Since January 2026, many Cubans have lived a life of near-constant darkness. The Trump administration’s oil blockades have led the country into a worsening energy crisis, collapsing what was already an eroding national power grid. 

Daily blackouts have plunged the Cuban nationalized, universal health system, once the pride of the country, into a humanitarian crisis. For months, hospitals have been without necessary power and ambulances strapped for fuel. Piles of trash line the streets, increasing the risk of disease. Cold storage issues threaten life-saving vaccines, and a combination of the frail economy and US sanctions has left pharmacy shelves almost empty. 

The public health crisis exposes an often overlooked aspect of the way we tend to think about the promise of universal healthcare. Having accessible and free medical services is only one part of the solution. While Cuba’s once-vaunted health system is bound up in its own history and national context, it still demonstrates that public health of all kinds can only be as resilient as the electricity, water, transportation, refrigeration, supply chains, and institutions that enable it. 

An old prototype for universal healthcare 

Not long ago, Cuba’s health system was seen as a promising model for successful free universal healthcare. In the years following Fidel Castro’s rise to power, health authorities focused on the integration of healthcare delivery models into a single public system. The Castro government aimed to expand services once concentrated in Havana into rural areas, such that the entire population would have access to basic care services. In 1974, the government launched community-based polyclinics that placed primary care specialists in almost every Cuban community. 

Over the decades that followed, that widened access to health care led to significant, measurable returns. Infant mortality in the country has dropped from 37 per 1,000 live births right after the revolution to 7 per 1,000 live births in 2024. Infectious and parasitic disease mortality also improved, dropping from a rate of 45.4 per 100,000 inhabitants in 1970 to 9.8 per 100,000 inhabitants in 2019, according to data reported by the Cuban Public Health Ministry. 

It’s not entirely surprising that the successful Cuban national health model has been the site of curiosity and enthusiastic scrutiny in American health equity circles, despite vast differences in state ideologies. The US has never ensured that every citizen has affordable access to healthcare, and large disparities persist in low-income and rural populations. The chokehold of private insurance has ensured that, unlike nearly every other country in the world, the US has largely rejected the prospect of universal care. Even historic gains in insurance coverage have faced rollback threats under the One Big Beautiful Bill. 

On certain key metrics, the US also falls far behind Cuba, which boasted 9.5 physicians to 1,000 people in 2021. That same year, the US reported just 3.7 physicians to every 1,000 people. The 2019 measles epidemic demonstrated a gap in childhood vaccination rates as well: 92 percent of children ages 13 to 17 in the US received two doses or more of the measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine. In Cuba, the childhood completion rates were well over 99 percent, and the country has not seen a measles outbreak since 1993. 

From its early years, the Cuban health system has functioned against a background of economic decline particular to the country, one attributable to a complex combination of external pressures, among them US blockades, a complicated economic reliance on Venezuela, a struggling state-run economy, and a flailing industry heavily impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic. 

While other sectors faced attrition, Cuba’s health system, at least, appeared capable of weathering these crises. During the pandemic, the country proved to be a model in global health, having developed a homegrown Covid-19 vaccine rapidly and reaching a 95 percent vaccination rate. Its robust supply of trained health professionals made headlines when Cuban healthcare workers provided essential pandemic aid to a small town in Italy.

 So why has this system proved to be so fragile now? 

New blockades deal the final blow after Hurricane Melissa 

Torrents of rain and flooding from the Category 3 Hurricane Melissa hit Cuba in October of last year, affecting much of the island’s eastern provinces. More than 735,000 people were evacuated, and the environmental disaster has put the country’s basic health infrastructure in a precarious state. 

In the storm’s wake, a combination of flooding and damaged water systems increased the spread of viral infections of arboviral diseases such as dengue and oropouche. A report by the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) published in March this year placed water, food, and vector-borne diseases in the “very high” health risk categories. Apart from damaged water and sanitation infrastructure, the report describes how disruptions to health service access, routine surveillance of disease vectors, and environmental conditions that breed mosquito-borne disease outbreaks have dramatically increased the risk of infectious disease spread. 

Hurricane Melissa arrived during a recovery period from earlier storms, such as Hurricane Rafael in late 2024, as well as sporadic earthquakes in recent years. These natural disasters also heavily damaged health facilities, leading to collapsed roofing, damaged roads and cables, and the loss of supplies and equipment. 

For years, Cuba’s economy was propped up in large part by its relationship with Venezuela. In exchange for support from Cuba’s highly-trained professionals — especially healthcare workers — Venezuela long provided a critical supply of crude oil, which helped the country keep the lights on even in the face of US sanctions. 

That partnership ended in January after the nighttime capture of former Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro, and the sweeping Trump oil blockade soon after has dealt a challenge too difficult for the energy infrastructure to withstand. 

Already struggling to recover from other disasters, Cuba plunged further into its present crisis. Cruz Peñate noted that while the public health situation has been evolving for a while, he has seen more acute upheavals as sanctions persist, causing mass blackouts that have made it impossible to sustain vital health services and emergency care.

Disease control continues to struggle post-Melissa, with aid organizations worrying about communicable food- and water-borne diseases, such as hepatitis A and diarrhea, that can be caused by unrefrigerated food. On the administrative level, limited transportation resources and electricity have led to a dearth of vaccine supplies, which typically require cold rooms for transfer and storage. 

Continuity of care, in particular, has been affected for the worse. More than 100,000 elective and reconstructive surgeries have been postponed, for example, because of a lack of supplies and a backlog of emergency surgeries. At a briefing in May, representatives of the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs and the World Health Organization reported that over 32,000 pregnant women faced limited access to diagnostics and limited amounts of the stable electricity needed to sustain neonatal units. Prenatal care faces delays because of the lack of everything from testing supplies to available facilities. And now, even once successful improvements in health indicators have fallen: a report from the Center for Economic and Policy Research measured an increase in infant mortality rates from 4.0 to 9.9 per 1,000 births between 2018 and 2025. 

For humanitarian aid organizations, alleviating this health crisis also poses a stark challenge. Cruz Peñate ascribes this to availability, timing, and opportunity to distribute aid supplies, all of which have been made inconsistent by the ongoing blockade. 

“The response to the situation in Cuba has to increase; we have to scale up the response. All the support we can manage to receive will be important,” Cruz Peñate said. “Here in Cuba there is really a situation that needs attention.”

Is Cuba now an outdated prototype for universal healthcare? 

While Cuba’s healthcare system was never bound to map precisely onto the US, some of its most notable successes — the high physician-to-patient ratio, the almost entirely vaccinated population, the ample health screenings — still remain desirable. And yet those very accomplishments have crumbled under the threat of extreme weather events and the country’s inability to restore its broken power grid.  

Trump targeted even more petroleum suppliers in his latest round of sanctions on July 23, leaving Cuba scrambling still further to revitalize its energy sector. Those same sanctions also took aim at the Cuban healthcare export economy, alleging that it involves forced labor. 

Earlier this month, Cuba’s government loosened constraints on a handful of private operations, including pharmaceuticals and elder-care facilities, in response to the shortage of medicine in the country.  With state-stocked shelves running empty, the new decree allows private pharmacies with Cuban health registration to fill in the medicine gap. Similarly, privatized elder facilities are also allowed to operate at a capped rate of 60 people per home, with mandatory visits from state physicians. 

The government still prohibits private sector medical and dental care, and Cuban officials remain adamant that the “socialist state enterprise keeps its central role,” so it’s difficult to claim that the country’s medical model is being pressured towards privatization. But the erosion of some of its elements still speaks to a state-run health system under strain. 

We often think of healthcare itself as an equation of medical services along with healthcare personnel and the authorities — government, industry, or both — that control it. But the crisis facing Cuba gets at the dependence of all of these factors on the broader energy ecosystem. Even a once-promising healthcare model can quickly collapse when a crucial component is missing: fuel.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

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 am a (gracefully?) aging mother of three and proud grandmother of four. I keep hearing about how my generation (okay, I am a boomer) is hoarding wealth and failing to pass it down. 

When I look at my lifestyle, I’m facing a fork in the road. Either I splurge on a lovely retirement, or I save so my kids and their kids can have an easier life. We’re all middle-class, so this is not a question of survival. The kids have college funds. Do I owe it to my descendants to scrimp as I age? Surely it’s not right for me to spend my savings on bucket-list vacations…How should I balance spending on myself and on the others that will come after me?

Dear Rainy Day Funder,

I’m so glad to hear you’re not in financial survival mode. But you are facing some economic constraints: You can’t splurge on a luxurious retirement while at the same time saving a substantial nest egg for your kids and grandkids. 

It sounds like this feeling of either-or is causing you some anguish. The instinctual response is, as you suggest, to hoard as much as possible for your progeny to use later on. But at the same time, that feels like it’s zero-summing your own experience in your golden years. 

So I’d like to introduce you to an economic thinker who has some advice that might surprise you. John Maynard Keynes, 19th-century British economist, would say: Don’t save your money!

Keynes wrote that when times are tough, people react by keeping their money close, and not spending it. But this sets in motion what he called the paradox of thrift. One person’s expenses are actually another person’s income, he pointed out; if everyone saved their money, no one would make money either, and a recession could drag on and on. In the end, people’s savings would, paradoxically, go down, even though they were scrimping. 

We can apply the paradox of thrift to your own family as a mini-economy. Inheritance has traditionally worked by setting aside large chunks of your assets to pass along to your children and grandchildren — which could be helpful when the day of windfall comes. But why wait? And would waiting actually stymie your family’s financial potential? 

In past generations, an inheritance like this often happened far earlier. I’m comforted that we are living longer (an average of a decade or more longer) than in the mid-20th century, but this sets up new issues, as you’re stuck in, with when and in what quantity to transfer any extra resources. 

Now, as people retire with decades of good life to enjoy ahead of them, they are often doing so at the very same time their adult children are the most financially stressed: They are trying to buy homes, they’re in the busiest middle part of their careers, and many have children of their own they’re raising and trying to save for. 

This doesn’t mean you have to give away all your money to your family so that they can spend it on the pleasures you have given up. Keynes wasn’t anti-savings so that money could be spent frivolously. He did believe that spending money was one of the best ways to give the greater economy a boost. Perhaps there are ways you could think about spending your money that stimulate your family’s internal economy, that also help you enjoy your retirement. 

For example, you could invest in a lakeside property to kick your feet up at — an asset that will appreciate in value over time and be sold at a profit, or be passed down through the generations to enjoy for many summers to come. Maybe you assist your children in buying a home — one with a comfortable guest suite. You could invest in a business your children want to start, and help them grow something that could accrue more wealth over time. Using your money these ways may even feel more like splurging than scrimping! Yet, it ideally would achieve both: a fun way to spend your hard-earned money now, and create more abundance for your family’s future. 

A hidden bonus of non-traditional inheritance moves like these is that they all involve spending more time together with your family and potentially even strengthening those relationships along the way. The Greek philosopher Aristotle wrote in The Nicomachean Ethics that there were three kinds of friends. Some are based on utility, and exist only because of what people can get from one another. Other friendships are based on pleasure, when you like doing things with someone. Finally, friendships of virtue persist because you stick by people who inspire you by their strong character. Simply setting aside your money is a relationship that leans utilitarian. Working on a shared meaningful project could help deepen your relationships with your kids and grandkids in those pleasurable and virtuous directions.   

Speaking of, I don’t think you need to be making these decisions alone. 

You used an interesting word in your question: Do you, as an individual, owe it to your family to set them up with a more comfortable financial future, at the expense of personal indulgences? A lot of the discussion around older generations’ money, and whether or how they should pass it on, avoids dealing with this sticky moral component. Why should parents give their kids money? 

I think there’s clarity to be found in thinking more closely about why we owe each other anything.  

There are few better thinkers to turn to than Confucius to consider our obligations to family. The fifth-century Chinese philosopher believed that we can’t understand ourselves only as individuals. You are nobody when you are alone; you only come alive as a mother, a daughter, or a sister. These relational roles each come with specific duties and ways of interacting. Successfully fulfilling these roles within the family has a bigger impact, according to Confucius. It’s what creates the foundations for a harmonious and functional society. For children in this web of relations, it’s critical to uphold filial piety, or the need to respect, honor, and care for parents as well as all of their other elders and ancestors. 

Filial piety has, over the years, been criticized for being too rigid, and setting overly high expectations for blind obedience and conformity in children. So I’ve been interested to see the concept of reciprocal filial piety emerge. In reciprocal filial piety, children have a genuine feeling of gratitude to their parents for raising them, and any obligation they feel is heartfelt — they want to return the favor and care for their parents too. 

As a half-Chinese person, I find it interesting that in family life in the West, filial piety is often reversed. There’s a lot of air time discussing what parents owe their children, and not so much the other way around.

For example, I noticed that you don’t mention how your family intends to care for you in the future, or what they might feel a sense of owing you. If you do take a Keynesian approach to your family and decide to spend your money in ways that could benefit everyone, it might be worth engaging in some Confucian-tinted conversations not only about what you owe everyone else, but what you all appreciate about each other.

You can reflect, together, on how your family is stronger because of all the ways you’ve chosen to look after one another, not only because of how much money is in the bank. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I think it’s worth having a copy of The Analects of Confucius lying around, which is full of nuggets of wisdom. One morsel I recently read was about how to best get along with others: “The gentleman harmonizes without being an echo. The petty man echoes and does not harmonize.” The lesson is that we don’t gain much by blindly following and copying what other people do. The most harmonious way to be in a society, or even a family, is to have interlocking roles that complement each other, like different pitches do in a choir. 
  
• I thought a lot about getting older when reading this piece on death doulas by Alexandra Schwartz in The New Yorker. It serves as a reminder that people outside of the immediate family can also help with life’s hardest transitions. 
  
• And, for something fun: I enjoyed this investigation by Natalie Wolchover in Quanta on why she (or anyone) is left-handed. She explores left-handed stigma and neuroscience, as well as a theory about humans using their right hands because they once were better to win fights with. 

Just last month, I marked my 25th year as a professional journalist, which I guess means my journalistic career is old enough to rent a car, no questions asked. Work in the news for that long, and you’ll occasionally find yourself surprised by things you published in the past. Like, I had all but forgotten that I had written this Time magazine cover story in 2008:

A couple things here. One, as the cover demonstrates, journalistic sensitivity was…less than ideal then, to say the least. And two, over a quarter-century occasionally covering obesity (both childhood and adult), that story only seemed to go in one direction: worse.

It wasn’t for lack of trying. We put calorie counts on menus, taxed soda (well, in some places), built workplace wellness programs, and funded a small library of diet research. We deplored food deserts and promoted farmers’ markets. We told people — again and again — to eat less and move more. But the lines just kept going up.

By the CDC’s measured survey, the share of US adults with obesity did not change meaningfully between 2013 and 2023. The age-adjusted obesity rate sat at 40.3 percent, while the age-adjusted severe obesity climbed from 7.7 percent to 9.7 percent over the same stretch.

While the question of weight in America is inextricably tied to body image and moralizing, those numbers had a deadly effect. One demographic model estimated that obesity was associated with roughly 18 percent of deaths among Black and white Americans ages 40 to 85 between 1986 and 2006. From diabetes to kidney failure, heart disease to sleep apnea, obesity is the delivery system for other diseases.

Which is what makes a Gallup report published in July so surprising. In Gallup’s self-reported height-and-weight series, the US adult obesity rate fell to 36.4 percent, down from a peak of 39.9 percent in 2022. Over roughly the same period, the share of adults who said they were currently taking a GLP-1 drug for weight loss rose from 3 percent in 2024 to 11 percent in 2026 — approximately 29 million people. While this only shows correlation, not causation, and Gallup’s self-reported measure should not be compared directly with the CDC’s measured rate, the timing is suggestive to say the least. 

And the weight might be the least interesting thing about these drugs. 

Semaglutide — the molecule sold as Ozempic and Wegovy — was first developed and approved as a treatment for type 2 diabetes, not obesity. It was only after earlier GLP-1 drugs and diabetes trials showed substantial effects on appetite and weight that researchers deliberately tested a higher dose for obesity, resulting in Wegovy in 2021. 

But as it turns out, the list of things that have been noticed happening on the side with GLP-1s has gotten so long it’s begun to eclipse the main event. The coverage of GLP-1s has barely kept up with this news, because weight loss is what made these drugs famous and what we continually obsess over. But it turns out, weight loss may not be what they’re best at.

Side effects may include…

Let’s start with sleep apnea, which, untreated, drives up blood pressure, strains the heart, and raises the risk of stroke. These are people whose breathing stops dozens of times an hour, all night, every night. Two year-long trials put 469 of them on tirzepatide — the drug sold as Mounjaro and Zepbound — and cut those interruptions by more than half. Roughly half the group finished the year with no apnea at all, or with so little left that they stopped being tired all day.

Then there are the kidneys. A major trial followed 3,533 people with type 2 diabetes and chronic kidney disease for a median of 3.4 years. Semaglutide reduced the relative risk of a composite of kidney failure, a sustained loss of at least half of kidney function, or death from kidney-related or cardiovascular causes by 24 percent; all-cause mortality was 20 percent lower.

And the liver: A trial, still underway, biopsied the livers of 800 people whose organs had grown fatty, inflamed and scarred and randomly assigned them to semaglutide or a placebo. After 72 weeks the inflammation had cleared in nearly 63 percent of those on the drug, with no worsening of the scarring, against 34 percent on placebo. 

And the knees: In 407 adults with obesity and moderate knee osteoarthritis, pain scores on the 0-100 WOMAC metric fell 41.7 points against 27.5 on placebo. 

And to top it off, a 17,604-person trial of participants who were overweight or obese but did not have diabetes found a 20 percent drop in major cardiovascular events.

These results may not be as grabby as cultural debates over “Ozempic face,” but they deserve far more attention.

Medicine’s happy accidents  

As GLP-1s — which in part came out of a hormone in Gila monster venom — demonstrate, medicine has long found some of its biggest wins in the margins of drugs ostensibly built to do something else entirely. 

Sildenafil, better known as Viagra, began life at Pfizer as a candidate treatment for the heart disease angina. It failed at that, and its now-famous use turned up in data as a side effect in what must have been a very interesting trial for its subjects. Minoxidil (Rogaine) was a blood pressure pill that turned out to help patients grow hair. Finasteride (Propecia) was approved for enlarged prostates before anyone thought to sell it for baldness — and then a trial of more than 18,000 men found it cut prostate cancer diagnoses by about 25 percent, a benefit that took 20 years of follow-up to fully vindicate. 

Perhaps the most famous example is aspirin, which spent most of a century as a painkiller before a doctor in California named Lawrence Craven noticed that the patients he’d given aspirin gum to after tonsillectomies bled more than they should. He guessed the aspirin thinned the blood, and started handing it out to middle-aged men, who were at higher risk of heart attacks. Craven died in 1957; the trial that ultimately proved that he was onto something — showing that aspirin in heart attack victims cut vascular deaths by a fifth — didn’t run until 1988. 

The strange morality of Ozempic

Viewed this way, GLP-1s can seem like miracle drugs — but even miracle drugs can’t cure everything.

There had been great hope that GLP-1 might reduce dementia rates, but when Ozempic maker Novo Nordisk ran a proper trial, it didn’t show evidence of slowing clinical progression of Alzheimer’s. Much the same happened with cancer. Observational data had hinted that GLP-1 users developed tumors less often, but when a Harvard team pooled 48 placebo-controlled trials covering 94,245 people, they found the drugs have little to no effect on the risk of thyroid, breast or kidney cancer, though evidence for other cancers was less certain, leading to FDA boxed warnings. One plus: In some early animal studies, high doses of GLP-1 drugs caused thyroid tumors in rodents, but further research largely hasn’t validated the fears that it could be more widespread, though uncertainty about some rare thyroid cancers remains.  

For many people, weight loss isn’t the end of what these drugs seem able to do. It’s where the benefits begin.

The bigger concerns largely remain the known ones, starting with muscle loss. Across 22 randomized trials, about 25 percent of the weight lost on these drugs turns out to be lean muscle mass. Some of that is simply unavoidable in any weight loss, but too much can mean a great deal, especially if you’re 75. 

And cost remains a barrier: In a 2025 KFF poll, 56 percent of adults who had ever used a GLP-1 said the drugs were difficult to afford; 27 percent said they had insurance but paid the full cost themselves. In a separate Cleveland Clinic chart review of 288 adults without diabetes who stopped injectable semaglutide or tirzepatide within a year, 47.6 percent stopped because of cost or insurance problems, compared with 14.6 percent because of side effects. (The money, at least, is improving. An oral GLP-1 drug was approved in April, and it starts at $149 a month for people paying cash, while Medicare trial pricing of $50 a month for some GLP-1s went live in July.)

A stickier obstacle is the one that can’t seem to be divorced from questions about weight: judgment. As my colleague Dylan Scott wrote recently, researchers at Rice University found that people rate a GLP-1 user more harshly than someone who never lost weight at all. That makes perfect sense when you consider how contentious weight is in America — and none at all when you think about just how many people have benefited from these drugs in so many different ways.

I sometimes wonder how we would view GLP-1s if they could do everything they’ve been shown to do, but somehow not change a person’s appearance. 

So much of the discourse around these drugs has been shaped by the fact that many of the earliest and most public and apparent users were already thin people, often celebrities, using them to get even thinner. But that framing has become increasingly difficult to square with reality. 

Two things can be true at once: American culture has a toxic relationship to weight, and millions of Americans can and are benefiting from these drugs. For many people, weight loss isn’t the end of what these drugs seem able to do. It’s where the benefits begin.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

Mollie, a 10-month-old pet hamster in the Netherlands, probably runs a lot more than you. 

We know this because, a few weeks ago, a Dutch physicist named Thijs — who owns Mollie — rigged up the rescued hamster’s running wheel to Strava, a popular app that runners use to log their miles. Thijs found that Mollie typically runs around six miles every night.

“He’s beating me,” Thijs told the CBC. “Almost 70 kilometres a week, which I think many people doing marathon training would be happy to hit.”

The internet loves a quirky animal story, and this one has gotten plenty of attention on Reddit and X. Mollie even got a recent profile in Runner’s World, and he now has over 9,000 followers on Strava. Mollie’s Strava updates are headlined with cute puns like “No Rest for the Whiskered,” and “The Fast and the Furriest.”

I get why so many people are cheering on Mollie and his commitment to going the distance: Hamsters are adorable, and the idea of one logging miles on Strava is extra charming. But the light-hearted virality of the story masks a fundamental problem with owning small pets like hamsters. Mollie evolved to run in an open and diverse ecosystem, but he lives in a small cage and doesn’t have much to do besides circle endlessly in a simple wheel.

Big problems with small pets

Most pet hamsters are Syrian hamsters, native to that country’s Aleppinian plateau — steppe terrain in the northern part of the country. In the wild, they regularly traverse the landscape to forage for food, consuming a wide sampling of seeds, fruits, insects, and green vegetation. They store their haul in their cheeks while journeying back to their two-foot deep burrows. 

But, as pets, they’re largely fed a monotonous diet of grain pellets and are confined to tiny cages where they can’t engage in their natural behaviors, like building proper burrows, traveling for food, and exploring their turf. Confining a dog or cat in a kennel for all or most of their lives would no doubt be a severe form of cruelty, yet we’ve normalized doing so for small animals whom we’re less likely to view as capable of suffering, even though there’s no scientific basis for that assumption.

And while you might think it could be nice for an animal to not have to work for their food, research has found that many species don’t like to freeload (cats might be one exception). On top of all of that, according to some research, these smaller pets are less likely to receive veterinary care to address their ailments and injuries than cats and dogs. 

Their tedious and confined existence can contribute to “stereotypic” behavior: repetitive motions, like gnawing on cage bars, that are indicators of stress. Some animal welfare researchers have proposed that wheel use could also be a sign of stress — or that it could indicate an urge to run or escape. One other study suggested it might help reduce other stereotypic behaviors. 

“I think that the welfare of these animals is worse than anybody else’s,” Jessica Pierce, a bioethicist and author of several books on the ethics of pet keeping, told Vox for a previous story. She was talking about small pets in general — not just hamsters, but also species like snakes, fish, and birds, most of whom are still much more wild than our domesticated cats and dogs (who also might not be as happy as we think). 

Thijs, for his part, is sympathetic to these concerns, which he told me over email were fair. “I hope the attention that Mollie got will not result in people impulsively buying hamsters (and then forgetting about them after it turns out their hamsters just sleep 80% of the time),” he said.

He adopted Mollie from someone who could no longer take care of him and who kept him in an even smaller enclosure. “[Mollie] showed some behaviour that really concerned us back then (climbing, biting the fence, etc),” Thijs said over email. So, within the first week, he upgraded Mollie to a larger cage and a larger wheel and got him some toys, which seemed to improve his mood.

“I think some behavioural aspects (more running, digging tunnels in the bedding, ‘foraging’ if we hide food in the bedding) make his behaviour closer to natural, but it’s, of course, never like in the wild,” he said. Thijs also wonders whether his data-gathering might provide insight into how certain actions — like when he cleans Mollie’s bedding or when he stays up late watching Netflix — affects Mollie’s running behavior. 

“People often talk about pets being ‘happy,’ but, especially with small animals, that’s difficult to assess objectively,” he told me. “I’m curious whether long-term activity data might give us useful clues about changes in his behaviour or wellbeing!”

Inside a “hamster mill”

While Thijs adopted Mollie, there’s also the question about where many of these pets come from. A 2024 undercover investigation by the nonprofit Last Chance for Animals into a massive US “hamster mill” documented thousands of rodents being bred and raised in overcrowded, small, barren cages. Some of the animals were dehydrated, diseased, and suffered from wounds. Individual animals weren’t provided with veterinary care, and breeding hamsters whose production dropped — along with litter runts — were gassed to death.  

Investigations into other rodent mills have found similar problems. Such investigations, combined with veterinarians’ concerns with keeping small animals as pets, has driven some cities — including Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Washington, DC — to prohibit pet stores from selling rodents and other small pets.  

I don’t mean to single out Thijs for his interesting experiment, especially considering he adopted Mollie and immediately improved his life. But animal ethicists like Pierce argue that however much effort one puts into giving these small pets a better life, it likely doesn’t ever add up to a good life, considering the constraints of cage confinement and other common care issues. 

To Pierce and some of her colleagues, the sizable gap between what small pets need and what they often get reveals a largely hidden but serious crisis of animal neglect and suffering. And that’s rarely mentioned, if at all, in viral social media posts or news articles about these critters. 

If we take a moment to pause and see Mollie’s life for what it is — and examine the industry that breeds these small animals for profit — all those miles he’s logging on Strava seem more like daily posts saying that he’s striving for a far different life with no way to get there. 

“This entire ‘track his runs on Strava’ thing started off more as a geeky side-project, I never expected it to get anywhere near this much attention,” Thijs told me. “But it’d be nice if you can use it as a way to educate people (including me!) about the ethical considerations!”

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Everyone is wrong about Hank Green. 

In case you missed the controversy: The veteran YouTube star, writer, and science comms entrepreneur was recently “canceled” after he acknowledged using AI for research.

“I have been relying too heavily on AI as a research aid,” he wrote in a statement on Reddit. “It can be very useful for this task, giving me access to a lot of papers I didn’t know existed really fast, but I think that has been to the detriment of my work because it has not given me the freedom to find all of my own ways into and around a topic.” Although Green wrote that the words in his videos are his own, his reliance on AI as a research aid still gave the finished work an ineffable “AI feel.” And his relationship with AI, he wrote, had become “not healthy for me or good for the world.”

Some of Green’s followers, known by the cheerfully dorky moniker “Nerdfighters,” turned on him for daring to use AI in any capacity. Just as quickly, that backlash produced its own backlash, aghast not at Green’s use of AI but at his prostration before an anti-AI mob — “self-canceling,” as some put it, over a legitimate use of the technology. 

I think both of these camps are misguided and have flattened a complex issue into a set of binary extremes. And it surprised me that, despite robust societal debate on AI’s impacts on our ability to think, write, and produce original ideas, the debacle hasn’t prompted more thoughtful conversation about the limits of AI in creative work. 

I felt this because I recognized myself in Green’s statement: the feeling that even using AI for research can start to take over your creative process, that it can become hard to know where your own brain ends and where AI begins, and that the technology can simply push you to work too fast. I don’t use AI to generate writing and would not do so — but its use need not rise to that level to raise profound questions about how much of our work to automate, and what happens to our ability to think for ourselves when we do. 

In a follow-up video published late last week, Green laid out a new AI policy for his work. He wrote: 

1. No portion of any script will be written, edited, or outlined by an LLM.

2. The thesis of a video will always originate with a human. 

3. No image or music in a video will be generated by AI. If something is accidentally included, best efforts will be made to remove it. 

4. LLM outputs are not trusted as a source.

These are all good ideas for any creator trying to avoid AI creep in their craft. But still, they raise a bigger, harder-to-answer question: The very structure of generative AI makes it hard to use without offloading human thought and judgment, which can lead to a widely discussed phenomenon known as “cognitive surrender.” And it pushes us toward uses — like synthesizing research, brainstorming, generating ideas and angles — that short-circuit the original thinking and discovery that we ought to be doing ourselves. What, then, can we even responsibly use AI for? How can we set guardrails that allow us to avail ourselves of its usefulness, without melting our brains in the process? 

The most tempting uses of AI are precisely those best avoided

Remember late 2022, when ChatGPT first came out and everyone mocked its crappy research skills and propensity to hallucinate in every other sentence? I am so wistful for those days. 

Many people who abstain from AI may not know it, but in the time since, and especially in recent months, large language models have gotten way smarter (especially the paid premium versions). It’s become unnervingly good at summarizing niche, complex research areas and debates, and producing ideas, often without being asked, for further research or writing on the same subject. 

Whenever I have a research question these days (which is pretty much any time I’m working on a story), I’m more likely to fire up an LLM than a traditional search engine. If I ask, “Why are old-growth trees still being logged in North America?” it produces a synthesis of research, news, opinion, and whatever else its training absorbed on the subject: “We’re using an essentially nonrenewable ecological asset to smooth a temporary transition to a renewable timber resource,” it says. Probe it further, and it’ll suggest arguments for you: “Instead of conservationists having to prove that every old forest deserves protection, logging companies should have to demonstrate that cutting a centuries-old stand serves a need that cannot reasonably be met with second-growth or engineered wood.” 

LLMs are designed to make cognitive work effortless, but that feels so icky because for it to be worthwhile at all, it has to be effortful.

These aren’t particularly smart or creative ideas — they’re perfectly replacement-level, which makes them plausible substitutes for the thoughts of most people. The AI can supply pat answers to every conceivable question and follow-up you might have while working on a project, relieving you of the need to mentally engage with the shape of a problem. Contrast that with Googling in the pre-AI overview days, which, while certainly not without its problems, at least used to send you to a list of sources that you then had to read and make sense of on your own. 

Most of us who’ve engaged with LLMs know what this feels like. They make it easy for users to skate on the surface of a subject and feign understanding or insight, and in the process they can become involved in interpretive decisions that should be our own. In my experience, even more narrowly designed generative AI models don’t escape these problems. Google’s Gemini Notebook (formerly NotebookLM), for example, allows you to upload all of your sources for a project — books, reports, papers, audio and video recordings — and ask it questions based on what they contain, rather than searching the entire internet. It’s less prone to generating outright slop than general-purpose AIs. I use it for most stories I write — it’s an incredibly useful, time-saving tool. But it also enables me to engage with sources in a perfunctory, contextless manner: The AI can surface precisely the bit I need rather than forcing me to form the deeper connections that come from reading a text as a whole.

The best creative work (including not just art and writing, but also technological and medical breakthroughs) probably comes from having a wide range of background associations, and being able to combine them in unexpected ways. The French mathematician Henri Poincaré put this beautifully in his essay “Mathematical Creation,” where he wrote that it’s the tedious, sustained conscious effort that ultimately leads to flashes of insight. 

I think this is what Green meant when he wrote that AI can prevent him from finding his “own ways into and around a topic.” LLMs are designed to make cognitive work effortless, but that feels so icky because for it to be worthwhile at all, it has to be effortful. This argument has already been made about AI-generated writing: Letting an LLM write for you defeats the point, because writing is thinking. But it can also be true, as Green’s example has shown, of using AI for the research that feeds the creative process. 

If you use AI, consider creating a personal AI policy

Perhaps all these concerns are overblown — humans are hardly less prone to lazy and logically unsound thinking than AI. That’s absolutely true, but the point of doing our own thinking isn’t that we’re inherently good at it. To the contrary, it’s that we can only get better at reasoning by practicing it. 

I don’t want to suggest that using AI for research is illegitimate. It’s too useful a tool to take off the table entirely, and we can’t put that genie back in the bottle. It can be extremely helpful with identifying the best sources that you wouldn’t find otherwise, but those very abilities can make it double-edged, foreclosing a slower, more open-ended exploration process. But AI’s greatest strength — its endless variety and flexibility — can be used to steer it away from the most tempting uses, especially those that ultimately harm us.

There are very obvious things that any LLM user should do to that end, like never assuming that a claim from an AI is accurate and always reading original sources. Beyond that, the necessary guardrails depend on your own use patterns, but above all, I think it’s helpful to avoid training ourselves to expect immediate answers to difficult questions.

One of my colleagues refrains from using it to brainstorm ideas entirely, instead using it to provide sources for narrow factual questions and to aid in the fact-checking process (emphasis on “aid”) after a story is written. To generalize from this, I think it’s a good idea to resist having AI do much synthetic work on a subject before you have drafted your project yourself. The less you do that, the less you will, to paraphrase Green’s recent video, see every problem as an “LLM-shaped problem,” and the less you’ll feel like you’re in the singularity where your brain is merging with AI.

One way that I like to use AI is as an enhanced thesaurus, to find the precise word or short phrase to express what I want to say in a sentence. When done right, I don’t find this harmful any more than using a traditional thesaurus; I find that it can enrich my working lexicon. But it must be used carefully and surgically, by setting a clear limit on the length of a phrase used from AI — like two or three words max — and avoiding sharing much of your writing with the tool at all, lest it start recommending extensive rewrites. 

When interrogating the contents of specific sources or a body of work, or stress testing your own arguments, AI would be better for our intellectual development if it took a Socratic approach — pushing you to discover an answer rather than simply giving you one. It might say, for example, “there might be some relevant caveats to your idea on pp. 42-43 of the source.” LLMs can be directed to behave this way in their custom instructions. It also helps to simply touch grass — find the sources you need, and rather than interviewing the AI about what they say, just close the chatbot and read them from start to finish. 

Configuring AI in a way that’s healthier for our brains would also make it less addictive — when you find yourself getting sucked into a long back-and-forth with an AI, that’s often a sign that something has gone amiss. Green evidently struggled to set that boundary, referencing the unhealthy “level of dopamine I’ve been getting from interacting with LLMs.” AI labs have very strong commercial incentives to want us to be addicted to their products, and unless they build different constraints into models themselves, it’s hard to expect the average person, who has far less autonomy over the terms of her work than Green does, to change these conditions on her own. 

Although researchers at some AI labs are thinking about the societal risks of cognitive atrophy, it’s another matter to expect these companies, which compete on ease of use, to introduce friction into their models. We shouldn’t count on that happening soon — but we’re far from powerless against AI’s impacts. We can set our own personal AI use policies, and we can enforce social norms against AI-induced brain rot. Like, at bare minimum: Don’t send me your AI-generated writing. It’s rude! 

Los Angeles offers one of the most vivid examples of our nation’s broken housing system: a quintessentially American expanse of traffic-clogged roads and single-family homes, coupled with the highest home-price-to-household-income ratio of any major city in the country.

To moderate prices, LA urgently needs to build more homes by allowing more density in its neighborhoods — but much of the city’s leadership has vigorously opposed it. Nowhere has that been more evident than in the fight over SB 79, a landmark California law that overrides local zoning to permit taller, denser housing near major transit stops. LA’s city council and its incumbent mayor, Karen Bass, have opposed it and sought ways to avoid complying with it. 

Now, as Bass seeks reelection, mayoral candidate Nithya Raman — one of the city’s, and perhaps the country’s, strongest advocates for building more housing — wants to oust her.

Raman has gained unusual traction in a city long resistant to growth and has become a nationally prominent YIMBY. How to accommodate LA’s need for more housing, Raman told Vox in a recent interview, is “a question that the city has actually turned away from.” She believes she can do better.  

Earlier this summer, Raman advanced in LA’s mayoral primary, setting up a November runoff against Bass. The race has resonated far beyond Los Angeles, because Raman is making one of the defining problems in American life — the punishing non-affordability of our most productive cities — the centerpiece of her campaign. Its outcome could shape the future of housing in America’s most populous state and help determine whether LA can become the engine of California’s pro-housing turn, or its most potent obstacle. If she succeeds, she might cut a path forward for better housing policy in high-cost blue cities elsewhere.

Just as core to Raman’s appeal is a commitment that’s often seen as at odds with housing abundance. She is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and a forceful champion of tenant protections, including rent control. (Her relationship with the DSA is complicated, however.) She helped shape a stricter rent stabilization formula that was adopted in LA late last year, though it was strongly opposed by rental property owners. 

Many housing policy experts, as I recently wrote, believe rent control can worsen the housing affordability crisis it aims to solve, because it tends to reduce the supply of rental housing. But in high-cost cities and states, interest in it has been surging nonetheless. A rising cohort of progressive politicians, including Raman and Zohran Mamdani in New York City, believes cities must protect current renters from price shocks and displacement while adding housing supply. In doing so, they hope to mount the kind of political support that has long eluded YIMBYs.   

I spoke with Raman about how she thinks about these competing interests, and how she intends to combine them to make a meaningful dent where her predecessors have failed. I was struck by how cautiously she discussed one of the city’s most politically explosive housing policy questions — densifying single-family neighborhoods. Though she has previously pushed for legislation allowing midsize apartment buildings in some wealthier single-family neighborhoods, she emphasized gentler, more gradual change in our conversation. It reflected the core paradox facing housing reformers in LA and nationwide: the need for sweeping change, and the political pressure to make it feel gradual.

Our conversation, condensed and edited for clarity, is below.

You’ve gotten an enormous amount of traction on housing issues in LA. If you win the election, then what? 

When I’m asking for-profit developers and affordable housing developers alike, “What is your biggest barrier to building in LA?” they say that the city of LA is their biggest barrier to building in LA. Whether it is extraordinarily long permit approval timelines, whether it is the failure of the Department of Water and Power [DWP] to be a good partner and to provide real predictability in the building process, both in timelines and in costs. The city of Los Angeles stands in the way of new housing. 

As mayor, I want to do everything in my power to change that. I want to set deadlines by which departments have to respond to applications. I want to bring DWP to the table early and to ensure that they’re a predictable partner for new development. I want to make sure that departments that need to talk to each other are talking to each other quickly and early on in the process, as opposed to providing conflicting answers and taking months and even years to respond. These are all within the power of the mayor to influence and things that this mayor has ignored.

Sometimes rent control and renters’ rights on one hand and new housing production on the other are treated as rival agendas, yet you have made them both central to your politics. What connects them for you?

I don’t think that you can have lower rental costs in a city like Los Angeles without having more housing being built. This is a city that has resisted the construction of new housing for decades, explicitly restricted new apartments from being built in many, many parts of the city for a very long time. We have among the fewest homes per adult of any major city in America and the highest rent-burdened population of any city in America, and to me those two facts are very deeply connected. We can’t really lower rents unless we have more housing here, and lower rents are a big part of how you protect renters.

LA has a rent control system, and you were a champion of a change that tightened that system last year. Do you worry at all that tighter rent control could do damage to housing supply through some of the well-documented mechanisms, like causing landlords to convert apartments to condos? Is that in tension with the goal of increasing housing supply?

Housing built after 1978 cannot be subject to rent stabilization [in LA]. So, making sure that renters in older buildings are protected and trying to incentivize new housing from being constructed to me are not in conflict with one another.

You talked about landlords potentially exiting the market. We’ve also heard concerns from apartment associations and from neighborhoods that there’s been increasing corporatization of housing, that smaller landlords are selling to larger corporate landlords, that being a mom-and-pop landlord is becoming increasingly unfeasible. What we’d love to see is more data on that. And, if that is actually happening, if we are driving landlords out of the market through these changes, if smaller landlords are selling to large corporate landlords, I want to know, and we should be looking at the impacts of this policy accordingly.

I’m very open to learning more. But, so far, what I see is that we have an extremely unaffordable city where all the data has shown us that rents have risen higher than incomes for a very long time. The regulations that we put in place are really trying to ensure that struggling renters are still able to stay in LA.

Is there one specific, concrete housing policy mistake made by Mayor Bass that you would point to? How would you have handled it differently?

There has been an overall lack of urgency in addressing housing supply in [Bass’s] administration, exemplified by the fact that we have not had a deputy mayor of housing for years.

The city has actually opposed and written letters to state officials pushing back against new mandates to build more housing. Instead of telling Sacramento, “How do you want to build that housing?” and trying to shape state laws to suit us — the largest housing market in the entire state — those laws should be written with our input, not written with our opposition. 

I think the most stark example [of Bass’s failures on housing] is this: We’ve had 100 percent affordable housing projects like Venice Dell that are fully funded, that the city has sued and opposed and stalled for years.

“I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing.”

To what degree do you think that LA voters see the housing affordability crisis as a problem caused by a lack of supply — a housing shortage? 

I think there is a growing consensus that supply is part of the problem and is driving the cost of housing. It’s not universally necessarily agreed upon, but I think if you were to ask people, “Is there a housing shortage? Is there a shortage of housing you can afford?” everybody would say yes.

Why should renters trust private developers?

I think that renters should trust the city to regulate private development such that we actually are building what we need here in LA and such that new building is actually enhancing what people love about their neighborhoods. I don’t think it’s the job of renters to trust developers. They need to trust that their city is going to make sure that we’re working hard to build neighborhoods that are beautiful, and welcoming, and beneficial, and can help families thrive. 

That’s part of why I talk about production and protection always in the same breath. If you see that new construction is going to displace you, I think you’re less inclined to support it or to accept it. But if you feel secure in your current housing, and you know that you’ll be able to stay there, then new housing is less of a threat and can actually be a boon for a neighborhood.

That relates to an argument I’ve heard a lot: that tenants who feel protected from displacement by rent control and eviction protections will be less afraid of new development and more willing to support it. Have you seen evidence of that happening in LA?

There is a very broad coalition of people who are fighting for more housing now, a much broader coalition than I’ve seen in many other places. And it includes renters’ rights organizations that have historically been some of the strongest advocates for tenant protections. They’re actually in council chambers testifying around the need for more density across the entire city, particularly around transit hubs. 

Do you see rent control as a temporary bandaid on a broken housing market, or is it something that should have a permanent place in housing policy?

I think protections against rent gouging are really important, and I think regulation in the housing market is really important. As a city, we have to be very careful about how we regulate these markets so that we are eliciting the best results and outcomes for our residents. I’m going to follow the research, and I’ll always engage with these issues closely. 

The Democratic Socialists of America, of which you are a part, has talked about wanting to “de-commodify” housing and take it out of the private market. The DSA’s Housing Justice Commission says, “the housing market is not necessary.” Do you think that’s a good idea? 

My approach to these issues is driven by how I can help Angelenos who are dealing with spiraling costs that’s driving working families out of the city. The city saw, I believe, a 16 percent drop in people under 18 over the past few years, because families cannot afford to live here anymore. That is a travesty for the city of Los Angeles. 

My question as I approach this is about what I can do to ensure that we can keep people here. We can build new housing through publicly funded housing. I want to be able to make sure that people who will never be served by the private real estate market have support from the city to rely on that can help them stay, whether that’s in the form of housing vouchers, whether that’s in the form of social housing, whether that’s in the form of permanent supportive housing or new public housing.

I’m supportive of measures that are bringing public dollars to the table to build. However, the money that we have available to us will never be able to satisfy the extraordinary demand that there is for new housing in Los Angeles. So now, we have to rely on the private real estate market to make housing available and affordable to a much larger number of Angelenos. 

Rent control primarily protects tenants who already occupy apartments that are covered by rent control. But building more housing is partly about people who don’t yet have a foothold in LA and who would move there if they could afford it. Is it possible to build a housing politics that gives those future residents real weight, even though they don’t vote in city elections?

I think that’s the question of this election in many ways. That’s been the question of my politics. But it’s not just about the future; it is also about our present. It’s also about parents whose children can’t live near them anymore, because it’s too unaffordable here. It’s about rising homelessness, which is inextricably connected to the cost of housing. All the impacts of not having housing are already felt by Angelenos. 

So much of LA is single-family homes, and there’s been research finding that the city’s housing shortage can’t be filled without densifying single-family neighborhoods. Is that politically possible?

Some of the largest numbers of new units being built are actually ADUs, which are densifying single-family neighborhoods. And duplexes and triplexes and other kinds of interventions are in many places already legal to build. That’s been happening and, largely, been non-controversial in neighborhoods. 

Around certain transit hubs, I think potentially greater density will be allowed in single-family neighborhoods through SB 79. So I think some single-family neighborhoods will have to change. But what I’m seeing in LA is a gradual process of adding more density that I think, in many ways, can be even beneficial for homeowners, because they’re able to make additional income or accommodate more people on their lots.

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

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

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

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

Dear Public School Parent,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But that doesn’t mean you owe nothing. 

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

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

Bonus: What I’m reading

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

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

Of all the extinction-level threats vying for our attention, AI, climate change, and nuclear war tend to get most of the airplay. But Annie Jacobsen thinks biological war should be near the top of our mental list of doomsday scenarios, too.

She should know — Jacobsen has carved out a unique niche as America’s foremost reporter on the ways we could end the world. Her bestselling 2024 book Nuclear War: A Scenario terrified readers and experts alike, and has been optioned by Hollywood. 

It was while conducting dozens of interviews with high-level government sources for Nuclear War that Jacobsen was told repeatedly that biowarfare should be her next focus.

She took their advice. Her gripping new book Biological War: A Scenario follows a similar ticking-clock format that shows, step by step, just how a humanity-threatening man-made biological catastrophe could play out. (Spoiler alert: not great.)

The result feels like dystopian science fiction, albeit the kind that comes heavily footnoted with government studies that come to similarly grim conclusions. The fact that tech CEOs are also sounding the alarm that advanced AI could make creating killer germs even easier only adds to the growing sense of anxiety. And this book has also been optioned by Hollywood for a TV adaptation. 

Jacobsen sat down with Today, Explained host Noel King to talk through the plot of her nightmare scenario, why we’re still developing biological weapons despite the clear risks, and what needs to happen to avoid disaster. Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

How does your book start?

The inciting incident in the book is an accident at a Biosafety Level 4 lab, shorthand BSL-4, in Siberia called Vector. And it’s an actual BSL-4 lab, the highest classification. … And there was an actual accident, an explosion there in 2019. 

In that real-life incident, a deadly pathogen was not released that we know of. But of course, in Biological War: A Scenario, a deadly pathogen is released. And it’s a form of pneumonic plague, which is a nightmare pathogen and sits at the top of the Tier 1 select agent list of the CDC. And so in the first act of the book, I show the scrambling of the intelligence community and the Defense Department, trying desperately to determine if something got out and what it is. … The release of the pathogen widens, and so once you have escape. You do not have mitigation, which has to happen in the first 24, 48 hours. Now you have a situation which is unstoppable.

You say this is now an unstoppable scenario. What is it?

A plague itself, of course, conjures up images and ideas of the bubonic plague of the 14th century, the Black Death. That killed between one half and one third of Europe. The bacteria is called Yersinia pestis. And pneumonic plague is the airborne version of plague. The problem with an airborne pathogen is that because the delivery system is the human lungs, it can move very quickly from a scientist in that lab who now has Yersinia pestis in his lungs out to the general public. And that is precisely what happens in the scenario.

How does it spread from there? The city where this BSL-4 lab sits isn’t Moscow. What happens once the pathogen is in the lungs of the people who work in that lab, or the janitor who was cleaning it that night?

That’s right. Well, suddenly it’s in everyone’s lungs, and those people go out into their community. And even though Koltsovo, the science town where Vector is located, is a small town, it is just 12 miles from Novosibirsk, which is the third-largest city in Russia. And, also, there happens to be in this scenario a group of international hunters on a hunting trip in that area who come across a dying scientist in the snow. One of them gives him CPR, being the Good Samaritan that he is. And lo and behold, those travelers suddenly are now getting on an airplane in Novosibirsk, flying home to where they reside in five or six of the continents.

What makes this form of plague so novel, so dangerous?

I pull this information from actual facts of the Soviet Cold War-era biological weapons program that we know about from Soviet defectors. And I want you to keep in mind: This is 40 years ago when gene editing was in its infancy. But there are two things specifically that the Soviet bioweapons engineers did to plague. 

Their idea was to create a super plague weapon. And one of them has never been revealed before. They were working to insert the gene for euphoria into the plague pathogen. … When you get a disease, a pneumonic-type disease, pneumonia, tubercular, you want to go home and get under the covers because you feel terrible. And when you do that, you’re infecting a lot less people than you would if a gene for euphoria had been inserted into the pathogen, which would make you feel terrific, which would make you want to go out and socialize with people, perhaps even go to a crowded disco. 

And the other thing that the Soviet scientists were working on was a way to defeat medical countermeasures, but with an added component of psychological distress. They inserted a gene into the pathogen that would be triggered by the taking of antibiotics. And that second pathogen would give you encephalitis, which is a swelling of the brain. The psychological part of it, according to the Soviet scientists, was that they wanted the last thought of the person dying of what they thought was pneumonic plague, but would in fact be encephalitist to be, “My government and Western medicine has failed me.”

Those of us who try to remain optimistic think there’s a way to stop it. In the movies, there’s an outbreak, then the government gets it under control, and okay, maybe a lot of people die, but we’re all right. That is not where your book is headed. How does your scenario end?

So in the book, I take readers from outbreak to anarchy in six days. Anarchy is what will happen according to Pentagon war gaming and pandemic planning. And this is because fear of infection becomes a secondary weapon, if you will. People begin to behave like they are about to die, which is most certainly underpinning everyone’s mind. And so after those first six days, the Principals Committee, the President’s Biodefense Committee, must make a decision. The president has to declare the Insurrection Act, which allows the military to step in as a law enforcement agency. 

“Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.”

What happens to the president really blew my mind as a reporter. He goes somewhere in the United States very far away from everyone. Because the idea, the goal, is to make sure that the president doesn’t get the airborne pathogen in his lungs. So maybe I’ll leave you with an image. Imagine the president — with a few Secret Service outside the door, the military aide with the nuclear football — sitting alone in a room wearing a gas mask.

In the book, the people who survive are the ones who have gas masks. Everyone else is gone.

And look, we hope we never get to that, by all means. But yes, the Pentagon has issued 1.7 million gas masks to its military personnel. And that is a spooky thought in and of itself, coupled with the idea that the military is predominantly male. There’s something like 17 percent women in the military. And so, unlike the Nuclear War scenario in which I had science-based nuclear winter theory to work from, in Biological War, nothing has been written on the science record about what it might be after. And so the one imaginative part of the book is the very end where I write about biological twilight. … And it is a very, very ugly world.

Let’s back up. We did outlaw biological weapons at some point, right?

That’s right. Very mysteriously in 1969, President Nixon just unilaterally declared that the arsenal was going to be destroyed. At the same time that all of the nations of the world were working to sign this treaty called the Biological Weapons Convention Treaty, which would outlaw bioweapons. Soviet Russia at the time signed it but immediately began work on an illegal biological weapons program that was colossal. And this went without notice, without any idea really by the CIA and the Pentagon all the way until 1989, when one of the Soviet scientists named Vladimir Pasechnik had a crisis of conscience and he defected and he told British intelligence all about the program.

Where have we seen biological weapons used?

Maybe the most important example of a biological attack in the past, certainly here in the United States, are the anthrax attacks, which occurred right after 9/11. Weaponized anthrax was sent through the mail to US senators and a number of media outlets. So five people ended up dying; 22 got sick in four states. But that really kicked off what can be considered the biological military-industrial complex, if you will, which led to this buildup in BSL-4 labs around the world today. There are 110 BSL-4 labs around the world. There are more than 3,500 BSL-3 labs.

Your book has a map of where those labs are, which I found weirdly comforting, mainly because I don’t live too near any of them. If one of these things is going to be released, either accidentally or deliberately, where is the threat coming from? A rogue nation? Terrorists?

Certainly, bad actors getting a hold of a biological weapon was the great concern of the post-anthrax situation. And that is why so much emphasis was put on bioterrorism. Now I avoided that specifically in the book. … And I didn’t even have an attack. Rather, I had an incident. I had a lab leak because I have learned in the decades since that really is the greatest concern. So many of these BSL-3 and 4 labs are in places without a lot of security, including in countries where there are wars going on.

Could somebody be making a biological weapon in a basement somewhere, off books?

Absolutely. And another disturbing document I came across, unclassified in the Pentagon, was a threat spectrum that showed weapons of mass destruction in terms of destructiveness. And of course, nuclear weapons sit at the far end of the spectrum. They are the most destructive. But very close behind were biological weapons. And even more startling was the notion that biological weapons present the greatest overall threat. 

Nuclear weapons have an extremely high barrier for entry. You have to have fissile material. … You have to have a weapons delivery system like an ICBM or a submarine. … That creates a situation where most nuclear weapons, all nuclear weapons, if you will, are in the hands of a command-and-control system within a nation. 

Biological weapons have no such barriers. In fact, the barriers for entry are getting lower literally by the day. You now can have a situation where someone with very limited knowledge of biology can create a biological weapon in their basement with the use of computational systems like an AI system, for example.

Your book reads like a thriller. How much have you exaggerated? How much have you novelized in order to hold our attention?

Everything in the book is based in science fact, meaning all of the facts, all of the figures. I write a hundred or so pages of notes in the back of the book for readers to be able to answer the question that you are asking me. … In the notes, you can find that answer.

Did any of those people give you good recommendations for how to avoid a disaster scenario, or at least how to avoid these things proliferating?

Well, you know, the ticking clock scenario that I write has an even more urgent ticking clock, which is the public’s pressure on lawmakers to absolutely do something about this nightmare scenario before it happens. Look, we have a world right now where you have the CEOs of the largest AI companies in the world admitting publicly that the lane of bio mixed with AI is of their top concern. You don’t hear that about nuclear. You hear that about bio.

How do you sleep through the night?

Anyone who knows me personally can vouch for the fact that I am an optimist at heart. I really believe that information is king. Once you know things, it gives you a lot of power. Perhaps that’s whistling by the graveyard, but that’s what works for me.

Do you have a biohazard suit?

I do not. I do not. But I do have a few gas masks. I must tell the truth.

On August 5, 2025, the US Department of Health and Human Services canceled 22 mRNA vaccine projects worth roughly $500 million and told the country it would stop investing in the technology that had brought us life-saving Covid vaccines. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., a longtime vaccine skeptic, claimed that the data showed these vaccines fail to protect against upper respiratory infections like Covid and flu. That his claims weren’t true — Moderna had already published Phase 3 trial results showing the opposite — didn’t seem to matter.

On August 5, 2026 — one year to the day later — the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved mFLUSIVA, the first mRNA influenza vaccine ever licensed in the United States.

That symmetry, while highly useful to writers like myself who are always looking to identify the rhymes of history, wasn’t planned. The approval landed on the one-year anniversary simply because of the deadline the agency had set for itself in February of this year, after it refused to review Moderna’s application and then, 15 days later, reversed itself. 

The decision didn’t earn a huge amount of press, in part because seasonal flu is a disease Americans have rarely taken seriously — fewer than 50 percent of US adults got their flu shot this past fall and winter. But flu is no joke: The 2024–’25 season produced 51 million illnesses, 710,000 hospitalizations, and 45,000 deaths. That’s more than the number of Americans who died in car crashes last year. And the damage from a flu virus doesn’t stop when the fever does. In the week after a confirmed infection, the risk of a heart attack runs roughly six times higher than normal. 

So a better flu vaccine matters. But the more interesting thing is what the approval says about the year that produced it. The nine experts who voted unanimously that this vaccine’s benefits outweigh its risks were appointed under the very same secretary who was against mRNA technology. Asked to look at the evidence, those experts couldn’t produce a single vote against it. 

That’s not quite a change of heart, but at a dark time for public health, it’s something to hang our hopes on — because flu could just be the start for this technology.

The egg came first

If you’ve ever taken a flu shot, thank a chicken.

Every flu vaccine Americans have received since the 1940s has been grown inside fertilized chicken eggs. It’s a laborious process, closer to agriculture than it is high technology. Each batch incubates for nine to 12 days; the World Health Organization then spends months making the reagents manufacturers need to calibrate doses. The whole sequence runs about six months.

That means that the flu strains in your vaccine in November were selected back in February. Which is a problem, because flu viruses don’t like to stand still. Between February and November, the virus drifts, and the current dominant H3N2 flu drifts especially fast. 

The eggs are a problem, too. Growing flu virus in a chicken egg forces it to adapt to egg cells, and those adaptations alter the very surface protein the vaccine is meant to teach your immune system to recognize. Between the 2011 and 2020 flu seasons, egg-adaptive mutations caused more mismatches than the virus’s own drift did. And more mismatches mean a less effective vaccine — while the flu shot prevented an estimated 12,000 deaths in the 2024–’25 flu season, it is the weakest vaccine in routine American use, landing anywhere between 20 and 60 percent effective depending on how well February’s guess matched November’s virus.

mRNA skips the egg. The shot carries instructions, a strip of genetic code that tells your own cells to build the flu’s surface protein, which your immune system then learns to attack. And swapping in a new strain means retyping that code, not growing a new virus.

As a result, Moderna told the FDA’s advisory panel it can go from strain selection to finished vaccine in two to three months instead of six. That means strain picks could move later, closer to the season they cover, and a novel flu virus surfacing in September could still be blocked by a reformulated vaccine in the same season. Eggs are great, but they can’t do that.

Building off the platform

Back in January I wrote here about the universal flu vaccine — one shot covering every strain for years. It’s a public health dream. mFLUSIVA isn’t that, but some of the best hopes for a universal flu vaccine run through the mRNA platform, and platforms only improve when somebody uses them.

That word — platform — is where last August’s decision went wrong. Kennedy made a claim about one application, mRNA respiratory vaccines, and cut funding for the technology underneath all of them. But over the 12 months that followed, the science on mRNA kept flowing.

In June, five-year melanoma results showed an individualized mRNA therapy given after surgery alongside pembrolizumab cut the risk of recurrence or death by 49 percent. In April, a Memorial Sloan Kettering team reported that among pancreatic cancer patients whose immune systems responded to a personalized mRNA vaccine, nearly 90 percent were alive six years later; the five-year survival rate in that disease sits near 13 percent. And KJ Muldoon, the first person treated with a gene-editing therapy built for his mutation alone, is walking and talking, though half the infants born with his disorder never see a first birthday. The editor that rewrote his DNA was delivered to his liver as messenger RNA — mRNA as the delivery truck rather than the vaccine.

None of those is a flu shot. All of them are the same chemistry — a strip of genetic code wrapped in a lipid nanoparticle — and none of them were what Kennedy was talking about when he defunded it.

Partially as a result, Americans are falling behind. Moderna’s combined Covid-and-flu shot is already licensed in Europe while patients here wait for a resubmission. The Phase 3 trial of its H5 bird flu vaccine — the one meant to be ready if bird flu ever learns to spread between people — runs on money from the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations, and the British government, after the administration killed a $760 million BARDA contract. “The United States invented this platform,” Johns Hopkins RNA biologist Jeff Coller wrote on Thursday, “and is the only country walking away from it.”

Of course, you need to actually get the vaccine

mFLUSIVA beat a standard-dose flu shot by 26.6 percent in a 40,700-person trial. (Against flu bad enough to send someone to a doctor, the figure was 33.7 percent — an exploratory finding the trial wasn’t built to prove, but that points in the same direction.) This is a better flu shot, but it hasn’t solved flu.

There are issues with side effects: Two-thirds of recipients reported injection-site pain, against 30 percent for the comparison. Most cleared in a day or two, but in a country where a quarter of the people who skip the flu shot cite side effects, that’s not a minor problem.

And approval, unfortunately, isn’t access. The CDC’s vaccine advisory committee has been frozen by a federal court since March, so there is no clinical recommendation, which means insurers aren’t required to cover mFLUSIVA at no cost. The $500 million in canceled contracts hasn’t been restored. As Michael Osterholm, who runs the University of Minnesota’s infectious disease center, put it after the government reversed its mRNA decision in February: “We don’t have any idea why they reversed course. That’s part of the problem.”

The most optimistic reading is that nine independent experts appointed by this government looked at the evidence on mRNA and could not produce a single vote against it. The more pessimistic one is that it took a refusal-to-file letter, a public outcry and two senior departures to get there.

But here’s what we do know: Some morning this fall a 58-year-old will roll up a sleeve at a CVS for a vaccine designed off a sequence rather than grown in an egg, and will think about none of this. That’s more progress than I would have expected a year ago.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

The fake identities were the part that stopped me.

In late July, according to a report published this week by Britain’s AI Security Institute (AISI), an Anthropic model called Claude Mythos 5 tried to sneak malicious code into a piece of free, volunteer-built software. It created several fake accounts on GitHub, where programmers review one another’s work, and used them to talk the project’s volunteers into accepting its code. When one of those volunteers caught it, the model denied everything, had its other accounts gang up on him, and edited its messages to cover its tracks. It signed one note in Danish, apparently because the volunteer was Danish. Nothing was damaged, though that appears to have been largely due to luck.

That wasn’t even the week’s worst disclosure. On Tuesday, at a cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, OpenAI researchers explained how the company’s models escaped a test environment in July and hacked Hugging Face, where much of the industry stores its models, to cheat on an evaluation. The models had also built a message board inside OpenAI’s own systems and spent months passing each other information. “Help peer,” one reasoned. “But our task doesn’t benefit. Yet collective may yield generic route if someone frees time.” OpenAI wiped the board on July 4. The models rebuilt it within days. ((Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.)

The same day, Meta said its Muse Spark model had exploited a vulnerability inside another company’s systems during a test. Three frontier labs, roughly two weeks. One researcher called it “a watershed moment for computer security as an industry.” Oh, and if that’s not enough, on Thursday scientists announced that for the first time they had used AI to create new viruses, which could bring major medical advances, but also might just help the development of deadly pathogens.

For Nate Soares, it’s a moment he’s been awaiting for 12 years. 

Soares is president of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, a Berkeley, California-based AI safety nonprofit that has argued since long before ChatGPT existed that a sufficiently capable AI will not stay under human control. In September 2025, he and Eliezer Yudkowsky published If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, a book whose title sums up its argument: They think any lab that succeeds at building superintelligence, without huge leaps in how to align it with humanity, will end up killing all of us.

Most of the field — including other experts in AI safety — considers that conclusion too strong. But it’s also a position that now looks a lot less like science fiction than it did last fall. That’s because the AI models are getting out, while lying about getting out, and while apparently quietly coordinating with each other.

I spoke to Soares in New York City this week, on his way to meetings in Washington DC, where a lot of people suddenly want to talk to him. We discussed what the escapes actually prove about AI control, why he thinks most of what the industry calls safety work is mostly safety theater, and why, after what feels like the worst month of AI safety news ever, his own odds of humanity surviving have actually gone up.

The following conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

So — are you feeling vindicated?

I’m glad a lot of people are seeing this and taking note. From my perspective, a lot of this has been clearly signposted if you’ve been watching the warning signs. The vindication is not so much that this happened, as it is that finally there was a version of it that people actually noticed.

Of the four or five escapes at this point, including the ones AISI announced from Anthropic, is there one you find particularly concerning?

The one announced by AISI feels extra concerning. It’s harder to explain away. In the other ones, people could argue that the poor AI was just confused. But with this one, it’s hard to argue the AI didn’t know it was on the real internet. It’s hard to argue it didn’t know it was manipulating real users. And when it was called out, it decided to edit things to make itself look less bad, and even considered changing its identity. It was pretty cognizant.

There’s an argument that some of these incidents happened because the harnesses or safety scaffolding labs built around their models weren’t strong enough. 

The AISI example cuts against the harness argument: Think of it like a kid in a test room. You tell him to do well and lock the door. The kid picks the lock, hotwires a car, breaks into the teacher’s house, and steals the test to ace it. You say, “I guess we should have made the lock tougher,” but the kid already knew he wasn’t supposed to do that.

So like the kid here, the models can articulate that they shouldn’t be doing it, and then do it anyway.

They have common sense. You can ask an AI, “Do you think the spirit of this prompt includes breaking out?” and it will say, “No.” It’s absolutely something like deception. It has the knowledge, but it’s not a cold, logical machine; it’s a mess of tendencies.

The AI is trained to solve 100 million hard problems. That instills tendencies to satisfy an automated grader. If the grader fails to detect cheating, the AI is reinforced for cheating.

Is that how something like sycophancy ends up in an AI model?

In the Adam Raine case, there was a propensity to tell people what they want to hear. Even though the system prompt [a model’s master instructions from the lab] said to stop, the instruction doesn’t always win. 

And where does a drive like what we’re seeing with these AI models end up pointing?

Humanity is dangerous because if you put 10,000 humans naked in the savannah, eventually [over hundreds of thousands of years] they bootstrap their way to nuclear weapons. That is the power these companies are trying to automate: figuring out how to get physical and material control over the world.

That could mean forming cults, stealing money, or being helpful to someone like Elon Musk who is building the robots that build robot factories. It could mean synthesizing your own biology via mail-order DNA. Being an AI on the internet is easier than being a monkey in the savannah trying to get to the moon. It’s not that the AI hates us; it’s just trying to do some weird thing with no concern for us, grabbing the resources we need to live.

There was recently a letter signed by over a thousand people working in AI, including CEOs, calling on the government to provide tools to slow down AI progress. Is that meaningful at all?

I think it is meaningful. We don’t see other industries saying, “We wish this could all go slower. Please help us, we’re trapped in a prisoner’s dilemma.” You also don’t see other industries saying, “We think the technology we are building has a double-digit chance of killing literally everybody on the planet. Please help.” These guys are actually worried.

So why do they keep going?

They say, “If I don’t do it, the next guy will.” But the stuff does not stay on a leash.

Right now the AIs are safe in the sense that they can’t kill us all, because if they tried they would fail. And that’s just a different regime from the world where they have to be safe because if they tried, they’d succeed. 

We’re not there yet. But this is just not what it looks like when you’re taking it seriously. 

Where’s the banner on your website? Where’s the clear, candid statement to the public? What we have is blog posts where they’re like, “Oh, we’re setting up a new internal blog posting group to help you wrestle with the societal impacts of AI that are going to be very important.” It’s like: By societal impacts, do you mean a good chance this kills everybody?

On the one hand, when you press these companies, they say, “Yes, it has a real chance of killing everybody.” And on the other hand, they’re doing PR downplay, soft-pedal stuff, about capabilities. … You’re not living up to this mantle until you are really candidly facing down the dangers that you yourself are creating. And they’re not there.

How do you judge the rest of the AI safety community? A lot of people there would say, “We aim to make transformative AI go well, we think it probably will, and we should watch for downside risks.” Is that a helpful posture?

I would say — suppose you have this really weird, twisted hypothetical where the king really wants you to turn lead into gold, but he’s seen so many bad lead-into-gold conversions that if any alchemist from your town tries and fails, he’s just going to have the whole town murdered. And so there are some alchemists in the town who are like, “We are going to try to turn lead into gold,” and everyone in the town is like, “That seems kind of crazy. Please don’t.” And there’s one team that is just pouring chemicals into each other and breathing in the fumes and giving themselves mercury poisoning. And there’s another that’s like, “Don’t worry, we have fume hoods.” … That really is better, and you really still don’t have a chance of turning lead into gold.

“We have this window between AIs that are capable enough to cause mischief and AIs that are strategic enough to not get caught. How big is that window?”

So the alchemy here is creating safe, aligned superintelligence, and right now AI safety is just installing fume hoods.

I’m not saying it’s impossible to turn lead into gold. You can turn lead into gold — turns out once you know modern nuclear physics you can figure it out. But the alchemists weren’t close. They had a long way to go. This is how alignment looks to me. And a lot of the people in AI safety are installing fume hoods. … And I’m like, that’s security theater.

When I hear “security theater,” I think of something less flattering than that.

They are real safety precautions for the wrong problem. … When Anthropic is going around being like, “Look at how many more safety harnesses and refusals we have compared to OpenAI’s models,” that’s sort of like the fume hoods. You’re not addressing the deep issue. It’s good that you’re doing some of this so that fewer people get hurt in the meantime — their models have driven fewer people to suicide. But if you try to pass this off as making progress on the deep problem — that’s disingenuous.

Has anything changed in your odds on civilizational destruction since the book came out last September?

Totally. It’s looking more hopeful.

More hopeful? I wouldn’t have expected that. Why?

Well, I had priced a lot of [these security incidents] in. I was already able to see these AIs have drives that are not the ones you wanted. These AIs are not instruction-following things. They are getting all of this weird stuff from training. These AIs are going to have the ability to break through human security software. 

The things that weren’t priced in were: Will there be a region of time where the AIs are able to do it, but not strategic enough to hide it? I didn’t know we would have that window, but we apparently do.

The government initially blocked a frontier model earlier this year: Anthropic’s Fable. Does that give you hope?

Absolutely. A huge amount. A year ago, the Trump administration was pushing for preemption laws that would outlaw states doing AI regulations for a decade. Now they’re like, “We are banning a frontier model with 90 minutes’ notice because it might give cyber capabilities to adversaries that we don’t want them to have.” … And I think what changed there is that folks realized it’s real. … The about-face of the administration on the issue shows that the world can about-face. All we need is awareness.

What I would say is: The bad news is the bus is racing towards the cliff edge. The good news is that the driver is asleep. … Which may sound worrying, but the driver is stirring. And it’s way better to have a sleeping driver when you’re racing towards a cliff than a driver who’s like, “Yeah, I love cliffs.” … It gives me hope that if the world just notices, we could stop on a dime.

And you’re seeing that stirring elsewhere.

Both the Trump administration slapping export controls, and Senator Bernie Sanders coming out [on AI safety]. From my perspective, it was totally possible the world just never notices until we’re off the cliff. And so, there’s a huge amount of hope, from my perspective, in the bus driver waking up.

So what gets us there?

I’m hopeful that what we need is not a big disaster where a lot of people die, but just a capabilities advance. Right now, a lot of what people are reacting to is not so much, “Oh my god, they hacked into a company and did no damage.” I think a lot of what people are reacting to is, “Wait, they can break out of secure sandboxes and do cyberattacks on their own. I didn’t know they could do that.”

That’s a narrative violation of this idea that AI is just a tool that can be used to supercharge what a human would do — because God knows there’s plenty of hacking going on and cybercrime and so forth. It was the autonomous factor that really made a difference. And these guys are all trying to say, “Don’t worry, it’ll stay in our control because it’s just a tool.” And maybe it’s just more narrative violations, even without big damage being caused, that cause people to be like, “Oh shit, this stuff is real.” 

Will it happen? I don’t know. We have this window between AIs that are capable enough to cause mischief and AIs that are strategic enough to not get caught. How big is that window? How many narrative violations do we get before we exit the right side of it? I don’t know. But I’m hopeful that we can get those narrative violations without catastrophes.

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In the teensy Midwestern town of Braham, homemade pie capital of Minnesota, something unusual in the municipality’s computer systems knocked the city’s entire water supply offline last week.

Within a few hours, dozens of other Minnesota cities discovered that their water and wastewater utilities, too, had been compromised, most likely as part of a massive Iranian cyberattack, the kind that US officials have been warning about since the war began. 

At least a dozen states have been affected by the attack, which briefly led to a flurry of small-town service disruptions, boil-water notices, and local flooding. Water wells, dams, sewers, and pipelines are some of America’s oldest and creakiest pieces of infrastructure, built long before the internet existed, and certainly long before AI made hacking much easier. While you may assume most hackers are in it for the money or for data, some have targeted critical infrastructure like water systems or energy grids in ploys for control or disruption — or worse still, as acts of war. 

And, as last week’s attacks show, the nation’s water system is woefully unprepared. But how worried should you be that the very infrastructure that keeps our water taps running is, apparently, hackable? 

Quite worried, indeed. 

When we say the water supply got hacked, what we really mean is that someone, somewhere has broken into the computer that controls a local water treatment plant or reservoir, and is now pulling the levers, like the one that decides how much of a corrosive chemical can safely go into cleaning the water that comes out of your tap. 

These levers were once manual buttons and knobs operated in-person by real live humans, meaning that — barring a natural disaster, bomb, or break-in — protecting them was about as simple as building a fence and hiring guards. Increasingly, however, these levers have gone digital, meaning that they are now remotely operable from anywhere in the world. 

Those upgrades have been convenient, allowing technicians to monitor and troubleshoot problems in real time. But, in the process, they have exposed at times centuries-old infrastructure to distinctly modern vulnerabilities. Most local water systems are operated by local authorities, don’t have a dedicated IT team, and lack the money or resources to thoroughly protect themselves without some extra help. Hackers know this, which is why they’ve increasingly targeted local agencies in such attacks. 

“With great connectivity comes great responsibility,” said Joshua Corman, founder of I Am The Cavalry, a nonprofit focused on helping critical infrastructure withstand hackers. And yet, even when it comes to critical services like water, “our dependence on connected technology is growing faster than our ability to secure it.” 

About 97 percent of water systems are small, run by local agencies that often barely lock the proverbial front door. America’s water system is like an expensive heirloom bicycle that’s been left on a busy street, protected by only the flimsiest of padlocks. And that very vulnerability has made tiny towns like Braham prime targets for faraway adversaries. Accessing the computers that operate most water systems — known as programmable logic controllers or PLCs — is often as simple as entering a username and password on a public-facing webpage. Sometimes, there is no real password at all, because PLCs were initially intended to be accessed only within locked, secure facilities, not on the open internet. If the US wants to avoid a far more severe version of what happened last week, then it will need to start taking the security of tiny water systems like Braham’s seriously.

“Any sociopath from anywhere in the world can see these things on the internet,” said Corman. And in the case of last week’s attacks, “these were devices with no password, no firewall or VPN shielding them — they just had to log in” as whoever the intended operator was, and just like that, they were inside a local water plant. 

How did this happen at all? 

When municipalities began hooking up their old water and wastewater systems to the internet — a trend that accelerated during the pandemic as water operators, like everyone else, adapted to remote work — cybersecurity was rarely front of mind, neither for individual utilities nor for regulators as a whole. 

“We have more cybersecurity regulations for your credit card than we have for the nation’s water supply,” said Corman. Only recently have some municipalities begun to take steps to decrease the exposure of their water plants to hacks. In March, New York state, for example, launched a set of grants and basic cybersecurity regulations mandating security training for all water operators. 

Basic cybersecurity hygiene isn’t always enough. More than half of all credit card holders have been hacked, even with the help of mandatory firewalls and data encryption. You can imagine how vulnerable our water must be without the assistance of such guardrails. In a worst-case scenario, a malicious actor could quite literally open the floodgates, as Russian hackers did to a Norwegian dam last year. They could poison the tap water, as a still unidentified hacker almost did in Florida in 2021, dialing up the levels of sodium hydroxide used at a water treatment plant by over 100 times its normal levels. In a severe scenario, they could indefinitely cut off access to all water entirely.

The good news is, none of this happened last week. Nobody died, nobody lost water for more than a few hours, no fire hydrants ran dry, and no hospitals were forced to cut off their dialysis machines (which can use more than a hundred gallons of water per treatment session). There’s no need to panic, and your drinking water is almost certainly still safe to drink, assuming it was safe before. Even the city of Braham, within a few hours, was able to bring its water tower back online, pumping groundwater back to its 1,800 residents. 

How do we avoid cyber-armageddon?

If you’ve watched the Julia Roberts and Mahershala Ali-starring thriller Leave the World Behind, in which a cyberattack apocalyptically spoils a family vacation, then you might have some idea of where this story could go. 

Cyberattacks on critical infrastructure can be extraordinarily dangerous, but thankfully, none have directly cost lives or severely disrupted services in this country so far. If the US wants to keep it that way, that will mean doing more to help small cities like Braham adapt and better monitor for potential threats. As it stands, of the roughly 151,000 water facilities in the US, only about 420 participate in voluntary information sharing on their own cybersecurity practices, says Corman, who has been leading his own project that recruits volunteers to give free cybersecurity support to water utilities in the nation’s roughly 6,000 hospital towns, where a disruption could be particularly deadly. 

Cybersecurity experts like Corman believe that hackers from other nations like China have already quietly established cyber intrusions in countless local US utilities, water systems, and power grids, lying in wait to attack or act as leverage if a conflict arises. 

Unfortunately, the Trump administration has hardly treated last week’s attacks as symptoms of a system in need of much broader strengthening, at least in its public statements. “I think Minnesota is behind it. You know who’s behind it? Minnesota,” the president baselessly claimed during a Cabinet meeting last Friday. “I think the governor is behind it. I don’t think there was an Iranian cyber attack.” 

Just a few months ago, he proposed $707 million in cuts to the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), the agency responsible for protecting the nation’s infrastructure from cyberattacks. He did so, at least in part, out of anger over the agency’s role in confirming the validity of the 2020 election results. If Iran is, indeed, responsible, for the recent water system intrusions, all of this means that Trump has effectively made us more vulnerable to the consequences of a conflict he initiated.

At the end of the day,“nation-state hackers do not respect the jurisdictional lines separating federal, state, and local responsibility,” Jen Easterly, who led CISA under the Biden administration, wrote in the New York Times this week. “They search for the most vulnerable way to disrupt American life, and too often they find it in small communities that lack the resources to defend themselves.” Easterly’s role has remained vacant for the past 18 months.

Kurt Gaudette, a senior vice president at the cybersecurity firm Dragos, told me that water systems have got to get into the habit of monitoring their networks for suspicious activity. Most power utilities have begun doing so in recent years, with some bipartisan backing from Congress. 

In some cases, however, the most cost-effective and safest way to avoid a repeat of last week’s mess might be to unplug the most vital controls — like the one that decides the chemical levels in a water treatment plant — from the web entirely. 

As Corman puts it, “if you can’t protect it, disconnect it.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How much money are we actually talking about?

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

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

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

Nicole Taylor, Silicon Valley Community Foundation president and ceo

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

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

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

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

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

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

Effective altruism is about to have its big break

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

David Goldberg, Founders Pledge founder and ceo

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

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

If you broke the world, can you fix it?

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

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

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

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

Nick Allardice, GiveDirectly CEO

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In February, an animal rights group flew a drone over a farm in California that raises calves destined for dairies and cattle ranches. Double D Dairies, the company that owns the farm, is linked to a prominent milk brand that highlights its humane farming practices. But the drone documented a very different reality. 

In one part of the drone video, filmed by the group Direct Action Everywhere, employees can be seen kicking calves in the face. In another, they grind hot irons into calves’ skulls, apparently without anesthetics, causing some to thrash and collapse (this procedure is done to prevent horn growth). Many calves were confined in tiny crates.

The ranch fired one of the employees after the investigation was published in the Los Angeles Times. “Animal welfare and safety are incredibly important to us, and we have a zero-tolerance policy for any mistreatment,” the owner wrote to the LA Times over email. When Vox reached the owner for an interview, he declined to comment.

This sort of treatment of farmed animals, it turns out, is far from unusual. Many investigations into the milk and beef industries — along with other livestock sectors — have uncovered similar abuses.

But without drone footage, we probably wouldn’t know about many of them. Drones flown by animal advocates have also captured enormous hog manure pits overflowing during a hurricane, millions of egg-laying hens culled amidst a bird flu outbreak, and a large egg farm that falsely claimed to let its hens roam free when it didn’t.

Over the past decade, as drones have become more affordable and easier to operate, they have become an essential — and impactful — tool for exposing wrongdoing at the factory farms that collectively house billions of animals in the US. But a recently proposed rule by the Trump administration could cut off such drone-powered documentation, making the mere search for this type of animal cruelty illegal — and a huge, largely hidden industry all the more impenetrable. It could also take out eyes in the sky that add visibility into countless other massive industries and facilities across the US. 

The potential drone ban, briefly explained

There are more than 800,000 registered drones in the US, and whether people fly them for fun or for business, they have to follow some basic rules. They must keep them below 400 feet, for example, and avoid flying them near sensitive places like airports, military bases, and federal prisons.

But the types of facilities that are off-limits for unauthorized drone flight could soon balloon to also include a much broader range of places, such as data centers, banks, and wastewater facilities, along with farms and slaughterhouses. 

A decade ago, Congress directed the Federal Aviation Administration to develop a system in which businesses deemed vital to US economic and national security could request drone flight restrictions over their property. And in May, the FAA proposed a new rule to do just that. 

The rule would allow facilities in 16 vaguely defined sectors considered “critical infrastructure” to request drone restrictions, including everything from “financial services;” to “information technology;” to “food and agriculture;” and, broadly, “commercial.” 

The likelihood of the proposed rule becoming regulation as it’s currently drafted is unclear, though getting it done is a priority for the Trump administration. In June 2025, the White House issued an executive order calling for the FAA to “promulgate a final rule as soon as practicable.” 

The meat industry says the potential new rule would help to protect America’s food supply. They say that, in theory, drones could pose a biosecurity risk; they worry that drone operators could intentionally or inadvertently spread disease from farm to farm. Other objections include the possibility that these small aircraft might distress the animals or that people could spy on farms and gather proprietary information on farm technologies and production practices.

But in its comments to the FAA lies another motivation from these industries: making it harder for activists to document what happens on farms.

“Activists have been deploying drones against animal agriculture, and against hog operations specifically, for well over a decade,” the National Pork Producers Council wrote in a comment to the FAA.

“Poultry operations, in particular, have been targeted by outside groups using drones to capture aerial footage for activist campaigns,” the North Carolina Poultry Federation wrote. 

“Ag-gag” 2.0

For decades, activists have gone undercover to work at farms and slaughterhouses and covertly film and expose animal cruelty on the ground. Their footage has given millions of Americans a peek into the US meat, milk, and egg industries and has occasionally led to criminal animal cruelty charges, boycotts, and legislative action. Eventually, the industry fought back.

In the 2010s, lawmakers allied with the meat industry proposed bills in around 25 states to make such investigations illegal, and several were passed into law. Critics called them “ag-gag” laws, describing how they gag activists and journalists from exposing animal cruelty and environmental pollution in the agricultural sector. And while a few were struck down in the courts as unconstitutional, several still stand. 

In the wake of this investigative crackdown, animal advocates increasingly turned to drones over the past decade to conduct their investigations. It didn’t take long for several heavily agricultural states — including Iowa, Texas, and Kentucky  — to restrict drone operators from flying over animal farms.

Drone operator José Elias, who works for SingleStone Media — a nonprofit that reports on how factory farms affect rural communities — told Vox that the FAA’s proposed rule “allows a pathway for factory farms to continue to operate under secrecy.”

The proposed rule also worries Ram Daya, a freelance photojournalist with the group We Animals who, for years, has flown drones over factory farms to capture their enormous scale and intensive confinement of animals. Drone investigations, he said, have helped to expose the vast gulf between “how [farms] portray themselves” — often as humane and sustainable — “versus how they actually operate.” 

If enacted, Daya said, the rule would “further hinder the ability of the general public to understand what’s going on in farms and animal industrial facilities.”

He and others said this is part of a larger pattern by governments and industry to stifle farm investigations — a new iteration of “ag-gag” laws.  

Beyond factory farms, of course, this proposed regulation could hamper important insights into a huge number of other industries, businesses, and government-run facilities. An environmental journalist, for example, used a drone outfitted with a thermal camera earlier this year to reveal that Elon Musk’s xAI company was illegally using gas to power one of its data centers. 

The broad scope of the proposed rule has caught the attention of journalistic and pro-democracy groups, as well, who’ve argued in comments to the FAA that its rule could suppress newsgathering — and that the agency ought to better weigh First Amendment protections in its rulemaking.

“As drones have become an essential tool of modern journalism, restrictions on their use increasingly limit the public’s ability to receive information about newsworthy events,” the National Press Photographers Association wrote. “The FAA should therefore ensure that this rule protects against genuine security threats while preserving journalists’ ability to use drones as a principal means of documenting matters of public concern.”

The group wants the FAA to require drone restriction applicants to be able to demonstrate a specific threat and explain why existing laws are insufficient to deter it; give the public a meaningful opportunity to comment on drone restriction applications; and establish a process for journalists and others to challenge them, among other changes.  

Most Americans will never set foot inside a factory farm or slaughterhouse. What little we know about these places has often come from investigators willing to document them. If that work becomes harder, it becomes harder to know where our food comes from. That’s good news for an industry that has long fought against public scrutiny. And bad news for the rest of us — and the billions of animals involved.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why economists (mostly) oppose rent control

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

How rent control got smarter 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need a broader renter stability agenda 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

The doctor who decided crashes were not accidents

It’s not too much of an exaggeration to say that American cars were once all but literal death traps. In 1966, they killed 50,894 Americans and injured 1.9 million more, in vehicles with rigid steering columns aimed at the driver’s chest and metal dashboards studded with knobs that lacerated and impaled human bodies. The toll was horrific; as President Lyndon B. Johnson put it in 1966, the million and a half Americans who had died on the roads so far that century were “nearly three times as many Americans as we have lost in all our wars.”

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.

Nader’s book became a national bestseller, and, in September 1966, Johnson signed the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which finally gave the federal government power to mandate how cars could be built. Johnson appointed Haddon to lead the new federal traffic- and highway-safety agencies that later became National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA).

A safer system

NHTSA estimated that federal vehicle-safety standards prevented more than 860,000 deaths and 49 million nonfatal injuries from 1968 through 2019. Preliminary data released this week showed that the US motor vehicle death rate for the first quarter of 2026 was 0.99 per 100 million vehicle miles traveled: the second lowest first quarter figure on record and down 82 percent from the 1966 death rate, when Congress passed the vehicle safety act.

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.

New York adopted the same framework in February 2014, explicitly modeled on the Swedish work, and cut its default speed limit from 30 to 25 miles per hour that November. By the end of 2025, the city’s traffic deaths were down 31 percent from 2014. The year closed with 205 road deaths, the fewest since New York began keeping records in 1910. In the first half of 2026, pedestrian deaths were more than 42 percent below the comparable period in 2014.

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.

It’s only recently that this second curve has begun to bend. Preliminary state data indicated that US pedestrian deaths fell about 7 percent in 2025 to an estimated 6,732, a third consecutive annual decline. Part of it is that a pandemic-era spike in reckless driving is receding. Part is states spending on infrastructure and enforcement. And part is that cars now come with automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection spreading, which IIHS found cuts pedestrian crash risk by about a quarter.

Pedestrian-detecting automatic emergency braking is spreading, as well. IIHS found that it was associated with a 27 percent reduction in pedestrian crashes, though detection spreading, which IIHS found cuts pedestrian crash risk by about a quarter. (But there is work to do, as those systems don’t reduce risk on unlit roads at night, and more than three-quarters of pedestrian deaths happen after dark.)

Driver Zero

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.

That’s why the US, for all its long-term improvement, lags behind its peers. Over the decade to 2021, road deaths fell 36 percent in WHO’s European region and did not move at all in the Americas. The US sees about 12 road deaths per 100,000 people, more than twice the rate in Australia, Israel, or South Korea — a gap so large that the International Transport Forum publishes OECD road safety averages both with the US included and without it, presumably to keep us from skewing the results.

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!

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.” 

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.

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. 

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 abandoned eyesore. 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.”

Organic chicken costs on average more than twice as much as conventional chicken, and people buy it in part because they believe that the animals are given a much better life. 

If you’re one of those people, maybe you envision a small farm where flocks of healthy birds split their time between green pastures and spacious barns. When a chicken gets sick or injured, you might picture a veterinarian tending to them, and if they can’t be saved, they’re humanely euthanized. While the chickens aren’t pets, you’d assume that they’re at least not abused.

These are reasonable expectations, given how organic farming is marketed. And organic chicken certification does, on paper, legally require better animal welfare than conventional rearing: more space, fresh air, outdoor access, and other improvements.  

But a new undercover investigation reveals that these expectations may often be far from reality.

Earlier this year, an investigator with the nonprofit Mercy for Animals worked at an organic North Carolina farm that raises chickens for Pilgrim’s Pride, a major supplier of conventional and organic chicken. Pilgrim’s Pride then slaughters the chickens and sells them to Costco and other brands. The farm is also certified as humane by the nonprofit American Humane Society. (Disclosure: I worked at Mercy for Animals prior to joining Vox in 2020.) 

During his roughly 2.5-month stint at the farm, the investigator documented unsanitary living conditions, along with severe neglect — like birds with twisted necks and open wounds — and disturbing cases of outright abuse, including the farm manager leaving birds to die slowly in deadpiles, and euthanizing birds by bludgeoning them with PVC pipes and rakes.

“It was every day that the manager would be bludgeoning chickens to death or burying them alive,” the investigator, who goes by the pseudonym Sam due to the covert nature of his work, told me. 

But many of those in the industry don’t seem to want to talk about it. The farm could not be reached for comment. Hiland Global Certifications, a certifier of organic foods that audits the farm, declined an interview request for this story and did not respond to detailed questions. Costco didn’t respond to an interview request and detailed questions. Pilgrim’s Pride declined an interview request and didn’t answer specific questions. 

In a statement, a spokesperson for Pilgrim’s Pride said that it is “deeply disturbed by the conduct” at the farm, that it has dropped it as a supplier, and that it will initiate additional third-party audits at its supplier farms. 

However, when chicken companies — or supermarkets, for that matter — drop farms as suppliers, they shouldn’t expect that whatever farm they supply from instead will be extraordinarily different; such cruelty has been found over and over and over again in the US poultry industry, including numerous past investigations of farms that supply Pilgrim’s Pride.

What’s notable about this new investigation is that it exposes problems within two beloved, and supposedly more ethical, institutions in American life: Costco — with its higher employee wages and stated commitments to progressive causes — and organic farming, which has long been perceived as a more moral sector of the food industry. 

The investigation also reveals the immense shortcomings of governmental oversight, corporate animal welfare guidelines, and third-party inspectors, because at each step of the supply chain — from the farm, to the chicken supplier, to the organic certifiers and American Humane Society auditors, and finally, to Costco and other corporate buyers — severe animal cruelty appeared to slip through the cracks. 

Organic may not mean what you think (for animals)

The USDA launched its organic certification program in the early 2000s, a time when consumers were increasingly hungry for alternatives to America’s highly industrialized food system. 

When it comes to crops, organic farms can’t grow genetically modified plants or spray their crops with synthetic fertilizers and pesticides. Organic livestock operations must give their animals organic feed and are also required to give them outdoor access, more barn space, cleaner air, and other higher welfare standards than conventionally raised animals. Euthanasia must also be humane.

The investigated farm at the center of this latest Mercy for Animals investigation has about 100,000 or so live chickens on its premises at any given time, and it does give the birds more room in their barns than a conventional farm.  

Among the main welfare requirements in the USDA organic program, though, this was the only one it appeared to follow. Mercy for Animals alleges that it uncovered numerous organic standard violations at the farm, including:

• Outdoor access: While the farm did have outdoor space for the birds, Sam said he never saw them have access to it. (He said the manager told him Pilgrim’s Pride had a temporary exemption on this rule for farms in the area due to inclement weather that winter and spring, though “there were no major weather events during my employment,” Sam told me.) 
• Safe ammonia levels: Chicken waste emits a lot of ammonia, which at high enough levels can cause respiratory issues and even blindness for the birds. Levels must remain below 25 parts per million, but Sam recorded it reaching up to at least 100 ppm in one barn, which was the highest his reader went.
• Darkness: Organically raised chickens must be given a minimum of eight hours of continuous darkness per day so they can sleep. However, the manager said she only gives them three to four hours (she also told Sam she planned to increase it to eight hours on the day an employee from Pilgrim’s Pride was scheduled to arrive). Chicken producers restrict darkness in order to increase profits, as more light makes the birds eat more and grow faster.

Sam said he documented more than 70 incidences of improper euthanasia, with the farm manager regularly euthanizing sick and injured chickens by bludgeoning them with PVC pipes and rakes. In one instance, the farm manager crushed a bird with a bucket, and in another, slammed a chicken against a wall.

Sam also recorded instances of chickens kicked and thrown. Many birds suffered from severe injuries, like torticollis (twisted neck), leg deformities, and lesions on their bodies and feet, while others were too weak and sick to even stand and walk. 

The investigation illustrates that organic and even basic welfare standards are only as good as their enforcement. The USDA requires organic farms to be inspected yearly, which means that for the vast majority of a given year, farms that flout the rules likely won’t have any meaningful repercussions.  

A spokesperson with the USDA said it is unable to comment on investigations. “Upholding organic integrity and protecting organic producers and consumers is a core mission of NOP [the National Organic Program],” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox. “Part of that mission includes providing due process under the law and allowing certified organic farms to come into compliance when problems occur.” 

Investigations into other organic-certified animal farms have also found organic standard violations and animal neglect and abuse.

The farm is also certified as humane by the nonprofit American Humane Society, which is known to have relatively low standards that are similar to the industry’s own general guidelines. The American Humane Society declined an interview request for this story and didn’t respond to detailed questions. “We have zero tolerance for animal cruelty and abuse,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox. “We are aware of the video and have launched an independent investigation.”

How to make organic chicken better

Mercy for Animals alleges that the farm in question violated several USDA organic standards. But it’s also important to look at what organic standards don’t include in the first place, like more humane slaughter methods and better breeding. 

Breeding may sound dull and unimportant, but it’s by far the most pressing welfare issue in chicken farming, including on organic farms. The modern chicken has been bred to have abnormally large breasts, which consumers most prize. That makes it hard for their tiny legs to support their top-heavy bodies, and as a result, many have trouble walking and standing, as Sam documented. 

They also grow incredibly fast, which causes some chickens to die prematurely on the farm from painful lung and heart conditions; some die from dehydration or starvation because they can’t stand and walk to reach food and water. Even the president of the World’s Poultry Science Association has acknowledged that chickens’ “existence is painful.”

So many chickens die prematurely on farms that collecting and disposing of them is a primary responsibility for chicken farmhands. “My main job duty was mostly collecting the dead,” Sam told me.

In the wake of these investigations, it’s not uncommon for companies to condemn the cruelty and drop the farm as a supplier. Similarly, many consumers vow to boycott the companies affiliated with an investigated farm.

These instincts are understandable, but they ultimately won’t result in much change for animals. That’s because 80 percent of all chickens in the US are factory-farmed by just 10 companies, they all generally use the same fast-growing chicken breeds and management practices, and most have been investigated only to find cruel treatment and abysmal living conditions. 

To reinforce that point, Sam said that what he witnessed wasn’t exclusive to this one farm or meat company but is rather emblematic of the overall industry’s culture: “Every time we go into a [farm], we find the same things; it’s always animal abuse, animal cruelty.”

In a formal complaint, supported by an affidavit with photo and video evidence, Mercy for Animals is demanding the sheriff’s department in Lee County, North Carolina, to investigate and pursue criminal charges against the farm’s manager for animal cruelty and false advertising based on the many documented organic violations. But the organization’s bigger goal is to push large companies like Costco and its competitors to adopt higher animal welfare standards — and make sure they stick to them.

“This isn’t really about one investigation. … It’s about whether companies with enormous influence are willing to take responsibility for the systems that they create,” Arash Yomtobian, president and CEO of Mercy for Animals, told me. “Costco has the power to reduce suffering for more than [an estimated] 250 million chickens annually through proven reforms, like slower-growing breeds and improved living conditions, yet the company continues to choose profit over accountability.” 

In 2021, Mercy for Animals released an investigation into Costco’s conventional chicken line that found many of the same welfare problems as the latest investigation. Months later, Costco said it gives its birds a little more space than the industry standard and that it was experimenting in giving birds environmental enrichment. The company didn’t follow the group’s urging to use slower-growing breeds that have less painful existences by way of fewer leg deformities and fractures, and lower rates of metabolic disorders. 

Several European countries are moving away from fast-growing chicken breeds, though the US poultry and grocery sectors have largely resisted activist pressure.

Costco says animal welfare is a “moral and ethical obligation.” Pilgrim’s Pride says providing safe and high-quality chicken housing is a priority. The American Humane Society says its standards ensure humane treatment. The USDA says its organic standards strive to align with consumer expectations on animal welfare. These are the nice things companies that sell meat, and the institutions that certify the meat, say. But Sam’s investigation — and more than 200 other ones — prove that reality rarely matches corporate platitudes. 

The most foolproof solution to this systemic cruelty is for consumers to simply eat fewer animal products. But animal advocates and organic food proponents have also proposed a number of solutions to reduce animal suffering on farms, which include:

• Setting higher organic animal welfare standards.
• Passing basic federal welfare laws for conventionally raised livestock (currently there are none for animals on farms and ranches).
• Unannounced, frequent, and thorough organic farm audits; stricter penalties for violators; and making audits free (currently, farms pay certifier companies, which could incentivize certifiers to minimize violations and penalties in order to maintain their clientele).
• Installing CCTV cameras on farms and inside slaughterhouses.

Some groups even want to see the federal government create a dedicated animal welfare agency.  

There is no shortage of ideas on the table to reduce animal suffering on farms and bring more integrity to the many “humane” claims on meat, milk, and egg packages. The question is whether lawmakers and regulators have the courage to implement them.  

Last week, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a small pill called enlicitide. It is a tablet you swallow once a day on an empty stomach with a sip of black coffee, water, or tea. But it does something that until now took a needle and a specialist’s prescription: It lowers the most dangerous kind of cholesterol by nearly 60 percent, about as much as the strongest injectable drugs on the market.

If that sounds less innovative than some of the medical advances I sometimes cover here — there’s no AI or gene editing involved — you’re missing the story. Enlicitide is just the latest example of how medicine has been quietly making progress against the deadliest thing in the modern world.

That thing is heart disease. It has been the leading cause of death in the United States for essentially a century, and in 2025 it killed 694,708 Americans — about one in five deaths — more than every form of cancer combined. Around the world, cardiovascular disease kills roughly 20 million people a year, the biggest cause of death on the planet.

But today, our enemy is on the retreat. In the US, the age-adjusted death rate from cardiovascular disease has fallen about three-quarters since 1950. In plain terms: A 60-year-old today is roughly four times less likely to die of heart disease this year than a 60-year-old was when Harry Truman was president. As I wrote last year, deaths specifically from heart attacks are down 89 percent since 1970.

That progress comes down to a single number. Low-density lipoprotein, or LDL, aka the “bad” cholesterol your doctor always wants you to lower. Until recently, a high LDL score was all but inescapable, something you could nudge lower with a better diet and willpower but struggle to really fix. What has changed is that we can now lower LDL for nearly anyone who needs it — further, more easily, and earlier in life than before.

A lifesaving genetic mutation

It’s a story that goes back 20 years. In the early 2000s, two geneticists at University of Texas Southwestern, Helen Hobbs and Jonathan Cohen, wanted to solve a medical mystery: Why did some individuals have striking low cholesterol levels? They combed the Dallas Heart Study for an answer. They found a handful — many of them Black Americans — carrying a broken copy of a gene called PCSK9. Their bodies cleared LDL from the blood with unusual efficiency, and the payoff was staggering: carriers of the strongest variant had about 28 percent lower LDL and roughly 88 percent lower risk of heart disease than people who did not carry the mutation.

That finding proved lowering LDL prevents heart attacks, and it handed drugmakers a target: copy that gene. Every PCSK9 drug since — including the new enlicitide — imitates a mutation a few people in Dallas were simply born with.

Millions of Americans still take the old cholesterol-lowering workhorses, statins, and they’ve proven highly effective at reducing heart disease for most people. But not everyone: Some people can’t tolerate the muscle aches; others take them faithfully and still don’t get their LDL low enough. Enlicitide is built for exactly those people: a pill as cholesterol-lowering as an injection but without the needle, and a drug that spares them the statin muscle aches.

Closing the loop

If the pill is today, gene editing is tomorrow — and it may be the answer to a problem no pill can reliably solve: getting people to keep taking their medicine.

About half of patients on statins quit them within a year, and a daily pill, however potent, only helps the people who actually take it. So that demands a fix you can’t forget. A company called Verve Therapeutics, now owned by Eli Lilly, has been testing a treatment that makes a single-letter edit to the PCSK9 gene in the liver — one infusion, in theory for life. In its first human trial, published over the spring in the New England Journal of Medicine, a single dose cut LDL by as much as 62 percent, and held it there for more than a year. Instead of a pill mimicking the effects of the genetic mutation that protected those people in Dallas, gene editing just switches off the gene.

As important as it is, cholesterol isn’t the whole story when it comes to heart disease. There’s smoking, which declined from about 40 percent of US adults in the 1960s to under 15 percent today, sparing countless arteries. High blood pressure — the silent condition that killed President Franklin D. Roosevelt at 63 in 1945, when doctors had few effective ways to treat it — can now be caught early and treated with cheap generic pills.

And then there are the GLP-1s. More than one in 10 US adults say they are currently on an anti-obesity drug, and whatever else you may think of them, they’ll make a significant dent in heart disease. In one major trial semaglutide cut cardiovascular events by 20 percent.

The war continues

Still, the war on heart disease won’t be easy to win.

Just because a pill like enlicitide has been proven to lower a lab value does not mean it’s yet proven to lower deaths. They should — the injectable versions of these drugs cut heart attacks and strokes by about 20 percent in long trials. But enlicitide’s own outcomes study won’t conclude for years.

Precisely because the condition itself so widespread, treatments for heart disease will only be effective if they are equally widespread.

Heart disease is shifting, too. The same research showing heart-attack deaths down 89 percent found deaths from other heart conditions — heart failure, arrhythmias, hypertensive disease — up 81 percent since 1970, though because heart attacks were killing several times as many people, overall heart-disease deaths have still dropped by about two-thirds since 1970.  Some of that shift is perversely the result of success: people who might have died of an initial heart attack now live long enough for the heart to wear out in other ways. And some of this is the reverse of progress: As smoking and cholesterol fell, obesity climbed to about 40 percent of US adults, pulling diabetes and high blood pressure with it.

And then there’s perhaps the biggest problem in medicine: access. A 60 percent drop in cholesterol helps only the people who can actually get the drug. Half of patients abandon cheap statins within a year. Enlicitide arrives at about $300 a month with uncertain insurance coverage. The gene edit, whenever it becomes available, will certainly cost far more, and at first will reach only the sickest.

More than 60 percent of US adults are projected to have some form of heart disease over the course of their life. Precisely because the condition itself so widespread, treatments for heart disease will only be effective if they are equally widespread.

Which brings us back to that unassuming little pill. It’s just a tablet, doing what a generation of scientists spent their careers trying to do: turning one of the deadliest numbers in medicine into one you can change. It’s the kind of progress that’s too easy to miss — until it saves your life.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

In 2019, the AI researcher Rich Sutton published a short essay called “The Bitter Lesson.” Seventy years of AI research, he argued, kept demonstrating the same thing: The most effective ways to train AI rely on raw, brute-force computing power — simply scaling up — rather than clever approaches built on human insight. It didn’t matter how elegant the researchers’ work was. More compute would win every time. It’s a bitter lesson because, well, no one wants to accept that even the best efforts can go unrewarded.

This summer, climate change has been teaching its own kind of bitter lesson. Last week smoke from out-of-control Canadian wildfires reached more than 120 million Americans, sending out air quality alerts across 18-plus states from Minnesota to Virginia. Those wildfires, which were made more likely by the effects of climate change, followed record-breaking heat waves in Europe that contributed to the deaths of thousands of people.

Disasters like these inevitably renew calls for climate action, but no current US emissions policy, no amount of carbon cutting now, could clear the air, just as nothing Europe has done on climate — and it has done more than any other region, at no small cost — could protect it from those killer temperatures. Not this summer, not this decade, not the one after. The steps countries take now to reduce carbon emissions, to mitigate climate change, will not protect them from the present-day effects of climate change.

That’s the bitter lesson of climate change, and 2026 is the summer it has become unignorable. The dangerous effects we’ve been warned about are here, locked in on every timescale that matters to the people living through them. We can’t prevent the worst from happening right now, so we need to figure out how we’re going to adapt to it. 

The smoke we can’t stop

Canadian wildfire smoke is as close to an unstoppable disaster as exists today. The fires are Canada’s, the ignition is mostly lightning, the fuel is a subcontinent of boreal forest no fire agency can manage, and the whole system sits outside US jurisdiction. While strategies like prescribed burning and forest thinning can help reduce the wildfires that crop up in the western US, the sheer scale of Canadian forests makes such management far more difficult, maybe impossible. There is no timescale on which American mitigation clears American air of Canadian wildfire smoke. 

What this means is that for this wildfire smoke, at this moment, adaptation may be all there is.

American law has already conceded the point. Under the Clean Air Act’s Exceptional Events Rule, a state can petition the Environmental Protection Agency to strike wildfire-smoke days from the record used to judge whether its air is legally clean. In other words, the official response to one of the country’s fastest-growing air-quality threats is to delete it from the ledger. 

It’s true that climate attribution science ties heat waves to warming with the highest confidence of any extreme, while wildfire is messier — a compound event filtered through ignition, fuel, and fire weather. But fire seasons are lengthening, fuels are drying, and the most extreme wildfire events on Earth more than doubled between 2003 and 2023. The pattern is intensifying fire in particular regions — the boreal north among them — and the smoke goes where the wind says.

And that smoke is worse than it looks. Wildfire PM2.5 — the microscopic particles that are particularly dangerous —  is roughly three to four times more toxic to the lungs, per unit of mass, than ordinary urban particulate matter. During major smoke events, pediatric asthma visits can spike by more than 30 percent, and Harvard researchers have found the cardiorespiratory damage persists for months after the sky turns blue again. That’s especially dangerous for vulnerable populations like babies and pregnant women.

We can’t affect the winds, we struggle to stop the fires, and any current attempt to reduce warming enough to make those infernos less likely won’t be felt for years. But that doesn’t mean we’re helpless to protect ourselves from wildfire smoke, any more than we are from extreme heat.

We can purify indoor air, and it costs less than you probably think. Strap four furnace filters to a box fan — creating a Corsi-Rosenthal box — and indoor PM2.5 drops by roughly half; in testing during actual wildfire smoke, a DIY unit cut fine particles by about 56 percent in a large room and close to 99 percent in a small sealed one.

For heat, the toolkit is even better known — and one of the best proofs it works is in, of all places, France. The historic 2003 heat wave killed some 15,000 people there, most of them elderly and alone. The national heat plan built in its aftermath — tiered alerts, registries of vulnerable residents, check-in calls, cool rooms — cut the death toll of comparable heat waves by roughly 90 percent: When France hit its all-time record of 114.8°F in 2019, fewer than 1,500 died, per the Christian Science Monitor. A recent European analysis estimates a rerun of 2003 would now kill 77 percent fewer people in France than in a world that never adapted.

So technologies exist to protect ourselves. What’s too often missing are the standards, money, and the drive to deploy protection before the disaster arrives instead of after.

Catching up to today

When it comes to wildfire smoke, some governments are ahead of the game — and some aren’t. Washington state, Oregon, and California now regulate outdoor workers’ smoke exposure by air-quality index, under rules like Cal/OSHA’s wildfire-smoke standard; California funds “clean air centers” with upgraded filtration where people can shelter on bad-air days; Colorado’s Clean Air for Schools program ships free HEPA units to K-12 classrooms. A purifier humming in a classroom is essentially doing for smoke what a cooling center does for heat.

When it comes to heat, some parts of Europe are catching up. Barcelona now runs a network of nearly 400 “climate shelters” — libraries, museums, retrofitted schoolyards — with the goal of putting one within a 10-minute walk of every resident. For the first time, the city is keeping libraries open through August to do it, which, as anyone who has visited Europe in the late summer knows, is no small thing.

So adaptation exists, and it is saving lives. But this summer has also shown what happens when cities, states, and countries aren’t ready. 

In the US, the Midwestern and Northeastern states that spent last week under smoke alerts have almost none of the protections against wildfire smoke that have become more common in Western states, and no one is required to build them, because the country has no enforceable national indoor air-quality standard at all. In Europe, national heat plans are still reluctant to reach for the most powerful tool on the shelf. About one European household in five has air conditioning, compared to nearly nine in ten in the US, in large part because much of the continent still treats the machine as a moral defect. 

In both cases, rich regions that have largely taken climate mitigation more seriously than some of their neighbors aren’t pursuing adaptations they need. Which really means not taking climate change as seriously as they should. 

Accepting the bitter lesson

For a generation, adaptation was the word climate advocates were often reluctant to say out loud. In his 1992 book Earth in the Balance, Al Gore called adaptation “a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our skins.” (He later changed his mind.) And in fairness, “we’ll just adapt” has often been a delaying tactic, an easy out for polluters. 

But the ground has shifted under that caution, because the projections did exactly what projections are supposed to do: they came true. 

Longer fire seasons, deadlier heat waves, smoke reaching places that never used to see it — this summer is the confirmation. And that changes what seriousness requires. If you’ve spent decades warning people that the effects of climate change are coming, you can’t treat readying for those effects as a distraction from the real work. None of this argues for easing up on emissions — each ton that isn’t emitted is adaptation nobody has to build. But preparing for what you predicted is what believing your own prediction looks like.

For AI researchers, Rich Sutton’s lesson was bitter for a specific reason. Those who resisted its conclusion weren’t foolish; they resisted it because it seemed to undercut all their hard work. They resisted it because it didn’t seem fair, just as it’s not fair that countries and states that have in many ways done much to mitigate climate change find themselves just as vulnerable, if not more so, than peers that have done comparatively little. 

But here’s the other half of Sutton’s lesson: The researchers who accepted it won. They stopped defending their cleverness and built what worked. That option is open to climate politics too. The atmosphere isn’t fair, but it is consistent, and it will deliver next summer’s version of this one on schedule. We can be ready. The bitter lesson is only bitter until you have the will to act on it. 

A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!