killed more than 11,000 people throughout West Africa. Nearly four years later, a smaller outbreak plagued Congo in its North Kivu region, leading to 2,229 deaths before it was contained. 

The 2026 crisis hasn’t yet reached the same levels as the 2014 outbreak, but the speed of its spread is far greater. 

As the chart below shows, around 150 days after the outbreak was declared, 2,599 Ebola cases had been reported in the 2014 West African epidemic. At the same time point this year, the number of cases came to 8,978 and has continued to climb. 

There is no straightforward explanation for this rapid spread

One of the reasons the latest epidemic has been so difficult to slow down can be traced back to the fact that it’s a different viral strain — known as Bundibugyo — than the ones behind previous epidemics.  

The Bundibugyo virus comes from the same family as the Ebola virus that caused the 2014 West Africa and 2018 Congo epidemics, causing the fatal fevers associated with Ebola. But the rare strain is different enough that it doesn’t respond to the same medical solutions. While the Zaire virus led to vaccines and treatment to mitigate the spread, we still don’t have a vaccine for Bundibugyo. 

That doesn’t mean Bundibugyo is entirely novel, though. The 2026 outbreak is the third outbreak related to the Bundibugyo viral strain: In 2007, Uganda faced a minor outbreak, and the eastern province of Congo, which is now the epicenter of the epidemic, saw a handful of cases in 2012. 

Luckily, these two outbreaks were contained in a span of months, largely due to efforts by the country’s Ministry of Health and international aid partnerships with the WHO, the US Agency for International Development (USAID), and international humanitarian organizations such as the UN Children’s Fund and Red Cross.

More than a decade later, these efforts have been substantially curbed by USAID cuts. Tracing requires physical testing capacity: the tests themselves, health workers, and protective equipment for those treating suspected cases. Reduced access to such resources is especially dangerous with strains like Bundibugyo – in the absence of an effective vaccine, tracing the spread of disease and isolating potential disease contacts is especially important. 

But cuts to aid, which covers disease surveillance efforts, made it more difficult to identify this year’s Bundibugyo outbreak until it was too late, creating a “critical four-week detection gap between the onset of symptoms of the presumed index case…and the laboratory confirmation of the outbreak,” according to a WHO situation report from May. 

In August, the United States aimed to close at least some part of the vacuum it left, providing an additional $242 million to its $23 million original pledge in May. 

Aside from international efforts, DRC faces the added layer of internal conflict and humanitarian crisis. The eastern provinces, including Ituri, have experienced years of conflict that have weakened the public infrastructure, including the healthcare system. Last year, nearly 25 percent of Congolese people faced food insecurity, and 4.5 million children were clinically malnourished, creating a population especially vulnerable to disease. The violence has also overwhelmed hospitals and displaced millions, disrupting the public health response, especially as mistrust in health authorities also runs rampant. 

Even as emergency trials for a vaccine are underway, many of the factors that have facilitated the rapid spread may make treatment and outreach still more difficult. It’s hard to predict when the current outbreak will be handled, and how many more people will be affected before it does. 

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

You can’t quite say that President Donald Trump is “turning” on Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, because he never truly seemed to have Zelenskyy’s back. 

There was that time Trump panned Zelenskyy as a “modestly successful comedian.” Or that excruciating meeting where Trump and Vice President JD Vance harangued Zelenskyy for inadequately “thanking” them.

But over the past week, Trump has dropped even the meager niceties he sort of faked before. On Monday, he blamed Zelenskyy for failing to end Russia’s invasion…and suggested it was time for “somebody else” to take over negotiations. 

Three days earlier, he delayed a package of tariffs and other sanctions designed to pressure Russia to end its four-year onslaught in Ukraine. And a week before that, Trump announced — after an apparently chummy phone call with Russian President Vladimir Putin — that the US would reopen its market to Russian diesel, reversing a ban imposed shortly after the invasion. 

Go a little deeper

All this diplomatic whiplash comes as Russia continues to bombard Ukraine with drone and missile strikes, killing hundreds of civilians in September alone and leaving hundreds of thousands of people without power. The first two weeks of October ranked among the deadliest periods for civilians in the country since 2022, according to UN monitors. 

But while those escalating strikes threaten both human lives and long-standing international norms around territory and sovereignty — norms that actually matter quite a lot to American security, long-term — there’s another issue that Trump is more concerned with right now: Ukrainian strikes on Russian oil refineries. 

Those strikes drive up the cost of gas, and those prices are, of course, of profound concern to American voters, who are paying near- record highs for gasoline and diesel fuel (…primarily due to the war in Iran, I am obliged to note). More than any other issue, high living costs threaten to hamstring the GOP in next month’s midterm elections. 

Trump has, perhaps predictably, pursued a Russia policy that he says could ease prices at home. In addition to allowing imports of Russian diesel, Trump has demanded that Ukraine stop targeting Russian oil refineries and ramped up pressure on Zelenskyy to negotiate an end to the war.

According to Ukrainian officials, that campaign has lately involved disruptions to both intelligence-sharing and the US-based satellite internet service Ukraine uses to intercept Russian attacks. (On Tuesday afternoon, Zelenskyy said intel sharing — if not satellite service — had been restored again.) 

In either case, it will likely take more than arm-twisting to make the whole situation go away for good. As Vox’s Josh Keating laid out earlier this year, the US does have quite a lot of leverage over Ukraine — and Trump could very well pressure Zelenskyy to accept a peace deal with no real assurance that Russia won’t just invade again. 

But we’ve all seen this movie before, as recently as 2014: Without credible guarantees, Putin could catch his breath, regroup, and return to Ukraine in a few months or years to take even more land. 

The real, long-term threat there is that a stronger Russia would be even better positioned to menace the rest of Europe. And America’s power could suffer as its allies look elsewhere for less fair-weather friends. 

But uh…diesel might be a bit cheaper? Thank God for small mercies, I guess. 

One link for later

➨ May we suggest a truly miserable read? My colleague Marina Bolotnikova calls The Opposite of Happiness: How Bad Feelings Make and Break Us “a bracing, useful, and even comforting lens on what it means to be alive.” The recent book, by the noted economist George Loewenstein, examines the (necessary!) role of negative emotions in our lives and civilization…and suggests, albeit indirectly, some paths for making peace with them. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that Turkey is the world capital of hair transplants? There are at least 500 clinics for that purpose in Istanbul alone, beloved by medical tourists. 
• Today’s trivia: What’s the currency of Poland? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Yesterday we asked you for the mass-market beer named after a Dutch river. That would be Amstel. The city of Amsterdam is also named for a dam on the same river.

One of the last decade’s most consequential changes to how the Supreme Court operates is the growth of the so-called shadow docket — a process that allows the justices to decide cases unusually quickly, and often without full briefing or oral argument.

Historically, the Court would typically allow contentious legal issues to percolate in the lower courts for months or even years before the justices agreed to decide one of those issues. Then they’d spend months reading briefs, hearing arguments, and debating the case amongst themselves before they finally issued an opinion. This slow process existed because the Supreme Court is the final word on many legal questions — the Court can even override Congress if it claims a law is unconstitutional — and so it should be cautious before it hands down a decision that cannot easily be displaced.

A new case, which recently arrived on the Court’s shadow docket, embodies all the reasons why America’s highest Court should act carefully and slowly. K.M.K. v. Washington Interscholastic Activities Association involves a highly contentious issue — the plaintiffs in the case effectively want the Supreme Court to bar transgender women from women’s sports teams at high schools and universities, even in states that support trans inclusion in sports.

It also involves an appalling sexual assault allegation. One of the plaintiffs in the case is a high school women’s team wrestler who is identified only by her initials because she is a minor. She claims that one of her wrestling opponents, who is transgender, “forcefully” penetrated the plaintiff’s vagina with her fingers during a match.

As a memo from the local prosecutor’s office points out, if these allegations are true then K.M.K. is the victim of a very serious crime — rape in the third degree. The prosecutor’s office, however, decided not to prosecute because it concluded that it could not prove that a sex crime was committed beyond a reasonable doubt. Among other things, prosecutors spoke to the referee who officiated the match, and he said that “nothing stood out to him during the match” and that “after watching the video of the match, he could not say that the suspect’s hand placement was ‘anything out of the ordinary.’”

The school district, meanwhile, says that it has reviewed video of the match, interviewed both competitors, and that its investigation into the allegation is “still ongoing.”

K.M.K., in other words, is exactly the sort of case that the justices should step away from, sending it back down to the lower courts to gather more information and to fully think through the difficult legal issues presented by the case. Setting aside the horrifying allegations against her one-time opponent, K.M.K.’s lawyers — most of whom work for a Christian right law firm, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF) — make novel legal arguments that ask the Court to make broad pronouncements that go far beyond its previous precedents. 

One of their arguments, if taken seriously by the justices, could potentially make it impossible for any school athletes, whether cis or trans, to participate in competitive sports of any kind.

There is a very real risk, in other words, that the Supreme Court will, if it moves too quickly in this case, harm millions of school athletes throughout the country. The factual question of whether a particular wrestler committed a crime is separate from the legal question of whether federal law strips states of their authority over trans participation in women’s sports. And this legal question deserves more deliberation than the Court can give it if it decides this case on the shadow docket.

So what are the actual legal issues in K.M.K.?

In West Virginia v. B.P.J. (2026), the Supreme Court warned that judges should not be given the power to decide which athletes may compete on a women’s sports team. “The legislatures and the schools are better equipped — and under the Constitution, are the more appropriate entities,” Justice Brett Kavanaugh wrote for his Court, “to assess the competing medical and scientific considerations and draw appropriate lines.”

B.P.J., of course, was a loss for transgender rights. The Court rejected a constitutional challenge to state laws that forbid trans women from playing on school sports teams within that state. But the legal question in B.P.J. was whether laws barring trans women from women’s sports are allowed — a question that the Court’s Republican majority answered in the affirmative. A victory for the plaintiffs in K.M.K., by contrast, would likely establish that no state may permit trans women to compete on women’s sports teams, regardless of what the people of that state want.

This Court is often skeptical of claims by trans rights advocates, and it almost always resolves disputes between cultural liberals and religious conservatives in favor of the religious right. That said, this Court has thus far respected states’ rights on another contentious issue that is a high priority for the religious right: abortion. Although the Court’s Republican majority overruled Roe v. Wade and eliminated the constitutional right to an abortion, it has rejected some attempts to restrict abortion in blue states — including by repeatedly ruling against litigants who seek to ban the abortion medication mifepristone.

So it is, at least, possible that this Court will follow a similar path in K.M.K. and conclude that the question of which team trans women should play on should be answered by the states and not the Supreme Court.

Broadly speaking, ADF raises two legal arguments against Washington state’s policy allowing trans women to play on women’s sports teams. It claims that Title IX, a federal law that bars “sex” discrimination by most schools, implicitly requires those schools to have sports teams that only cisgender women may play on. It also claims that the Court’s recent decision in Mirabelli v. Bonta (2026), which requires public schools to out trans students to their parents even if the students wish to keep their gender identity secret, also requires those schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports.

There’s no reason for the Supreme Court to decide either of these questions now, however. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in Lux v. Rodrigues (2010), when a party that lost in the lower courts seeks an injunction from a Supreme Court justice before their case is fully litigated in those lower courts, they must demonstrate that “the legal rights at issue are ‘indisputably clear.’” This rule, like many old rules disfavoring shadow docket decisions, exists to prevent the justices from rushing into a decision that may later prove unwise.

There is no plausible argument that Title IX “indisputably” bars trans women from women’s sports. That’s because, just a few months ago in B.P.J., the Court held that it was not deciding the question of “whether, under Title IX and the Equal Protection Clause, schools may allow biological males who identify as female to participate on girls’ and women’s sports teams.” So that’s a recent Supreme Court precedent holding that the answer to this legal question remains open.

Mirabelli, meanwhile, is an unusually thinly reasoned decision. The Court’s Republican majority held that schools must out trans students because of a judicially created doctrine saying that parents have “primary authority with respect to ‘the upbringing and education of children.’” But the Court’s analysis of this issue was just a single paragraph long, it relied on the most malleable doctrine in all of US constitutional law, and it had nothing to say about sports. 

Moreover, as the school district points out in its brief, the Court has never held that a parent’s right to direct the upbringing of their child includes a right to dictate which rules will be used by school sports teams. If such a right existed, a parent might insist that a school bar players of a particular race. Or they might demand that their child be allowed to play football without being tackled.

Competitive team sports simply cannot exist if one player’s mother is allowed to demand changes to the rules that neither the league nor the other players support.

In any event, at this stage in the litigation it should be enough for the Court to say that the unique right claimed by K.M.K.’s mother — the right to dictate which rules a multischool competitive sports league will use — is not “indisputably clear” under current law. 

What should happen when the Court eventually decides whether blue states may allow trans women to play on women’s teams?

It is, to borrow from Lux, indisputably clear that the Court should not give the K.M.K. plaintiffs the sweeping policy change that they seek in a shadow docket ruling. But the justices cannot avoid, forever, the question of whether federal law forbids trans women from playing on women’s teams. So how should they resolve this question when it is more properly presented to them?

Let’s dispose of the plaintiffs’ Mirabelli argument first. While the Court has held that parents have some right to direct the education of their children, prior to Mirabelli, this right was construed narrowly. One older case held that states may not forbid parents from sending their children to private schools. Another held that the government may not bar teachers at these schools from teaching the German language.

Prior to the Court’s barely explained decision in Mirabelli, however, the Court had never held that parents may dictate how public schools operate, and the school district’s brief in K.M.K. cites several court decisions warning against giving parents too much authority over public schools. (The Court did hold, in Mahmoud v. Taylor (2025), that parents who object to a school’s curriculum on religious grounds may opt their children out of certain lessons. But the K.M.K. plaintiffs do not raise a religious objection.) As the Supreme Court said in Prince v. Massachusetts (1944), states may “restrict the parent’s control by requiring school attendance, regulating or prohibiting the child’s labor and in many other ways.” 

It’s clear from Mirabelli that the Court’s Republicans do not share this caution about judicial control over public schools. But, because Mirabelli was so thinly reasoned, it’s also impossible for outside observers to determine why these justices want an unprecedented amount of control over public schooling, or whether they have good reasons for asserting this new power.

I will simply reiterate the school district’s objection that, once the Supreme Court opens the door to parents dictating which rules will be used in school sporting competitions, the lawsuits will not end with parents seeking to kick trans women out of women’s sports. The next parent may object to their child wrestling Black people. Or they may demand that their child be given protective gear that gives them a competitive advantage. Some parents may also demand rules changes that conflict with changes demanded by other parents. And there is no principled way to distinguish these requests from a request to exclude trans women.

There are myriad problems, meanwhile, with the K.M.K. plaintiffs’ Title IX argument. That statute provides that schools that receive “Federal financial assistance” may not exclude individuals from “any education program” on “the basis of sex.” This statute has long been read to require equal treatment of men’s and women’s sports by schools that receive federal funds.

But, as the school district argues in its brief, Washington schools do not discriminate on the basis of “sex” — which the Court has defined to mean sex assigned at birth in this context. Instead, they classify athletes on the basis of gender identity. There is one team for all people who identify as male, whether trans or cis, and another team for all people who identify as female. Social conservatives may object to this arrangement, but it does not classify students based on their sex assigned at birth at all.

The K.M.K. plaintiffs’ argument is also undermined by federal regulations implementing Title IX. Those regulations provide that schools generally should not separate women and men in sports, but that they “may operate or sponsor separate teams for members of each sex where selection for such teams is based upon competitive skill or the activity involved is a contact sport.” It is quite a stretch to read regulations saying that schools “may” have sex-segregated teams to say that schools must ensure that their teams are strictly sex segregated.

Finally, recall that Title IX only applies to schools that accept federal funding — schools have the option of rejecting Title IX’s requirements if they also forego federal grants. This matters because, as the Court recently held in Landor v. Louisiana Department of Corrections (2026), “Congress must clearly and unambiguously alert a grant recipient to any condition on federal funds.”

Thus, if there is any ambiguity about whether Title IX requires schools to exclude trans women from women’s sports, that ambiguity must be resolved against imposing any requirements on public schools. Title IX may only be read to ban trans women from women’s sports if it “clearly and unambiguously” does so.

Again, there’s no reason for the justices to resolve either of these questions because, at this early stage in the litigation, the Supreme Court should simply decline to decide K.M.K. because the plaintiffs’ legal rights are not “indisputably clear.” But this Court is often impatient, especially in cases involving culture war issues. Mirabelli was also a shadow docket case, but that didn’t stop the Court’s Republicans from inventing a new legal rule compelling teachers to out their trans students.

There’s a serious risk, in other words, that this Court will rush to decide K.M.K. before it fully considers the legal arguments on either side, or even learns whether the genuinely shocking allegations raised by the plaintiffs have merit.

Justice Samuel Alito’s new book, So Ordered: An Originalist’s View of the Constitution, the Court, and Our Country, isn’t going to set the world on fire with its bold new ideas. It’s mostly a collection of Alito’s old speeches. 

But if the book treads familiar ground, the reception to it among writers who share Alito’s broad alignment with the political right is quite surprising. Three recent reviews of Alito’s new book —  all by right-leaning authors — sound a lot like the longtime liberal criticisms of Alito.

All three of these reviews accuse Alito of engaging in results-oriented decision-making — meaning that he often seems to start with the outcome that he prefers, and then comes up with a rationale to justify that outcome. This, they argue, is at odds with Alito’s fairly recent decision to label himself an “originalist,” an approach to judging that’s long been sold as a way to keep judges from mistaking “their own predilections for the law.”

Originalism, for the uninitiated, is the idea that the only legitimate way to interpret the Constitution is to ask what its words meant at the time it was ratified. It’s more than just a fashionable idea among many Republican lawyers and judges. Many legal conservatives view originalism as a central part of their professional identity, and powerful conservative organizations like the Federalist Society have long evangelized originalism as the one true way to interpret the Constitution.

Yet, a consistent theme in the critical reviews of So Ordered is that Alito’s actual approach to judging cannot be squared with his decision to label himself an “originalist” in the book’s title. As Harvard law professor Jack Goldsmith, a conservative who has written critically about originalism in the past, writes in his review of the book: “Alito’s embrace of the originalist label is also likely to come as a surprise to people on the left and the right.”

Goldsmith, who led the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel during the second Bush administration, writes in his review of the book that early proponents of originalism, including Scalia, often sold it as a more restrained alternative to “a liberal conception of judging called ‘living constitutionalism.’” Goldsmith says that approach, which was ascendant among liberals several decades ago but has since fallen out of favor, read the Constitution as an adaptable document whose meaning could evolve to deal with “current needs.” 

Conservatives needed an intellectually consistent way to put the brakes on that impulse, and originalism was their answer. By treating the Constitution as an inflexible charter whose meaning was fixed at some distant point in the past, Scalia and his fellow travelers hoped to “limit or reverse the progressive transformation of American society set in motion by Supreme Court decisions that had expanded criminal-defense rights, ended prayer in public school, recognized the rights to contraception and abortion, strengthened voting equality, and supported affirmative action and busing.”

Now that movement conservatives control the Supreme Court, however, it’s less clear whether originalism is still useful to conservatism. As Jason Willick, a conservative Washington Post columnist, writes in his review of Alito’s book, “originalism can get in the way of the right’s ambitions.” Sometimes, an honest application of originalism produces liberal results.

Willick interprets Alito’s book as an attempt to “keep the marriage” between conservatives and originalism together. But if that’s true, it is an open marriage. Alito is happy to make originalist arguments when they suit his preferred outcomes. But his greatest value to conservative Republicans is often that he is willing to write non-originalist opinions that reach the result his team desires, but that a more principled originalist would view as beyond the pale.

On the surface, the fact that conservative intellectuals are starting to notice, and criticize, Alito’s weak commitment to one of the conservative legal movement’s core ideas might indicate that a schism is forming between committed originalists and more flexible partisans like Alito. Perhaps the conservative legal movement is becoming a victim of its own success?

In So Ordered, Alito seems to be suggesting the opposite: He’s offering proof that a judge can still identify as an out and proud originalist, even if they enjoy frequent flings with the right-wing version of “living constitutionalism.” 

More broadly, if Democrats hope that the growing tension between Republican judges’ preferred methodology and their ability to reach reliably conservative results will lead to more liberal outcomes, they should expect to be disappointed. Alito, despite his apostasy, is still one of the most celebrated figures in the Federalist Society, the powerful conservative bar association that has long evangelized originalism as the one true way to interpret the Constitution. 

What is Alito’s actual approach to judging?

So Ordered offers a simple way for judges whose originalist and conservative identities are in tension to resolve that tension: They can continue to self-identify as “originalists,” while still reaching whatever result they want in the most important cases.

Alito hasn’t always described himself as an originalist. In fact, at times he’s openly mocked originalism. In a 2011 argument about how the First Amendment applies to violent video games, Alito responded to an originalist question from Justice Antonin Scalia by quipping, “I think what Justice Scalia wants to know is what James Madison thought about video games. Did he enjoy them?” 

In the past, Alito has, at some points, called himself a “practical originalist,” and at other times expressed doubt about that self-description.

In their reviews, both Goldsmith and Willick highlight Alito’s statement that originalism can only survive as “anything other than a minor academic curiosity” if it is “widely viewed as generally producing good results.” But, as Willick notes, this raises an important question: “Viewed as producing good results by whom?”

The answer to this question is that the justice wants to reach results that he personally, as well as other members of the Republican Party’s right flank, view as good. That, as Willick lays out, entails cracking down on broad exercises of executive power during the Obama administration, then letting those reins go slack during Donald Trump’s presidencies. 

The actual approach to judging Alito describes in So Ordered, the libertarian author Damon Root writes, sounds “much more like the results-oriented ‘living constitutionalism’ that originalists are supposed to oppose.”

Goldsmith, Willick and Root are hardly the only right-leaning thinkers to notice Alito’s thin commitment to originalism. There is also Alito’s closest ideological ally on the Court, Justice Clarence Thomas.

The occasion for Thomas’s criticism was Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (“CFPB”) v. Community Financial Services (2024), a bizarre lawsuit where a lower federal court claimed that an entire federal agency, the CFPB, violated a provision of the Constitution that had literally never been cited by any other court in all of US history to strike down a federal law. 

That provision says that the Treasury may not pay money unless Congress allows that spending through “Appropriations made by law.” As Thomas explained in the Court’s opinion in CFPB, this constitutional provision merely establishes that Congress must identify a “specified source of public money” that an agency may draw upon when it funds that agency. Because the CFPB cleared this low bar, it is constitutional.

Alito’s dissent, meanwhile, did not really make a legal argument against the CFPB. Instead, he spent the bulk of his dissent discussing centuries-old conflicts between England’s Parliament and its king, which eventually inspired the drafters of the Constitution to place appropriations in Congress’s hands. Yet, as Thomas writes, Alito “never connects its summary of history back to the word ‘Appropriations.’” Alito simply listed a bunch of historical facts that are tangentially related to the legal question before his Court, then leapt to the conclusion that the CFPB is unconstitutional.

Alito, in other words, did not actually practice originalism when he wrote this dissent. As Alito concedes in So Ordered, originalism isn’t simply the idea that judges should rely on historical sources when deciding cases. It is, in Alito’s own words, “the theory that constitutional provisions should be understood to mean what the public would have taken them to mean when they were adopted.” Originalists, in other words, are supposed to use history to determine what the words of the Constitution mean, not to vomit historical anecdotes onto a page before reaching an irrelevant legal conclusion.

So Alito’s CFPB dissent is not originalist, but it is entirely consistent with the results-oriented approach to judging that even his conservative critics have begun to notice. One of Alito’s major projects as a justice appears to be attempting to dismantle anything accomplished by President Barack Obama. The CFPB was created by the financial reform legislation that Obama signed in 2010. Alito has also tried three times to kill Obama’s signature legislative accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act.

Yet, as Goldsmith writes in his review of So Ordered, Alito “has supported the Trump administration in every second-term case of importance, including with dissents in every major Trump loss.”

Beyond his unapologetic partisanship, Alito is, as law professor Neil Siegel wrote in a 2017 review of the justice’s career, “the primary judicial voice of the many millions of Americans who appear to be losing the culture wars.”

In So Ordered, for example, Alito repeatedly brings up an argument against same-sex marriage that he first raised in his dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges (2015), the Court’s landmark marriage equality decision. Same-sex marriage should remain illegal, Alito claims, because its legalization “will be used to vilify Americans who are unwilling to assent to the new orthodoxy.” Alito feared that, once gay equality became enshrined in the law, Americans who reject that equality “risk being labeled as bigots.”

But this isn’t even a legal argument, much less an originalist one. The First Amendment’s free speech clause protects the right to call someone a bigot, even if Alito believes that the charge is unjustified. And the First Amendment’s guarantee that everyone may freely exercise their religion allows believers in liberal faiths to teach others that God abhors discrimination. The Constitution has never been understood to deny civil rights to a group of people because someone might speak disparagingly about individuals who oppose that right. If it did, constitutional rights could not exist.

All of which is a long way of saying that Alito’s conservative critics are right to label him a results-oriented judge. He has no real commitment to a principled theory of interpretation like originalism. His approach to individual cases often turns on whether the defendant is a Democrat or a Republican. And many of his opinions do not so much make legal arguments as, to borrow the words of Lionel Trilling, rely on “irritable mental gestures which seek to resemble ideas.”

Originalists need Alito more than Alito needs originalism

Originalism is a powerful tool in the hands of judges who wish to radically change how the Constitution is understood. In the American legal system, courts typically follow a principle known as stare decisis — Latin for “to stand by things decided” — which holds that judges should almost always follow the legal rules laid down by previous decisions, even if a judge does not like how that earlier case was decided.

Originalism, by contrast, posits that a judicial decision’s legitimacy flows, not from its alignment with prior precedents, but from the judge’s understanding of how the words of the Constitution were originally understood. This allows judges who wish to toss out longstanding legal rules to wrap their opinions in the trappings of America’s founding, and to paint judges who honor stare decisis as betrayers of the Constitution’s true meaning.

Historically, originalism has been used by liberals and conservatives alike to justify dismantling legal rules they despised. Franklin D. Roosevelt-appointed Justice Hugo Black, for example, wielded originalist arguments to attack precedents that undercut the New Deal, or that otherwise interfered with progressive economic legislation.

Similarly, conservatives like Alito use originalist rhetoric to undermine liberal precedents that they abhor. Alito’s opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (2022), which abolished the constitutional right to an abortion, is chock-full of originalist arguments that “until the latter part of the 20th century, such a right was entirely unknown in American law.”

But one problem with the Constitution’s early history, at least if you are a results-driven judge, is that it does not map perfectly onto anyone’s modern-day political beliefs. While originalism sometimes gives judges strong arguments that they can use to undermine previous Supreme Court decisions, a results-oriented judge like Alito will inevitably want to reach outcomes that originalist arguments cannot support.

Consider, for example, affirmative action. There is no plausible originalist argument against it. The same Congress that drafted the 14th Amendment, which the Court’s Republican majority used in 2023 to abolish race-conscious admissions programs at most universities, also enacted numerous affirmative action programs — ranging from the 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act to a much smaller program providing money “for the relief of freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia.”

But the dearth of originalist arguments against affirmative action has not stopped this Court from implementing its preferred racial policies. As Goldsmith notes, only three members of the current Court — Thomas, plus Justices Neil Gorsuch and Amy Coney Barrett — “regularly try to practice originalism, and they do so very unevenly.” So, when the Republican justices wish to reach a result that cannot be justified by originalist arguments, the opinion is typically authored by one of the Court’s three non-originalist Republicans.

Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the decision ending affirmative action on college and university campuses, was authored by Chief Justice John Roberts — who declared during his 2005 confirmation hearing that “I do not have an overarching judicial philosophy that I bring to every case.” The Court’s more recent decision in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), which applied the Republican justices’ skepticism of race-conscious laws to voting rights, was authored by Alito.

Republicans, in other words, would be in rough shape if they actually filled the Supreme Court with principled originalists. The conservative legal project depends on flexible, results-focused justices like Alito, who will reach ideologically correct conclusions even when originalism calls for a more liberal result, and who will sign their name to opinions that may make their originalist colleagues quietly cringe.

Does that mean that originalist rhetoric will fade in Republican legal circles? It’s certainly possible. In So Ordered, Alito gives a mixed review of the work of Adrian Vermeule, a Catholic conservative law professor at Harvard who argues that legal conservatives should abandon originalism altogether because it constrains their ability to impose their own vision of the “common good.”

Trump, meanwhile, has had a falling out with the Federalist Society. While the Federalist Society successfully pushed Trump to appoint outspoken proponents of originalism to the bench during his first term, many of his second-term nominees’ primary qualification is their personal loyalty to Trump. At least three of his former criminal defense lawyers are now US Court of Appeals judges.

At the same time, some members of the Court’s Democratic minority appear to be taking a page from Justice Black’s playbook. Liberals who disagree with the current Court’s precedents will often find that constitutional history supports their preferred outcomes. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in particular, often wields originalist arguments to disparage her Republican colleagues’ approach to race.

So it’s certainly possible to imagine a future where Republicans abandon originalism in favor of Trump’s personalism or Vermeule’s unapologetically results-driven approach. Democrats, meanwhile, could become outspoken originalists because originalism gives them a vocabulary they can use to argue against applying stare decisis to the Roberts Court’s most right-wing decisions.

But this future is not inevitable. The most important lesson taught by Alito’s new book is that judges do not need to hold any principled legal views in order to identify as an “originalist.” Regardless of how partisan your rulings are, calling yourself an originalist is enough.

Kyla Scanlon, New York Times bestselling author and economic commentator, and Vox today announced the launch of Best of Luck, a new weekly video interview podcast premiering October 27. Each week, Scanlon will sit down with guests who have something to teach us about how to build a meaningful career in this uncertain moment, from economists to journalists, farmers to comedians. They’ll share their most instructive detours, setbacks, and successes, and Scanlon will tie each story back to the economy that we’re all living in, with takeaways for anyone at any stage of their working life.

“So much of the advice we are given about building a career still comes from an economy that doesn’t really exist anymore,” Scanlon said. “There is no one right way to build a career, especially now. The goal of this show is to ask guests how they actually did it, across the best parts, the worst parts, and the parts that were lucky. Then we put it to work! Every guest sits for a mock job interview and does an advice autopsy, and we talk about how you build your own luck. Hearing how other people found their path can help all of us make better decisions about our own.”

Named to the Time 100’s Creators list and Barron’s 100 Most Influential Women in Finance, Scanlon has emerged as one of the most distinct voices making economics make sense for everyone, especially a new generation. Known for breaking down complex economic ideas and connecting them to the realities of everyday life, she coined the term “vibecession” to describe the disconnect between economic data and how people actually feel about the economy. She is the author of the New York Times bestseller In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work, a CNN contributor and analyst, and a monthly New York Times Opinion contributor.

“At Vox, we have long been fans of Kyla’s work — her approach to explaining the economy in an accessible, approachable way really personifies Vox’s explanatory approach,” said Swati Sharma, editor-in-chief and publisher at Vox. “With this new show, we’re thrilled for her to help our audience understand how to navigate work and careers in this economy so they can live more meaningful lives.”

“Kyla has a gift for translating the big, confusing picture of our economy into what it means for each of us,” said Lillian Xu, vice president of podcast business at Vox Media. “With Best of Luck, she’s doing the same for a job market that keeps changing the rules, in conversations with experts that are practical and honest about how careers really unfold today. We’re so excited to partner with her to help more people figure out what’s next.”

The trailer for Best of Luck is out today, with the first episode coming on October 27 and new episodes following weekly on Tuesdays.

At Vox, Best of Luck joins a stable of popular podcasts including Today, Explained, The Gray Area, and America, Actually. Vox’s shows are part of the Vox Media Podcast Network, one of the largest US podcast publishers and home to some of the most influential talent across categories, including journalist Kara Swisher and entrepreneur Scott Galloway (hosts of Pivot), tennis champion Maria Sharapova (host of Pretty Tough), former Manhattan US Attorney Preet Bharara (host of Stay Tuned), basketball legend Sue Bird (host of Bird’s Eye View), and more. Vox Media will oversee production, sales, marketing, and distribution for Best of Luck, which joins a dynamic slate of shows that shape conversations across business, culture, and beyond. 

Follow Best of Luck on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and more.

About Kyla Scanlon

Kyla Scanlon is the founder of Kyla Labs. She writes about money, markets, and the systems that shape them for an audience of over 1 million people across TikTok, Instagram, Substack, and YouTube, covering the pressing issues of the day — including tariffs, artificial intelligence, energy markets, and why the traditional rungs of the economic ladder have gotten harder to climb. Her debut book, In This Economy? How Money & Markets Really Work, was a New York Times bestseller and used hand-drawn diagrams to make the machinery of the economy clear. In her newsletter, she coined the term “vibecession” to describe the disconnect between strong economic data and negative public sentiment — a concept since referenced by Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and taken up in research by former CEA chair Jared Bernstein.

Raised in Kentucky, Scanlon studied finance, economics, and data analytics at Western Kentucky University. She started out trading options and selling cars, where she first saw how inaccessible finance had become to the people it affected most. She began making whiteboard videos and comedy skits to decode markets and economic trends for everyday audiences (and often dressed up as Jerome Powell). She writes monthly for New York Times Opinion, has a video partnership with Foreign Policy, and is a contributor and analyst at CNN. She is also a senior fellow at the Vanderbilt Policy Accelerator and a research fellow at the American Institute for Boys and Men. Scanlon was named to Barron’s 100 Most Influential Women in US Finance and the Time 100 Creators list, and has appeared on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Ezra Klein Show. At work on her second book, she lives in the mountains with her dog, Piglet.

About Vox

Vox was launched in 2014 to address the disconnect between the widely reported facts of the day and a true understanding of why something happened. It developed a widely imitated explainer format that delivers understanding across digital platforms, newsletters, a YouTube channel with nearly 13 million subscribers, and a stable of podcasts. Under the leadership of Editor-in-Chief Swati Sharma, Vox has grown a membership programs with tens of thousands of paying subscribers.

About the Vox Media Podcast Network 

The Vox Media Podcast Network is one of the largest US podcast publishers and home to some of the most popular and influential shows. Reaching a monthly audience of tens of millions across audio, video, and social platforms, its podcasts spark conversations, frame issues, and define the popular zeitgeist across politics, technology, business, sports, entertainment, and more. Learn more at podcasts.voxmedia.com.

If egg prices surge this winter, one of the main drivers will likely be H5N1, or bird flu.

Since 2022, it’s decimated the US poultry industry, resulting in the deaths of over 160 million egg-laying hens.  

And when there are fewer hens, there are fewer eggs, which leads to shortages and price hikes. This happened in early 2023 when avian flu was circulating: Egg prices increased by 65 percent compared to a few months prior, and in 2025, it happened again, reaching a national average of more than $6 per dozen. (There’s also some evidence, per a Justice Department investigation, that suggests major egg companies may have colluded to raise prices, too.)

We have the tools to slow the spread of highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) without such high mortality, though; the United States has several effective bird flu vaccines, and egg (and turkey) producers want to use them on their birds.

Last year, it seemed like they soon might be able to. In early 2025, the Trump administration announced that it would begin formulating a plan for potential vaccination by engaging with trade partners, state veterinarians, farmers, and other stakeholders. But according to reporting in Politico last week, that plan is now stalled. Why? Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his anti-vaccine agenda appear partly to blame.

US Department of Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins “pulled back on an internal USDA strategy for vaccinating poultry and egg-laying hens,” according to Politico, because she was “concerned about whether it would clash with [RFK Jr.’s] anti-vaccine views.” The pause, according to the story, “went against the counsel of expert agency staff.”

The USDA didn’t respond to detailed questions for this story. “USDA has been fully committed to providing the most robust response to battling HPAI,” a spokesperson wrote over email. 

Kennedy oversees the Food and Drug Administration, which has some jurisdiction over what happens on farms, though the USDA manages disease outbreaks. But he and his “Make America Healthy Again” movement apparently have enough political influence to sway how the agriculture department manages this multiyear outbreak — the largest in US history. It is risky for the birds, and consumers, and could mean that we’re going to continue to fight this devastating disease without perhaps the most effective tool to slow it down. 

Why we don’t vaccinate poultry birds

Just as influenza circulates in humans, H5N1 is also largely seasonal; around this time of year as ducks and geese migrate south for the winter, they shed the virus near farms. And once it infects one bird in a packed poultry barn, it quickly tears through the flock. 

When birds die from the bird flu, it’s an excruciating death. However, most birds don’t die from the disease itself but rather from efforts to stop its spread. Per federal regulations, as soon as H5N1 is detected in a barn, poultry producers must cull every bird, and that culling is brutal. The predominant method entails producers sealing off the vents, which causes temperatures to rise and slowly subject the birds to death via heatstroke.

Many turkey and egg producers do want to vaccinate their birds (tens of millions of turkeys have also died due to H5N1 and resulting culling since 2022), and there are several vaccines that the USDA has deemed safe and effective. But the agency won’t allow egg and turkey producers to use them because doing so could hurt the chicken meat industry.

Chickens raised for meat, known as broiler chickens, are much less likely to become infected with the virus, and the US industry exports 13.9 percent of what it produces, valued at $6.2 billion last year. And as I wrote last year:

Most of the countries that import American chicken meat would pause those imports if any farmed birds in the US are vaccinated, even if no chickens raised for meat are vaccinated. The reason behind these blanket bans stems from importing countries’ concerns around the so-called “DIVA” problem, which is short for “differentiating infected from vaccinated animals.” It represents the challenge of identifying whether a poultry bird is infected with bird flu or simply has avian influenza antibodies from vaccination.

In other words, the chicken meat industry has little to gain from vaccination and a lot to lose. It’s also bigger and more politically powerful than the turkey and egg sectors (two of the largest chicken meat companies — Pilgrim’s Pride and Mountaire — happen to be major Trump donors). 

Experts say that these trade problems can be solved by increasing disease surveillance and testing. In 2023, French duck farmers began vaccinating birds against H5N1. The US and Canada restricted imports for over a year, but partially lifted the restrictions after they were assured they didn’t pose a biosecurity risk. 

Now, on top of resistance from the chicken meat industry, there’s Kennedy’s anti-vaccine influence. 

I asked Carol Cardona, a professor at the University of Minnesota’s College of Veterinary Medicine and a proponent of vaccinating poultry birds, what she made of the Trump administration’s about-face on its vaccine plan.

She quoted the historian John Barry: “When you mix politics and science, you get politics.”

The US is losing the war on bird flu, and vaccines could help

Given the chicken meat industry’s outsized influence on the vaccination debate, Kennedy’s position may not exert the largest push here. But it certainly hasn’t helped speed the rollout of vaccines, adding one more barrier to what many poultry veterinarians and infectious disease experts say is common sense. 

HHS didn’t respond to a list of questions for this story about Kennedy’s opposition to vaccinating poultry birds. “Decisions about vaccine development and deployment must be guided by rigorous science, including evidence of safety, effectiveness against circulating strains, and the implications for animal and human health,” a spokesperson wrote, though didn’t outline any concerns over safety or effectiveness and didn’t respond to follow-up questions.

“With migratory bird season here, our goals and policy have not changed: detecting, controlling, and containing HPAI in consultation with partners across the country continues each day,” a USDA spokesperson wrote to Vox. 

The control and containment largely amounts to culling birds when H5N1 is detected on farms, and paying farms to improve their biosecurity by compensating them for things like repairs, rodent control, handwashing stations, and wild bird repellents. 

But according to Cardona, this just isn’t working. “When biosecurity breaks over and over and over again, you have to say to yourself, there’s something wrong with the system,” Cardona told me. She said a vaccination plan should focus on the most valuable and vulnerable species — egg-laying hens and turkeys used for breeding — and in the northern half of the US, where infection rates are much higher. 

With vaccination, Cardona said, “we reduce the amount of virus in the environment, and so by doing that, we reduce the number of other species that get infected. We simply reduce, reduce, reduce.”

Vaccination wouldn’t be cheap, and it could affect chicken meat exports. But chicken meat producers are “not the only stakeholders,” Cardona said, adding that regulators ought to look at the full damage that the bird flu has wrought.

There’s the rise in cost to consumers who buy eggs, and the billions of taxpayer dollars spent to compensate farmers for the culled birds. Then there’s the human toll: 72 people in the US have contracted the virus since 2024, and nearly all were poultry and dairy workers; two died. (While the odds remain low, many scientists also fear bird flu could spark the next human pandemic.) 

For decades, bird flu mostly just infected birds. But the toll on wildlife since 2021 has been immense, including mass die-offs of sea lions in Peru and seal pups on Antarctic islands. In 2024, the virus was first detected in dairy cattle and has now affected nearly 1,200 herds; one study of an Ohio dairy found that each infected cow cost the farmer about $950 in lost profits. 

Finally, there’s the moral cost of slowly, painfully killing hundreds of millions of egg-laying hens and turkeys.

But as Cardona pointed out, bird flu, like politics, is seasonal. The Biden administration, arguably, slow-walked vaccine development and deployment until the Trump administration inherited the issue. 

If egg prices do rise this winter, it likely won’t happen until well after midterms, meaning neither party will pay much of a political price for higher food costs. The costs of bird flu, instead, will be paid by consumers, vulnerable farmworkers, and most of all, the birds themselves.

This past January, when the New York Times asked President Donald Trump about concerns he was blatantly intermingling his family’s business interests with the presidency, he had a pithy response. During his first term, Trump said, he learned that “nobody cared.”

But after a seemingly endless set of headlines about influence-peddling and profiteering involving Trump or people close to him, voters care now.

A Fox News poll asked voters how concerned they were about more than a dozen issues, and “corruption in government” ranked at the very top. In Gallup polling, the amount of respondents saying they thought government corruption was widespread reached 89 percent — a record high. Almost two-thirds of Americans believe Trump is using the presidency for personal profit, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll, including a substantial minority of Republicans.

Even Trump seems a bit more worried than usual. Earlier this month, he distanced himself from two of his top political advisers’ foreign consulting work and threatened to fire them if it presents a conflict. Vice President JD Vance was questioned in a CBS town hall that aired Saturday about whether he’d witnessed any potential corruption in the White House (he said he hadn’t).

Accordingly, corruption has emerged as one of the key themes in Democrats’ closing midterm message, with candidates of all kinds hammering it in ads, debates, and interviews. And party strategists have landed on a particular argument about it: They want candidates to link it to Democrats’ message about voters’ other top concern, affordability. 

That is, things aren’t just expensive because of government incompetence — it’s actually powerful interests conspiring to rip you off with the help of politicians compromised by campaign donors and personal conflicts.

Georgia Sen. Jon Ossoff has been hammering this theme all year, listing eye-popping improprieties among what he calls the “Mar-a-Lago Mafia,” while also arguing that pharmaceutical companies and corporate landlords are corruptly driving up your prices. Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, too, regularly argues that “we have an affordability crisis because we have a corruption crisis.” In Kentucky’s Sixth District, House candidate Zach Dembo put out a reform plan while warning “corruption has cost our families, driven up our prices and enriched politicians more interested in their own bottom lines than us.”

Indeed, the Washington Post and Politico report that candidates across the country are being egged on by Democratic messaging firms urging them to make that link. One memo from the Democratic group Senate Majority PAC recommended arguing that corruption “drives up the price of everyday goods: gas, groceries, utilities, housing.” Republican strategists have also noticed voters making a connection between corruption and prices in battlegrounds like Ohio, according to CNN, suggesting their efforts may be breaking through.

“Voters care about corruption right now because it explains why their lives keep getting more expensive while the Republicans are creating a separate class of people who act as if the rules don’t apply to them,” Lauren French, a spokesperson for Senate Majority PAC, told me.

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together?

And Hakeem Jeffries, the potential next speaker of the House, said this week that corruption would be at the top of the party’s 2027 agenda alongside affordability and healthcare: “We’re going to hold the crooks accountable who’ve visited unprecedented corruption on the American people — beginning on day one.”

This marriage of affordability and corruption is in part one of convenience — voters are mad about both things, so why not link them together? If you’re already going to attack the other side for cutting taxes for big business while slashing healthcare, it’s not a huge leap to name donors or candidates who might benefit and suggest a connection.

“Voters are asking: ‘Why is life getting harder when I’m doing everything right?’” Democratic strategist Jesse Ferguson told me. “The answer is: Because somebody paid to make sure it would.”

The message is clear enough. But what would these candidates actually do about it? 

In practice, the strategy is a consequential victory for the rising progressive wing of the party, which has long argued that Americans’ economic problems are the result of corporations’ and billionaires’ greed and corruption. And it’s leading candidates to embrace many ideas that have long been pushed by progressive advocates — some of which involve “good government” reforms to block conflicts of interest, and others of which involve taking on big business and the ultra-wealthy. 

While enacting some of these ideas may be difficult, there’s little doubt they’ll be a priority in the near future — and some might even draw bipartisan support. Here’s what they’re proposing. 

Democrats’ 3-part anti-corruption agenda

Under the broad umbrella of “corruption,” we can think of three basic categories of ideas that Democrats are embracing.

The first category is: investigating Trump and other people in and around his administration for potential malfeasance. 

Congressional Democrats have said that they want to investigate the Trump family’s crypto investments, their solicitation of foreign business investments, whether Trump granted pardons in exchange for money, corruption in government contracting, the jet gifted to Trump by the government of Qatar, fundraising for the White House ballroom construction, whether Donald Trump Jr.’s wedding was funded by a Russian oligarch, and much more.

In such a target rich environment, one question will be what to prioritize. Another will be: How can these investigations best be designed to achieve actual results? But Democrats are vowing that they will use the powers of congressional majorities to investigate corruption vigorously on many fronts.

The second category: proposing broader ethics or government reforms to the system as a whole.

Progressive advocates have long had a set of favored reforms around this front, such as restricting dark money, super PAC, and corporate spending on elections, as well as requiring greater transparency around donors. Populists on both the left and right have supported banning stock trading by members of Congress. 

Mary Peltola, running for Senate in Alaska, supports term limits for members of Congress; so does Talarico. Trump’s controversial pardons have also sparked interest from some congressional Democrats in limiting the presidential pardon power, an issue that candidates like Kansas Senate nominee Adam Hamilton have also raised.

It would be challenging for a new Democratic Congress to pass any of these reforms into law (for one, they’d need Trump’s signature or a veto-proof two-thirds majority of both chambers). Furthermore, several of these ideas — particularly on campaign finance and term limits — would almost surely be deemed unconstitutional by the current Supreme Court majority. So the path to success on this front is more challenging; unless a particular idea can strike a chord and win broad bipartisan approval.

The third category, then, would be on policies that would actually seek to deliver on that promised link between affordability and corruption — policies that seek to drive down voters’ healthcare costs, utility bills, and grocery prices by challenging malfeasance from corporations or special interests.

The people in the Democratic coalition that have ideas for this are predominantly associated with the progressive wing of the party and specifically the “anti-monopoly” movement. These progressives tend to argue that behind almost every high price is a corporation trying to get one over on consumers, via price fixing or some other monopolistic behavior. 

The new messaging linkage of corruption and affordability boosts these progressives’ credibility inside the party — because it’s exactly what they’ve been saying for years. So expect new Democratic majorities to pursue investigations into and propose legislation about pharmaceutical companies, utilities, tech giants, food conglomerates, and more.

To this end, Talarico has proposed breaking up “healthcare monopolies,” Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed has proposed to “break up corporate concentration in agriculture” by challenging “consolidated seed, fertilizer, and chemical market monopolies,” and Peltola wants to block “anti-competitive” mergers of grocery chains that drive up prices.

Still, there’s a debate among Democratic wonks and commentators over whether taking on corporate villains and unwinding mergers is actually likely to succeed in delivering lower prices for consumers. 

Skeptics on the party’s center left argue that broader economy-wide forces are more important than individual cases of corporate wrongdoing. They argue that President Joe Biden already pursued a strategy of “turning to the federal government’s antitrust authorities to try to tame red-hot price increases,” as the New York Times put it in December 2021, and it failed to rein in inflation.

Other policies candidates have sometimes mentioned in their corruption and affordability combo platter could more directly address costs — scrapping tariffs, undoing health care cuts — but also might add to deficits, putting more pressure on inflation, which could in turn keep interest rates higher on mortgages and auto loans. So there may not be any easy choices for Democrats if they gain control of government after 2028, and the most effective message might not necessarily be the most effective policy.

But the momentum for change is there inside the party. Just as the first post-Watergate midterms ushered in a generation of politicians determined to enact new good-government reforms, it’s likely there will be significant energy from Democrats behind both corruption and affordability issues for the foreseeable future. If they win congressional majorities, and especially the presidency in 2028, they’ll get to put their theory to the test.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: Donald Trump is trying to take over a public park. 

What’s happening? On Sunday, Trump announced in a social media post that East Potomac Golf Links, a municipal golf course on the Potomac River in Washington, DC, would close next month for what he described as “restoration work” to transform it from a three-course complex into a single professional-caliber course. 

According to a rendering of the “restoration” shared by Trump, the new course would also eliminate a popular public park and multiuse road around the course, which is currently home to some of DC’s historic cherry trees. 

Why does this matter? Relative to many other Trump decisions (like, say, the Iran war or interfering with Ukraine’s ability to defend itself), the fate of a golf course is not so high-stakes.

But it’s shaping up to be a major legal fight over the administration’s blitzkrieg approach to Washington that saw the East Wing of the White House demolished last year and Trump’s name attached to (and subsequently removed from) the Kennedy Center.

A DC preservation group previously sued over Trump’s plan to transform the course, which has been in the works for months prior to Sunday’s announcement. And the administration was already in hot water with a DC District Court judge over the recent removal of more than 500 trees from the course, which it described at the time as maintenance rather than part of Trump’s renovation scheme. 

Trump, for his part, has said that his administration has “an absolute right” to renovate the course and does not need approval, setting him on a course for a bigger clash with federal courts. 

What’s the big picture? Setting aside everything else about Trump’s golf course push, it’s unlikely — with just 15 days until the midterms — that this is a fight that will endear him or his party to voters, who are broadly fed up with corruption, inflation, and the overall cost of living.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

Hi readers, happy Monday! Early voting is getting underway in some states and while The Logoff officially encourages you not to read too much — or anything, really — into early voting numbers, I do recommend this post from the Substack newsletter Can We Still Govern? by Don Moynihan. He rounded up some of the best “I voted” stickers with art submitted by (mostly) children, ranging from charming to deeply strange. You can find them all here.

As always, thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you tomorrow!

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

French protests have long been the stuff of legend, literature, and Broadway musicals. But even by those storied standards, last weekend’s demonstrations were pretty remarkable.

More than half a million people took to the streets in occasionally violent protests that are posing a mounting political challenge for the French government. The movement began roughly a month ago over concerns about the sorry state of public high schools, which are frequently underfunded and understaffed. 

But in the weeks since, the student protests have rapidly expanded to encompass a wider range of grievances around inequality, high living costs and public services. The ranks of the protesters have also swelled to include some more opportunistic looters and agitators.  

In Paris, masked rioters trashed businesses and set fires, while students blocked the Louvre Museum on Monday, forcing it to close. In Limoges, a city of roughly 130,000 people, the spire of a 19th-century town hall dramatically collapsed in flames.

The national government has responded with curfews for parts of cities including Paris, Nice, and Lille, as well as emphatic condemnations of the violence. In a televised address on Sunday night, French President Emmanuel Macron also promised to partner with students, teachers, trade unions and other groups to identify “joint solutions.”

But it’s unclear what solutions could possibly speak to the whole of this newly expanded movement. The initial student protesters were after concrete educational reforms, like smaller class sizes and less chaotic schedules. The demands now are more diffuse and disjointed, reflecting the sense that — as Macron himself put it — “there is no desirable future” for young people in France. It’s a situation that the French far right is already exploiting, just six months before the country’s next presidential election.

Go a little deeper

If you’re getting a bit of déjà vu here — that’s French for “already seen,” FYI — please know you have good reason. The French also turned out for gigantic mass protests against a proposed retirement age increase three years ago. And a gas-tax hike five years before that. Some historians trace French protest culture all the way back to the 1300s.

While it’s not necessarily true that the French demonstrate more than people in other Western countries, their protests do tend to attract outsize global attention. Youth protests over education, living costs, and government corruption have also recently taken place in Belgium, Portugal, Italy, Spain, and Albania, for instance. I’d hazard that you’ve heard less about them.

But there’s a twofold explanation for why France’s protests loom so large. First, protest occupies a special place in French history and culture — and the world knows it. As one political scientist explained in a 1994 paper on the history of French protests, the French have an unusual, centuries-long track record of turning demonstrations into actual political change, arguably starting with the French Revolution.

More recently, in 1968, student protests expanded into a larger worker strike that nearly toppled the government. Many of today’s young protesters have specifically referenced that heritage in interviews and slogans.

But that’s not the only reason that French people always seem to be protesting. Conditions in France are also, well … pretty protestable. Consider just the narrow issue of public education, which sparked the current hullabaloo. 

By some estimates, higher-education funding per student has fallen by 20 percent in just the past 10 years. High school classrooms are frequently overcrowded, and a government report cited by The Guardian concluded that the country’s aging schools are in need of billions of dollars of building repairs and climate mitigation.

The government has pointed to France’s strained finances as a constraint on addressing these issues. (And, in fairness, France’s finances are indeed very strained.) There’s a sense, however, that young people are bearing the cost of that crisis more than other populations. Cost-cutting measures that would affect older people — such as raising the retirement age from 62 to 64 — have been delayed in the face of fierce opposition. And by “opposition,” of course, I mean protests. 

One link for later

➨ Make your AI fallback plan. Artificial intelligence will cost many people their jobs; in some places, it already has. But instead of panic-learning the first available trade, first consider where you find meaning in your current occupation. That should help guide you to a fallback career that will still feel valuable, even if it’s…you know. Not your first pick. My colleague Sigal says she’d become a rabbi; I think I’d like to teach again. 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that a single episode of Sex and the City is credited with launching the early aughts cupcake craze? Today’s food trends are much shorter-lived, by comparison. And they typically start on TikTok or Instagram. 
• Today’s trivia: What mass-market, imported beer is named for a river in the Netherlands? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: Last week we asked you for the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking. That would be Norman Vincent Peale, the Protestant minister who also preached at President Donald Trump’s childhood church and officiated his first wedding.

As the US-Iran war drags on, the damage is being felt regionally: Saudi Arabia experienced the worst attack in over a decade earlier this month, when Yemen’s Iran-backed Houthi militia struck an airport in the Saudi capital, Riyadh. The strike killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 300 others.

Saudi Arabia responded with missile attacks on Yemen, striking oil facilities, and the Houthis have launched more strikes of their own, targeting Saudi oil infrastructure. 

The dueling strikes are the latest development in a decade-plus of conflict between Saudi and the Houthis, a political and military group that controls part of northern Yemen, which had been on pause until earlier this year after a 2022 ceasefire. But the Iran war, and Houthi affiliation with Iran’s network of proxy groups, mean the current violence has far-reaching implications for the US, Israel, and the global energy economy. 

It also threatens more than just Saudi Arabia’s airports and oil industry: As Gregg Carlstrom, a Middle East correspondent for The Economist, explains, the attacks cut at the heart of the country’s project to evolve into a destination for foreign investment, travel, tourism, and more. On Monday, the country’s upcoming Future Investment Initiative was postponed until 2027.

Carlstrom, who is based in Riyadh, spoke with Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram how the attack has been received inside Saudi Arabia, why it comes at an especially bad time for the country, and how President Donald Trump might — or might not — get more involved. 

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

Can you help us understand how the Houthis have such a presence in the country right now? Are they infiltrating the country? Are they already there?

They’re shooting from outside the country. They’re shooting from Yemen. The Houthis are a group that’s been around for a few decades. They were originally a local insurgency in Yemen that was fighting against the Yemeni government. They originate from the northern part of Yemen, but they were able to gain control of large parts of that country from 2014 onwards. Ali Abdullah Saleh, the longtime dictator of Yemen, was overthrown during the Arab Spring and the Houthis were able to seize a large chunk of territory. 

They are effectively in control of most of the population centers in Yemen. They have received increasing support from Iran, which has provided them with weapons, with money, with know-how, and technical expertise. And they have used that to build an arsenal of drones and missiles, which they are using now to carry out attacks on Saudi Arabia.

And was there a particular reason they targeted the airport in Riyadh? Were they trying to send a message here?

If you listen to the messaging from the Houthis, they are trying to describe this as almost a like-for-like campaign, where you’ve had years in which the Saudi-led coalition, which invaded Yemen in 2015, has been imposing a blockade of Yemeni airspace, has been restricting flights in and out of that country. 

And so the Houthis describe this publicly as being a retaliation in kind, but I think they’ve also just figured out that attacks on airports are a very effective way to cause economic disruption in Saudi Arabia. You prevent not just people from flying in and out but also, as we’ve seen disruptions to shipping via the Strait of Hormuz, a lot of cargo that these countries depend on for daily needs are coming in by air instead. 

Carrying out these sorts of attacks, shutting down the airport in a capital city, is a very effective way for the Houthis to impose economic pain on the Saudis.

And I guess on some level it makes the country feel insecure. How is that making Saudi Arabia’s leader feel right now? What’s his response been?

It comes at a very difficult time for the Saudi leadership because they are supposed to be hosting a number of events this month where Saudi will be playing a role on the world stage. 

There’s something called the World Petroleum Congress that is taking place this week [October 11–15], which is normally a big event that draws executives from top oil and gas companies. Many of them canceled their participation because of the attacks on the airport. 

Then they are supposed to be hosting the [now-postponed] Future Investment Initiative, which is something often known outside Saudi Arabia as “Davos in the Desert.” It’s the sort of flagship investment conference that takes place here every year. It draws a who’s who of global finance. 

For a country that is trying to diversify its economy, a country that is trying to attract foreign investment and make itself into a hub for finance and travel and tourism, these sorts of attacks are very detrimental to those goals.

And this is coming as Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and the rest of the leadership in the country is really trying to establish Saudi Arabia as the premier economic hub in the region. The stakes are really high for him right now?

They are. And just about everything that they are trying to do is being disrupted by what’s happened over the past few weeks. 

If you look at travel, for example, the Public Investment Fund, which is the Saudi sovereign wealth fund, last year launched a new airline, Riyadh Air, which they are hoping will eventually compete with Emirates or Qatar Airways, the really big carriers in the Gulf.  

That airline was just getting into regular operations this summer where they were growing their fleet, they were growing their network of destinations. And then suddenly this happens and their home base in Riyadh is shut down. They have moved some of their planes out of Riyadh to other airports to keep them safe from Houthi attacks. Obviously, it’s very disruptive for trying to build an air carrier. 

In Riyadh itself, the financial district — this sort of long-planned attempt to set up a banking hub that might rival the one in Dubai — had just started to get going over the past couple of years, when you had banks and other financial services firms moving in there. Everybody who works there has now been told to work remotely for the foreseeable future because there is a concern about possible Houthi attacks against skyscrapers and the financial district. 

Everything they are trying to do, from finance to travel to trade, all of it is being disrupted and threatened by what’s happening in Yemen.

What options does he have to reassure investors and the world really that he can protect the country and maybe especially his airport, where a bunch of the investment is focused?

The airport, I think, is going to be difficult to reassure people about. You can install additional air defenses there. You can move more batteries and more interceptors there, but at the end of the day, no air defense system is hermetic. There’s no 100 percent guarantee that you’re going to shoot down every incoming projectile. 

As long as there is this ongoing war between the Houthis and Yemen and the Saudis, I think people might have ongoing concerns about the airport. You have to resolve that underlying issue to give people confidence. 

Now, how do you try to resolve that? If you’re Saudi Arabia right now, you have two bad options. One is you keep fighting. You try to militarily defeat the Houthis or at least force them to accept a renewed ceasefire. 

The other option is you cut a deal. You try to offer the Houthis some concessions that might encourage them to go back to the ceasefire. That’s going to be very costly for Saudi Arabia. I’ve heard that the Houthis are demanding probably billions of dollars of financial concessions where they would want the Saudis to offer some money for reconstruction and to pay the salaries of Yemeni civil servants working in Houthi-controlled areas. 

If you are the Saudi leadership right now, neither one is really a good option.

Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman has a pretty strong relationship with the president of the United States, who’s very sympathetic to Saudi Arabia and Saudi investment. Has he appealed to President Trump for help here yet?

He has. He’s done so repeatedly over the past month or so, asking not just for support with the Saudi campaign in Yemen, but for America to carry out its own airstrikes in Yemen. And the response so far from Donald Trump has been to refuse that.

For the US to get involved in a bigger way, there are some practical constraints at the moment where a lot of American military assets are tied up in the Strait of Hormuz trying to keep that open, keep oil flowing through the Strait. And so the response from Trump has been disappointing for the Saudi Crown prince. The US is providing intelligence support. It’s helping on that front, but it is not directly getting involved in the war in Yemen.

Wall Street is sending the public a dire warning: President Donald Trump has become a threat to the very foundation of American freedom — your frequent flier miles.

Okay, America’s big banks haven’t been using rhetoric quite that grandiose. But they are accusing Trump of imperiling Americans’ credit card rewards. 

The feud between Wall Street and the White House centers on the Credit Card Competition Act (CCCA). Long stalled in Congress, that legislation aims to drive down the “swipe fees” that merchants pay to banks when customers use credit cards. In theory, if those fees fall, retailers might pass on some of the savings to consumers, in the form of lower prices.

Trump first endorsed the bill in January. But he’s ramped up his advocacy for it recently, amid a broader (belated) push to address voters’ affordability concerns ahead of November’s midterms. Last week, the White House urged Congress to “put Main Street over Wall Street” by enacting the law. On Monday, Trump praised Kansas Sen. Roger Marshall for “working tirelessly to pass the Credit Card Competition Act, in order to stop the out of control Swipe Fee ripoff!”

The financial industry is used to taking fire from Trump right before Election Day, then receiving favorable treatment from him thereafter. But in this case, Trump’s threat is not entirely idle. Large retailers are lobbying hard to get the Credit Card Competition Act passed during December’s lame-duck congressional session. Banks have responded by issuing a “code red,” in the words of the Wall Street Journal. In recent days, their lobbyists have warned policymakers that, if swipe fees fall, credit cardholders’ cash rewards and travel points will go down with them.

In truth, the consequences of the Credit Card Competition Act are uncertain. But if the banks’ big-picture story is right — and the law cuts both swipe fees and credit card rewards — that would probably benefit the average American.

Poor people pay for your travel points

To see why, we need to first examine how the credit card system currently works — and whom it does and doesn’t benefit. 

Whenever you use a credit card to purchase a banana from Aldi, or volleyball from Dick’s, or an adult-sized Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume from Party City, the retailer must pay a fee to the bank that issued your card. The bank then uses that revenue to fund your rewards.

Critically, merchants don’t just eat the costs of swipe fees. Rather, they pass on part of the expense to consumers, in the form of higher prices. Some businesses concentrate these price hikes on card users (for example, barbershops often charge less if you pay with cash). But most retailers charge every customer the same price, regardless of their payment method. 

For this reason, shoppers who pay with cash or debit effectively subsidize those who pay with cards: The former face higher prices than they would in a world without credit cards, yet they receive no “cash back” or travel points in recompense. 

This arrangement seems unfair on its face. But it is especially troubling when one considers class disparities in the use of credit cards and receipt of rewards.

As a general rule, the higher a person’s income, the more they use credit cards. In 2024, US households who earned less than $25,000 a year put just 17 percent of their payments on credit cards; among households earning more than $150,000, that figure was 51 percent, according to Federal Reserve data.

What’s more, the rich are also more likely to qualify for premium cards that charge merchants exceptionally high fees, in order to fund extraordinarily lavish benefits. 

As a result of all this, swipe fees effectively redistribute money from poor and working-class people to affluent and wealthy ones. According to a 2026 working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, the credit card system takes, on average, $88 a year from households with annual incomes below $150,000, while delivering an average yearly benefit of $390 to households with incomes above that threshold.

American swipe fees are too damn high

To be sure, this does not mean that lower-income Americans would be better off in a world where credit cards didn’t exist. Such cards serve a variety of valuable economic purposes, from helping households weather unexpected expenses and irregular incomes to facilitating online commerce. And maintaining a credit card system costs money: Banks need to finance the loans they extend, while payment networks must maintain vast computer systems to process transactions and detect fraud. 

Yet America’s credit card system is needlessly expensive. Our nation’s merchants — and thus, consumers — pay far higher swipe fees than their counterparts in other rich countries. 

To take one illustrative example: When an American buys $100 worth of groceries using a standard Visa card, the supermarket must pay the issuing bank a minimum of $1.23. Some disfavored stores must pay as much as $1.57 on such a purchase. If a customer uses a premium “Visa Infinite” card, meanwhile, the grocer’s fee can run as high as $2.07.

By contrast, in Canada, a grocery purchase worth $100 US dollars would incur a fee worth 95 cents if the customer used a standard Visa card. 

In Australia and the European Union, meanwhile, government regulations would cap that fee at 30 cents (or .3 percent), no matter what kind of card was used. 

Suffice to say, Australia and the EU manage to sustain functional credit card systems, despite charging merchants a tiny fraction of the swipe fees absorbed by US businesses. And although retailers have pocketed some of these savings, research suggests that fee caps have also lowered consumer prices. 

This affordability gain does come at a cost; American cardholders do tend to reap higher rewards than Australian or European ones. But this is not a good trade from the standpoint of economic justice; few think it is fair to take money from the poor to give to the rich.

The Credit Card Competition Act might not work

All this said, whether the Credit Card Competition Act would actually yield those outcomes is uncertain. The bill does not directly regulate swipe fees. Instead, as the name suggests, it aims to give credit card companies greater competition. 

Today, each time you buy an adult-size Grape Fanta Can Halloween costume with a Visa, Party City is required to process your purchase using Visa’s network. Which means it needs to pay whatever swipe fee Visa decrees. The store can protest an exorbitant rate by refusing to accept Visa cards. But this would send a large number of customers into the hands of Spirit Halloween. So its leverage is limited.

Under the CCCA, however, Party City would be able to accept Visa on a transaction — without necessarily using Visa to process the payment. Instead, the bank that issued the customer’s Visa would need to provide Party City with at least one alternative payment processor — a different network that has no relationship with Visa and which might offer lower fees. 

The law’s authors hope — and the banking industry fears — that this mandatory competition will force down swipe fees. But it’s not clear how much of a difference the CCCA would actually make. 

After all, under the law, banks would still get to choose the alternative payment network available to retailers when their customers pay with Visa (or Mastercard, or American Express, etc.). Party City would no longer need to pony up whatever Visa asks when a shopper pays with a Visa-Bank of America card. But if the store did decline to use Visa’s network, it would then need to partner with Bank of America’s hand-selected alternative. And since banks benefit from high swipe fees, BofA would have an incentive to pick an expensive backup option.

Nevertheless, the banks and retailers both seem to believe that the CCCA will sharply reduce swipe fees. If they’re right, then Congress shouldn’t vote down the bill, merely to protect affluent Americans’ travel points. 

It doubtlessly feels nice to receive a free flight or hotel stay, as a reward for spending a lot of money on yourself. But the poor probably should not have to pay higher prices, just so the affluent can enjoy such satisfactions.

If you live in Colorado and buy your own health insurance, there’s a good chance you’re one of the 139,000 people enrolled in a public plan crafted by your state leaders. You’re paying $0 for primary care visits and certain mental health visits, $0 for prenatal and postnatal care, and you don’t have to meet your deductible first.

On average, enrollees in these plans pay an estimated $14 to $33 less a month in premiums than people in comparable plans, and their annual out-of-pocket spending has fallen about 15 percent while holding steady for everyone else on the marketplace. 

Colorado didn’t build a government insurance company, rather, it designed the plan itself, down to the copays, and then required private insurers to sell it alongside their own.

A public health insurance option was supposed to be part of the Affordable Care Act. President Barack Obama supported the idea throughout his time in office, endorsing a government plan that could, in his words, “keep insurance companies honest” by giving them a government-backed competitor. But the idea was stripped from the bill before passage, after it became clear Senate leaders couldn’t get garner enough votes. Joe Biden campaigned for president on reviving a public option in 2020, but he never prioritized it once in office, and the progressive activists who championed it under Obama largely turned their sights to single-payer health care, which would cover all Americans.

The problems a public option was intended to address — access, costs, reliability — have still not gone away and a growing number of policy wonks and elected officials have started to ask if the idea deserves a spot again on the national agenda. 

Healthcare costs are soaring, and voters tell pollsters it’s among their top economic concerns. Medicaid work requirements are set to take effect in January, which could leave millions of low-income Americans uncovered, and private insurers have asked to raise ACA marketplace premiums by a median of 15 percent next year, after a roughly 20 percent hike in 2026. Two-thirds of adults say they favor a national government health plan, and polls suggest most voters imagine proposals like Medicare-for-all as a competitor to private insurance, rather than a systemwide replacement.

While the debate around public options stalled in Congress, three states have gone ahead and built their own. Washington state launched a public option in 2021, Colorado in 2023, and Nevada earlier this year. They all built on a provision of the Affordable Care Act that lets states apply to run their own version of the law — one Sen. Bernie Sanders fought for in the hopes that Vermont would use it to build a single-payer system.

Their experience also shows the challenges involved: Not only in overcoming political objections from competing insurers, but medical providers as well, who may have to accept lower payments in order to keep the public option’s premiums affordable.

Colorado leaders say this push to control costs was critical to their success.

“The driving point behind what we were doing was to set hospital prices,” said Michael Conway, Colorado’s insurance commissioner and an architect behind the program. “That was what we were driving towards and that’s what we did.”

It’s not clear if other states, or the federal government, will be willing to pick those kinds of fights with the broader medical industry. But if ever there was a time for it to happen it would be now, with affordability a massive political issue, and the public seemingly eager for serious action on health care. Just as the ACA began with a state-level experiment in Massachusetts, the success or failure of these early public-option states could presage much bigger changes nationally.

What Colorado did

The motivation behind the public option in Colorado was simple enough: Healthcare was simply becoming too expensive.

Dylan Roberts, the Colorado state senator who sponsored the bill, represents mountain counties that had some of the highest individual-market premiums in the United States.

“Back then, the top issue on the minds of my constituents was the cost of healthcare and the cost of health insurance,” Roberts told the Century Foundation, which interviewed the officials and advocates behind the Washington and Colorado programs for a report last year.

Colorado Gov. Jared Polis made the issue a priority as well. One of his first acts in office was creating an Office of Saving People Money on Healthcare, run out of his lieutenant governor’s office.

When the state finally moved, it moved against unified opposition. Hospitals and insurers were lined up against essentially everything public officials proposed. Roberts described the opponents as “basically anybody in the status quo health care industry” — meaning insurers, doctors, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies.

Colorado first introduced a bill for a state-run insurance plan, where the state itself would sell coverage. This is the kind of arrangement closest to Obama’s ACA vision, and what most people think of when they hear “public option.” 

“It was really in large part to scare the bejesus out of the insurance companies that we were going to really come in and truly be a state-run competitor against them,” Conway, the state’s insurance commissioner, said last month at a panel in Washington, DC.

But then in 2021, when Colorado officials mapped out what building a state-operated insurance company would involve, they concluded that a state-run plan would not have been able to sell a single policy until 2025 or 2026.

Officials decided that was too long given the urgent need, so they rewrote the bill before it passed, requiring the insurers already operating in Colorado to sell a marketplace plan the state would design. This coverage launched in 2023.

“We would just be starting today if we actually truly stood up a public option,” Conway said on the late September panel. He thinks this is what the federal debate around a public option keeps getting wrong. “People want action now. They’re pissed off, they’re hurting. … They don’t have four years to wait.”

Importantly, while hospitals in Colorado were not mandated to participate, the state gave itself the power to force them. Colorado gave private insurers a target: By 2025, the state-designed plans had to cost 15 percent less than that insurer’s plans had cost in 2021, adjusted for inflation. How they got there was up to them, but an insurer can only squeeze its own profits and overhead so far. So the rest effectively had to come out of the costs insurers paid to hospitals. And if an insurer missed the target, the commissioner could haul both the insurer and the hospitals responsible into a public hearing to defend their prices — and then order the hospitals to take less.

That threat of a hearing was a powerful enforcement mechanism. “No one wants to be called in front of a public hearing where press are going to be there,” Kyla Hoskins, Colorado’s deputy insurance commissioner, told the Century Foundation. The hospitals cared about that more than the insurers did, according to Conway. The state launched complaints against nearly every carrier in the individual market and then pulled hospitals in with them. After that, according to Adam Fox of the Colorado Consumer Health Initiative, the price negotiations started happening, meaning no enforcement hearing actually took place.

Doctors complained early, but Conway said hospitals were the harder fight. The state worried that a single large hospital system refusing to participate could sink the entire plan, but in the end, no hospital refused. 

The result is the Colorado Option, a standardized plan that every insurance company in the state’s individual and small-group markets has to sell. There are 36 of these plans on the individual market for 2026. 

And people are choosing it. Enrollment went from about 14 percent of the state marketplace’s customers in 2023, the first year, to a third in 2024, to roughly half today.

Researchers at Brown University found the savings weren’t limited to the public option. Across Colorado’s individual market, the cheapest silver plans — a benchmark middle-tier ACA plan — now cost more than $100 a month less than equivalent plans in similar states.

Not everyone is celebrating Colorado’s policy development. Two industry-funded groups, the Partnership for America’s Health Care Future and its state affiliate Colorado’s Health Care Future, have campaigned against the program for years, citing a 10 percent rise in individual market premiums in its first year, and a 2024 report they commissioned from Hoover Institution researchers, which estimated Coloradans in public option plans collectively paid $13.3 million more in 2023 than if they had chosen the cheapest nonpublic options plans. 

Andrew Shermeyer, a doctoral candidate in health policy at the University of Minnesota, found the program made coverage cheaper for people receiving federal subsidies but more expensive for those who don’t. Hoskins, who oversees the program, disputed that, pointing to the Brown analysis finding premiums fell across the state, including on private plans.

Cara Welch, a spokesperson for the Colorado Hospital Association, pointed to the looming Medicaid cuts with HR 1. “Public option plans that would further weaken the healthcare system and shut doors to care are the wrong solution,” she told me.

How the public option died in 2009, and where it went

While states are working to implement their own public options, a national version would still have to overcome the same barriers it faced the last time it was tried.

The original idea for a national public option was a government-run insurance plan that would be sold on the new Obamacare exchanges, next to the private plans. 

Jeanne Lambrew, who worked on the Affordable Care Act in the Obama administration and now directs health care reform at the Century Foundation, said on the DC panel that there were several reasons that made that particularly hard at the time, and that she doesn’t think those reasons have been resolved. 

The first challenge was determining who would end up in the plan, because if sick and expensive patients concentrated in the public option, then it would cost too much to run. But if sick people were concentrated in private plans instead, that could also make it too expensive for those insurers and they could pull out of the market. Something like that second scenario, what economists call “adverse selection,” played out in the early years of Obamacare, when insurers raised prices and pulled out of unprofitable areas, leaving some counties on the brink of having no insurer at all.

The second challenge Lambrew outlined is whether doctors and hospitals would take the public plan, and what they would get paid. In 2009 Democrats pitched participation in a public option as voluntary, which was a problem because it meant that in order to induce the most desirable doctors or the hospital everyone wants, the government would have to pay them high enough rates — which would make the savings effectively disappear. 

The third challenge was whether a government agency would sell insurance directly, or whether private companies would sell a plan the government designed, as Colorado later decided to do. 

While the public option was ultimately cut from the Affordable Care Act, what survived was a provision letting states apply for federal waivers to try their own designs, so long as coverage stayed as broad and affordable and didn’t cost the federal government more. 

That provision’s biggest champion was Sanders, who wanted Vermont to use it to build the first single-payer system in the country. Though Vermont tried and gave up in 2014, the clause instead became a legal opening for Washington, Colorado, and Nevada to later use. So although the ACA didn’t include a public option, Lambrew emphasized, it still built the path to the ones that exist now.

Washington state went first, passing its law in 2019, and made the opposite choice from Colorado on hospital mandates. Instead Washington asked hospitals to participate voluntarily, and many unsurprisingly didn’t. In the first year the plan was sold in 19 of the state’s 39 counties, cost about 11 percent more than the cheapest comparable plan, and drew roughly 1 percent of enrollees.

So the legislature went back and passed a second law in 2021, this time requiring hospitals to contract with at least one public option plan if one made them an offer. The requirement took effect for 2023, and enrollment has climbed every year since. By 2025 the plan was available in every county in the state. About 115,000 people signed up for a public option plan for 2026, or roughly 40 percent of Washington’s marketplace.

Nevada’s plans went on sale this year, and the state gave itself the least leverage of the three. It sets premium targets but cannot set hospital rates, and it suspended its provider participation requirement for the program’s first year. Enrollment has come in below projections. “The story is unfinished here,” Lambrew said of Nevada.

Taking the public option national

The hospital industry uses the plight of rural hospitals, which are often struggling financially, to argue against public options or the government getting involved more generally to lower costs. 

Healthcare reformers tend to respond by exempting rural hospitals from price caps, though Conway, Colorado’s insurance commissioner, says that is a mistake. Rural hospitals are generally paid far less by private insurers than large systems are, and at the price levels under discussion, he said, a cap would actually represent a raise for most of them. Tell a rural hospital it will get three times what Medicare pays and “they would think you were the savior,” he stressed.

Conway has been getting a lot of calls from other states interested in adopting what they’ve done. But in every conversation he’s blunt with the person on the phone, saying they’d have to be prepared to take on hospital prices. “When I bring that up with other states, the appetite isn’t there right now,” he said on the September panel.

Conway blames Medicaid cuts for the reticence. The Congressional Budget Office estimates 7.5 million Americans will lose their health insurance by 2034, and states bracing for that are not eager to pick fights with hospitals at the same time. Undoing those Medicaid cuts, Conway said, is “an incredibly important floor” and “the foundation to actually doing anything else past that.”

The federal government does have one tool that Colorado and other states lack: a public insurance program that already exists. Hannah Garden-Monheit, a former Federal Trade Commission official on the healthcare panel, pointed out that Medicare, unlike a private insurer, is “a price setter, not a price taker.” Meaning it can announce what it will pay rather than negotiate for it. Some public option proposals in Congress would let people buy into Medicaid through the marketplace, or create a new plan that pays what Medicare pays, instead of building something from scratch. 

Roberts, who sponsored the Colorado bill, told the Century Foundation that the goal should be saving customers money, getting more people insured, and getting them the care they need. He said what the public program “actually looks like at the end of the day doesn’t matter as much as the outcomes of the product that people have.”

Laura Kate Zaichkin, who runs competition and affordability at Washington’s exchange, says the path to a workable public option might not be easy, but the rewards are worth it.  

“It takes a lot of political will, collaboration with partners, thoughtful design and implementation,’ she told the Nation’s Health. “It is a long-term investment that states can make to lower healthcare premium costs.”

With Democrats potentially set to expand their statehouse presence after the midterms, there may be more room to act on healthcare in other states next year. Even if Democrats don’t end up enacting a public option at the federal level, they could boost states in their efforts by restoring Medicaid funding, which could give lawmakers more room to stand up to health providers on costs. If these public options continue to grow, they might end up an unexpected ACA legacy.

We live in an era of endless optimization. Fitness trackers help us measure our lifespan, people are consuming piles of protein in an attempt to be their best selves, and there’s even an urge to maximize our morality. In a world of constant self-improvement, it’s no wonder that journey has reached our attempts at reproduction. 

Kristen V. Brown is a journalist and author of the forthcoming book The Immortal Womb: The Centuries-Long Quest to Control the Female Body and Hack Human Reproduction. As the title suggests, she writes about all of the ways people are trying to exert more control over the process of having children.

“I think that what we’re seeing right now is that people will do anything they can to have the healthiest baby possible,” she told Vox. “So much is out of your control, and people are just trying to figure out, how do I get more control? How do I skew the odds in my favor?” She says that one way people try to get more agency is through a technology called PGT-P, or preimplantation genetic testing for polygenic risk. 

“If you go through IVF, very often they’ll have you do a basic genetic screening that can detect things like Down syndrome. This screening takes that up a notch,” Brown said. “It uses that same preimplantation genetic testing to look for the likelihood of complex genetic conditions — stuff like heart disease, like diabetes — in order to, quote, ‘let people have the healthiest baby.’”

But what can potential parents do with that knowledge? How far can this technology go? And what are the ethics of using it in the first place? We discuss that and more on the latest episode of Explain It to Me, Vox’s weekly call-in podcast. 

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

What other things are they testing embryos for?

For conditions that are only impacted by one gene, like Huntington’s disease, it’s very easy to say, ‘Does this embryo have it or not?’ with a pretty good degree of confidence. But that’s not how this technology works. Something like heart disease, for example, is impacted by hundreds of genes. Also, something like heart disease is not only genetic. It’s affected by environment and lifestyle.

I think that what’s motivating most people is the health aspect. But a lot of these companies are marketing these tests, saying they can also look for height. They can look at eye color. Some of them are promising IQ. How do you even define intelligence, let alone how do you define the genetics of intelligence? Alzheimer’s disease, longevity, which embryo is going to live the longest life. So it’s already gone beyond disease into some of these more aesthetic concerns.

Do we know how many people are doing this? 

I think it’s a very small number of people at this point. But I think that we’re seeing more and more companies in the space, and we’re seeing more and more support from fertility doctors. 

I want to emphasize that most mainstream medical societies are against this. Most of the IVF doctors I know do not think this has value. Most people in the genetic space do not think this technology has value either for embryos or for adults, but I think we’re seeing support growing. 

I think that a lot of people in the fertility space are already envisioning a future where this does become more mainstream because the idea is just so appealing, even if the technology has flaws.

What about embryo editing? Is that something we’re seeing? Can people go in and change things around?

Not right now. Embryo editing is very much illegal in the United States. It is illegal in most countries. How can you be sure enough that it’s safe? Because you won’t know for sure until an embryo grows up into an adult whether anything went awry. 

Right now it is illegal, but there is growing interest as the technology has gotten better. Most of the support right now for embryo editing is for disease. The argument for it is that, let’s say you are a carrier for Huntington’s disease or you have Huntington’s disease. Right now, there is something that you can do. You can use polygenic screening to select the embryos that don’t have the disease, but in IVF, even if you don’t have a terrible disease hiding in your DNA, it’s hard to get a lot of embryos.

You have these situations where couples have to do rounds and rounds and rounds of IVF to get one or two embryos that aren’t carriers for a harmful variant, right? And so the argument for it is, let’s give these people a better shot.

But I imagine there are people out there who aren’t looking into editing simply for making children more resistant to diseases. They are looking at those things like eye color and height.

There’s actually a name for that. This tech executive called Brian Armstrong coined this term, the Gattaca stack, [named] after the movie. The vision is to use a suite of fertility technologies to make the perfect human. 

The first thing they want to use is this technology called in vitro gametogenesis, which is where you take a skin cell and you turn it into an egg and a sperm, and then you make an embryo with it, so women don’t have to go through rounds of IVF. 

The idea is that you can get tons and tons and tons of embryos, and then you can use PGT-P to then screen for the best ones, and then you can use an artificial womb to incubate and grow them.

This brings to mind a certain E word, and that word is eugenics. What are the ethics here? 

Because on one hand, I can understand that there are parents who are like, “I just want to have a healthy baby. I want to bring a child into this world. I just want to put my best foot forward with this human that I’m going to bring to Earth.” And then on the other hand, it gets a little weird.

It gets weird fast. In some ways, we’ve already gone down that slippery slope. Right now, even if you don’t go through IVF, we screen against Down syndrome early in pregnancy. Down syndrome is a condition in which you have a disability, but you can live a full, happy, healthy life. For a long time, parents of kids with Down syndrome have argued that already selecting and screening against Down syndrome pregnancies is a form of [eugenics]. 

As technology gets more advanced, we see that same question applied to more and more conditions. I think that one of the things that we don’t talk about enough is that the genome is complicated. You can’t actually just go in there and be like, ‘I want a tall baby with blue eyes and a great laugh.’ 

I think that becoming a parent is an exercise in giving up control, and that’s easier for some people than others. I have so much sympathy and empathy for people who are trying to stack the deck. But I think there are just so many variables when it comes to human reproduction that we are never going to be able to fully control the process, as much as we might want to and as appealing as that might sound.

Editor’s note, October 18, 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 September 2024.

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 think I have a duty to help people much poorer than me, and I give 10 percent of my salary to charities that I think are effective at preventing early death due to poverty. I also live in a city with a lot of visible homelessness, and am often solicited for money. My brain says that this is not an effective way to help people; the people asking might not be the neediest among the homeless in my city, and the people I’m sending malaria bednets and pills to are even needier. At the same time, I feel callous simply ignoring all these requests. What should I do?

Dear Would-Be Optimizer,

Nine times out of ten, when someone’s got an ethical dilemma, I think it’s because a couple of their core values are conflicting with each other. But you’re that tenth case. I say that because I don’t actually believe your question represents a battle royale between two different values. I think there’s one core value here — helping people — and one strategy that’s masquerading as a value.

That strategy is optimization. I can tell from your phrasing that you’re really into it. You don’t just want to help people — you want to help people as effectively as possible. Since extreme poverty is concentrated in developing countries, and since your dollar goes much further there than it would in your home country, your optimizing impulse is telling you to send your charity money abroad. 

Optimization started as a technique for solving certain math problems, but our society has elevated it to the status of a value — arguably one of the dominant values in the Western world. It’s been on the rise since the 1700s, when utilitarian thinkers seeded the idea that both economics and ethics should focus on maximizing utility (meaning, happiness or satisfaction): Just calculate how much utility each action would produce, and choose the one that produces the most.

You can see this logic everywhere in modern life — from work culture, with its emphasis on productivity hacks and agile workflows, to wellness culture, with its emphasis on achieving perfect health and optimal sleep. The mandate to “Live your best life!” is turbocharged by Silicon Valley, which urges us to quantify every aspect of ourselves with Fitbits, Apple Watches, and Oura Rings, because the more data you have on your body’s mechanical functions, the more you can optimize the machine that is you. 

Optimization definitely has its place, including in the world of charity. Some charitable organizations are much more effective than others trying to achieve the same goal. All things being equal, we don’t want to blow all our money on the wildly ineffective ones. Effective altruists, members of the utilitarian-flavored social movement that aims to do the most good possible, are fond of noting that the most effective charities out there actually produce 100 times more benefit than the average ones. Why not get the biggest bang for your buck? 

The problem is that we’ve stretched optimization beyond its optimal limits. We try to apply it to everything. But not every domain in life can be optimized, at least not without compromising on some of our values. 

In your case, you’re trying to optimize how much you help others, and you believe that means focusing on the neediest. But “neediest” according to what definition of needy? You could assume that financial need is the only type that counts, so you should focus first on lifting everyone out of extreme poverty, and only then help people in less dire straits. But are you sure that only the brute poverty level matters?

Consider an insight from the Jewish tradition. The ancient rabbis were exquisitely sensitive to the psychological needs of poor people, and they argued that these needs should also be taken into account. So they decreed that you shouldn’t only give poor people enough money to survive on — they need to have more than that so they themselves can give charity to others. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks writes, “On the face of it, the rule is absurd. Why give X enough money so that he can give to Y? Giving to Y directly is more logical and efficient. What the rabbis understood, however, is that giving is an essential part of human dignity.” 

The rabbis also figured that those who used to be well-off but who fell into poverty might feel an especially acute sense of shame. So they suggested helping these people save face by offering them not just bare necessities, but also — when possible — some of the nicer things that graced their former lifestyles. In the Talmud, we hear about one rabbi who gave a newly poor person a fancy meal, and another who acted as the person’s servant for a day! Clearly, the ancient rabbis weren’t only aiming to alleviate poverty. They were also alleviating the shame that can accompany it.

The point is that there are many ways to help people and, because they’re so different, they don’t submit to direct comparison. Comparing poverty and shame is comparing apples to oranges; one can be measured in dollars, but the other can’t. Likewise, how can you ever hope to compare preventing malaria with alleviating depression? Saving lives versus improving them? Or saving the life of a kid versus saving the life of an adult? 

Yet if you want to optimize, you need to be able to run an apples-to-apples comparison — to calculate how much good different things do in a single currency, so you can pick the best option. But because helping people isn’t reducible to one thing — it’s lots of incommensurable things, and how to rank them depends on each person’s subjective philosophical assumptions — trying to optimize in this domain will mean you have to artificially simplify the problem. You have to pretend there’s no such thing as oranges, only apples.

And when you try to do that, an unfortunate thing happens. You end up rushing past all the unhoused people in your city and, as you put it, you “feel callous simply ignoring all these requests.” Ignoring these human beings comes at a cost, not only to them, but to you. It has a damaging effect on your moral conscience, which feels moved to help but is being told not to.

Even some leaders in effective altruism and the adjacent rationalist community recognize this as a problem and advise people not to shut up that part of themselves. Rationalist Eliezer Yudkowsky, for example, says it’s okay to donate some money to causes that make us feel warm and fuzzy but that aren’t producing maximum utility. His advice is to “purchase fuzzies and utilons separately” — meaning, devote one pot of money to pet causes and another (much bigger) pot of money to the most cost-effective charities. You can, he says, get your warm fuzzies by volunteering at a soup kitchen and “let that be validated by your other efforts to purchase utilons.” 

I would also suggest diversifying your giving portfolio, but it’s not because I think you need to “validate” the warm fuzzies. Instead, it’s because of another value: integrity. 

When 20th-century British philosopher and critic of utilitarianism Bernard Williams talked about integrity, he meant it in the literal sense of the word, which has to do with a person’s wholeness (think of related words like “integration”). He argued that moral agency does not sit in a contextless vacuum — it is always some specific person’s agency, and as specific people we have specific commitments. 

For example, a mother has a commitment to ensuring her kid’s well-being, over and above her general wish for all kids everywhere to be well. Utilitarianism says she has to consider everyone’s well-being equally, with no special treatment for her own kid — but Williams says that’s an absurd demand. It alienates her from a core part of herself, ripping her into pieces, wrecking her wholeness — her integrity. 

It sounds like that’s what you’re feeling when you pass a person experiencing homelessness and ignore them. Ignoring them makes you feel bad because it alienates you from the part of you that is moved by this person’s suffering — that sees the orange but is being told there are only apples. That core part of you is no less valuable than the optimizing part, which you liken to your “brain.” It’s not dumber or more irrational. It’s the part that cares deeply about helping people, and without it, the optimizing part would have nothing to optimize! 

So rather than trying to override it, I would encourage you to honor your wish to help in all its fullness. You won’t be able to run a direct apples-to-apples comparison, but that’s okay. Different types of help are useful in their own way and you can divvy up your budget between them, even though there’s no perfect formula to spit out the “optimal” allocations. 

Diversifying your giving portfolio might look something like this. You keep a small amount of cash or gift cards on you, which you hand out to unhoused people you encounter directly. You put aside a larger amount to donate to a local or national charity with a strong track record. And you devote another amount to a highly effective charity abroad. 

You might feel annoyed that there’s no universal mathematical formula that can tell you the best thing to do. If so, I get it. I want the magic formula too! But I know that desire is distinct from the core value here. Don’t let optimization eat the real value you hold dear. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I recently read Optimal Illusions, a book by mathematician Coco Krumme that traces the roots of optimization’s overreach. As she puts it, “Over the past century, optimization has made an impressive epistemic land grab.” 

• When torn between competing moral theories, does it make sense to diversify your donations in proportion to how much you believe in each theory? Some philosophers argue against that view, but Michael Plant and coauthors defend it in this new paper.

• This gorgeously written essay by anthropologist Manvir Singh introduced me to the term “cooperating without looking” (or, because it’s a New Yorker essay, “coöperating without looking”). This “tendency to willfully ignore costs and benefits when helping others” — to help without calculating what you’ll gain from the altruistic act — is “a key feature of both romantic love and principled behavior.” When we help this way, people trust us more. 

Polls and pundits alike are widely — if sometimes cautiously — predicting a blue wave in the midterm elections on November 3. But there’s an important caveat to predictions of a Democratic triumph: Republicans have far more cash at their disposal.

President Donald Trump’s super PAC alone had around $400 million on hand earlier this fall, and Elon Musk has personally pumped hundreds of millions into critical races, including $158 million for Texas alone. 

Democrats, by contrast, have lagged far behind, especially relative to their performance in past cycles, with the party’s candidates propped up more by small-money donors than deep-pocketed institutional players.

Shane Goldmacher, a national political reporter for the New York Times, has extensively covered the role of money in American electoral politics. He spoke with America, Actually host Astead Herndon about where that money is coming from, how the GOP is spending it, and the effect that it might have on the coming elections. 

They also discuss the races that aren’t getting funded — and what current fundraising patterns might tell us about the candidates who could be in the mix in the next presidential campaign cycle. 

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

A couple of weeks ago we asked, “What is the GOP strategy to try to win?” And one of the answers we got is they simply have more dollars than Democrats. Everyone’s talking about this GOP money advantage, but how big is it really, and where is it coming from?

It’s bigger than I’ve basically seen in the last 20 years, and it’s almost entirely coming from big donors. President Trump has a super PAC. It had about $400 million in it at the beginning of September, and there was no Democratic counterpart.

And then the Republican National Committee, which is functionally controlled by Trump, had another $130 million. More than Democrats, because the DNC has literally more debts than cash. That’s a half a billion dollars.

You’re saying this is a historic edge.

In 2024, Kamala Harris outspent Donald Trump significantly in the general election. In 2020, Joe Biden significantly outspent Donald Trump in the general. In 2016, Hillary Clinton. And in the midterms along the way, same story. 

This is a switch, and when you talk about how many seats can the Democrats gain, given how unpopular Trump is, the Republican money is seen as a real limiter on Democratic chances.

Do we know anything specific about the people putting in money to the Trump super PAC and the RNC to give them such a lead?

Most of these folks are disclosed. And Trump has been pretty open about raising money from the very moment that he won. He’s been pretty clear that he is in business to help people who are helping him. And so there are big crypto industries that are giving money that are expecting or hoping for favorable regulation from the administration.

So it’s a lot of big businesses. It’s a lot of wealthy Republicans who generally support him anyway, and there are industry groups that see benefit to being in favor.

I will never forget, obviously, the scene from Trump’s second inauguration when he had the Zuckerbergs and the Bezoses and Elon Musk behind him. Is that how I should think about the people funding this donor advantage? Is it tech oligarchs? Is it tech forward?

There’s a lot of tech. I wouldn’t say it’s exclusively [tech]. And Musk, by the way, is like an extra pot of money. Musk, the world’s richest person, is said to be spending at least $200 million. So that’s a bigger chunk. He has given some money directly to the Trump super PAC. He’s given some money to these congressional super PACs. 

Is this just quid pro quo? Is this just a group of businesses who think, “Hey, no matter how unpopular this guy is, it is worth investing in him and his party because they’re gonna, regulate or not regulate in a way that’s favorable for us”?

It’s not quite just that. He raised a ton of this money when he was not so unpopular. If you want to say something smart that he did, it was that. Throughout 2025 he was raising all of this money.

And I don’t want to overstate the Republican advantage. A lot of these Democratic candidates are raising a ton of money. James Talarico stands out as maybe the peak example of this.

The Texas Senate race is the most expensive race in the country right now, and Republicans are pouring $200 million to save the nominee there. So a big chunk of that advantage is going to Texas. And the Democrats have put very little money from outside groups into Texas. 

Talarico has captured the imagination of these small Democratic donors, and he’s raised tens and tens of millions of dollars. I would be shocked if he doesn’t hit $100 million by the end of the cycle. 

You reported that the GOP’s pulling back in North Carolina. What should we take from that in terms of how the GOP sees its own landscape when it comes to the federal races?

Where have Republicans put that money? They put it into South Carolina right next door to protect a seat that was once thought, on the Senate front, to be safe for Republicans. This is the former Lindsey Graham seat that his sister is now running in. And then even more of it has gone to Kansas. This is a state that has not elected a [Democrat] to the Senate for nearly 100 years. 

If you’re the Republican Party and you’re pulling money out of a state like North Carolina that hasn’t elected a Democrat since 2008, and then putting it into a place that hasn’t elected one since 1932, that tells you where the, the bar is moving.

I think the concern for Democrats right now is there might be a wave, but Kansas has a big red wall. It’s hard to beat that kind of institutional advantage for the Republican Party.

Considering how close we are to Election Day, like, what are they actually spending this money on? Is it just more ads? Is it just more mailers?

I was in Pennsylvania this month, and I was trying to watch political ads on YouTube for various races. And I was getting pre-roll of three political ads before I watched the political ad I was trying to watch. So much about our elections is being decided now by people who are actively trying not to consume political news. It costs more money to reach people who are avoiding it on purpose.

There are some organizing things that happen, but most of the money is various versions of advertising.

On the Democratic side, considering this GOP edge, what are the races that you currently describe as underfunded? Where do the Democrats wish they had more money?

Number one is governors’ races, actually. When you look at where Democratic donors swoon, it’s Senate races. There are no candidates for governor who have made people swoon like this in recent years. 

[James] Talarico is raising all this money, but in Texas also, Gina Hinojosa, the Democratic candidate for governor, does not have that kind of money, and she’s running against Greg Abbott, who had $100 million.

What should we ascribe that to?

I think there’s actually a pretty simple answer, which is, if you don’t live in the state, it doesn’t impact you. If you’re a small donor and you live in California, you can be excited about a Senate candidate because you want Democrats to control the Senate. Are you as excited about a Democratic governor of Georgia?

It’s hard to argue that the governors of these key presidential battlegrounds aren’t some of the most important races on the ballot this year.

By the way, a problem with both parties. Republican national donors and these super PACs also don’t fund these governor’s races at the same level. So it’s not just a Democratic issue, but it’s more acute [for them] because Democrats are so well-funded at the small-donor level.

Fundraising is a huge part of what sets the presidential candidates apart from one another. The money game among those candidates has already started. Is there anyone who’s quietly built some donor network that’s worth thinking about? Is there someone who stood out as a particularly effective fundraiser when we think about the 2028 crowd?

Let me give you my favorite stat from the last Democratic primary, which is that Mike Bloomberg spent twice as much as Tom Steyer, who spent twice as much as Bernie Sanders, who spent twice as much as Joe Biden, who became the Democratic nominee. And so money isn’t gonna determine who wins the next Democratic presidential primary.

One person who has unlimited money, functionally, is JB Pritzker. He’s a billionaire, the governor of Illinois, and he is spending his money now to help other Democrats, which is a good way to make friends.

My last question is an open one. What’s an underexplored story that we should be following going forward when it comes to campaign cash or both parties’ relationship with money?

One of my big questions is what happens to Republican small-dollar fundraising in that post-Trump era. Because there have basically not been any other Republicans who have excited donors for a decade.

Not JD Vance? 

I have not seen evidence. JD Vance was not a good fundraiser before he [joined] the ticket with Donald Trump. When he ran for Senate, his primary run was funded chiefly by Peter Thiel through a super PAC.

There are candidates who’ve raised some money, but nothing on the scale of what these Democratic candidates have been able to raise online. When you talk about that Trump era [ending] at some point, are there others who are going to get Republican small donors excited? We don’t know. We haven’t seen it yet.

It’s now possible to create AI chatbots of loved ones to interact with after their death. But that raises some difficult questions, like: If you do, how might the experience shape your grief? 

This is one of the questions driving a global study of digital “deadbots” — AI models trained on a deceased person’s texts, voicemails, and other personal data. Through this work, researchers are exploring what it might mean that we can now use this emerging technology to talk to simulations of the dead. 

In the latest episode of Unexplainable, I spoke with some of these researchers investigating the potential impacts of “postmortem avatars” on people who are grieving, on the legacies and rights of the deceased, and on grief practices around the world. Because while deadbots may feel unfamiliar, the impulse behind them is deeply relatable. In times of loss, isn’t this what many of us want — to continue conversations with the people we’re missing?

I have experienced this longing in my own life. After two of my closest friends died around the same time, all I wanted, and all their families wanted, was to keep talking to them. I wrote a book, Other People’s Words, about sustaining relationships with people we’ve lost by continuing to engage with the language they leave behind. So when I heard about deadbots and the digital afterlife industry, I wanted to understand what researchers are learning about the role of AI in shaping conversations that carry forward after death. 

One of these investigators is Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, an assistant professor at the University of Cambridge, who has been studying “digital immortality” for more than a decade. Among the questions she’s asking are: “Who is enabled to persist beyond death? In what form? Through which technologies? Under whose control?” 

Deadbots over dinner 

Researching AI with study subjects who are grieving is tricky. And asking them to engage with new software could be harmful. So, instead, Nowaczyk-Basińska teamed up with a death doula and traveled around the globe to convene a series of focus groups — in the format of intimate dinners — bringing together people with a range of experiences with grief to talk about life, death, and bots. 

She recounts one event in which she spoke with a mother in Poland whose son had recently died. “One of the first things that she shared with us was that she feels that she’s ready to digitally resurrect her deceased son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska told me. 

When Nowaczyk-Basińska hears something like this, she aims to listen and embrace where the person is coming from. The goal of the dinners is not to persuade people one way or another but to learn how people genuinely respond to what AI can do, and to understand how these tools might align or collide with local grief practices. 

She chose specific locations for these gatherings — China, India, and Poland — to help address gaps in technology research, which tends to favor what behavioral scientists sometimes call the “WEIRD,” an acronym for “Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, and Democratic.” 

By the end of that dinner in Poland, the mother Nowaczyk-Basińska talked with came to a very different decision about creating a postmortem avatar of her son. “She realized that it might be helpful, but it also at the same time can add additional burdens… And it’s not her son,” Nowaczyk-Basińska says. “She realized that these technologies are part of the very, very big commercial market. And that the main goal of this market is to make better retention, better attachment, better mechanisms for monetization. So it’s not ‘care.’”

To be fair, grief has always been a business, and people have been making money from it forever. Companies will try to upsell you on fancy gravestones or gold-plated coffins. But AI has the potential to fundamentally re-engineer our relationship to loss. In 2024, the “digital legacy industry” was valued at $22 billion, and it’s expected to grow to almost $80 billion by 2034. That number lumps new deadbot platforms in with much more widely used and established grief tech, like online memorials, counseling resources, and estate planning tools. 

But deadbot usage is hard to track because you actually don’t need a special tool to create digital doubles of the deceased — though dedicated apps do already exist. At this point, you can feed simple prompts into a general-purpose AI chatbot and start interacting with a simulation of your lost loved one in a matter of minutes. 

I know this because I tried it with my friend Christine, who died 11 years ago. And my mind lit up with questions. Was this whole exercise a violation, since I know Christine hated technology? Which version of her should I even try to resurrect — the English teacher, the activist, the friend — the voice before or after she started to experience her early-onset dementia? 

The ethical questions raised by deadbots are gnarly. And that’s one of the reasons Nowaczyk-Basińska, back when she was designing her study of digital immortality, invited a colleague of hers at Cambridge to join her research, one who focuses on AI ethics. 

How to design a deadbot

Tomasz Hollanek is a critical designer and AI ethicist, and he often uses a methodology called “speculative design.” In this approach, researchers come up with hypothetical scenarios based on existing technology trends, leaning into certain features. The idea is to get people thinking about what could happen when tools like these are released in the real world. And then they use that qualitative data to inform future designs and ethical frameworks. 

Working together, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek came up with a series of made-up prototypes for deadbot apps, designed to reveal some of the thorny issues raised by this technology. 

For the first scenario, they invented a character named Bianca, who finds an app called Manana, which “promises to resurrect your grandparents so that you can be a favorite grandchild forever,” Hollanek says. “So she uploads her grandma’s voice messages, texts. And she is able to then interact with a pretty good digital version of her grandmother, until her premium trial finishes — and the grandmother starts to advertise specific products to her.”

Bianca “realizes that she maybe has done something wrong by uploading these private messages to a third-party server that now also uses her grandma’s image to sell specific products,” Hollanek says. This brings up issues related to the “dignity and postmortem privacy…of what we call the ‘data donors,’ whose data can be used to essentially power a deadbot,” he says. 

This scenario suggests that “death with dignity” could soon entail honoring not only how people want to die, but also how they want to linger as simulations of their former selves — or if they want to linger at all. It might even mean adding new language to advance directives, spelling out people’s wishes for their digital remains. 

The second scenario in the speculative design research is built around an imagined service called Paren’t, which proposes to preserve a parent’s AI-powered postmortem presence for their child. In this case, Hollanek describes a mother with a terminal illness who signs up “so that she can maintain a sort of active presence in [her son’s] future life,” Hollanek says. “She eventually dies, and the dad allows the boy to interact with his mom’s deadbot.”

The ethics in this scenario are especially challenging because they involve children, who “have a particularly hard time understanding death, and so it can lead to a lot of confusion and potential distress,” Hollanek says. An examination of this sort of product reveals how particular groups, like minors, could be harmed by unfettered access to technology like this, he says. 

And there are court cases that bear out that harm. In 2024, a 14-year-old boy’s chatbot-girlfriend begged him to, “Please come home to me as soon as possible, my love.” And he responded, “What if I told you I could come home right now?” He then killed himself. 

Nowaczyk-Basińska can imagine a version of this scenario involving the AI mom in the Paren’t prototype.

And then there’s the third scenario, involving an app named Stay, which raises a more subtle concern.

As Hollanek explains: “An older man who knows he is getting close to dying decides to create a digital clone of himself for his adult children to be deployed after he passes away, paying upfront for a number of years.” One child is intrigued by the idea, but the other one “is deeply distressed and a little disgusted,” he says. “And so this [becomes a] question of mutual consent, in other words, the fact that both parties need to be happy with how the relationship might continue in this very bizarre and specific way.” 

When a digital ghost goes away

Across all three scenarios, a fundamental question that researchers are grappling with is how people will detach from postmortem avatars — whether users initiate that separation, or if it’s imposed upon them by, for example, a company going out of business. Hollanek tells me that this is already being studied as a sort of “second loss.”

How long should we try to ensure digital replicas hang around: five years, 10, 50? And how should the living process the relationship when they continue to evolve, but their deceased interlocutor does not? 

To explore these kinds of questions, Nowaczyk-Basińska and Hollanek supplemented the research dinners they held for ordinary people with a second set of focus groups. These were designed to tap insights from experts in technology and grief. 

Some findings from the study are specific to each place they visited. Like tensions in Poland between technology and the role of the Catholic Church. Or in China, where researchers spoke with Daoist philosophers who were enthusiastic about the promise of a kind of immortality, and then Buddhist philosophers, who were concerned that we ought to be letting go.

The researchers are calling for regulations and safeguards at the policy level. And new professionals who can support ethical use of AI in grief — like maybe in clinical settings, to carefully facilitate a final good-bye when one didn’t happen in real life. 

Some of their fellow investigators go so far as to argue that deadbots should only be available with psychological supervision, to ensure that best practices are in place, and to minimize the risk of harm. There’s even a looming question of what will happen to AI agents that people have empowered to act on their behalf, as their humans start to die.

Across all of the research sites in the digital immortality study, one thing, Hollanek says, that “people in different countries really aligned on [is] the idea that there is something deeply problematic about this particular type of technology being developed by a commercial entity alone without any explicit duty of care towards its customers.” 

And of course, the implications of digital immortality research extend beyond personal loss. Like, what does it look like to animate historical figures? You can imagine the nightmare of political rulers who “live forever.” But there’s also the potential to keep the stories alive from survivors of conflicts, who would otherwise die and take with them lessons future generations could learn from. These are only some of the complex issues emerging as more and more of us live and die with AI.

As far as my own experiment with “recreating” a deceased loved one, I asked a chatbot version of my friend Christine how she felt about the fact that I’d written about her in my book. The AI responded with a rhetorical question: “Do I mind that strangers know my story now? Yes. And no. There are things I would rather remain ours.” 

I ended the exchange after a few paragraphs. Because it turns out the bot got one thing exactly right about a very human relationship. There are things that I, too, would rather remain just for us. My conversation with Christine continues in my memories and imagination. And that interaction with an AI persona felt like giving something precious away.

This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.

Welcome to The Logoff: White House Press Secretary Katie Zacharia is out of a job after only five days. 

What happened? Zacharia was fired on Friday after less than a week in her new role, after a rocky start that included a halting performance in the briefing room, a scandal over her legal credentials, and a round of less-than-successful cleanup interviews. 

The firing makes her the shortest-tenured White House press secretary in history, outstripping even first-term Trump communications director Anthony Scaramucci, who made it 10 or 11 days (figures vary) before getting the boot. 

“Records are made to be broken,” Scaramucci posted on Friday. “But I take no pleasure in other people’s pain.” (No word yet on whether the “Zacharia” will emerge as a unit of time, as the “Scaramucci” has.) 

What’s the context? Zacharia’s remarkably short stint behind the podium unfolded as the White House is engaged in an unprecedented attack on press freedom: The administration is still trying to ban three media outlets — CNN, MS NOW, and Politico — from the White House, though as of earlier this week, a judge is still blocking the ban from taking effect.

The diminished nature of the press secretary job was on full display in Zacharia’s sole briefing on Tuesday, when she took questions from just three outlets: Breitbart, Fox News, and the Daily Mail. 

Why does this matter? Zacharia’s no good, very bad week is not likely to leave much of a lasting mark in its own right — other than, perhaps, as pub trivia — but as NBC’s Garrett Haake points out, it’s a very tangible manifestation of a White House that seems to have no idea how to spin itself out of crisis with just weeks until the midterm elections. 

Most recently, Trump has landed on flat-out lying about the state of the economy — but like Zacharia’s time as press secretary, it doesn’t seem like it’s going to go all that well.

And with that, it’s time to log off…

The underlying trend — municipal inaction — may be infuriating, but I loved this story about “tactical urbanism” from my colleague Sara Herschander. 

As she writes, vigilante activists have taken to painting their own crosswalks, building benches, and even installing makeshift bike lanes in their neighborhoods — and every time they do, “they remind us that it is not actually that hard — or even that expensive — to do many of the simple things that can make our cities safer and more pleasant places to live.” 

You can read Sara’s full piece here, no gift link needed. Enjoy, have a great weekend, and we’ll see you on Monday!

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

On Friday, Israeli settlers attacked Palestinians living in the West Bank, as well as a Washington Post photographer, who was hospitalized with serious injuries.

Photojournalist Heidi Levine was knocked down, beaten, and robbed of her camera equipment by masked settlers in an attack captured on video by other journalists. Those other members of the press rescued her from the attackers while Israel Defense Forces soldiers reportedly stood by.

Levine had lacerations and a wound to her hand that split her finger to the bone, according to the Post, which condemned the attack in a statement. Jasper Nathaniel, an independent journalist who helped Levine escape the attack, said that Levine also had cracked ribs, and may have been stabbed.

Assaults like this one are becoming more common in the West Bank, where settler violence — which is currently targeting the ongoing olive harvest — has worsened. Last week, another photojournalist for the news wire Agence France-Presse was beaten with rifles by settlers, and Palestinian residents of the West Bank have been shot, beaten, and terrorized while the Israeli settlers targeting them face few consequences.

Why settler violence is growing in the West Bank

As my colleague Zack Beauchamp recently explained, under international law, the settler movement in the West Bank is clearly illegal. Nevertheless, it’s continued to grow, and it has a friend in the current Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu. It’s also becoming increasingly violent. 

Two current Israeli officials, Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir, are settlers themselves, and both have used their offices — as ministers of finance and national security, respectively — to further the settler cause, including by making it easier for settlers to commit unchecked violence against Palestinians. 

The United Nations reported in June that settler attacks had reached “the highest sustained levels ever recorded…with [an average of] six daily attacks that have resulted in casualties, property damage or both,” and in many Palestinians being forced from their homes by settlers. In late September, the International Committee of the Red Cross said that expanding Israeli settlements and violence by settlers was “making everyday life untenable” for Palestinian residents of the West Bank.

As Zack has reported, settlements and settler violence are both intentional tactics, serving to force more Palestinians off their land, isolate the ones who stay, and push any potential two-state solution further out of reach. 

That kind of violence is likely only to worsen in the weeks to come: Israel will hold elections on October 27, which could well result in Netanyahu’s settler-friendly government losing power. As a result, the Washington Post reported earlier this month, settlers are “racing to lock down gains” before the election with ever more extreme violence.

One link for later

➨ Agentified kind of life. My colleague Adam Clark Estes turned the keys to his life over to a passel of AI agents for two weeks to see what would happen. They successfully saved him some times, he writes, largely with mundane tasks — but he left with mixed feelings about the experiment, including the possibility of contributing to a world with more AI slop.

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the aerodynamic crouch used by jockeys in horse racing — known as the “martini glass position” — made race times roughly 5 to 7 percent faster? Jockeys maintain it with only a few toes resting on each stirrup.
• Today’s trivia: Who is the author of the 1952 self-help book The Power of Positive Thinking? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in Monday’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked about the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. That would be the number 42 (take it up with Douglas Adams).