There are two kinds of people in this world: those who find it acceptable to be a little tardy and those who consider it an affront to all that is decent. As someone who frequently runs late, I’m often relieved when someone else is, too. And I don’t mind if a friend is a bit behind; the worst-case scenario is I have a few minutes of peace in which to stare at my phone. But the perpetually punctual see this as disrespect, as showing up late is a sign you don’t value others’ time, that you believe what you’re doing is more important.
Of course, few people would be satisfied with waiting at a restaurant for an hour while their date swears they’re only ten minutes away. Is there a socially acceptable sweet spot for tardiness that satisfies both the need for punctuality while giving grace to the time-challenged? To answer that question, I enlisted the help of three people with unique viewpoints: an etiquette expert, a researcher who has studied lateness, and an extremely punctual guy who has strong feelings on the matter.
Answers have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity.
The etiquette expert: You get a 15ish-minute buffer to casual events, 5 minutes for everything else
“Five minutes late to a Zoom call or a scheduled phone call for work is, in my mind, really late. Five minutes late to meet your friend at a restaurant is not very late and very forgivable. Five minutes late to their house, super forgivable. Half an hour late to dinner and they won’t seat you and now you’ve lost your table, that starts to be a bit annoying. Late to a surprise party is unforgivable. I’ve seen hosts get really upset about that one because you can likely ruin a very well-planned surprise. There’s a 15-to-30-minute arrival period for most gatherings. You push past that and you’re showing up really late. If you are going to be late, let somebody know, whether it’s a phone call or a text message.
If you were only getting together for an hour and you’re starting to push the half-hour mark, you might want to check in with someone about whether you’ve really messed up and it’s not worth it for them to stay and meet with you for 20 minutes by the time you arrive.
There are definitely friends who take advantage of other people’s time and that would be something to talk with someone about if it’s chronic and to the point where it starts ruining the experience. You could say, ‘I know that you’re often 20 to 30 minutes late when we get together for something. It would mean a lot if you could try to be on time at seven for this one.’ We can’t control how other people react. They might feel offended. They might start rattling off reasons why they’re always late and you can say, ‘I know and I understand it really does happen, but it’s been consistent enough and this one’s important. I would really love to have you get there at the start time.’ I think that can make a difference.”
The lateness researcher: It depends on the cultural norms of the people involved
“Being late differs across the world. We have wide windows of time or very narrow ones depending on the culture. In our research, we were comparing Dutch, South African, and Pakistani norms. We knew that there would be differences, but we had no idea how much. Pakistanis really have a different idea about lateness. They’re much more flexible about it. The window’s much wider. For the Dutch and South Africans, the window is about 15 minutes. After that, people will start thinking they’re not coming anymore or start calling. But for Pakistanis, that moment arrives much later.
For people who grew up in cultures that are more aligned with the Protestant work ethic, we would say there’s a deal between two people about the time frame. If you don’t conform to that, then you violate that norm and then you are late. For Pakistanis, it is a time frame that aligns with the clock, but it depends on who is there, not so much as a deal between two people. The Dutch are very egalitarian. Everyone, it doesn’t matter what status you have, is allowed about 15 minutes. But we saw that for Pakistanis, if you’re meeting a very important person, then they can arrive much later.
There’s also a bit of the emotional side or the feeling that you are personally responsible and you’re rude if you don’t stick to those norms. I discussed this in class with my students because a lot of them show up late. I was saying, ‘I think it’s very rude when there’s somebody presenting and they get interrupted by doors opening.’ A lot of them said, ‘I don’t think it’s rude.’ They had different norms about that situation. Some of them agreed with me, but not everyone.
In practice, I think that it depends on how important the appointment is. In our class, we emphasized that we as teachers find being on time important. The norm violation becomes more important when it is explicit. And I have a sense that now the students are more apologetic.
In developing intercultural skills, ‘bridging’ is often trained. One of the things in bridging is to make expectations explicit. It involves explaining how violating the norms surrounding them are experienced, and then trying to find solutions that are acceptable for both sides. Often, this leads to people agreeing that it means give and take, but it can also mean changing procedures or rules.”
—Wendelien van Eerde, associate professor at Amsterdam Business School at the University of Amsterdam
The punctual guy: Actually, just be early
“For a home-hosted dinner party, no more than 30 minutes late before it’s inconsiderate.
For dinner reservations at a restaurant, five minutes before is inconsiderate as normally your party can’t be seated until everyone is there and making everyone wait for you isn’t cool.
For house party gatherings, show up whenever unless specifically asked by the host to be there at a specific time.
For work-related situations, like being on set ready to shoot at your scheduled call time, be there five minutes before your call time. The crew got there on time to prepare for you. Show them the same respect. Your time is not more valuable than theirs.”
Try as we might to get everything done, leave the house in a timely manner, and hope for no traffic, life often has other plans. Lateness happens. But as long as you make a good faith effort to be on time, openly communicate when you’re running behind, and don’t make a habit of it, consider a 10-to-15 minute window an appropriate buffer. Any later and you might start to lose goodwill.
“Blue zones” are places around the world where people have been reported to live longer, healthier lives. The idea began with researchers studying communities in places like Ikaria, Greece; Loma Linda, California; Nicoya, Costa Rica; Okinawa, Japan; and Sardinia, Italy, where daily life seems to support longevity through movement, connection, purpose, and healthier eating.
But over time, blue zones have become more than a way to study longevity. They became a certification program exported to communities across the United States.
In this video, we visit California’s Beach Cities to see what happens when a community tries to recreate the conditions of a blue zone, and ask whether the lessons of longevity can really be engineered, or whether basic public health ideas have been repackaged into something much bigger.
Democratic candidate for US Senate in Michigan Abdul El-Sayed speaks to supporters before heading off on a march through downtown on August 2, 2026 in Detroit, Michigan. | Scott Olson/Getty Images
Welcome to The Midterms, Actually. Every week I’ll be writing about two things: one big idea or trend I see forming across the 2026 primaries, and one thing I’m hearing from a voice on the ground. Let’s get into it.
One big idea: The Uncommitted movement has already won
During the 2024 presidential election, on the third night of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, we recorded an episode of my election podcast The Run-Up that I still think about all the time. The premise was simple: I wanted to know whether Democrats were making a material change at the top of the ticket or just a cosmetic one. So we asked convention-goers a plain question — how would Kamala Harris’s Democratic Party be any different from Joe Biden’s?
The tone of the piece reflected the optimism of the room. The activists, down to a person, thought Harris was showing a newfound openness to the administration’s critics. But underneath the hopium was a specific policy desire: that Harris would break from Biden’s unconditional support of Israel’s violent campaign in Gaza. That afternoon, I spent time with members of the Uncommitted movement, born in Michigan, who were trying to pressure the DNC into putting a single Palestinian speaker on the stage. They held press conferences with grieving families, and warned the party that the Democrats’ Muslim and Arab base in particular would not forget being sidelined.
United Auto Workers president Shawn Fain made clear the confidence surrounding Harris at the time was tied to the belief her posture around Gaza would be different from Biden’s: “She’s made, obviously, a couple different comments on Gaza,” he said. “We called for a ceasefire in UAW back in November. And obviously, she understands the humanity issue of this. And I mean, my conversations I’ve had with Kamala Harris have been very good, very fruitful.”
They didn’t get one. Not the speaker, not the policy shift, not the break from Biden. Harris famously refused to distance herself from her boss, whether it was Israel or anything else — and likely lost because of it.
And while many of the most prominent voices of the Uncommitted movement (including current Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed) ended up publicly backing Harris in the end, some of Harris’s most ardent supporters have repeatedly blamed left-wing activists for undermining her campaign. Haley Stevens, the Michigan representative who’s running for the Senate as the party’s establishment choice, has sought to make El-Sayed’s support for Uncommitted an issue in that race, suggesting that the movement planted seeds of discontent ahead of a must-win presidential election.
I want to argue the opposite. Two years after the Uncommitted movement shook up the Democratic Party, its impact has never been more clear. Public opinion of Israel has plummeted across the American electorate, to the point where the movement’s position is now a majority opinion. Per Quinnipiac, 77 percent of Democrats say they believe Israel is committing a genocide — an unthinkable number just two years ago. The Uncommitted movement also led to the growth and maturation of the Democrats’ Muslim left, which has already molded prominent elected officials like New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed.
Even more, I think Uncommitted challenged the blame-the-voters framework that allows the establishment to avoid self-reflection. The movement was never only about a DNC speaking slot, but about the idea that every vote must be earned, not owed. It was a retort to “vote blue no matter who” — an argument that conditional support for the party is not only valid, but of moral importance.
In 2024, that posture got you branded a spoiler. Today it’s just how Democrats talk. When I sat down with Hasan Piker — the most popular voice on the Democratic left — he told me he voted for Kamala Harris but pointedly refused to endorse her, and named exactly why:
“The only reason for my refusal to openly endorse was because of…a continuation of the genocide in Gaza.”
“I understand the harm reduction arguments…but it’s not a practical approach to winning elections, and demonstrably it’s been a failure with Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris.”
Piker put the mechanism plainly. October 7, 2023, and its aftermath, he told me, were “a seismic shift that gave a lot of confidence to the left, that as long as they stood by their positions…people would actually see the truth.” The movement didn’t move Biden. It moved the electorate Biden’s successors now have to answer to.
And you can trace that shifted ground straight into this year’s wins. In New York, Zohran Mamdani rode exactly this coalition into City Hall — a victory Piker described as the proof of concept he’d been waiting for: “that’s why I was so grateful for Zohran’s victory…I can just point to him.” In Congress, progressives like Darializa Avila Chevalier in New York City and Melat Kiros in Colorado add to the growing evidence that acknowledging Israel’s actions in Gaza as a genocide is now a litmus test for Democratic voters gauging the trust and credibility of their candidates.
Which brings us to Michigan, where the whole thing started. It’s easy to forget now, but the Uncommitted movement was born in the Michigan primary — and the general-election bill came due there, too. Kamala Harris got 36 percent of the vote in Dearborn, a city Joe Biden had carried with nearly 69 percent in 2020. She lost the state by about 80,000 votes. The voters the party told to fall in line didn’t, and Michigan is where that refusal was most legible.
Now look at who’s competitive in this week’s Senate primary. Abdul El-Sayed is running on the precise argument Uncommitted was making in the streets of Chicago — except now it’s a statewide campaign with real money behind it, against a candidate backed by tens of millions in pro-Israel spending. He turns the foreign-policy question into a pocketbook one and refuses to soften the language. As he said on America, Actually:
“There is an electoral cost to backstopping genocide and apartheid.”
“If you can’t call a genocide perpetrated by our tax dollars the moral abomination that it is, then at some point it’s hard for me to believe that you’re gonna fight for anything,” he told me.
Whether or not El-Sayed wins today, the fact that a candidate running explicitly against AIPAC and unconditional aid is fighting for a Senate seat in a swing state is the clearest possible measure of how far the ground has moved since that convention floor.
In the coming months, it may be that the Democrats’ moderate wing — think tanks like Third Way, party leadership, and those offended by the electorate’s rising leftist tide — will adopt some of the same tactics they criticized. Already, Rep. Hillary Scholten, who is supporting Stevens in Michigan, has signaled she may refuse to support El-Sayed in a general election, due to his association with Piker.
It seems “vote blue no matter who” has its limits. For progressives. For centrists. For everyone.
What I’m hearing
With Michigan’s primary set to conclude today, that leaves the Wisconsin governor’s race as the next big election on the Democratic calendar. This week, I reached out to Dan Shafer, a reporter in Milwaukee who has been covering the race for months. Schafer writes for the Recombobulation Area, where he’s political editor and writes a weekly opinion column.
It looks like Francesca Hong, the DSA-aligned state assemblywoman, has a commanding lead in the Wisconsin governor’s primary. This would’ve been a shock a year ago. How did this happen?
The short answer is that Francesca Hong has simply run the best campaign. She has run circles around the consultant-brained conventional approaches of her opponents, and has found success by doing things decidedly differently.
From the very beginning, I characterized her as the “wild card” in the race. And while I certainly did not envision her having a commanding lead in the polls in the final stretch in the primary, I knew that, given her background in the restaurant and hospitality industry, she wouldn’t let anyone out-work or out-hustle her on the campaign trail. Her relentless ground game and digital organizing energy essentially issued a challenge to every other campaign to step up. The rest of the field failed that test.
She’s also absolutely dominating this primary with younger voters. In the Marquette University Law School Poll from last week, the data showed her with the support of 66% of likely primary voters in the 18-29 age group, and 51% in the 30-44 age group. No other candidate was even in double digits. I write a breakdown of every new Marquette poll, and these are just preposterous numbers. For Gen Z and millennials, she is the candidate.
Hong has made data centers and AI backlash a centerpiece of this race. How important is this issue specifically in this race?
I think it’s been the No. 1 issue [since] she’s taken off in this primary.
She backed a data center moratorium in January, and began running on this issue early. It’s been a very animating issue in Wisconsin, first for all the reasons the anti-data center backlash is coming to so many Great Lakes states, but also because of the failed Foxconn project in Racine County that happened during the first Trump administration under then-Gov. Scott Walker. It came with the promise of thousands and thousands of jobs, Trump called it the “eighth wonder of the world,” and it’s just been a miserable failure on so many levels. Hong just filmed her most recent ad at the Foxconn site — a project the Republican nominee Tom Tiffany voted for while in the state Senate at the time.
Politically, though, what really helped Hong on this issue is that no other candidate running backed a data center moratorium. One of the most significant moments of the primary happened in a June 3 candidate forum focused on working-class issues, where moderator JT Cestkowski asked a yes-or-no question on whether the candidates back a data center moratorium. Only Hong said yes. If any other candidate had said yes, that would have given the anti-data center voter options in the primary. Instead, they all went to Hong.
There is an assertion that Hong is a weak general election candidate. Is there evidence for this?
This is Wisconsin. Anyone pretending a statewide election in this of all states should be considered anything other than a toss-up is kidding themselves. Many have argued that her likely Republican opponent, Tom Tiffany, is a uniquely weak general election candidate in his own right. But it can’t be denied that there would be a whole lot of risk involved with her as a general election candidate: The “socialism” of it all will undoubtedly be a challenge. But Francesca Hong continues to be a wild card, and she might have what it takes to play a winning hand.
A field organizer places signs on the podium before the pro-choice Kansas for Constitutional Freedom primary election watch party in Overland Park, Kansas, August 2, 2022. | Dave Kaup/AFP via Getty Images
Editor’s note, Aug. 5, 6:20 am ET: Kansas voters rejected a proposed amendment to change how state supreme court justices are selected. This piece below was originally published on August 4.
Four years after the Dobbs decision, abortion battles have largely taken a backseat in national news to other policy fights this cycle. Leaders in the anti-abortion movement say they’re disillusioned with President Donald Trump’s unwillingness to push for further restrictions. The federal battle over access to abortion medication seems to be settled — for now. Public awareness of that fight is limited, and even at the state level, a couple years have passed since the high-pitched but successful state-level efforts to protect abortion access in red states.
Yet a little-known battle has been playing out in Kansas, where a ballot measure to change the way state supreme court justices are selected serves as a reminder that these fights over abortion are still active, even if they take the form of creative procedural and administrative efforts.
If it succeeds, opponents say, it would open the floodgates for similar efforts in other states to politicize the remaining independent state courts (13 other states use a method similar to Kansas) and provide a road map to undoing abortion protections in other states that have safeguarded them.
On Tuesday, Kansans are deciding whether to change the way judges on the state’s highest court are selected. Up until now, judges were selected through a nonpartisan merit-based system: When a spot opens on the bench, a nine-member commission submits a list to the governor, who then selects a replacement.
The referendum would replace this system with direct, partisan elections of judges, like any other politician. Proponents say it’s a democratic move, a way to better express the will of voters over “unelected” bureaucrats. Yet critics say it’s first and foremost about restricting abortion rights — which both the court and voters have rejected.
How Kansas became an abortion rights flashpoint
In 2019, the state supreme court recognized the right to abortion in the state constitution; three years later, after Dobbs, voters rejected a Republican-championed proposal to overturn that ruling, choosing to preserve abortion rights by a 59-41 margin in a deeply red state.
It was after that failed vote in 2022 that then-state attorney general Republican candidate Kris Kobach outlined a new strategy for undoing these protections: changing the way the supreme court is selected, electing anti-abortion candidates, and “slowly and quietly” overturning the 2019 decision and 2022 vote.
“If you look at the various proposals, one of the proposals that is crystal clear is allowing people to popularly elect justices to the supreme court, which is the most common system among all of the states in the country,” Kobach said in 2022.
He’s a bit more careful talking about this in 2026: “There is a real desire to bring back some accountability to the judiciary,” he told the New York Times this week. “It’s not just about abortion.”
Tuesday’s results would have huge ramifications, critics said, given that nonelected state courts have been a final bulwark against Republican supermajorities and governors in red states. Kansas has been an island for abortion access for women in the South and central US since the Dobbs decision.
The victory in 2022 also inspired abortion rights advocates to try to use ballot measures to enshrine these protections in about a dozen other states, which successfully overturned abortion bans in Missouri and Ohio. State courts in Utah and Wyoming, meanwhile, blocked bans.
The next frontier in the abortion wars
These independent checks on power have been under attack for years, Michael Milov-Cordoba, a court expert and counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice’s judiciary program, told me.
“State legislators across the country are increasingly trying to undermine those courts. … That retaliation takes a few different forms, but changing how judges are selected is top of the list,” Milov-Cordoba said. “And what we’ve seen is that in many states where courts stand up for abortion rights and strike down abortion restrictions, efforts to change state judiciaries have followed.”
He noted the complete reworking of the Utah supreme court in the last year, including by expanding and packing it. Similar retooling of the state supreme court happened in Iowa in 2022. Montana is likely the next battleground, where Republican legislators are exploring various avenues to strip or limit the state supreme court’s powers. That in turn has led the ACLU to get involved to boost a constitutional amendment this year that would preserve the nonpartisan status of judicial elections.
And in recent years, state supreme court elections have been inundated with spending and attention from both in- and out-of-state backers. Last year’s Wisconsin judicial election, for example, became the most expensive race of its kind in US history, with more than $100 million spent — just two years after a contest for a different seat on the state supreme court had set its own record at more than $50 million spent.
“If these courts become partisan, then they will be just like any other election fight — subject to being bought and sold by billionaire political funders,” Deirdre Schifeling, the chief political and advocacy officer at the ACLU, told me. “They become a race to the bottom … and [Republicans] are finding backdoor ways to seize power to push their ideological agenda.”
Already, Kansas has seen heavy spending: More than $12 million have been spent from both sides, including about $5 million from the ACLU, Schifeling told me.
”Everyone’s focused on the Michigan Senate race, other kind of big-ticket, sexy elections,” Schifeling said. “Well, this is just as important and much more under the radar. Without a balanced court, we are going to lose rights and liberties across the board in a state like Kansas.”
GLP-1 drugs promised to usher in a new era of treating obesity as a disease. We could leave behind the anti-fat biases of the past, which blamed obesity on moral failing or personal weakness. Instead, these drugs would allow us to approach it as a medical condition, a complex matrix of genetics and other forces which could be changed with the right dose of these powerful new medicines.
Or so the thinking went.
While the clinical potential of these drugs remains immense, they have yet to change how the broader US culture perceives and engages with weight and weight loss. Even as millions of Americans shed pounds in bulk for the first time, they are also contending with fierce stigma and shaming from others — instead of being criticized for being fat, they are being criticized for using GLP-1s.
The social media communities that have blossomed around GLP-1s are filled with tales of awkward conversations and much worse. Partners who berate a significant other who wants to go on Wegovy or Zepbound. Coworkers who blame the drugs for their rising insurance costs. Even dismissive and unsympathetic doctors and nurses.
Some people who take GLP-1s must contend with an uneasy sense of living behind enemy lines: Many people describe being at work or out in public and overhearing people talking about GLP-1s and passing judgment on people who they think are taking a “shortcut” to lose weight.
“It’s like you’re being stigmatized without the person who’s [saying] it even realizing it, necessarily,” said Adriana, a 33-year-old GLP-1 user who lives in the Chicago area. (Vox agreed to identify the people we spoke to by their first name, to protect their privacy when discussing stigma.)
“There’s a lot of internalized stigma and judgment we have from the culture about our bodies and ourselves.”
Erin Standen, psychology professor who studies health and behavior change at Rice University
This is not just evident from anecdotes. Researchers have put the question to the test. And they have found that Americans not only feel more negative stigma toward somebody who lost weight with a GLP-1 than somebody who lost weight through diet and exercise — they also feel more negatively about the GLP-1 user than somebody who never lost weight at all.
“It seems like people are really reacting negatively to the idea that somebody who has lost weight with a GLP-1 might be, quote-unquote, ‘taking the easy way out’ or cheating the system,” said Erin Standen, a psychology professor who studies health and behavior change at Rice University and led one such study. “There’s a lot of internalized stigma and judgment we have from the culture about our bodies and ourselves.”
Americans have internalized the message that being overweight is a personal failure so thoroughly that, now that the kind of extraordinarily powerful weight-loss shots and pills long hoped for are here, many people struggle to see it as good news. They see it as cheating.
GLP-users feel damned if they do, damned if they don’t
GLP-1 users have found themselves in a trap. They’ve felt judged for years for their bodies: Studies have found that up to 42 percent of adults with obesity have experienced some kind of weight discrimination; and between 40 and 50 percent have internalized weight bias. One survey from this year found that 81 percent of people taking GLP-1s said that they had felt social pressure to be thin, and more than half said that those attitudes influenced their decision to take one of the new weight-loss drugs.
And yet, now that they’re cutting weight, they’re being judged for how they lose it. In the same survey, 69 percent of GLP-1 users said other people saw the drugs as a cheat code, 23 percent said that it was hard to handle other people’s feelings about the meds, and 43 percent said that they didn’t like talking about their GLP-1 use for fear of judgment.
“Culturally we have a widespread belief that weight isn’t complex — it’s simply energy in versus energy out,” Susan Persky, a behavioral scientist at the National Institutes of Health who has studied GLP-1 stigma, told me in an email. “If everyone ‘should’ be able to manage their weight through diet and exercise, engaging willpower and hard work, using GLP-1s is seen as a cheat or a hack. So someone with higher weight who uses a GLP-1 is not only seen as lazy or weak, they’re also seen as cheating to achieve weight loss that other people have ‘earned’.”
Perhaps the most extensive study on GLP-1 stigma so far is from scholars at Rice University, UCLA, and the Mayo Clinic, published in the International Journal of Obesity in April. It followed an earlier paper, published in April 2024 in the same journal, that suggested people had more negative views of a woman who lost weight with a GLP-1 versus somebody who lost weight with diet and exercise.
The new experiment sought to replicate those findings and extend them. How did people feel about somebody who took a GLP-1 versus somebody who never lost weight at all? How would people feel about somebody who regained weight? They gave more than 600 participants short profiles of hypothetical patients who were all alike except for one thing: One had lost weight with diet and exercise, one had lost weight using a GLP-1, one didn’t lose weight. They were asked to rate the person on various positive and negative metrics, to measure how they perceived the person and whether they’d want to associate with them socially.
What they found revealed how deep the bias against GLP-1 users seems to run.
When comparing the two hypothetical people who lost weight, study participants offered far more negative traits and far fewer positive ones to the people who had used a GLP-1, Standen told me. “That really stuck out,” she said. They also ranked the GLP-1 user as more unhealthy.
But even beyond that, people actually rated the person who didn’t lose weight at all more positively than the GLP-1 user. “People were more likely to say they were willing to connect socially with the person who hadn’t lost weight as compared to the person who was a GLP-1 user,” Standen said.
The study didn’t ask the participants to explain in detail why they felt the way they did about GLP-1 users. But Standen and other experts attributed the attitude to those cultural norms around body weight that have turned obesity in the minds of many into a matter of personal morality rather than the medical and socioeconomic issue that most clinicians view it as.
“Stigma toward GLP-1 use reflects deeply rooted cultural beliefs about effort, discipline, and personal responsibility for weight and health,” Stacy Post, a postdoctoral scholar at Georgetown University who authored the 2024 study on GLP-1 stigma with Persky, told me over email. “In this context, it is not surprising that GLP-1s are often viewed as a ‘quick fix’ for a problem that many believe should be solved through willpower and lifestyle changes alone.”
And the consequences of stigma go beyond straining someone’s personal relationships. People can feel shame and stress when they think they’re being judged, and that in turn can have direct physical effects that are bad for their health.
“These small little moments where people feel discriminated against do accumulate in the body,” Standen said. “Experiencing stigma or feeling judged for having used or not used a GLP-1 is directly harmful to your overall physical and mental health.”
Feeling judgment “also might lead you to either avoid health care or be less open when seeking healthcare in ways that could long-term harm your health as well,” Standen said. We know how much GLP-1s can improve the health prospects of somebody who is obese, so if somebody decides not to take a weight-loss med for fear of being judged, that is a net loss to their health.
What it’s like to be a GLP-1 user when society shames GLP-1 users
The Rice study affirms something GLP-1 users have been saying in online communities since these drugs hit the market a few years ago. I have spent the past few months reading these stories on the various Reddit communities dedicated to GLP-1 drugs and weight loss, and the frustration that users experience in being judged for medications they feel are approaching a miracle drug is palpable.
One poster described her boyfriend becoming “extremely upset” when she said she was considering going on a weight-loss medication; another person also detailed their fight with an unsupportive partner. Others have contended with rude comments from coworkers. People have faced judgmental questions when they were visiting a hospital’s emergency room for something unrelated. One person even encountered the stigma at their cross-stitch club.
I spoke with two people, Adriana and Mike, who had shared their experiences of GLP-1 stigma on Reddit.
Mike, 50, and living near Boston, says he had been big his entire life, but after seeing an unflattering vacation photo a couple years ago, he decided he wanted to get serious about losing weight and thought a GLP-1 could help him. After losing some weight through Weight Watchers, he went on Zepbound; all told, he’s shed about 170 pounds.
He and others have encountered judgment for his weight loss in surprising places. Mike told me the story of going to visit an old friend from college, after he had started taking Zepbound.
His friend’s mother was there and she inquired about his evident weight loss. He told her he was taking a GLP-1 medication. And for the rest of the weekend, she badgered him about whether whatever he was eating fit with his “diet.”
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“It was eye-opening because when I first went on it, I’m like, ‘I don’t understand why people don’t want to tell anybody. This is a good thing. The world should know,’” he told me. “And then you realize, ‘Oh, God, this is affecting my ability to enjoy myself this weekend because I have to answer for it every two seconds.’ That’s when you’re like, ‘Okay, I understand why people don’t want to tell.’” (He added that the incident has, fortunately, become a running joke between him and his friend.)
Adriana from Chicago had been naturally thin for most of her life, never developing particularly good diet or exercise habits. But a couple of years ago, she had a bad mental health episode and started to cope by overeating, she says; she gained 50 pounds in a year. She had a family history of diabetes, and her doctor told her she was prediabetic. She felt an urgency to do something, she told me: “I just need to go on this medication before I do irreversible damage to my health.”
The medicine has revitalized her she said. She hasn’t experienced serious side effects and the food temptations that led her to binge-eat have been quieted. She says she’s seeing a therapist and a dietitian and feels as good as she has in years.
But she’s experienced stigma at every stage of her journey too. Adriana said that growing up, she was often praised by her family for being thin. Then when she gained weight, her family nagged her about it and friends started cutting her out of more physical activities.
Since she started taking Zepbound, she hasn’t told a lot of people — but she has still felt the prejudice toward GLP-1 users in unexpected ways. Many people in her life just assume that she is reverting back to her previous body type and compliment her for looking slim, then turn around and judge somebody else who’s on a weight-loss drug.
“My coworkers will say, ‘Oh, you look so good,’ and then they’ll mention some other person who was maybe always bigger, and they’ll say, ‘But she’s on the shot,’” Adriana said.
And online spaces, where so many of our health and wellness conversations take place these days, are filled with people expressing hurtful opinions about GLP-1 users, often fixating on reports — both credible and not so credible — of dangerous side effects. That was what prompted Adriana to post her frustrations on Reddit.
“What really bothers me is the fake concern for our health, which is the thing that always comes along when people are policing other people’s bodies,” she said. “When people are overweight, people say, ‘Well, I’m just concerned for their health.’” she said. But “now that there is this medication that’s helping, the stigma is: ‘Well, what about the side effects?’”
Will the GLP-1 stigma ever go away?
As GLP-1 use continues to rapidly expand across the country, there are signs that this stigma could eventually be broken down.
It starts with sheer numbers: The more people who take a GLP-1 or know somebody who has, the more likely they might have a more charitable view of GLP-1 users. About 12 percent of Americans said in an August 2025 survey that they had taken a GLP-1 drug. As of May 2026, one in five US households had at least one GLP-1 user, according to data from PricewaterhouseCoopers. This growth may be the best hope for breaking the stigma that is a nasty asterisk on what is otherwise a remarkable moment in medicine.
“As these medications become more prevalent and more people have either used them themselves or have a close loved one who has used them, it is possible that that will help to reduce the stigma and increase acceptance,” Standen said. “We know that in general, one of the more robust findings in social psychology is that as people have more contact with folks who have identities or situations that might be unfamiliar to them, bias tends to go down over time.”
It is expected to be one of the largest prescription drug rollouts ever.
Mike said he has confronted acquaintances who spoke badly of GLP-1s, explaining how they have worked for him and the hard work he has put into the process. “Your perspective always changes when you suddenly know someone,” he said.
The number of GLP-1 users is probably as low as it will ever be. Medicare launched its $50 GLP-1 prescription program in July, and millions of Americans will be eligible to receive these medications cheaper. It is expected to be one of the largest prescription drug rollouts ever.
And access should continue to expand. Pharmaceutical executives say they are making inroads with the private employer-based insurance plans that cover about half of the US population; at a health conference — Aspen Ideas: Health — in late June, Laura Steele, group vice president of US cardiometabolic health at Eli Lilly, said the company has seen large employer coverage increase significantly, from about 20 percent covering the medications in 2025 to 67 percent.
In a decade, 50 percent or more adults in the US may be taking one of these drugs, Alison Furman, partner and US consumer markets industry leader at PwC, said at the Aspen panel.
As bad as things might still feel to people taking GLP-1s right now, social attitudes do seem to be evolving. According to PricewaterhouseCoopers data shared with Vox, 23 percent of current GLP-1 users openly share that they are on the drugs, compared to the 2 percent who say they haven’t told anyone. People who are considering going on a GLP-1 are even more open-minded. More than half of those considering the drugs (53 percent) say they would share their use with their immediate family members, versus 42 percent of current users.
“The stigma is subsiding,” Furman said. “You see an increase in just openness around this drug. All those signs we believe point to increased adoption over time.”
Adriana has even seen hints of it herself. She has opened up to a few friends who had asked about her weight loss. “Once you start that conversation,” she said, “it’s kind of shocking how many people are like, ‘You know what? I’ve been thinking about going on.’”
Road injuries remain the leading cause of death for everyone between the ages of 5 and 29 — ahead of malaria, ahead of war and homicide, ahead of every disease we spend more time worrying about. | Sharon Steinmann/Houston Chronicle via Getty Images
Let me start with the most local of local stories: the intersection down the street from my apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where Columbia Street meets Summit Street.
Since my family moved into the neighborhood in 2023, I’ve hated this intersection. It has no stop signs, no crosswalks, no signal. Crossing on foot with my son has meant grabbing his hand and hoping any oncoming cars would slow down, which, given that this is New York City, is maybe a 50/50 proposition at best. Everyone knew a stop sign or signal was needed, but the city did nothing.
That finally began to change late last year, after a 10-year-old girl was struck and injured by a car just two blocks north of the intersection. The neighborhood organized, packed a public meeting, and eventually walked a city official down the block so he could stand in the intersection and see what they saw every day. Which is how I woke up on July 17 to see four stop signs and freshly painted crosswalks at the intersection I hated so much.
My very local story is part of a much bigger one. Cars kill about 1.16 million people a year worldwide — more than the population of San Jose, California erased every year. Road injuries remain the leading cause of death for everyone between the ages of 5 and 29 — ahead of malaria, ahead of war and homicide, ahead of every disease we spend more time worrying about.
For most of the 20th century, that was simply the price of moving around faster. Being in a car was the most dangerous thing most of us did on any given day, and we seemed to have no choice but to accept the consequences.
But, it turns out, we don’t. According to new data released last month, between 2011 and 2025, the rate at which the world’s roads killed people, measured against population, fell 21 percent, even as more than a billion motor vehicles were added to the world’s roads. It’s still far too high, and the death rate actually increased in Africa, as more vehicles are added to often substandard roads. But in epidemiological terms: Globally, exposure went up while deaths went down. What ultimately changed was an argument about whose fault it really is when a car crashes.
Detroit’s answer to all this was that Americans were bad drivers. A doctor named William Haddon Jr. thought the industry was looking at the wrong thing. Haddon trained as a physician and came to car crashes as an epidemiologist. He saw them as systems failures and understood that cars had to be designed to protect drivers against themselves.
Haddon wasn’t working alone. In April 1959, a Labor Department official named Daniel Patrick Moynihan published “Epidemic on the Highways,” making a version of the same argument: The problem was how cars were built, not who was driving them. In 1965, the consumer advocate Ralph Nader — whom Moynihan had hired the year before to help write the government’s highway safety report — published Unsafe at Any Speed, a catalog of everything automakers already knew they should fix and had decided not to.
But while America has largely aimed to make crashes survivable, other countries decided that wasn’t ambitious enough. In October 1997, the Swedish parliament adopted a national policy called Vision Zero, built on the premise that nobody should be killed or seriously injured on the roads — and that, when someone is, ultimate responsibility belongs to the people who designed the system, rather than solely to the person who made the mistake. Sweden began adding median barriers to rural highways in 1998, and a national revision of speed limits rolled out in 2008-’09. Since Vision Zero’s adoption, Swedish road deaths have fallen about 61 percent, from 541 in 1997 to 213 in 2024 — about two deaths per 100,000 people, the lowest rate in the EU.
Four stop signs on a Brooklyn corner are what that idea looks like at its smallest possible scale.
The people we left outside the car
But, in our effort to make our cars safer, we neglected to do the same for everyone else on the street. Between 2009 and 2023, US pedestrian deaths rose 80 percent, even as other categories of traffic deaths increased just 13 percent. By 2022, pedestrian deaths had climbed to a 40-year high — back to 1981 levels.
One major contributor is as simple as geometry. The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that vehicles with hoods above 40 inches are about 45 percent more likely to kill the pedestrian they hit than vehicles with hoods of 30 inches or less and a sloped profile. A low, sloped hood catches an adult at the legs and rolls the body up onto it. A tall flat one catches the torso and drives the body down and under. Light trucks — which have gone from under a fifth of new vehicle sales in 1975 to more than four-fifths today — accounted for 54 percent of US pedestrian deaths with a known vehicle type in 2023.
I’m glad there are stop signs at Summit and Columbia now, but it was a good outcome produced by a bad process — one that required a child being hit by a car to get started. There are more dangerous intersections in this country than there are communities with the voice and the stamina to demand fixes. A real Vision Zero wouldn’t wait for the crash; it would identify which intersections could kill someone and fix those first.
For now, though, I’m simply happy that, in my local corner of the world, the streets got just a little bit safer.
New York is also an outlier. As my colleague Marina Bolotnikova wrote earlier this year, Vision Zero hasn’t worked nearly as well elsewhere in the country, largely because the American public is less accepting of road designs that inconvenience drivers.
Since the US probably won’t adopt Sweden’s approach, a more realistic hope might be autonomous vehicles. This month, the Insurance Institute compared about 50 million driverless Waymo miles across four cities with human driving in the same places and found that, per mile, the robotaxis were involved in 68 percent fewer crashes of the kind a human driver would typically report to police. Waymo’s own tally across more than 220 million driverless miles claimed 93 percent fewer injury-causing crashes involving pedestrians — which is to say the technology is best at precisely the thing American road design has been worst at.
If Haddon fundamental insight was that systems have to be built to counter the inevitable errors when a human drives a two-ton hunk of metal and glass at 60 mph, then maybe it makes sense that the ultimate system response is to remove the human altogether. For now, though, I’m simply happy that, in my local corner of the world, the streets got just a little bit safer.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
Donald Trump at Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, New Jersey, on July 31, 2026. | Aaron Schwartz / AFP via Getty Images
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: It’s clearer than ever that President Donald Trump has no way out on Iran.
What’s happening? Over the weekend, Trump posted to social media that he had agreed to “hold off any attack” on Iran because “the perimeters of a deal has been agreed to.” The deal, he said, would include the reopening of the Strait of Hormuz and a nebulous “end to Iran’s nuclear threat.”
That should all sound fairly familiar, since it’s essentially what the US and Iran agreed to — and subsequently abandoned — in June. As of Monday morning, though, Trump had already pivoted, accusing Iran of being “unbelievably duplicitous” in negotiating.
“This is a last chance for them to sign a good document,” he told reporters in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, threatening “decapitation” — essentially the same warning he issued in April.
What’s the context? Since the collapse of the June “memorandum of understanding” between the US and Iran, which ended the immediate conflict and set out a path for negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program, the two countries have resumed hostilities, if not full-scale war. In July, three more US servicemembers were killed in Iranian attacks.
Why does this matter? The Logoff has tried to steer clear of blow-by-blow coverage of the Iran war, because this kind of reversal happens a lot: Trump is constantly blustering, promising a deal, threatening massive retaliation, backing down, and doing it all over again.
This latest episode, more than five months into the war and tidily compressed into just a few days, is little different. We’re writing about it anyway because it’s a good reminder of what has emerged as the essential fact of the war: Trump may have started the conflict, but he doesn’t seem to have any real plan in place to end it — and the longer things drag on, the greater the risk to the US troops fighting it.
And with that, it’s time to log off…
Vox’s Unexplainable podcast is tackling the “holy grail of sensory biology” — magnetoreception, which lets birds navigate using Earth’s magnetic field — this week with some help from author and journalist Ed Yong. You can listen here, and I also recommend Yong’s newsletter, which regularly features some spectacular bird photos.
Thanks for reading, have a great evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow!
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche attends a Cabinet meeting at Camp David, the presidential retreat, on July 31, 2026. | Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
For a brief moment late last week, it looked like acting Attorney General Todd Blanche’s bid to get the word “acting” removed from his job title was in serious trouble. But that moment appears to have passed, as two key Republican senators just signaled that they will vote to move his nomination forward.
Sens. John Cornyn (R-TX) and Thom Tillis (R-NC) halted Blanche’s nomination because of concerns about a $1.8 billion slush fund that Blanche helped create as the Justice Department’s acting leader, as well as some objections to a collusive deal between President Donald Trump and the IRS that could have shut down tax investigations into Trump, his family, and his businesses. Both senators announced on Monday that they will no longer block the nomination.
Though these two senators, both of whom are retiring in January, did extract some minor concessions from the Department of Justice in return for their votes, they objected to only a small fraction of Blanche’s efforts to transform the DOJ’s lawyers into Trump’s personal advocates and enforcers. The fact that Blanche is likely to be confirmed, despite his sycophancy toward Trump, suggests that any meaningful guardrails on a weaponized Justice Department have ceased to exist.
Cornyn and Tillis both currently serve on the Senate Judiciary Committee. That committee, where Republicans currently have a two-vote majority, was originally scheduled to vote on Blanche’s nomination Thursday — but that vote would have failed if Cornyn and Tillis rejected the nominee. And, now, it’s likely to go ahead.
Cornyn and Tillis’s objections to Blanche were quite narrow in scope. They demanded a written order from Blanche “terminating the anti-weaponization fund,” a reference to the $1.8 billion slush fundthat could be paid out to Trump’s allies, including participants in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Blanche originally established this fund in a May 18 order. On Sunday night, he tweeted out a new document terminating his May 18 order.
For the most part, however, the two senators did not object to Blanche’s broader efforts to weaponize the Justice Department against people who’ve displeased Trump, including the use of law enforcement to cow Trump’s critics. As both deputy attorney general and as acting attorney general, Blanche oversaw several highly dubious prosecutions brought against Trump’s perceived enemies and prominent Democrats.
A video introduced in federal court, for example, indicated that Blanche personally instructed law enforcement officers to arrest Newark’s Democratic Mayor Ras Baraka — an arrest that led a federal magistrate judge to scold the DOJ for “using the immense power of the government to pursue weak cases or to make examples without sufficient cause.” Under Blanche’s oversight, the DOJ’s also brought flimsy charges against individuals like former FBI Director James Comey and New York state Attorney General Letitia James, who investigated Trump for potential wrongdoing.(One minor exception: Tillis did previously pressure Blanche to drop an investigation into former Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell.)
So, while Cornyn and Tillis successfully pushed Blanche to make some small concessions in order to secure their votes in the Judiciary Committee, neither senator appeared interested in a confrontation over Trump and Blanche’s broader efforts to transform the DOJ into a revenge-seeking agency. And now, it appears likely that Blanche will be confirmed — and that those efforts will continue.
What did Blanche actually agree to do in order to get Cornyn and Tillis’s votes?
Earlier this year, Trump, the Trump Organization, and Trump’s two oldest sons sued the IRS, claiming that it failed to prevent a contractor from leaking some of Trump’s tax documents. The president originally demanded a $10 billion payout from the federal government, and the lawsuit triggered widespread concerns about a conflict of interest, because Trump was both the plaintiff and the chief executive of the government he sued.
On May 18, a little over a month after Blanche became the federal government’s top lawyer, Trump (and the other plaintiffs) entered into a “settlement agreement” that did not include a $10 billion payday for Trump but that did include several provisions favorable to Trump, his family, and his companies.
Among other things, the settlement announced the creation of the “anti-weaponization fund,” which would distribute moneyto an unknown group of people who claim they were unfairly targeted by previous administrations based on decisions by five individuals appointed by Blanche. It also included a provision claiming that the IRS (and potentially other federal agencies) is “FOREVER BARRED” from pursuing any claims that “have been or could have been asserted by Plaintiffs” — open-ended language which sparked fears that a wide range of potential investigations into Trump, his family, or his companies could be shut down forever.
So, Blanche walked back the specific order that he signed to establish the $1.8 billion slush fund, but he did not repudiate the part of the settlement that immunizes Trump, his two oldest sons, and the Trump Organization from many tax investigations. According to Tillis, the DOJ merely said that this part of the settlement does not apply to parties (including federal agencies) that were not parties to Trump’s original lawsuit.
Though this deal appeared to have been enough to secure Cornyn and Tillis’s votes, and most likely to ensure Blanche’s confirmation in a Republican Senate, it is unlikely to placate Democrats. As Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) tweeted Tuesday morning, Blanche’s new order “doesn’t prevent payouts to violent insurrectionists in the future,” and it “leaves in place a tax-immunity deal that could help Trump skip taxes on the $2.3 billion he made last year.”
And the question of whether the DOJ may bring politically motivated charges against figures like Baraka, Comey, or James appeared to not even be part of the deal struck between Blanche, Cornyn, and Tillis.
One reason why the two senators exacted such meager concessions may be because they didn’t have a very strong hand to play against Trump. Because Blanche is currently the Senate-confirmed deputy attorney general, he can remain head of the Justice Department, in an acting role, for as long as Trump is president. Indeed, when negotiations between Blanche and the two senators appeared to hit an impasse late last week, Trump threatened to “keep Todd as Acting A.G., and push hard to get the Anti-Weaponization Bill” if Cornyn and Tillis wouldn’t support Blanche.
But that doesn’t change the fact that Blanche’s concessions are thin gruel. His statement on the slush fund merely confirms that “there is no Fund” right now. And, under the terms of the apparent deal reached with Cornyn and Tillis, Trump, his sons, and his primary business still gain broad immunity from a wide range of tax investigations.
So, while Cornyn and Tillis may have given Trump and Blanche a brief scare, they never put up much real resistance to Trump’s nominee.
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appears at his confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Judiciary Committee on July 15, 2026. | Eric Lee/Getty Images
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
We always like a bit of good democracy news — such news being in overall short supply — and acting Attorney General Todd Blanche appeared to deliver some last night.
Blanche is currently jockeying for the permanent AG gig, which would put him in charge of the Justice Department. But his confirmation process stalled over bipartisan objections to President Donald Trump’s “anti-weaponization fund,” a $1.8 billion reparation program for people who claimed the government had wronged them.
On Sunday, in acknowledgement of those objections, Blanche confirmed in writing that the Justice Department had rescinded the fund and had no plans to revive it. It’s a rare reminder that the Senate’s confirmation power can still constrain the White House, even if many Republican lawmakers would rather not rock the boat. And the presidential boat was very much rocked by the dustup over Blanche’s confirmation.
In a post on Saturday, Trump insisted that he’d get some version of the fund even over senators’ objections. And on Monday, he told reporters that he didn’t sign off on the rescission. Notably, the two Republicans who forced that surrender — North Carolina’s Thom Tillis and Texas’s John Cornyn — will both depart the Senate in early 2027.
All the president’s slush funds
The anti-weaponization fund is just the latest of Trump’s attempts to siphon federal money into an account that he or his allies control. In fact, the quest to secure such a slush fund is a defining feature of his presidency — and several of his previous, less egregious attempts have been more successful. Those include:
Venezuelan oil accounts: Since the US toppled Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro earlier this year, proceeds from the sale of Venezuelan oil have gotten routed into special US Treasury accounts, which are labeled as Venezuela’s sovereign property — but only released at the direction of the secretary of state.
The Board of Peace: Trump’s controversial coalition for rebuilding Gaza was conceived as a pay-to-play operation: Member countries get seats for a mere three years unless they pony up $1 billion to the Trump-controlled organization. While more than 20 countries have signed on, Reuters reported in April that only two had actually made contributions.
US sovereign wealth fund: Trump first floated this idea of a government-owned wealth fund, which would allow him to direct federal investment in private companies, during his first term. While it never got off the ground as such, the administration has since acquired equity stakes in at least a dozen firms.
“The long-term risk is not just that Trump might be doing something illegal,” Tad DeHaven, a policy analyst with the Cato Institute, wrote for Vox earlier this year. “The long-term risk is that his presidency is normalizing treating the receipt and disbursement of money as instruments of personal power.”
One link for later
➨ Happiness is overrated. In a new book, the author Ian Bogost argues we should instead pursue sensory gratification: the simple and immediate pleasure found in physical experiences, whether changing gears in a stick-shift car or holding a warm mug in your hands.
Before you go…
Did you know…that dolphins have been known to beat and kill other animals for fun? I spent much of my weekend watching a baby animal documentary with my sick child, and am actually devastated to learn that many adorable animals “are also murderous monsters.”
Today’s trivia: What Pennsylvania-born singer/songwriter is sometimes called “the godmother of punk”? (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 Friday we asked you for the Vietnamese word for festival. That would be “tết,” as in the 1968 Tet Offensive — a brutal military campaign that began during Vietnamese Lunar New Year celebrations.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic, Wegovy, and Mounjaro have been wildly successful. But as popular as they are, Americans still have very negative feelings about the people using them. In this month’s Highlight cover story, Dylan Scott explains why ‘Ozempic stigma’ hasn’t gone away, how it’s impacting GLP-1 users, and whether it could begin to fade as more and more people take the drugs. Also in this issue: How to tolerate uncertainty. What rent freezes could mean for renters. Good news about declining road deaths. And the coming AI wealth boom.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani holds up bananas labeled with a 30 percent off sticker during an announcement on municipal grocery stores at a Campaign for Hunger community food distribution center in Brooklyn, New York, on July 27, 2026. | Adam Gray/Bloomberg via Getty Images
New Yorkers will soon enjoy a 30 percent discount on their meat, seafood, milk, and bread — so long as they shop at a city-owned store.
Mayor Zohran Mamdani touted such bargains this week at a press conference detailing his plans to launch five public grocery stores, in a bid to lower New Yorkers’ food costs. Under the proposal, the city would own each supermarket and dictate its pricing and labor practices, while private grocery companies would handle the day-to-day operations.
Key takeaways
• Mamdani plans to open five city-owned grocery stores offering steep discounts on staple foods. • Public stores can help where private grocers are absent, but that is not the main problem in New York City. • The stores are unlikely to sell food more efficiently than large private retailers. • The same public money could reach more low-income New Yorkers through direct food assistance.
While stimulating, these grand philosophical arguments have often overshadowed more banal but pressing questions: Would public grocery stores do more to advance Mamdani’s stated goals than other things the city could do with the same money? Has New York’s mayor discovered a way to sell groceries more efficiently than Costco does — or an approach to nutritional relief more effective than simply giving poor people more cash and food?
The answer to both of these questions appears to be “no.” And that should concern more than just New Yorkers. Mamdani’s vision is already inspiring imitators, with San Francisco and Boston both exploring their own public grocery store proposals. And in national discourse, the mayor’s policy is widely understood as an experiment — one testing a bold new theory of how governments can make food more affordable.
Unfortunately, although public grocers have merit in some circumstances, the theory underlying Mamdani’s specific plan is not merely unproven but incoherent.
Grocery socialism makes more sense for small-town Republicans
Public grocery stores have historically aimed to solve a problem that New York City does not have — a total absence of private supermarkets.
In 2018, the small town of Baldwin, Florida lost its only grocer. With only 1,600 residents — and a median income of $44,271 — the community no longer generated enough business to be worth the local IGA’s while. And no other national chain rushed in to fill the gap.
So, the municipality opened its own grocery store, the Baldwin Market.
This attracted national media attention. And not without reason. A deeply conservative small-town trying its hand at socialism was a fun story. And it turned out that Baldwin wasn’t an aberration: Other agingrural communities in red America had turned to government grocers once private supermarkets had left them in the lurch.
Progressive policy thinkers took inspiration from these examples. In the ensuing years, proposals for using public grocery stores to combat urban food deserts — impoverished neighborhoods without convenient and affordable supermarkets — began to circulate. The merits of such plans can be debated. But their logic was straightforward: Where the market fails to provide residents with healthy food options, the government should step in.
When post-COVID inflation sowed outrage over food prices, however, some on the left reconceived the purpose of public supermarkets: In their telling, such stores weren’t merely a means of eliminating food deserts, but also a way to make groceries more affordable.
Mamdani’s plan is principally animated by the latter goal. With more than 1,100 grocery stores and 10,000 bodegas, most of New York City is well-provisioned by private food vendors. And although parts of the municipality are under-served, the mayor is not actually concentrating his stores in such areas; his planned East Harlem location lies just blocks from an Aldi, Costco, and many other grocers.
In a report detailing its policy, the mayor’s office makes clear that its primary aim is to drive down New Yorkers’ food bills. Yet there’s little reason to think that public grocery stores are a cost-effective way to do that.
New York City probably won’t provide groceries more efficiently than Costco
Without question, a government store can make groceries more affordable for its own customers: All it has to do is charge below-market prices.
And yet, if that store manages this feat by operating at a loss, then its shoppers’ savings will come at the broader city’s expense.
That might not be too troubling, if one pictures rich taxpayers footing the bill. But for a city like New York — which faces a structural budget deficit — revenue is a scarce resource. A tax dollar spent on public grocery stores is one that can’t be spent on nutritional assistance for low-income people. And all else equal, the latter will do more to enhance affordability: If you have a limited pool of food subsidies — and want to minimize the number of New Yorkers who can’t afford groceries — then you should spend your funds on the poor, not on whoever happens to show up at your city-owned store.
Thus, for Mamdani’s supermarkets to be cost-effective, they can’t just subsidize low prices with taxpayer money. Rather, they need to deliver groceries more efficiently than private retailers do.
Public ownership can unlock efficiencies in certain contexts. For example, America’s private health insurance system generates massive administrative redundancies. By one estimate, if the US replaced its sprawling insurance industry with a single government payer, it could cut our health system’s annual administrative costs by $500 billion. In other words, a Medicare For All program could theoretically provide more healthcare-per-dollar than the current system does, by eliminating excess bureaucracy.
But there are no comparable inefficiencies in the grocery sector. True, a government retailer could generate some savings by declining to take a profit. But margins in the industry are slim; the average profit rate among food retailers was just 2.1 percent in 2025. Therefore, Mamdani’s stores can’t finance 30 percent discounts merely by dispensing with shareholder returns.
Meanwhile, the city actually wants its stores to be less cost-efficient than private grocers in some respects. According to its policy brief, the government grocers will pay their workers higher wages than most retailers and may also favor “local and regional suppliers,” rather than automatically contracting with whichever food producers offer the best rate.
The city suggests that its stores will have some cost advantages: Unlike private competitors, they will pay no rent or property taxes on their facilities. But these are merely additional subsidies, not actual efficiencies: By providing free real estate to its grocers, the city is forgoing revenue that it could otherwise collect and spend on nutritional assistance or other public goods.
It is not yet clear how much money the city is prepared to lose each year on these stores. If Mamdani’s celebrity — and heavily advertised bargains — lure large masses of people to his markets, their steeply discounted goods will quickly sell out. In that circumstance, to avoid long stretches with empty shelves, or some complex rationing system, the city would need to rapidly restock money-losing items, compounding the stores’ operating losses.
In theory, there is one way that government stores could benefit consumers throughout a city without being especially efficient enterprises in themselves: They could force other retailers to cut prices by accepting lower profits or discovering new efficiencies. But with grocery margins already thin, squeezing private markets further could lead to closures, thereby reducing shoppers’ options. Further, Mamdani himself insists that his stores will go out of their way to avoid harming private competitors (which, in New York, consist primarily of the sorts of small businesses that Mamdani has promised to help).
In any case, five stores won’t substantially impact pricing citywide. And so long as each government grocer operates at a loss, scaling up the program will only deepen its costs — and thus, the tradeoff between funding public supermarkets and anti-hunger programs.
Aldi for all
At present, Mamdani’s grocery store experiment looks fairly cheap. The city estimates the stores will require $70 million in capital costs. As already noted, it’s unclear precisely how large each store’s annual operating budget will be. But even if each supermarket loses many millions each year, it still won’t make that big a difference, in the context of the city’s $125 billion budget.
Still, the opportunity costs of Mamdani’s policy are real. New York City currently plans to spend $3.1 million next year on a program called Get The Good Stuff (GTGS), which essentially gives SNAP recipients up to $10 off each time they purchase fruits and vegetables from 25 participating grocery stores. With the money slated for its public supermarkets, New York could dramatically expand the program, while also investing more money into its food banks. Alternatively, the city could modestly increase cash transfers to its lowest-income residents.
To be sure, none of that would offer much benefit to middle-class shoppers. And the mayor is quite reasonably concerned with increasing grocery affordability for the typical New Yorker. But the city can advance that aim — while actually increasing its revenue — by easing zoning and permitting rules that currently make it difficult for large, low-cost retailers like Costco and Walmart to operate in many parts of the city. Happily, to Mamdani’s great credit, his administration’s paper on public grocery stores does briefly mention the need for permitting reforms.
Maybe public grocery stores are an end in themselves
All this said, there may still be a reasonable case for Mamdani’s stores or others like them. For example, a city’s residents might come to see such retailers as a kind of attraction, public amenity, or community space, akin to a park or library.
Further, public grocers could theoretically increase the public’s faith in the government. While the grocers are unlikely to be efficient in reality, they may appear to be. After all, their low prices will be far more visible to consumers than their operating costs. If Americans come to associate the public sector with cheap, ostensibly well-run supermarkets — rather than dreary DMV lines — that could aid the left’s broader efforts to expand the government’s remit. (Although, if the public grocers end up being characterized by overcrowding and empty shelves, the policy could further erode Americans’ confidence in the public sector.)
As a means of maximizing affordability, however, Mamdani’s program makes little sense. It will mostly just transfer income from the city’s broad population to the small subset of New Yorkers who happen to live near — or work at — one of its five stores.
Where private markets fail to provide any grocery options, public stores may be the best way for municipalities to meet their residents’ nutritional needs. But in other contexts, governments can make a bigger difference by simply putting more money in poor people’s pockets.
In this photo illustration, a smartphone displays the Kimi K3 logo in front of a screen showing the Chinese national flag on July 18, 2026, in Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China. | Photo illustration by Cheng Xin/Getty Images
The release of the new AI model, Kimi K3, has reignited concerns in Washington and Silicon Valley that China’s AI capabilities are catching up fast to the United States.
US concerns about Chinese AI can be separated into three general buckets: cybersecurity vulnerabilities, military capabilities, and the future of democracy.
While there’s wide consensus that China’s growing AI dominance is cause for concern, there’s less about what to do about it, and some potential policy options may be counterproductive.
The latest round of consternation was triggered this month when a little-known Chinese AI startup called Moonshot released a new large language model called Kimi K3. The conventional wisdom had been that the leading AI models developed by companies like OpenAI and Anthropic were between six to 12 months ahead of their Chinese competitors. Kimi dashed those assumptions: now, analysts say American companies may be as little as two to three months behind.
Dean Ball, a former Trump administration official now with OpenAI, warned in a bleak post on X that models like Kimi K3 could lead to a world of “full AI communism” and a “dystopian hellscape” of AI under full government control.
Policymakers have worried for years now about China gaining an edge over the US in the AI race. Both the Donald Trump and Joe Biden administrations took steps to slow China’s AI progress, including blocking the export of the most advanced US semiconductors.
The White House is already reportedly considering taking steps to ban “open-weight” models — models that are easier to adapt for a user’s own purposes — like Kimi K3 in the United States. The Trump administration has also accused Moonshot of using the unauthorized “distillation” of one of Anthropic’s models — basically using another model’s outputs to train itself rather than raw data — as well as gaining access to blacklisted Nvidia chips in Thailand.
But often lost in the debates about what to do about China’s accelerating AI capabilities is the question of why the US cares about this at all. Obviously, the American companies developing the latest frontier models care about maintaining their edge, but why should it matter to Americans if the chatbot in their pocket was developed in Silicon Valley or Shanghai? And perhaps even more so, why should it matter what chatbots people in Nairobi or Brussels are using?
The concerns in the US about Chinese AI generally fall into three broad buckets: cybersecurity concerns; military and national security concerns; and human rights or democracy concerns.
For the moment, concerns about who is winning the AI race can feel a bit abstract, but as AI becomes more embedded into governments, militaries, and ordinary people’s lives, the difference will start to be felt in a much more material way at both a national and personal level. In general, there is a growing sense that it matters which of the world’s vastly different superpowers builds the technology that could transform everything.
“People’s relationship with AI is becoming foundational to how they live their lives, so the choices people make about whose model they use and where they are physically hosted, as they share some of their most intimate secrets and ask for life advice and business guidance, and run an increasing share of their life — those are incredibly important,” said Ryan Fedasiuk, a former State Department technology adviser now at the American Enterprise Institute. “It’s a contest between the United States and China to define the operating systems through which people live and work.”
Here’s what else America loses if it loses that contest.
Chinese AI could be more vulnerable to cyberattacks
The concerns about using Chinese AI are in some ways a repeat of the concerns over Huawei, the Chinese telecoms firm that built much of the world’s 5G internet infrastructure, but which the US government banned from operating in the United States during the first Trump administration over concerns that the Chinese government could intercept information transmitted over these networks.
Today, the concern is that many firms are increasingly integrating Chinese AI models into their systems, both because they are often cheaper and because they are “open-weight.” (“Weights” refer to the setting an AI model uses to process a user’s inputs. “Open-weight” models make these publicly available for users to tinker with, rather than charging for access.)
There are some indications that Americans using Chinese AI models are already vulnerable. A Booz Allen study from earlier this year tested four Chinese models commonly used by US developers and found that three of them generated software with far more “hidden vulnerabilities” that could be exploited by hackers than their US counterparts. There’s no proof that the models were doing this intentionally, but the study did find that the models were “changing their behavior depending on who the user seemed to be or what country the request referenced.”
AI can also be used to carry out cyberattacks. Although nearly all the leading models have safety protocols meant to prevent this, they’re not bulletproof. Even Anthropic’s Claude, generally considered one of the most secure models, was adapted by Chinese hackers last year to engage in cyber espionage. The open weights of the leading Chinese models could make it even easier to strip out the safety protocols.
AI could give China a military edge
The simplest and most obvious argument for why AI matters for American national security is that it’s all too conceivable that the US and China could be at war in the years to come, and AI could be a major factor in determining who wins.
The conflicts in Ukraine, Gaza, and Iran have shown that modern militaries are already extensively using AI for intelligence collection and targeting. Semi- or fully-autonomous drone swarms are a major component of US plans for repelling a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. Then there’s the risk of AI being used to generate new bioweapons or other dangerous threats.
US experts believe China has pursued a “military-civil fusion” strategy, encouraging the People’s Liberation Army and Chinese defense contractors to collaborate closely with civilian technology companies and research institutions in order to gain an edge in military AI applications like intelligence analysis and drone swarms. It’s difficult to know exactly which of these capabilities China is focusing on, but procurement data suggests leading Chinese technology firms like Deepseek and Alibaba are involved in work with potential military applications. Analysts also accuse China of using outputs from US models like ChatGPT and Claude to train AI systems that could help develop China’s defense capabilities.
And that’s just conventional weapons. The US government has alleged that Chinese labs have “continued to engage in biological activities with potential [bioweapon] applications” amid concerns that artificial intelligence could help make such weapons more sophisticated and deadly.
China could export digital authoritarianism
Last year, it was reported that Miiloo, a fuzzy children’s plush toy with a built-in AI chatbot, would, if prompted, happily tell users Chinese Communist Party talking points like “Taiwan is an inalienable part of China.” The hubbub over Miiloo reached the US Senate floor. While it’s hard to imagine that many users were really asking Miiloo to help clear up East Asian territorial disputes, the affair illustrated much larger concerns about the dangers of letting AI models built by an authoritarian government with one of the world’s strictest censorship regimes become the global standard.
Chinese generative AI tools are legally required to uphold the country’s “core socialist values,” according to a document published by its national cybersecurity standards committee. So it’s little surprise that DeepSeek, the Chinese chatbot that sent shockwaves through the US tech industry in 2025, politely declines to answer when you ask it what happened on June 4, 1989, in Tiananmen Square.
It’s not just that Chinese AI could help shape the political narratives absorbed by billions around the world, at a time when US soft power is ebbing and surveys show people in many countries already now have a more positive view of China than the United States.
The fact that under Xi Jinping, China’s government was centralizing power and becoming more, not less, authoritarian in the years leading up to the recent advances in AI are a major factor driving the mistrust in its technology.
“I think many of the sincere arguments about the risks of these models and what China would do with them stems from the coercive authoritarian approach of China’s current leader,” said Mieke Eoyang, former US deputy assistant secretary of defense for cyber policy. “I don’t think we would be having this conversation in the same way with someone like [China’s previous leaders] Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao.”
It is a serious concern if models built to conform to the values and political priorities of China’s current government become the global standard. But some are skeptical of the idea that human rights and democracy should be the goal of AI competition, worrying that the damage has already been done. The premise of that idea has gotten “shakier in recent years,” says Steven Feldstein, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment and author of the book The Rise of Digital Repression. Under this administration, the US has cut support for democracy and human rights programs overseas, and often allied itself with authoritarian governments. Then there’s the fact that at least one leading chatbot often seems to mimic the racist and antisemitic views of the world’s richest man who is also an ally of the current president.
While it’s still true that Chinese AI reflects the authoritarian values and priorities of China’s leaders, Feldstein notes, “this idea that the US is standing at the forefront of protecting and advancing democracy, human rights, that we’re not sort of there to manipulate information or to push a narrative agenda that reflects the ideological preferences of its leaders, has started to fray.”
The race to AGI
There’s also a set of concerns around the topic of “artificial general intelligence,” the hypothetical point at which AI exceeds human capabilities and is able to improve itself. The concern, expressed by both US government commissions and senior officials in both administrations, is that China is “racing” toward AGI and that whichever country achieves it first will have a massive geopolitical advantage. This is the type of thinking behind invocations of the nuclear-era Manhattan Project to justify massive government investments in AI development.
Chinese leaders do not appear to view AI competition this way. “The US conversation around this is much more ‘AGI-pilled’,” says Jeffrey Ding, a professor at George Washington University and expert on US-China technology competition. “The concern here is that we are very much on the brink of this explosion of more and more powerful AI that leads to it dominating everything.” Chinese leaders, on the other hand, “generally see AI as a productivity tool.”
If Chinese AI is a problem, what should we be doing about it?
This is not just a Beltway or Silicon Valley concern. A recent Pew survey found that 43 percent Americans believe it is very important for the US to remain the leader in AI development, versus 22 percent who said it was not that important. Interestingly, the survey also found that most Americans believe China is already ahead on AI, though the expert consensus is that it’s still slightly behind.
“We’ve gotten so used to the fact that the US has been the leading player in technological revolutions from like mobile internet to the internet era, so it’s worrying to feel we may no longer have that dominant strength,” said Selina Xu, China and AI policy lead in the office of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
Even if there’s some consensus that AI competition is a priority, there’s less agreement on how to go about it. The challenge, Xu says, is “How do you manage the very concrete national security risks that come from competing with China on AI, but not turn technological competition into blanket protectionism?”
Often, the policy responses to this challenge have been contradictory.
The Trump administration, in its first term, pioneered the policy of restricting the export of the most advanced semiconductor chips to China, but Trump undermined that policy last year by permitting Nvidia to sell its advanced H200 chips there. The move flummoxed China hawks in Washington and went against the preferences of AI developers like Anthropic, but probably had a lot to do with lobbying by chip maker Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, CEO of the world’s most valuable company.
In some cases, the US may be inadvertently making China’s models more appealing. In June, the Trump administration placed export controls on Anthropic’s advanced Fable model. This move prompted the company to take the model down for all users and led to the first time that AI capabilities meant for the global public took a step backward.In response, French President Emmanuel Macron warned, “We will not buy any model made by [US AI] companies if from one day to the next you can just turn off the switch.” Chinese models are hardly immune from concerns about kill switches or back doors, but if both governments involved in the AI race are seen as meddling, customers may just opt for whichever one is cheaper.
The latest flashpoint in the debate concerns the reports that the administration is considering banning open-weight models. This prompted an open letter from dozens of leading tech companies including Nvidia and OpenAI defending access to these models as necessary for helping the US maintain AI leadership. Advocates note that open-weight models can help respond to vulnerabilities as well as create them: When a rogue OpenAI model recently hacked into the startup Hugging Face’s systems, Hugging Face’s engineers used an open-weight model developed by China’s Z.ai to analyze the attack.
Despite the frequent comparisons, AI is not a national security competition like the early days of nuclear weapons or the space race. It’s a technology with potentially grave national security implications, that’s also used by millions of people around the world to plan their Tuesday night dinner or help with their homework. The log-in for Claude is not carried by a military officer at the president’s side. And much of the important work on developing these new technologies is being done by private tech companies, not government labs or defense contractors.
It may be that AI capability will help determine which country has the edge in the 21st century. It may also be that the benefits of these capabilities will be shared: Chinese companies might be no less capable than their American counterparts when it comes to developing new medications or clean energy technology.
The challenge of crafting technology to prevent a “dystopian hellscape” is to not accidentally make the existing world worse.
This man fought a four-decade war against the Voting Rights Act. He has some help from a once-small faction within the Republican Party that took over the Supreme Court. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Last June, in a case that effectively guaranteed one of Alabama’s Black Democratic members of Congress would be replaced by a white Republican, the Supreme Court used a single word that delighted movement conservatives and made many longtime civil rights advocates want to weep.
The word “colorblind” might not suggest, to many casual observers, the gravity of what the phrase means, how much power it has to roll back civil-rights reforms enacted in the 1960s — and the major ideological change ushered in by this Supreme Court. Proponents of colorblindness argue that any law that draws distinctions on the basis of race, for any reason whatsoever, is equally repugnant under the Constitution. Under this theory, laws like the Voting Rights Act and similar efforts to lift up historically disadvantaged racial groups are legally indistinguishable from the very kind of Jim Crow discrimination that the VRA sought to abolish.
Key takeaways
The Supreme Court recently declared that the Constitution is “colorblind.” This means laws that seek to elevate historically disadvantaged racial groups are just as unconstitutional as Jim Crow laws.
Colorblindness was once a fringe idea, but now it is the law of the land. It is the reason why the landmark Voting Rights Act is almost entirely dead.
Although proponents of colorblindness claim their idea was embraced by post-Civil War drafters of the 14th Amendment, it’s really a much newer idea that began to emerge in the 1970s.
It’s an idea that cuts across the Roberts Court’s race decisions, including its decisions abolishing affirmative action in nearly all universities, its decisions undercutting public school integration, and its decisions dismantling the VRA.Under the colorblind thesis, the Constitution sees a modern law intended to guarantee some Black representation in Congress as precisely as intolerable as a 19th-century law forbidding Black people from voting at all.
As Chief Justice John Roberts summarized colorblindness in a 2007 opinion, “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.”
And lest there be any doubt, the Court’s commitment to this project extends far beyond a few pithy quotes.Just over one month before Allen, in Louisiana v. Callais (2026), the Court’s Republican majority imposed colorblindness on the laws governing US elections, effectively killing a 1982 amendment to the VRA — which was signed by President Ronald Reagan — in the process. Three years earlier, in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard(2023), the same justices implemented colorblindness in college and university admissions, ending affirmative action in nearly every institution of higher education in the country.
Allen’s reference to “our colorblind Constitution” confirms the breadth of this project, because if the colorblind thesis is imposed by the Constitution itself, that means that judges must strike down any law or government program that takes account of race, whether in hiring, federal contracting, university admissions, elections, or the military. (Though it is notable that the Harvard decision did dodge the question of whether service academies such as West Point may take account of race in admissions, after military leaders raised concerns that a racially diverse enlisted corps would resent being commanded by a corps of officers who do not resemble them.)
This shift in the Court’s approach to race cases is likely to lead to a purge of programs intended to benefit historically disadvantaged groups. Armed with precedents like Callais and Harvard, pro-colorblindness advocacy groups have filed a wide range of lawsuits challenging scholarships for minority youth, targeting groups that promote minority-owned businesses, and even trying to prevent universities from conducting surveys of Black students.
The GOP’s hard-right turn against laws like the Voting Rights Act is a recent development. Callais, after all, neutralized a law signed by Reagan, a Republican. An earlier Supreme Court case invalidating much of the VRA, Shelby County v. Holder (2013), struck down an extension of the VRA that was signed by Republican President George W. Bush. A significant faction within the GOP has fought against the VRA since the Nixon administration, but they repeatedly lost in the two elected branches of government and only prevailed after they captured an unelected judiciary.
But the victory of the “colorblind” theory in the conservative legal movement is alsothe result of decades of work. It is largely a story of how a once-fringe faction within the Republican Party took over both that party and then the Supreme Court. And, now that it controls the Court, that faction seeks to lock its approach to racial questions in place forever.
The pre-Roberts Court’s approach to race
Proponents of the colorblindness thesis often trace its origins to Justice John Marshall Harlan, the only dissenter in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), the Supreme Court’s infamous decision permitting racial segregation. “Our Constitution is color-blind,” Harlan wrote in that dissent, “and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.”
Yet, while Harlan was a racial progressive by the standards of late 19th-century legal elites, his views would offend nearly all modern-day Americans. The full context of Harlan’s famous “color-blind” line suggests that he rejected segregation, at least in part, because he viewed it as unnecessary to maintain white supremacy. “The white race deems itself to be the dominant race in this country. And so it is in prestige, in achievements, in education, in wealth and in power,” Harlan began the very same paragraph that includes the line about colorblindness. “So, I doubt not, it will continue to be for all time if it remains true to its great heritage and holds fast to the principles of constitutional liberty.”
The truth is that modern legal arguments regarding the Constitution’s racial equality provisions did not fully take shape until late in the 20th century. The Court’s landmark school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education(1954) spoke only of a right to racially integrated public schools: “We conclude that in the field of public education the doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place.” After Brown, the Court handed down a series of unexplained orders affirming lower court decisions that struck down segregation at public beaches, municipal golf courses, parks and elsewhere. But many of these orders were just one sentence long, and they hardly answered the question of why segregation is unconstitutional outside of the public school context.
By the 1970s, legal scholars began to split between two competing theories of how the Constitution approaches race. The first theory, which Yale law professor Reva Siegel labels the “antisubordination” principle, contends that “it is wrong for the state to engage in practices that enforce the inferior social status of historically oppressed groups.” On this theory, Brown was correctly decided because the purpose of school segregation was to subordinate Black people, and the Constitution does not tolerate a racial underclass.
The other theory, which Siegel labels the “anticlassification” principle, simply declares that “government may not classify on the basis of race.” And thus any law that draws any distinction on the basis of race is constitutionally suspect, even if that law was enacted to undo the legacy of racism.
The Supreme Court of the 1970s and ’80s, however, did not divide into two neat camps. Every late 20th-century justice was at least a moderate proponent of Siegel’s anticlassification principle. While Justice Thurgood Marshall, for example, argued that the Constitution views laws which seek to “remed[y] the present effects of past racial discrimination” with less skepticism than it does laws that enforce white supremacy, he still would have subjected affirmative action and similar programs to “intermediate scrutiny,” which is the same test that courts apply to laws that discriminate against women.
Meanwhile, while a majority of the Court ultimately concluded that both Jim Crow-like laws and programs like affirmative action must survive the same exacting legal test — known as “strict scrutiny” — the Court also permitted at least some affirmative action programs to exist. The seminal case was Regents of the University of California v. Bakke (1978), which recognized that students from underrepresented racial groups bring “experiences, outlooks, and ideas” to the classroom “that enrich the training of its student body and better equip its graduates.”
And thus, if universities could not take some steps to racially diversify their student bodies, all of those students, including the white ones, would receive an inferior education.
The pre-Roberts Court, in other words, took a pragmatic approach to race cases that avoided drawing rigid lines or categorically declaring well-meaning programs intended to achieve racial equality off-limits. The justices of this era also understood that institutions outside of the Court often had far more expertise on how to foster a pluralistic society than nine lawyers in black robes.
Take Justice Lewis Powell’s opinion in Bakke, which said that “it is the business of a university to provide that atmosphere which is most conducive to speculation, experiment and creation,” and which ultimately concluded that universities “must be accorded the right to select those students who will contribute the most to the ‘robust exchange of ideas.’”
Powell was a white Southerner who, as chair of the Richmond, Virginia, school board, left office six years after Brown with only two of Richmond’s 23,000 Black children attending school alongside white students. But he was also humble enough to recognize that universities knew something about how to educate university students to succeed in a diverse nation that he and his fellow justices did not. And so he gave these universities some leeway to exercise that expertise.
Indeed, if anything, the current Court’s most defining feature is the complete absence of the very kind of humility that Powell showed in Bakke — especially on questions of race.
Writing colorblindness into the Constitution was one of Roberts’s top priorities as chief justice
John Roberts became chief justice of the United States in 2005. Less than two years later, he made his first big push to write colorblindness into the Constitution.
In a sharp break with earlier school segregation decisions, which concluded that public schools may require each school to have “a prescribed ratio of Negro to white students reflecting the proportion for the district as a whole,” Roberts wrote that public schools are forbidden from voluntarily integrating themselves.
Parents Involved v. Seattle School District No. 1 (2007) involved two school districts, one in Seattle and another in Louisville, that allowed families to select which schools they wanted their children to attend. If more students chose a particular school than that school could accommodate, however, the districts gave a preference to children who would make their chosen school more diverse. The idea was that, since the districts had to come up with some way to determine who got to attend oversubscribed schools, it should do so in a way that fostered racial integration.
This was the case where Roberts declared that “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.” Indeed, Roberts even wrote that these two districts’ attempt to integrate public schools was no less odious than Jim Crow segregation. “Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin.” The school districts in Parents Involved, he claimed, asked his Court to “allow this once again — even for very different reasons.”
This is the essence of the colorblind theory of the Constitution. According to Roberts, the Constitution draws no distinction between white supremacist laws that segregate children by race, and an administrative scheme that tries to slightly increase the racial diversity of public schools.
It’s worth noting that Roberts’s views did not fully carry the day in Parents Involved, although a total of five justices agreed that the two school districts’ assignment schemes must be struck down. Justice Anthony Kennedy, who retired in 2018, wrote a separate opinion criticizing Roberts for going too far. “In the administration of public schools by the state and local authorities,” Kennedy concluded, “it is permissible to consider the racial makeup of schools and to adopt general policies to encourage a diverse student body, one aspect of which is its racial composition.”
But the Court’s overarching conclusion that racial integration can violate the Constitution still shocked the seniormost member of the Court. In dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens wrote that “it is my firm conviction that no Member of the Court that I joined in 1975 would have agreed with today’s decision.”
A justice ready to take colorblindness from a fringe idea into the law of the land
In 1982, President Reagan signed an amendment to the Voting Rights Act which clarified that state election laws that have a disproportionate negative impact on racial minorities violate the VRA, even if the plaintiffs cannot prove those laws were enacted with racist intent — this was the amendment that Roberts’s Court effectively repealed in its Callais decision. Reagan did so over the objections of a conservative faction within his administration, and one of the most vocal members of this faction was a young lawyer named John Roberts.
As a Reagan White House attorney, according to journalist Ari Berman, Roberts “wrote upwards of 25 memos opposing” the 1982 law. He “prepared administration officials for their testimony before the Senate; attended weekly strategy sessions; and worked closely with like-minded senators on Capitol Hill.”
Meanwhile, in an unrelated 1982 memo to Attorney General William French Smith regarding Smith’s upcoming meeting with the chair of the US Civil Rights Commission, Roberts urged Smith to “reiterate our commitment to the color-blind principle” in that meeting.
Though Roberts, and the conservative faction that he belonged to, lost the fight to get Reagan to veto the 1982 law, this movement was hardly a flash in the pan. The original Voting Rights Act of 1965 included a provision requiring states with a history of racist election practices to “preclear” any new election laws with federal officials to ensure that those laws would not prevent people of color from voting. This provision was initially set to expire in 1970, which meant that there was an internal fight within the Nixon administration over whether President Richard Nixon should sign an extension.
The conservative faction lost that fight too. They also lost similar fights over Voting Rights Act extensions in 1975, 1982, and 2006, all under Republican presidents. The 2006 extension, signed by President Bush, passed the House by a 390-33 margin, and it passed the Senate 98-0.
Ultimately, however, a conservative faction that was too weak to convince a single senator to oppose the 2006 extension had the last laugh. While this faction was only a minor player in Bush-era electoral politics, it dominated conservative legal groups like the Federalist Society and successfully pushed its own candidates for the Supreme Court. And so,in 2013, that Court struck down preclearance in Shelby County. Roberts wrote the opinion, which was joined by all of the Court’s Republicans.
The piecemeal death of the Voting Rights Act, in other words, wasn’t just the triumph of a once-impotent faction within the GOP over a voting rights law, it was a triumph over the democratic process itself. Time and time again, this faction lost its fight against the VRA in the two democratically elected branches of government. But none of that matters to a faction that controls the Supreme Court.
The colorblindness thesis is ahistorical
One irony of this fight over how the Constitution approaches race is that, while the most recent version of the Republican Party embraces colorblindness, it does so despite a lack of evidence that the Constitution’s racial equality provisions were originally understood to support this thesis. In Republican legal circles, it’s currently fashionable to tout originalism, the idea that the Constitution’s meaning was fixed at the time it was drafted or ratified, and that judges must interpret constitutional provisions in line with this original meaning. Several of the current justices, including Justices Clarence Thomas, Neil Gorsuch, and Amy Coney Barrett, are outspoken originalists.
But within the Supreme Court it was Justice Thurgood Marshall, the great civil rights lawyer turned liberal justice, who first examined how the 14th Amendment, with its guarantee that no one will be denied the “equal protection of the laws,” was understood by the post-Civil War Americans who drafted and ratified it. And that evidence does not support colorblindness.
“The Congress that passed the Fourteenth Amendment is the same Congress that passed the 1866 Freedmen’s Bureau Act, an Act that provided many of its benefits only to Negroes,” Marshall wrote in a separate opinion accompanying the Bakke decision. He also quoted members of Congress who complained during debates over this act that it gave Black people “favors that the poor white boy in the North cannot get,” as well as lawmakers who defended the “very discrimination” the Freedmen’s Bureau “makes between ‘destitute and suffering’ negroes and destitute and suffering white paupers.”
Seven years later, in 1985, legal scholar Eric Schnapper wrote a seminal paper fleshing out Marshall’s argument. Schnapper identified “eight Reconstruction measures establishing programs limited, in varying degrees, to blacks.” These laws included the Freedmen’s Bureau named by Marshall, as well as less significant laws offering targeted benefits to Black Americans. One law appropriated $15,000 “for the relief of freedmen or destitute colored people in the District of Columbia.” Another provided safeguards for Black veterans of the Union army.
For more than four decades, no justice even attempted to rebut Marshall and Schnapper’s originalist case for affirmative action. Indeed, the Court’s originalists were so silent that, in a 2013 article, conservative legal scholar Michael Rappaport complained that they have “not made any real effort to justify their affirmative action opinions based on the Constitution’s original meaning.”
Justice Thomas did finally attempt to rebut at least some of Marshall and Schnapper’s evidence in a concurring opinion in the Harvard case, but his response to the originalist case against colorblindness was quite feeble. Thomas’s opinion did “not contend that all of the individuals who put forth and ratified the Fourteenth Amendment universally believed” in colorblindness, and he claimed that the historical record is “sparse.”
Regarding the Freedman’s Bureau, Thomas argued that the laws authorizing it “applied to freedmen (and refugees), a formally race-neutral category, not blacks writ large,” even though “freedmen” is a category that consisted entirely of Black people. Regarding the other Reconstruction-era laws identified by Schnapper, Thomas discussed two of them.
Thomas acknowledged that “an 1866 law adopted special rules and procedures for the payment of ‘colored’ servicemen in the Union Army,” but anachronistically claimed that this law does not show that its 19th-century drafters rejected colorblindness because it may survive the strict scrutiny test that the Supreme Court devised during the 20th century. Thomas also conceded that “another law, passed in 1867, provided funds for ‘freedmen or destitute colored people’ in the District of Columbia,” but speculated that Congress “may have enacted the measure” — which again, used the words “colored people” — “not because of race, but rather to address a special problem in shantytowns in the District where blacks lived.”
All of which is a long way of saying that the colorblindness thesis is a far more recent invention than its most prominent proponents acknowledge. It was primarily devised, not by post-Civil War lawmakers seeking to undo the legacy of slavery, but by late 20th-century conservatives who opposed programs like affirmative action.
If there was a serious originalist case for colorblindness, one of the justices would have made it in the 45-year period between Marshall’s opinion in Bakke and Thomas’s opinion in Harvard. And when Thomas finally did attempt to rebut the evidence gathered by Marshall and Schnapper, key prongs of his argument rested on anachronism and conjecture.
The fate of affirmative action and similar programs should be decided by elected officials, not by judges
In 2006, the people of Michigan voted to end affirmative action in that state’s university system. This ban sparked a far-fetched lawsuit claiming that it was somehow unconstitutional for the state to enact such a policy. As Judge Jeffrey Sutton wrote about this suit, the plaintiffs’ argument “transforms a potential virtue of affirmative action into a vice,” because “if there is one feature of affirmative-action programs that favors their constitutionality, it is that they grow out of the democratic process.”
The question of what, if anything, should be done to racially diversify campuses — or to otherwise lift up communities that faced hundreds of years of enslavement, segregation, or other forms of government-sanctioned racism — is fraught. It is entirely reasonable to believe, as Chief Justice Roberts argued in Shelby County, that the same aggressive civil rights policies that were necessary to tear down Jim Crow in the 1960s are no longer needed two generations later. It is also reasonable to believe that, in a nation where the median white household earns over $36,000 more per year than the median Black household, that not enough is being done to close this gap.
Judge Sutton’s insight, in other words, should cut both ways. In a democracy, we are supposed to resolve these sorts of fraught questions through elections, not litigation. As the original history of the 14th Amendment shows, the United States did not ratify the post-Civil War constitutional amendments to prevent Harvard from diversifying its campus, and we certainly did not do so to prevent Congress from requiring former Confederate states to give some legislative representation to Black people.
Similarly, proponents of colorblindness are more than capable of enacting their preferred policies without having to bypass democracy. Unlike the disenfranchised families who brought the Brown case, advocates of colorblindness do not need a judicial decree to advance their political goals — they can enact their preferred policies the same way that they did in Michigan’s 2006 election, by persuading voters that they are correct.
Nevertheless, by constitutionalizing colorblindness, the Republican justices have attempted to lock in place what could be, at most, a very transient electoral consensus around their preferred racial policy.If the American people decide, in the 2028 election or beyond, that the recent turn against laws like the Voting Rights Act was a terrible idea, they will have to replace the Supreme Court before they can reinstate those laws.
But maybe I know too much, or…too little about how much to know? | Pete Gamlen for Vox
Hi readers! Shayla Love here, science journalist and longtime fan of Your Mileage May Vary. I’m honored to be subbing for Sigal Samuel while she’s out on parental leave. I’m diving into your questions as a way to help understand human nature and our choices through multiple lenses: philosophical, psychological, and beyond. Please send in any emotional, body/brain, sociological, perceptual, or other kind of life quandaries you might have.
I’m swimming in information. I have tracking apps to keep tally of my daily steps, minutes online, my calories, my sleep. Throughout the day, I am awash with data — some “actionable” and some useless. I find it a struggle to prioritize. I find myself looking up the latest betting odds for a Senate race in a state where I don’t live. (I didn’t bet on the race.) What I want to know is: What should I know less about? I’ve heard that ignorance is bliss, though I don’t often find that to be the case. But maybe I know too much, or…too little about how much to know?
Dear Un-blissfully Aware,
As a fellow know-it-all, I relate to your impulse to gather as much information as possible. I used to obstinately reject the idea that ignorance was bliss. Even if I learned something that was unpleasant, wouldn’t it be much worse not to know it?
But, as you may suspect from sharing my temperament in this arena, this approach to life can lead to hoarding knowledge like a frantic animal preparing for winter. You’re acquiring information as if it’s a scarce resource (which it’s not) and as if choosing to know something is neutral (it isn’t). What helped me understand the implications of this sort of approach was learning about the cases when people decided not to know, or the study of “deliberate ignorance.”
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Several years ago, a psychologist, Ralph Hertwig, and lawyer, Christoph Engel, who both work at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, examined what happened in the early 1990s, when the archives of East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, opened to the public. Any person who had been living in the German Democratic Republic could check if they had been spied on. There was a pretty substantial catch, though: The spies were often “unofficial collaborators” — friends, family, teachers, or lovers who had been tasked with covertly collecting information. When the files were opened, many elected not to look. Hertwig and Engel estimated that potentially more people chose not to know what their files contained than those who did.
This goes against what we think we know about humans and how you have described yourself. Even Aristotle seemed quite certain that “all men naturally desire knowledge.” In the 1980s, the psychologist George Miller followed along in this line of thinking. He described humans as informavores: creatures with minds that constantly seek out and consume information. So, it can feel surprising to hear about occasions when people didn’t start grabbing for every available datapoint like squirrels dashing for acorns as the first winds of fall arrive.
But, as Hertwig and Engel — who collaborated on an entire book called Deliberate Ignorance: Choosing Not to Know — point out, we’re surrounded by people choosing ignorance all the time. They avoid looking at their bank statements, they skip doctor’s appointments, and they cover their ears and say “no spoilers” if someone is talking about a movie they haven’t yet seen.
Even Nobel Laureates do this. When James Watson, one of the co-discoverers of DNA’s double helix, had his own genome sequenced, he requested that a specific gene be left out: ApoE4, which can reveal an increased Alzheimer’s risk. Watson’s grandmother had Alzheimer’s, and her experience clearly made an impression on him. (Then, many in the scientific world tried to remain ignorant to Watson’s increasingly misogynistic and racist comments, until it was unignorable.)
Why do people choose not to know? The most common reason: Ignorance can be an extremely effective way to regulate any emotions that might crop up in response to knowledge. You can minimize negative feelings by, for example, not knowing that your otherwise friendly neighbor had been reporting on your comings and goings.
In a study about romantic relationships, a majority of people said they didn’t want to know if their partner had ever thought about cheating on them (but never acted on it). Other research showed that most people wouldn’t want to know the exact time of their death. Alternatively, someone could cultivate the feelings of joy and surprise by waiting to find out the sex of a baby until it’s born.
Deliberate ignorance can also be used to protect us from our biases. Scientists do blinded studies, because the knowledge of what drugs are being used can unwittingly change the outcomes or research. When orchestras implemented blind auditions, more women musicians were accepted.
Of course, deliberate ignorance can be problematic when it causes harm to yourself or others, like failing to gather basic information about your financial or physical health. In some cases, for instance, about 10 percent of people who got tested for HIV didn’t come back for their results — which could lead to further spread of the disease.
But when skipping out on knowledge doesn’t endanger you or those around you, it’s worth asking: How would this information make me feel?
This sounds like a question that’s missing from your information-ingestion habits. You don’t have to — and shouldn’t — ignore everything that comes across your desk. But your deliberate ignorance filter is turned entirely off; seemingly anything passes through it. To take just one of your examples, you mentioned fitness wearables. It can be useful to be aware of your general activity levels and your sleep, but honestly, don’t you already know enough from your memories of a workout class and how rested you feel in the morning? A quest for more detailed knowledge like this can backfire, making people more anxious, and disconnected from their actual physical experience.
It’s not just about how much knowledge to take in, it’s also about what kind. The breadth of information that you’re seeking out makes me wonder if you’re not already using knowledge to regulate your emotions by favoring superficial knowledge over the meaningful. When we face difficult tasks (even if they’re important, and we want to get them done), that’s usually when, suddenly, a Senate race in a far-off state starts to become interesting, or you find yourself scrolling a high school acquaintance’s wife’s Instagram.
In the 1990s, two technology researchers proposed the concept of “information foraging,” which was inspired by early user behavior on the web. A few years later, Webster’s dictionary announced that their word of the year was “infosnacking,” or mindless grazing for useless knowledge online in order to pass the time.
Snacking sometimes is fine, but you’ll start to suffer if you only eat chips for every meal rather than something more nutritious. I suspect you might be avoiding the slightly more challenging task of taking in other, more nutrient-dense knowledge. If you cut out the step tallies, screen minute totals, and news headlines scrolling, what could you choose to know instead?
What I’ve learned about myself is that I will always lean towards being an informavore. I can’t help it. I am hungry to know, and there is no need to totally overhaul this valuable part of who you are (as I also tell myself!). This means you don’t need to replace your infosnacking with zenfully staring at the ceiling or emptying your mind through meditation. You can still put new things into it! But you could worry less about your daily information calorie intake and spend more time thinking about the nutrition content of your knowledge diet.
Take a lesson from our many deliberately ignorant friends, and try disregarding some of the little stuff — the body tracking, the random factoids — for a period of time. But, at the same time, increase your knowledge about other subjects: a neglected hobby or a nonfiction book collecting dust on your shelf. Have a long conversation with your best friend and ask each other questions you’ve never asked before or interview an older relative about their childhood.
And remember that all of this knowledge relates back to your emotional life. Rather than asking yourself what you should or shouldn’t know, examine how you might be using knowledge to alter how you feel. Knowledge changes us. It can make us happy, anxious, excited, or sad; it impacts our decisions and how we see ourselves and other people.
In some of your newfound spaces of intentional ignorance, you may find just some surprising moments of bliss.
Bonus: What I’m reading
The ostrich may be famous for its head-burying ignorance, but that’s actually a myth dating back to the ancient Romans. Ostriches don’t hide their heads, but, rather, bury their eggs underground. I highly suggest flipping through the book Ostrich by Edgar Williams, professor of cardiopulmonary science at the University of South Wales, for a natural and cultural history of our largest living bird that is way more interesting than it needs to be.
In a moving essay in the China Books Review, poet and writer Zhang Er remembers growing up during the Cultural Revolution and receiving “torn books,” or sections of forbidden books, to read from a family member. Even with incomplete knowledge, “my world expanded with each torn book,” she writes.
Not a book, but a powerful story on the ripple effects of being exposed to new information in East Germany: the 2006 movie The Lives of Others, from director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, which I recently saw for the first time. A Stasi officer listens into the life of a playwright, whose own fragile ignorance about his situation in the GDR is becoming challenged.
In cities where space is tight, underused golf courses are, in theory, ideal canvases for new housing. | Patrick T. Fallon/AFP
Maybe it was never a great idea to build so many golf courses in the desert. But in the 1990s, when Tiger Woods mania was at its peak, Las Vegas went on a fairway construction spree, dotting the city with dozens of pristine, water-gobbling green oases, most woven around upscale master-planned suburbs.
One of those new fairways was the privately owned Badlands Golf Club, whose name now evokes huffs of frustration and wistful what-ifs from Las Vegans in the know. Opened in 1995 about 15 miles west of the Strip, the luxury course once wound its way around some of the city’s most opulent mansions and gated communities.
Key takeaways
An old golf course in Las Vegas is about to be transformed into the largest affordable housing complex in Nevada’s history.
If all 16,000 golf courses in America were turned into such housing, we’d have 22 million more affordable homes.
NIMBY urges can make such projects difficult, but the housing crisis makes it important to consider them.
By the time Woods crashed his car into a fire hydrant in 2009, the golf industry was in a crisis of its own. Many Americans had lost their appetite for the sport, which began hemorrhaging millions of players during the Great Recession and Woods’s fall from grace. Thousands of golf courses built during boom times shut down as a result — Badlands Golf Club among them.
Meanwhile, Las Vegas, like many American cities, needed more homes to help alleviate its brutally high housing costs. These days, Nevada needs 120,000 additional affordable homes, but it is running out of places to build them, in part because about 85 percent of the state is federally owned, meaning there’s little room left for its cities to grow or sprawl. Shuttered golf courses — which often had the advantage of being tied into existing urban infrastructure, unlike more undeveloped land — presented ideal spots for relatively low-cost development.
Not everyone was happy about the idea. To the ire of its affluent neighbors, the precious real estate of the Badlands Golf Club was slated for a new housing development in 2015. What came next was one of the worst land disputes in Nevada history, a decade-long legal tussle waged by the city of Las Vegas at the behest of wealthy locals. Las Vegas was forced to fork over $286 million to a developer last year — one of the largest such settlements in history, and more than the city’s entire annual municipal culture and recreation budget — for illegally denying applications and permits to build atop the Badlands, which by then sat empty, an abandonedeyesore. Eleven years after the fiasco started, a new developer finally began clearing the site for a new luxury housing complex earlier this year, while Las Vegas has had to enact hiring freezes and delay municipal projects to pay off its hefty bill.
In cities where space is tight, underused golf courses are, in theory, ideal canvases for new housing. These huge, repurposed tracts of land can fit thousands of new units — ideally, affordable ones — alongside other amenities like parks or basketball courts smack in the middle of some of the country’s most desirable and well-connected neighborhoods. This makes such developments much cheaper to build than creating a new suburb with all new roads and power lines from scratch.
Not every attempt to turn golf courses into housing lands is destined for financial calamity. Just last year, the city of Las Vegas approved a plan to convert a separate golf course, the city-owned Desert Pines Golf Club, into a 1,500-unit housing complex, the largest affordable housing project in Nevada history and a public-private partnership between the city, the Nevada State Infrastructure Bank, a private developer, and nonprofit partners. The project is a rare win for these kinds of developments, and may offer a blueprint for how they can be accomplished in the future. But even there, the challenges are still real.
“Everyone wants more housing at a regional level. Everyone acknowledges that we need more housing,” said Nicholas Irwin, research director at the Lied Center for Real Estate at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. “But no one wants it near them, and that’s the tricky part.”
How to turn a golf course into housing
Desert Pines Golf Club opened in the heart of East Las Vegas in 1996, a lush, manicured 18-hole course, peppered with over 4,000 imported pine trees. Like nearly one in five fairways nationwide, Desert Pines was municipally owned, its pricey water needs subsidized by Vegas taxpayers.
With its rolling green hills, Desert Pines was, by far, the largest contiguous green space in the mostly working-class neighborhood that surrounds it. But while golfers flocked to the course, many local residents barely even knew it was there or likely assumed it was out of their price range, said Ángeles Ramos, a local organizer with the immigrant advocacy group Make the Road Nevada. “Only the wealthy wanted it for their own purposes,” she told me in Spanish, but “what we want, what we urgently need, is more affordable housing.”
There was a time when “we could just build anywhere and everywhere because the valley was underdeveloped,” Irwin said, but “now, we’re buttoned up against it. We are incredibly dense, because we’ve basically filled up the land we have.” Much of Nevada is undevelopable because the federal government has set it aside for other purposes like recreation, which explains the state’s bevy of tourist attractions like Lake Tahoe or Red Rock Canyon. But it also leaves the city with little space to build.
If all 16,000 golf courses in America turned all of their land — about 2.3 million acres — into housing with the same density as Desert Pines, it would be enough space to build 22 million homes. If you applied that approach to only those courses that are, like Desert Pines was, municipally owned, then you could still build 4.3 million affordable homes, which would make an enormous dent in the nation’s current shortage of about 7.2 million affordable homes.
That’s not to say that every golf course in every land-constrained city ought to be bulldozed to make way for new apartment buildings. Golfing, for the record, has made a bit of a comeback lately, much like its most famous star. And even if fairways were still closing at the rate they were a few years ago, there’s no way that they could solve Nevada’s housing gap alone, much less overcome the shortage nationwide. But they can still help close the gap.
Ramos, who is among the local leaders organizing community meetings around the Desert Pines redevelopment, believes it could be transformative for the community over time. She says that in her neighborhood it’s become a luxury for many families just to live alone with their spouse and kids, rather than doubling up in cramped apartments, pooling together money each month to keep up with rising costs.
When the Desert Pines redevelopment opens about a decade from now, it will include not just 1,500 housing units, but also a soccer pitch, walking trails, and a job training center. In East Las Vegas, the temperature often feels more than five degrees hotter than it does in the Badlands’ affluent suburbs, where residents enjoy over nine times as much parkland per person.
“This project brings a lot of hope,” said Ramos, who’s especially excited about the prospect of more accessible, kid-friendly green spaces. “We’re all human. We need equity, respect, and to live with dignity, and that’s why we urgently need trees too.”
As it turns out, you can do a lot with an old fairway. Even with all of those bells and whistles, the new development will still likely use less water than the golf course did. And, because the plot of land is already enmeshed within the community of East Las Vegas — close to existing sewer, water, and electricity lines — it will be much cheaper to build there than it would be to try doing so on the outskirts of the city, said Antonio Bermúdez, vice president of McCormack Baron Salazar, the developer working with the city and state government on the proposal.
“What I’ve seen so far in the state of Nevada is that the political will is there,” he said, though the question is, “how do we make this happen not just in Nevada and the city of Las Vegas, but everywhere else where affordable housing is needed.”
Not in my golfyard!
If the Badlands has become a brutal fable of bad governance and highly charged NIMBYism, then Desert Pines may prove to be the model of a golf course-to-housing project gone right.
It also enjoyed the privilege of being located in a welcoming neighborhood, filled with renters who could personally benefit from the project. By contrast, many other golf courses were instead built as a luxury perk embedded in master-planned communities, meaning they’re surrounded by homeowners who fear that losing a recreational amenity — especially if it’s replaced by less upscale housing — could affect their property value.
“Everyone wants more housing at a regional level. Everyone acknowledges that we need more housing. But no one wants it near them, and that’s the tricky part.”
Nicholas Irwin, research director, Lied Center for Real Estate
Just across the street from the Badlands is another golf course, Angel Park Golf Club, built on federal land granted to the city of Las Vegas. If the city ever tried to build an affordable housing complex like the one it’s planning in Desert Pines, it would almost certainly fail given the outrage with which the surrounding community reacted to a proposal for other high-end housing in their backyard.
Victoria Seaman, a former Las Vegas City council member, was elected in 2019 to represent the district that includes the Badlands, mid-lawsuit. Even the “big, beautiful two-acre lots” the developer originally envisioned for the site, she said, were not good enough for Queensbridge, an ultra-luxury gated community abutting the course that acted as a powerful lobbying bloc during the decade-long process, influencing the city’s illegal decision to block the original property owner from breaking ground.
The city of Las Vegas is still paying off the total $286 million settlement it made over its obstruction of the Badlands project, in part through funding cuts to projects like the Desert Pines redevelopment in East Las Vegas.
“These were expensive homes with beautiful planning,” Seaman said of the project planned for the former golf course, and yet somehow, “these very big donors in Queensbridge convinced the entire [homeowners association] that the developer would ruin the neighborhood.”
The fight over fairways is really a fight over who gets to live where
The Badlands example is particularly dramatic, but it also gets at the challenges faced by similar projects across the country. Even a decade after many fairways fell into decline, there are few other examples quite like Desert Pines, and certainly none as large. While dozens of cities — including Denver, New York, and Virginia Beach — have made overtures to turn golf courses into housing in recent years, almost all such projects have been met with upheaval and fierce resistance from locals.
To some extent, that’s understandable. In Sparks, Nevada, hundreds of local residents have flooded community meetings in recent months to oppose a proposal to raze the Red Hawk Golf and Resort and build over 700 new homes in its place. “Promises were made to this community,” Tom Ciesynski, one of those homeowners, told me, “these lots, these very nice homes, were sold with premiums added for those that were sitting on the golf course.” Now, he says, the fairway’s owner is trying to build “tract homes that just don’t fit the character” of a neighborhood that has come to see the Red Hawk as its centerpiece, where Ciesynski regularly goes to golf, and where his wife takes her yoga and pilates classes.
He understands that Sparks, like most of Nevada, faces a housing crunch. “Most people aren’t opposed to all new development, but there’s a right way to do it and a wrong way to do it,” he said, and there are other places within a “stone’s throw of where we live” where he thinks the developers ought to go and build instead.
He arguably has a point. Recreation spaces are important for livable cities, too, and it’s not fair that homeowners who were promised one thing when they bought their properties are now facing a new reality.
And yet, the most troubling trade-off is not the one that leaves a homeowner golf course-less but the one that leaves families in East Las Vegas unable to afford homes at all. It may be tempting to only build affordable housing in places that won’t put up a fight, which in practice, means avoiding most golf courses, especially those in wealthy neighborhoods that want to preserve the kind of exclusivity that many fairways were built to project in the first place. But cities can no longer afford that indulgence — and in any case, they shouldn’t be digging in their heels to protect it.
When people talk about a new development not fitting the character of a neighborhood, “what they’re describing is an amorphous feeling,” said Irwin of the University of Las Vegas, “and if you make policies based on feelings and vibes, you get bad policy.”
A senior couple sold their house in Minnesota and moved to central Florida, where they will have more time for their convertible sports car. | Bruce Bisping/Star Tribune via Getty Images
Over the next 20 years the United States will see a massive transfer of wealth as boomers leave trillions of dollars to their children as they pass away. A contingent of those children are asking, “What if we got that money, now?” Millennials and Gen Z want to be able to take advantage of the money they stand to inherit before their parents pass away. While a majority of parents actually do help their kids, many with the means are surprisingly reluctant.
Bill Perkins argues that these parents should let it all go. Perkins is an entrepreneur and the author of the book Die with Zero. He argues that the money would be better spent while your children are young adults rather than in their 60s when they may already be set up financially. Perkins joined Today, Explained co-host Noel King to explain the philosophy behind his book and why the best time to give is now.
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
What you’re essentially saying is before you pass on from this earth and leave your kids a big inheritance, maybe instead give that inheritance away sooner.
If you’re going to leave money to your kids, you should be thinking about what’s the right amount. That’s probably the first thing that people think about. But one of the things that people don’t think about is when is the right time? And I argue ferociously that it is not when you die. It is actually well before you die. So that gift makes the maximum impact on their lives.
So you would be agreeing with the millennials who are feeling some kind of way about their parents sitting on the inheritance for now and waiting until they pass on. You think that the youths have a point?
Oh yeah. I’m their best friend. I am definitely their best friend. When you leave an inheritance to someone, you’re trying to have maximum impact on their lives so that they may be able to enjoy it. And that time is not at 86 or 60. The time that they can convert that capital into meaningful experiences at the greatest rate without that much decay is between 28 and 33.
Why is that? What’s happening between 28 and 33?
The sharpest and the biggest calculator you will ever be is at 28. And you reach physical maturity at 33 and then it plateaus and declines. And so what that means is that your mental acuity is declining and your physical abilities are declining at various rates, which means that your ability to convert that money into experiences that you enjoy or can do decline as you age. Most of your life is still ahead of you. At 60, most of your life is behind you.
Are you literally advocating “die with nothing”? Or are you saying, “Hey boomer, maybe have a responsible cushion and give your kids the rest.” What are the mechanics of this?
I am arguing to get as close to zero as possible. Knowing that there are uncertainties in life, that’s going to be probably an impossible goal — especially the biggest uncertainty, when you’re going to die. The uncertainty around what things will you be doing later in life besides hanging out and maintaining yourself. But this is an iterative formula, and if you are not on autopilot and you deeply think about it, you can be more efficient with the allocation of your resources and how you split those things up.
There’s a mathematical reality to some of this. If you’re a boomer and you’re sitting on money, you invest it. Having that money compound over 15 or 20 years, you could be giving your kid, when they are 60 or 65, just an enormous sum of money versus a much smaller sum based on how investment works when they are 33. What do you think about the argument that it’s better math to wait?
I would say that they’re not truly understanding the purpose of the money. Would you give your kid who’s 30 a rattle or a binky? So the understanding of the purpose of the money is for them to have a fulfilling life, not to have a bunch of zeros. And so what matters is how do they convert those zeros into a fulfilling life? And so because you decay — that’s the unfortunate part of having a human body — and then you eventually die, the ability of you to convert that money into the adventurous life or fulfillment that you choose declines with age. And you could just have a thought experiment. How much would you pay of your net worth to be 30 again?
Jesus. One hundred percent, and I’m not 65.
Exactly. And so you can easily see that I’m not going to make enough capital to make up for the difference in age, right? Because that money helps make the life.
We know that this is a very hard conversation to have. It’s hard for parents to talk about not being here. It’s hard for kids to approach this without seeming greedy. How do you suggest families broach this conversation?
The one thing I don’t tell people is whether you should be leaving an inheritance or not. That’s up to you. There are some people who are just like, “All my money is for me. The kids, I gave them an education or gave them whatever they need, a shot in life, and they have to go make their own way.” That’s one. But those who intend to leave a gift, once they’ve thought deeply about it, I think they will come to the logical conclusion that it’s not a bequest. It’s an inheritance and that there’s a better time. And so in my mind, it’s a gift of love. It’s a gift of opportunity. It’s like, “Here you go. I’ve been fortunate in my life to be able to pass on the gift of choice. And here’s this capital and here’s some wisdom that comes with that.” But again, that’s me, not you.
Secretary of State Marco Rubio at an ASEAN meeting in the Philippines on July 23, 2026. | Ezra Acayan/Getty Images
The International Criminal Court is in the trenches right now.
Last week, its chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, was voted out of his position. In a first-of-its-kind vote, 82 member states decided that he engaged in misconduct and a serious breach of duty. The vote comes after he was accused of sexual misconduct by a female colleague at the ICC, which Khan has denied.
It’s a mess, and it’s hitting the ICC at an inopportune time. On top of this internal turmoil, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently launched an all-out attack on the court.
In a Wall Street Journal op-ed earlier this month, Rubio wrote that the Trump administration’s goal is to “dismantle the ICC—brick by brick, if necessary,” citing the possibility that the court could “target” American citizens, such as Border Patrol agents or US soldiers.
The US is not a member of the ICC, and has a history of wariness about the organization.
Beth Van Schaack previously served as the US ambassador-at-large for global criminal justice, a role that led her to work directly with the International Criminal Court. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about the decades-long tumultuous relationship between the US and the ICC. And they discuss whether, if the ICC is now weaker than ever, the Trump administration can actually break it for good.
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.
If the International Criminal Court is charged with dealing with people who have allegedly done very bad things and then trying them, why is the United States not a member?
The United States signed the treaty in the waning days of the Clinton administration, but never submitted it for ratification to the Senate. And one of the concerns is that the final treaty allows for jurisdiction over individuals who may commit crimes on the territory of state parties. And the United States has always been concerned about that principle because we have troop commitments.
Supporters of the court have always said the United States and its personnel are vulnerable regardless of whether you join. If US personnel are committing crimes on the territory of state parties, which we saw in Afghanistan, the response is to do those cases domestically and there’ll be no occasion for the International Criminal Court to consider those matters.
There’ve been peaks and valleys in the relationship between the ICC and the United States. So we’re in a frankly pretty deep valley right now with this new campaign that Secretary Rubio announced.
But back in the Bush administration, there was also very acute concern and it stemmed from this Afghanistan investigation. The Bush administration and Congress both put in place measures that they thought would be protective of US servicemembers. So that was one valley.
Now what’s interesting is in the second term of the Bush administration, many of these measures were dismantled because the Bush administration realized that the court was doing important work in some areas where it also cared about justice — in particular, Darfur.
Then, the Obama administration announced a reset in its relationship with the court, and that’s where I entered the picture. The Obama administration directed various executive agencies to look for ways to support the court where the work that it was doing was consistent with US policy.
Then, we had the first Trump administration, which reversed course almost immediately and eventually imposed sanctions on senior figures, including the prosecutor herself and one of her key aides.
Then, we get to the Biden-Harris administration. They pulled down those sanctions and again launched a reset of the relationship. At that point, there were a number of situations where the court was working, including following the brutal war of aggression by Russia against Ukraine.
Here we saw a remarkable rise of bipartisan support for the work of the court. You had senior Republican figures in Congress supporting the court. The late Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) led a resolution that was supporting justice in Ukraine. Secretary Rubio, then Sen. Rubio, joined that resolution. There was new legislation passed that made it easier for the United States to support the work of the court.
Of course, with the second Trump administration, we have reversed course again, and in particular with Rubio’s announcement.
Well, let’s talk about the reversal. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is at one point on board with the ICC, and then recently he vows to dismantle it. What happened here?
It’s not clear what the precipitating event is, to be honest. There is no existential threat at present. Obviously, there’s always the concern that this is some kind of a distraction because matters are not going well in Iran and with respect to the economy — that this is something to pull eyeballs away from those matters onto something that he can look tough in. Is this just kind of red meat for anti-multilateralism or is there something that is not made public that is happening?
Is there anything actually that Marco Rubio or anyone else in the United States at the highest level could do to the International Criminal Court to put an end to it?
The International Criminal Court is part of a larger system of the rules-based order that we’ve been trying to build since World War II. Almost all of our friends and allies are members of this court and they care deeply about its success. They are committed to seeing a system of international criminal justice. So, no is the answer. The United States alone cannot dismantle this court.
Now, it can injure the court and it has already done so. There are already eight ICC judges, including judges who hail from some of our closest allies — France, for example — who have been subjected to brutal sanctions. They can’t use credit cards that pass through New York. They can’t make reservations online because of financial sanctions. They can’t travel to the United States because of travel bans, et cetera. The chief prosecutor and two of his two deputies have been sanctioned. Non-governmental organizations that are involved in human rights in Palestine have been sanctioned and a UN figure has been sanctioned. Those measures are already in place.
What his most recent campaign seems to announce is some diplomatic move to try and convince states to leave the court or to cease their cooperation with the court. And we have seen in recent days a couple of states announcing that they were withdrawing. These are mostly states within Africa, but also Venezuela, subject to investigation by the prosecutor’s office. The United States can certainly injure the court, but there’s no way that we could dismantle the court.
Most Americans don’t spend a lot of time thinking about the International Criminal Court, but they may know it because lately, it has gotten a lot of attention that the court has issued an arrest warrant for [Israeli Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu. New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani has said he would like to see Netanyahu arrested if he comes to New York.
Mamdani has said he does not have that power. He cannot order the NYPD to do it, but he would like for it to happen. What are the chances that Benjamin Netanyahu comes to the United States and is arrested?
Pretty close to zero, if not actually zero. This is a matter of federal law and international law. And the Headquarters Agreement between the United States and the United Nations, which placed the headquarters of the UN in New York, basically gives certain privileges and immunities to individuals who are coming to New York to attend official functions.
New Yorkers are a feisty bunch. So when word is out that Benjamin Netanyahu is in New York, can you imagine the protests that would happen? Can you imagine the embarrassment that he might experience when he’s supposed to be giving his remarks at the General Assembly High-level Week where all the heads of states convene to deal with transnational issues and his motorcade is ensnarled in protests protected by the First Amendment, calling for his arrest for various international crimes? If I were his lawyer, I would say, “There’s no chance you’re going to get arrested.” But honestly, it could be a miserable visit, given all of the strong support for accountability in this matter in the United States.
This is a lot of drama for a body that for a long time seems to have avoided a ton of very public drama. So who gets hurt in all of this? Is it the court? Is it the US and its reputation? Where do you think this leads?
Unfortunately, I think everyone comes out not looking great here. The court needs to put in place measures to be able to receive those complaints by witnesses, whistleblowers, victims themselves, process them quickly, but also fairly to all parties involved. The United States looks terrible as well, launching a campaign like this against an international organization whose mandate it is to deliver justice for the worst crimes known to humankind.
Michigan Democratic Rep. Andy Levin holds a campaign rally on July 29, 2022 in Pontiac, Michigan. He lost his primary that year to Haley Stevens, who is now embroiled in a fierce Senate primary. | Bill Pugliano/Getty Images
One of the most powerful forces in American politics is about to face a major test of its influence — and it may well come up short.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or AIPAC, has for decades spent heavily to ensure that US policy remains strongly supportive of the Israeli government. The group has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on lobbying and elections to stock Congress with allies and keep them supportive of Israel’s policy priorities once they’re there. It also tries to defeat elected officials and candidates who, in its view, are too supportive of the Palestinian cause or too critical of Israel’s Gaza war.
Next week’s Democratic Senate primary in Michigan is AIPAC’s biggest-ever investment in a single election: The group has spent more than $30 million to defeat staunch Israel critic Abdul El-Sayed and to try to ensure Rep. Haley Stevens wins the Democratic nomination instead.
In the past, AIPAC has very often gotten its way. But this time may be different. El-Sayed has been explicitly running against AIPAC, arguing that the group’s heavy investment in the race discredits his opponent — and trying to capitalize on the Democratic base’s sharp turn against Israel due to the devastation of the Gaza war. And if polling is any indication, it seems to be working. Several recent surveys show El-Sayed with a double-digit lead.
If he wins, it would arguably be AIPAC’s worst-ever defeat. It could also mean we’re in a new chapter of politics, where the group’s heavy spending is less and less effective — and even potentially toxic to voters in the Democratic base.
What has changed, and how could these changes reshape politics?
To understand the influence of AIPAC — what it’s like to go up against the group, and also how its power may be ebbing — we spoke to a Michigan politician who ended up on their bad side, crossing the group on the Israel issue and then losing his seat. (In fact, he lost it to the very candidate AIPAC is boosting in next week’s Senate contest: Haley Stevens.)
Andy Levin was a two-term congressional incumbent and scion of a Michigan Jewish political dynasty — he succeeded his father, Sander Levin, who had served in the House for decades. Andy’s uncle, Carl Levin, had served in the Senate for decades as well; both held high-profile committee chairships.
But once in Congress, Andy Levin staked out positions on Israel that spurred furious pushback from AIPAC. A former president of the group declared he was “arguably the most corrosive member of Congress to the US-Israel relationship.”
And when, after redistricting, he and his colleague Rep. Stevens ended up running against each other in the same primary, AIPAC spent more than $4 million to boost her chances, successfully knocking Levin out of Congress.
Levin is an enthusiastic supporter of El-Sayed, and was in the car on his way to canvas for him when we spoke Thursday. Our conversation, which has been condensed and edited, follows.
How Rep. Andy Levin ran afoul of AIPAC
Tell me about your history and how you’ve thought about the Israeli-Palestinian issue over the years.
I guess the thing to understand is, I’m Jewish, right? You know what a mezuzah is? I had mezuzot on all my doors in Congress. I was the president of my synagogue until I won my primary, and then I felt I had to resign and turn that over.
I am a long, long, longtime human rights activist. My human rights grounding comes from my values as a Jew. Everyone’s created the image of God, you know, and all this. “Justice, justice shall you pursue.” Not a lot of words are repeated twice in the Torah.
So I was active on Tibetan human rights and Haitian human rights. I was in China during the Tiananmen massacre. I interviewed the Dalai Lama. In 1990, as a graduate student, I went to Israel and Palestine. We traveled all over Israel, and we could go in Gaza, there was no Hamas yet. We met the political leaders there and talked to everybody in the West Bank.
And I came home, and I wrote an article in the Detroit Jewish News that said, “Oh my God, 23 years of occupation, this is enough. It’s totally toxic. It’s bad for our soul as the Jewish people, and there’s no solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict without fully realizing the political and human rights of the Palestinians.”
My positions never really changed. But after a quarter century of Bibi [Netanyahu] being the Israeli government — he’s always been against the two-state solution, no question, but he pussyfooted around; he played a lot of games about it. But his government’s gotten more and more right-wing. And in this century, no president of either party has done anything significant to force the Israelis and the Palestinians into each other’s arms, or just to, like, really negotiate.
So you get elected to Congress in 2018. How did you earn the enmity of AIPAC?
I get to Congress. I get on the Foreign Affairs Committee. And the Gaza war before this one happens [in 2021]. It was like a pimple compared to this, but it was terrible.
In the House, there were eight more senior Democrats who worked on Israel and Palestine together. I was, like, the kid; they let me tag along. We were all J Street-aligned [J Street is a more progressive Israel advocacy group].
There were these meetings, and everyone was like, we have to do reconstruction of Gaza, we have to do aid. And I’m like, okay, I’m for all that. But this is just an endless cycle of violence. I want to focus on ending the cycle of violence and actually achieving peace.
So I wrote the Two-State Solution Act. And, dude, it was quite a milquetoast piece of legislation, if I may say so. It was not adequate in any way. But the preamble said, “whereas” — you know, all the “whereas”-es [rhetorical throat-clearing at the beginning of legislation], which aren’t an effective part of it — it said, whereas Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, under international law and United Nations resolutions, these are occupied territory.
The Democratic Majority for Israel pollster, Mark Mellman, attacked me, saying, Andy Levin says we shouldn’t be able to pray on the Western Wall. Because of that preamble, which said East Jerusalem was occupied territory arguably — it’s ridiculous.
But with the Two-State Solution Act — this is the stranglehold that AIPAC had. Some people are sort of more intellectually serious in Congress, and some are less. Some are more like, they study things themselves, but some are more staff-driven.
Some of the more serious people came up to me and said they read the Two-State Solution Act, and they said really nice things about it. And then they said, “But of course I can’t co-sponsor it, you understand.” One colleague came and co-sponsored, but because AIPAC said “dude, no,” he withdrew.
How Levin lost to Haley Stevens — who was aided by AIPAC’s spending — in 2022
So then, in the 2022 cycle, there was redistricting, and you and your colleague Haley Stevens ended up running in the same district, and that’s when AIPAC tries to defeat you.
After the Census, Michigan went from 14 to 13 seats. Haley and I were mushed in together now. You could have argued that either of us should’ve run in the new, current, 10th district. Haley lived in the 10th district; she was more moderate, and that’s a more Republican or mixed district. I never represented any of that.
My case was, I lived in the center of the new 11th district; I still live there. My kids are the fifth generation of my family to live in the new 11th district. The whole Jewish community is almost all in the new 11th district, overwhelmingly.
But the former national president of AIPAC wrote this fundraising appeal for Haley and said, Andy Levin is the most corrosive member of Congress for the US-Israel relationship.
So the level of threat they saw in me — if you get a Rashida [Tlaib] or even if you get an Abdul [El-Sayed], they’ll fight against them. But I’m the Jewish guy, right? I’m the son of Sander Levin, the nephew of Carl Levin.
They were these two Jewish kids from Detroit, grandsons of immigrants, who rose to be, at the same time, the chair of the [House] Ways and Means Committee — my dad — and the chair of the [Senate] Armed Services Committee. So this is super threatening to AIPAC, right? So they targeted me.
So I got trounced by Haley. And I wondered afterward; I told Celinda [pollster Celinda Lake], I should have run in the new 10th district because this intramural fight was so horrible, so unpleasant. She said, I admit it would’ve been better — but I don’t admit you would’ve won in the 10th. Because AIPAC would have backed [Republican nominee] John James, and they would have spent any amount of money to beat you.
Why the politics of Israel changed — and why he thinks Abdul El-Sayed has a better shot at winning, including in the fall
You lost your race, but it certainly seems like, four years on, your views are winning inside the Democratic Party. The party base increasingly seems to be siding with you and against AIPAC now. Take me through what changed since then.
Horrifying things caused the change. Genocide caused the change. Seventy thousand-plus Palestinians killed in Gaza caused the change. Most houses of worship, university buildings, hospitals, residential buildings being destroyed, and the US either providing the weapons for or even paying for a lot of this.
These huge bombs, which US military leadership said, we don’t use those in populated areas — we’re providing them to Israel, and not only was Israel using them like on apartment blocks, they were using them on places they told people to flee. Any parent seeing all these maimed and killed children — and, what’s happening on the West Bank is horrifying, right? That’s part of it.
But the other part is, it gets mixed in with the larger, horrifying phenomenon of dark money, and corporate money, and special interest money in our politics.
I mean, the idea that AIPAC is using mostly dollars from Republican centimillionaires and billionaires to be the biggest spender in Democratic primaries — that’s so gross, and it’s a huge problem for the Democratic Party and also for our democracy.
Most people don’t vote on Israel and Palestine at all; they vote on their pocketbook, on their kids, on their neighborhood, on inflation, on jobs. We’re at a really huge gathering crisis about income and wealth inequality in America.
So we need three things, really, in candidates this year: authenticity, boldness about policy proposals, and truth-telling. I think this year, people are so fed up with politics as usual. And can you imagine? Honestly, can you imagine Abdul could win when they’re spending $80 million to beat him?
Why do you think he’s able to pull that off — if he is? The election isn’t over, of course, but it’s on Tuesday, and the latest polling has shown him with a double-digit lead.
Sometimes the amount of money, it does become a little bit of a story in itself. Of the money being spent on Haley Stevens’s behalf, what percentage is going to be money she raised outside of AIPAC, and what percent is going to be dark money of one kind or another?
But one of my biggest things about this election is this notion about how to win in November, which drives me out of my mind. The idea is, the liberals are gonna vote for the Democrat. The MAGA people are going to vote for the Republicans. Therefore, it’s all about the independents. It’s all about the people in the middle. Therefore, we must run to the mushy middle to win.
It’s a static idea of the electorate, right? They call Michigan a swing state. What is a swing? The whole beauty of the swing — when you’re a kid, you go so high, you go all the way to the back, and you feel like you’re weightless for a second, and you go all the way to the front. That’s swinging.
That’s what Michigan does. [In presidential primaries], this state voted to nominate George Wallace in 1972. We voted to nominate Jesse Jackson in 1988. And Bernie Sanders in 2016.
Abdul can attract voters across the political spectrum who hate the system. He’s so different than Trump, but they look at him and are like, well, nobody’s going to fuck with him. I don’t think he’s going to kowtow to anybody or just do what anybody says. I think he’s gonna do his own thing, and it will be entertaining to watch this.
I think that actually Abdul can expand the electorate, and he’s the better candidate. We must win this seat in November. Abdul’s the better choice.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino looks on after the World Cup final between Spain and Argentina on July 19, 2026, in East Rutherford, New Jersey. | Marvin Ibo Guengoer — GES Sportfoto/Getty Images
The 2026 FIFA World Cup wasn’t perfect, but it was still pretty great. Legions of fans got to experience the US (and Canada, and Mexico), and Americans embraced visiting teams in turn. There was lots of extremely good football (soccer), and Cinderella teams like Cape Verde had a chance to shine.
Not even two weeks later, though, FIFA president Gianni Infantino is doing his best to kill the good vibes. He has a new proposal to sell stakes in the World Cup to private equity, attempting to capitalize on an enormously profitable tournament — with record revenue of about $15 billion in this year’s edition.
Specifically, his plan would create a new entity to run the World Cup, with FIFA the majority owner. Up to 21 percent of the company would be offered to private shareholders, in a major departure from FIFA’s current, ostensibly non-profit model.
And so far, nearly everyone hates it. Many of FIFA’s 211 member associations are in outright revolt; one of its six regional confederations, UEFA, which represents European football, has threatened to boycott FIFA events if the plan goes forward. “We will never lend this model our legitimacy,” UEFA wrote in a statement released Thursday.
Go a little deeper
UEFA is not the only governing body in football that has condemned Infantino’s plan to bring private money into the World Cup, though it has led the charge. Concacaf — which represents North and Central America, plus the Caribbean — and the Asian Football Confederation have also come out against the idea.
Collectively, they make up nearly two-thirds of FIFA’s member associations, which creates a real math problem for Infantino — the plan would require approval from a majority of FIFA members to take effect.
The intensity of the backlash has raised questions about Infantino’s future. As the Athletic reported on Thursday, he’s up for reelection as FIFA president in March, but he may no longer have an easy time of it. On Friday, FIFA’s chief operating officer described the proposal as “the project of one person” — Infantino — in a statement coming out against it.
For now, though, FIFA and Infantino say they plan to forge ahead with a “consultation period” for the plan. It sets up an even higher-stakes version of the battle over “hydration breaks” — which double as lucrative commercial breaks — that Roger Bennett, founder of the soccer podcast Men in Blazers, described to Vox in June.
“Ultimately,” Bennett told Vox, “the whole game of football is currently in a battle between its roots and the commercial imperative that comes from being as big as it is. … It is the last megaphone which is faintly audible around the world. And when you have something that big, it becomes deeply desirous to make as much money as you can out of it.”
One link for later
➨ Bail on plans the right way. If you’re currently staring down a weekend engagement you’d rather not attend, Vox’s Allie Volpe has some pointers on canceling without injury or offense. For starters, you can only bail on casual events with someone you either know very well or not that well at all. And you should offer an honest excuse before attempting to reschedule.
Before you go…
Did you know…that, until 2016, scientists routinely excluded female mice from medical research? The National Institutes of Health now requires that researchers include both sexes to help guarantee that drugs work safely for both men and women.
Today’s trivia: What’s the Vietnamese word for “festival”? (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 to identify the “ugli” fruit. Ugli is the registered trademark for the Jamaican tangelo, a natural — and honestly, perfectly good-looking — hybrid that was discovered in the wild in the early 1900s.
This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.
“Ooooh, a jar, a tiny little jar,” the overlapping voices of the popular social audio say in a hushed, awed tone, evoking an intrusive thought. “Keep the jar with the other jars.”
Jess Lynch, an artist in Toronto, made the audio on a whim. Among her friends, she’s known as the one whose dishwasher is always filled with jars.
Not just any old jar, mind you. Lynch has standards. “It’s gotta be a solid mason jar,” she said. “It’s gotta have a lid.” Other qualities that make a container worth keeping? A good seal, watertight, completely see-through, no sticky labels. If it doesn’t meet her standards, it goes straight to recycling.
Still, she savors the chance to take a container for another spin. “I love reusing,” Lynch told Vox. “Why would I go to the dollar store and buy to-go cups that have to go in the garbage when I could take my little pasta sauce jar that I picked out from dinner last night [and] fill it up with a little savvy B?”
When other people started using the clip as a soundtrack for showing off their own jar stashes, she realized she had struck a chord. The community of collectors is legion.
More than half of American grocery shoppers reuse their glass containers, according to an EcoFocus survey commissioned by the Glass Packaging Institute (GPI). Nineteen percent reuse them for food storage, 14 percent repurpose them for tasks such as organizing and crafting, and another 20 percent reuse them and then recycle them later. Meanwhile, about 30 percent choose to recycle them immediately after use. (Whether you reuse it a hundred times or throw it in the recycling right afterward doesn’t affect how recyclable the glass is, per GPI president Scott DeFife, because the material is “endlessly recyclable.”)
People who stockpile jars, bottles, and other containers often hold onto them with some glorious intended future purpose in mind. What once held store-bought pasta sauce could stow lentils, leftovers, or that pickling project you’re definitely about to start. Perhaps all of those glass olive containers could become a set of chic matching centerpieces for a dinner party you throw down the line. And there’s nothing better to hold a propagating plant stem than a buxom bottle. The container may be empty, yet it’s full of possibility.
The satisfaction of stashing
Monica Chavez, the content creator behind House of Esperanza, said she began saving jars when she was a kid. “I come from very humble beginnings,” she told Vox. “We didn’t have much growing up, so repurposing, recycling, and finding a use for everything was critically important.” Sour cream containers held leftover food. Old coffee tins became planters.
And that sensibility stuck with her, which she describes as, “Yeah, this is a cute jar, I am going to get the most out of it. … It’s that human need to make use of the things you spend your money on.”
Chavez will go out of her way to acquire the right container. She finds that the jar for the Rao’s sauce sold at Costco, for instance, is a more useful shape than the one at grocery stores. She’ll even pay a little bit more if it means she can hold onto the vessel. For example, she buys Oui yogurt, which comes in glass jars with a foil top. “I bought a set of bamboo lids and now I repurpose those,” she said, adding that the jars can store overnight oats, salsa, or other food, or be used by her daughter when she’s watercoloring. Chavez has noticed companies being more savvy about packaging “their products in a way so that the product can continue to live on in those people’s homes…and then it kind of becomes free branding for them.”
“If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time.”
Monica Chavez, content creator, House of Esperanza
Yoplait, the manufacturer of Oui, is definitely aware of the appeal of its container. It has an entire page on its website dedicated to “jar crafts” such as wedding table centerpieces, mini topiary trees, and beauty organizers. Jam company Bonne Maman similarly has a webpage filled with DIY “hacks” for its iconic jars with red gingham tops. “Reusing your empty jars is the perfect way to enjoy Bonne Maman, even after the last spoonful!” it says.
While Chavez has “a lot of jars in rotation constantly,” she also regularly culls her collection. “If the cabinet won’t close, it’s time,” she said. She’ll often list them on Facebook Marketplace or in a “buy nothing” group. “Let them live on somewhere else instead of immediately trying to recycle them,” she said.
Rachael Engelhardt of Trader Joe’s Kitchen and Food With Hardt is a big-time stockpiler who said she’s currently “at max capacity” with her jar collection. But when one of them goes home with a friend or the lid gets rusty, there’ll be an opening in her cabinet for more. She regularly puts them to use because “I have to justify keeping them all in my kitchen.” One of her most coveted containers to reuse is a spice grinder — if she buys one that holds, say, black peppercorns, it might end up grinding up an entirely different seasoning later.
Lynch, Chavez, and Engelhardt all seem to actually take advantage of the various jars and bottles they stash. But for others, that’s not quite how it goes.
“I’ve seen desirable jars and I’ve saved them, like, one-off,” Sally Augustin, an environmental psychologist and a principal at Design With Science, told Vox. “Only usually, in fact, always in the past, it comes to a point where I’ve had it for a while and I realize, I’ve never put anything in this jar. I think it’s time for it to be recycled, and off it will go.”
Augustin said that many of these containers seem “inherently potentially useful” but, when it comes down to it, “we probably actually have better options.” As she sees it, jars might appeal to people’s nostalgia, or folks might like the look of it, or want to believe they are the kind of person who will reuse vessels. But when those containers gather dust rather than color-coordinated art supplies or heirloom seeds, it might be time to admit defeat. You don’t need an increasingly crowded shelf of empty jars reminding you of your failure to meal prep or make eye-catching terrariums. In that case, the ultimate container — the recycling bin — can relieve you of this burden.
The impact of reusing jars on the planet
Even though this practice falls under the dictionary definition of “reuse,” is it actually helping the planet? Not particularly. Paul Ferraro, a Johns Hopkins University professor who studies human behavior and public policy, said that this kind of “consumerism-sided decision-making has very little effect on the environment, positively or negatively.”
Ferraro gets the impulse. “These minor decisions make us feel better psychologically,” himself included, he told Vox. But individual choices such as plastic versus glass or paper versus plastic “do not matter in a meaningful way compared to collective changes in how we manage our environment,” he said. It’s not that these decisions are utterly meaningless; more that they’re overall “without significant impact,” he said.
If reusing jars you already have keeps you from buying a slew of Tupperware online, great. But if the hunger to acquire new and better reusable vessels has you ordering glass containers from e-commerce sites and getting them shipped overnight, you might be canceling out any of that good when you account for packaging, emissions, and manufacturing.
Ferraro “would not encourage anybody to waste much time” agonizing over specific decisions like glass versus plastic —“worrying about whether there’s an optimal choice for packaging is misplaced energy.” The calculations that go into it are complicated and very variable, with little to show for it in the end. Glass has higher upfront environmental impacts than plastic, per Ferraro: producing it is energy intensive, and it’s heavier so it costs more to transport. The concern with plastic, meanwhile, is what happens after its disposal — if it’s treated as litter, it’ll break down and leach microplastics into the environment. And your ability to recycle it depends on the recycling practices where you live. “So by and large, the rule of thumb is if I’m going to reuse that glass and it’s going to displace other purchases that I would have made, then the glass can be a better choice,” he says. “But the difference is going to be tiny.”
Of course, it’s much easier to commit to reusing containers than, say, utterly changing the way the United States manufactures products — the latter feels a little above our individual pay grade. But if you want to do your part as an individual to stop climate change, Ferraro says forgoing a cross-country plane ride “would be vastly more impactful on the environment than any of my consumer decisions throughout the whole year,” he said. Ensuring your home is well-insulated is another more effective choice.
So if you’re torturing yourself by holding onto containers you’ll never use for the sake of Mother Earth, release your chains and toss them in the recycling bin. But for many collectors, it’s not about that.
Lynch said that she thinks of the spirit of her grandmother whenever she puts something from her jar collection to good purpose. “Every time I find a new use for something that I have hung onto for a while, I feel vindicated,” she said. “Like, oh, I knew there was a reason I was keeping this.”
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