The factors that lead to tragedies like Covenant School are deeply ingrained in US politics, culture, and law.

A shooter armed with two assault-style rifles and a handgun killed at least three children and three adults Monday at Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, before police shot and killed her.

A motive hasn’t yet been determined in the shooting, and neither has the identity of the shooter. Police said she did not have any immediately apparent link to the school, which is a Christian private school serving about 200 students up to sixth grade.

The Covenant School incident is America’s 129th such mass shooting — an incident during which four or more people are shot, as defined by the Gun Violence Archive — since the beginning of 2023. It follows mass shootings at Michigan State University, two mushroom farms in Half Moon Bay, California, and at a ballroom dance studio in Monterey Park, California.

These shootings come in the wake of numerous others last year including at a Walmart in Chesapeake, Virginia; at an LGBTQ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado; on a school bus allegedly targeting members of the University of Virginia football team; a Fourth of July parade in Highland Park, Illinois; at a hospital in Tulsa, Oklahoma; at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas; and at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.

No other high-income country has suffered such a high death toll from gun violence. Every day, 120 Americans die at the end of a gun, including suicides and homicides, an average of 43,475 per year. Since 2009, there has been an annual average of 19 shootings in which at least four people are killed. The US gun homicide rate is as much as 26 times that of other high-income countries; its gun suicide rate is nearly 12 times higher.

Gun control opponents have typically framed the gun violence epidemic in the US as a symptom of a broader mental health crisis. But every country has people with mental health issues and extremists; those problems aren’t unique. What is unique is the US’s expansive view of civilian gun ownership, ingrained in politics, in culture, and in the law since the nation’s founding, and a national political process that has so far proved incapable of changing that norm.

“America is unique in that guns have always been present, there is wide civilian ownership, and the government hasn’t claimed more of a monopoly on them,” said David Yamane, a professor at Wake Forest University who studies American gun culture.

Last year, Congress reached a deal on limited gun reforms for the first time in nearly 30 years. But the recent shootings underscore why narrow reform won’t stop mass shootings — and just how embedded gun violence is in the US.

The US has a lot of guns, and more guns mean more gun deaths

It’s hard to estimate the number of privately owned guns in America since there is no countrywide database where people register whether they own guns, and there is a thriving black market for them in the absence of strong federal gun trafficking laws.

One estimate from the Small Arms Survey, a Swiss-based research project, found that there were approximately 390 million guns in circulation in the US in 2018, or about 120.5 firearms per 100 residents. That number has likely climbed in the years since, given that one in five households purchased a gun during the pandemic. But even without accounting for that increase, US gun ownership is still well above any other country: Yemen, which has the world’s second-highest level of gun ownership, has only 52.8 guns per 100 residents; in Iceland, it’s 31.7.

American guns are concentrated in a tiny minority of households: just 3 percent own about half the nation’s guns, according to a 2016 Harvard and Northeastern University study. They’re called “super owners” who have an average of 17 guns each. Gallup, using a different methodology, found that 42 percent of American households overall owned guns in 2021.

Researchers have found a clear link between gun ownership in the US and gun violence, and some argue that it’s causal. One 2013 Boston University-led study, for instance, found that for each percentage point increase in gun ownership at the household level, the state firearm homicide rate increased by 0.9 percent. And states with weaker gun laws have higher rates of gun-related homicides and suicides, according to a study by the gun control advocacy group Everytown for Gun Safety.

The link between gun deaths and gun ownership is much stronger than the link between violence and mental health issues. If it were possible to cure all schizophrenia, bipolar, and depressive disorders, violent crime in the US would fall by only 4 percent, according to a study from Duke University professor Jeffrey Swanson, who examines policies to reduce gun violence.

There’s still a pervasive idea, pushed by gun manufacturers and gun rights organizations like the National Rifle Association, that further arming America is the answer to preventing gun violence — the “good guy with a gun” theory. But a 2021 study from Hamline University and Metropolitan State University found that the rate of deaths in 133 mass school shootings between 1980 and 2019 was 2.83 times greater in cases where there was an armed guard present.

“The idea that the solution to mass shootings is that we need more guns in the hands of more people in more places so that we’ll be able to protect ourselves — there’s no evidence that that’s true,” Swanson said.

Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images

The prevalence of the self-defense narrative is part of what sets apart the gun rights movement in the US from similar movements in places like Canada and Australia, according to Robert Spitzer, a professor at SUNY Cortland who studies the politics of gun control.

Self-defense has become by far the most prominent reason for gun ownership in the US today, eclipsing hunting, recreation, or owning guns because they’re antiques, heirlooms, or work-related. That’s also reflected in ballooning handgun sales, since the primary purpose of those guns isn’t recreational, but self-defense.

American gun culture “brings together the hunting-sporting tradition with the militia-frontier tradition, but in modern times the hunting element has been eclipsed by a heavily politicized notion that gun carrying is an expression of freedom, individuality, hostility to government, and personal self-protection,” Spitzer said.

That culture of gun ownership in the US has made it all the more difficult to explore serious policy solutions to gun violence after mass shootings. In high-income countries lacking that culture, mass shootings have historically galvanized public support behind gun control measures that would seem extreme by US standards.

Canada banned military-style assault weapons two weeks after a 2020 mass shooting in Nova Scotia. In 2019, less than a month after the Christchurch massacre, New Zealand lawmakers passed a gun buyback scheme, as well as restrictions on AR-15s and other semiautomatic weapons, and they later established a firearms registry. The 1996 Port Arthur massacre in Australia spurred the government to buy back 650,000 firearms within a year, and murders and suicides plummeted as a result.

By contrast, nearly a decade passed after the 2012 school shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, before Congress passed a new gun control law. The Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the law passed in June 2022, was relatively limited: it did not ban any types of weapons, instead incentivizing states to enact new measures meant to limit who can access guns.

Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images

“Other countries look at this problem and say, ‘People walking around in the community with handguns is just way too dangerous, so we’re going to broadly limit legal access to that and make exceptions on the margins for people who might have a good reason to have a gun,’” Swanson said. “Here we do just the opposite: We say that, because of the way that the Supreme Court interpreted the Second Amendment, everybody has the right to a gun for personal protection, and then we tried to make exceptions for really dangerous people, but we can’t figure out who they are.”

While the majority of Americans support more gun control restrictions, including universal background checks, a vocal Republican minority unequivocally opposes such laws — and is willing to put pressure on GOP lawmakers to do the same. Alongside the NRA, and a well-funded gun lobby, this contingent of voters sees gun control as a deciding issue, and one that could warrant a primary challenge for a lawmaker who votes for it.

The gun lobby has the advantage of enthusiasm. “​​Despite being outnumbered, Americans who oppose gun control are more likely to contact public officials about it and to base their votes on it,” Barnard College’s Matthew Lacombe explained in 2020. “As a result, many politicians believe that supporting gun regulation is more likely to lose them votes than to gain them votes.”

Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images

Congress in June passed a bipartisan gun safety bill for the first time since the 1990s. But the new law — which incentivized states to pass red flag laws, enhanced background checks for gun buyers under 21, and closed the “boyfriend loophole” which allowed some people with domestic violence convictions to purchase guns — is not sufficient to fully address the causes of mass shootings. Certain studies suggest that even truly universal background checks may have limited effects on gun violence.

The Supreme Court has made it impossible to cure America’s gun violence epidemic

In 2008, the Supreme Court effectively wrote NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre’s “good guy with a gun” theory into the Constitution. The Court’s 5-4 decision in District of Columbia v. Heller (2008) was the first Supreme Court decision in American history to hold that the Second Amendment protects an individual right to possess a firearm. But it also went much further than that.

Heller held that one of the primary purposes of the Second Amendment is to protect the right of individuals — good guys with a gun, in LaPierre’s framework — to use firearms to stop bad guys with guns. As Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in Heller, an “inherent right of self-defense has been central to the Second Amendment right.”

As a matter of textual interpretation, this holding makes no sense. The Second Amendment provides that “a well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

We don’t need to guess why the Second Amendment protects a right to firearms because it is right there in the Constitution. The Second Amendment’s purpose is to preserve “a well-regulated Militia,” not to allow individuals to use their weapons for personal self-defense.

For many years, the Supreme Court took the first 13 words of the Second Amendment seriously. As the Court said in United States v. Miller (1939), the “obvious purpose” of the Second Amendment was to “render possible the effectiveness” of militias. And thus the amendment must be “interpreted and applied with that end in view.” Heller abandoned that approach.

Heller also reached another important policy conclusion. Handguns, according to Scalia, are “overwhelmingly chosen” by gun owners who wish to carry a firearm for self-defense. For this reason, he wrote, handguns enjoy a kind of super-legal status. Lawmakers are not allowed to ban what Scalia described as “the most preferred firearm in the nation to ‘keep’ and use for protection of one’s home and family.”

This declaration regarding handguns matters because this easily concealed weapon is responsible for far more deaths than any other weapon in the United States — and it isn’t close. In 2019, for example, a total of 13,927 people were murdered in the US, according to the FBI. Of these murder victims, at least 6,368 — just over 45 percent — were killed by handguns.

Allison Dinner/AFP via Getty Images

Last year, the Supreme Court made it even harder for federal and state lawmakers to combat gun violence. In its decision in New York State Rifle & Pistol Association v. Bruen, it massively expanded the scope of the Second Amendment, abandons more than a decade of case law governing which gun laws are permitted by the Constitution, and replaces this case law with a new legal framework that, as Justice Stephen Breyer writes in dissent, “imposes a task on the lower courts that judges cannot easily accomplish.”

The immediate impact of Bruen is that handguns — which are responsible for the overwhelming majority of gun murders in the United States — could proliferate on many American streets. That’s because Bruen strikes the types of laws that limit who can legally carry handguns in public, holding that “the Second and Fourteenth Amendments protect an individual’s right to carry a handgun for self-defense outside the home.”

One silver lining for proponents of gun regulation is that the majority opinion, written by Justice Clarence Thomas, embraces language that first appeared in Heller, which permits some gun laws such as prohibitions on “dangerous and unusual weapons.” Nevertheless, it placed an emphasis on historical analogies that could endanger many laws that enjoy broad bipartisan support. The future of firearm regulation looks grim for anyone who believes that the government should help protect us from gun violence.

Update, March 27, 2023, 2 pm: This story, originally published on May 26, 2022, has been updated with details from the March 27 Covenant School shooting.

The prime minister is pausing his plan to overhaul the judiciary following mass protests.

Mass protests broke out in Israel Sunday night after Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his defense minister for opposing his months-long plan to overhaul the judiciary. Monday, he agreed to postpone — but not abandon — the change.

Though the plan is widely unpopular and has driven months of protests, tensions peaked in the lead-up to an initial vote on the overhaul plan that was slated for Wednesday, but will now take place after Parliament resumes session next month. As a condition for agreeing to the delay, National Security Minister Itmar Ben Gvir required that he be allowed to preside over a new national guard to combat crime.

Tens of thousands of people demonstrated Sunday across Israeli cities, with police in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem using water cannons to disperse protesters who blocked highways and lit bonfires. Thousands showed up outside Netanyahu’s home in Jerusalem, where they broke through a police barricade.

Workers across industries have also staged walkouts initiated by Histadrut, Israel’s largest trade union federation. The public sector, health care, the central bank, the stock exchange, transportation, universities, museums, shopping malls, and even McDonald's have all been affected. Airports were halted briefly but resumed on Monday.

The overhaul plan would give the legislature almost unchecked control over judicial appointments and limit judicial review of governmental policies and laws. Netanyahu, who is facing corruption charges that put him at the mercy of the courts, has argued that the reforms would provide a much-needed check on what he perceives is an out-of-control liberal judiciary. His critics maintain the changes are an effort to keep power and to bring the independent judiciary under the control of Netanyahu’s right-wing government.

Israel’s allies have expressed concern about moving forward with the overhaul plan, which they have indicated threatens the underpinnings of Israel’s democracy. The White House has called for compromise and emphasized that shared democratic values are foundational to the US’s relationship with Israel. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz said earlier this month that the “independence of the judiciary is a precious democratic asset.”

Why is this happening now?

Defence Minister Yoav Gallant, also of Netanyahu’s ruling Likud party, delivered a televised speech on Saturday calling for the government to pause the overhaul because it “created an internal rift” in the military that “poses a clear and immediate threat for Israel’s national security.” Some in the military reserves, in which every Israeli citizen is required to serve for several years and which the government often draws upon for operations, have not shown up for duty in protest of the proposal.

Netanyahu’s decision to fire Gallant, the most senior official to speak out at the time, sparked Sunday’s protests, which were some of the largest in the country’s history. But outrage had been brewing long before then.

In 2019, Netanyahu became the first prime minister in the country’s history to be charged with corruption for acts committed while he was on the job following a years-long investigation. He was accused of receiving more than $300,000 in gifts in exchange for expanding a tax exemption for Israelis who return to the country after living abroad, helping to orchestrate a TV channel merger, and aiding a Hollywood producer in renewing his US visa.

He was also accused of seeking favorable coverage in a major Israeli newspaper in exchange for agreeing to push legislation to clamp down on one of its rival newspapers. And he allegedly accepted favors from a telecom mogul in exchange for protecting his business interests.

Netanyahu has denied all of the allegations, instead framing the case as evidence of a broad conspiracy against him by the left, and ignored calls for him to resign. He can continue to serve as prime minister if he is not been convicted. The trial has been delayed multiple times, and there have been concerns that judges on the case are dragging their feet, with no end date in sight.

Following his reelection last year, Netanyahu announced his overhaul plan, which was seen as a transparent attempt to shape the judiciary to his advantage in his corruption trial. Under the plan, the nine-member committee that currently selects judges would be altered so that the ruling party would have a majority of seats, and Parliament would be able to pass laws that Israel’s Supreme Court had previously struck down.

Protesters organized weekly demonstrations opposing the plan that gradually increased in size and intensity as Netayahu’s government pressed on, with public opposition reaching a fever pitch last weekend.

What might come next?

Though his government survived a no-confidence vote on Monday, Netanyahu has faced intense pressure to reverse course from at home and abroad.

Israeli President Isaac Herzog, whose role as head of state is mostly ceremonial and does not involve intervening in politics, urged the government Monday to stop the judicial overhaul for “the sake of the unity of the people of Israel, for the sake of responsibility.”

Netanyahu has not given any sign that he’s abandoning the reforms altogether. But it seems that he has agreed to resume the conversation after Parliament’s recess for Passover next week. A statement by Jewish Power, one of the right-wing parties in Netanyahu’s coalition, announced that they would then endeavor to “pass the reform through dialogue.”

There has been no word from Netanyahu so far, other than a request that protesters avoid violence, even though he was reportedly scheduled to deliver an address on Monday.

A shooting on Monday has left at least three students and two adults dead.

At least three children and two adults were killed in a shooting at the Covenant School, a private Christian school, in Nashville on Monday, according to WSMV4 News. The suspect is also dead, per Nashville police.

On Monday morning, Nashville police and fire departments responded to an “active aggressor” at the school, which serves roughly 200 students in kindergarten through sixth grade. It’s not yet clear how many people were potentially injured at this time or what the shooter’s motive was.

Students are being bused away from the school to another location for reunification with parents at Woodmont Baptist Church at 2100 Woodmont Boulevard.

There have been more than 100 mass shootings that have occurred in 2023 so far, a disturbing milestone that highlights America’s unique problem with guns.

This is a developing story, which we’ll be updating as more information becomes available.

Don’t let buses and subways become another casualty of the pandemic.

America’s largest public transportation systems are facing their greatest challenge in generations — a crisis with the potential to decimate their service, cripple local economies, and diminish quality of life.

When Covid-19 arrived three years ago, most transit passengers stopped riding, shrinking transportation agencies’ fare revenues. Today, ridership remains far below pre-pandemic levels. Unless they can quickly find new sources of funding, big transit systems will be forced to drastically curtail service, which would drive away still more passengers and place those systems in an even deeper financial hole.

Such a scenario would directly affect current riders, but it would also devastate cities whose post-pandemic priorities — such as revitalizing downtowns, reducing greenhouse gas emissions, and boosting equity — rely on the ready availability of mass transportation.

But a death spiral is not inevitable. To escape it, transit leaders must offer a full-throated defense of their essential role in American life. They must then secure new and reliable revenue streams from state and regional sources, which will require convincing residents and legislators that transit is worthy of subsidy — not an easy thing to do in a country where the vast majority of people don’t ride the bus or train. “Do you know how many times the median American rides transportation each year?” Brian Taylor, a professor of urban planning and policy at UCLA, asked me.“Zero.”

The only realistic way for transit officials to garner public support for the funding they desperately need is to demonstrate an ability to replace car trips, not just serve economically disadvantaged people who lack other means to get around their city. Otherwise, they forfeit the pro-transit arguments that resonate most with the public: curtailing congestion, reducing auto emissions, and boosting economic growth.

And to replace cars, transit agencies must offer fast, frequent, and reliable trips. This should be the core mission of any functional public transportation system, but increasingly, transit leaders are being pushed to focus on distracting priorities like electrifying buses, eliminating fares, and fighting crime. The biggest US transit agencies must be allowed to simply focus on delivering high-quality service. There is no Plan B.

20th-century suburbanization triggered a fiscal crisis for transit

To appreciate the urgency of transit’s current predicament, one must first understand its turbulent past. “The cycle I’m worried about now is one we saw from 1945 to 1970,” said Nicholas Bloom, a professor of urban policy and planning at Hunter College and the author of the forthcoming book The Great American Transit Disaster: A Century of Austerity, Auto-Centric Planning, and White Flight.

Hum Images/Universal Images Group

Mass transportation’s heyday came in the early 20th century, when privately run streetcars were ubiquitous throughout urban America, and residents of cities like Boston and New York City flocked to new subway lines. But the rapid ascent of the automobile prompted many regular passengers to decamp for car-oriented suburbs, with employers following. Declining ridership eroded transit companies’ finances, leading to deteriorating service that drove away still more riders.

With transit companies teetering on the brink of collapse after World War II, local and state governments intervened to prevent service from disappearing altogether. A wave of public takeovers included the creation of Chicago’s CTA (1947), Boston’s MBTA (1964), Philadelphia’s SEPTA (1964), and New York City’s MTA (1968).

Adding to transit’s postwar woes was a federal government focused on cars, not buses and trains. The landmark 1956 Federal-Aid Highway Act, for instance, launched the modern interstate system that catalyzed suburbanization while destroying many dense urban neighborhoods. Only with the 1964 Urban Mass Transportation Act did Congress start to provide a modicum of financial support for transit.

But it came with a big catch: The feds would subsidize capital expenditures, such as purchasing new buses or building a new rail line, rather than the ongoing provision of service, which was mostly paid from a combination of fare revenues and contributions from state and local governments.

In 1960, just over 12 percent of commutes to work occurred on transit, but by 2019 that figure had fallen to 5 percent. It was even lower in most of the country; the national average was propped up by a few populous metro regions that developed before the automobile’s arrival, where residents had more reason to use the bus or train because of limited downtown parking.

In New York City, for instance, 32 percent of commuters in 2019 traveled to work via transit; the figure in Boston was 13 percent and in Chicago 12 percent. Those three regions plus San Francisco, Washington, DC, and Philadelphia accounted for around 65 percent of total transit trips nationwide.

In major metros, transit has been indispensable

Unlike in the rest of the United States, transit agencies in these big, dense cities have long derived much of their operating revenues from passenger fares. In 2019 New York City’s MTA recovered more than half of its operating expenses through farebox revenue, while Chicago’s CTA drew 41 percent and Philadelphia’s SEPTA 35 percent. By comparison, the comparable figure for Phoenix’s Valley Metro was 14 percent, and for Dallas’s DART 12 percent.

Fare revenues allowed the biggest transit systems to provide more service, which made taking the bus or train more appealing for those who could otherwise use a car. Research has consistently found that transit’s regularity and reliability — more than its price — exert a powerful influence over mode choice. “The two most important factors driving satisfaction with transit are service frequency and travel time,” observed the nonprofit TransitCenter in a 2016 report.

Big transit systems’ singular ability to replace driving has brought them powerful allies. Their regional business groups often see transit as a means to avoid the crippling congestion that would hinder economic growth and depress real estate values. In Washington, DC, an alliance of corporate executives called the Federal City Council played a key role rallying the region to create Metrorail, which opened in 1976.

Such agencies have also found support in regional referendums and state budgets. According to the American Public Transportation Association, state and local governments contributed more than $500 billion toward transit systems between 1975 and 2019, with the largest systems getting a disproportionate share of those funds. Although suburban and rural residents may never ride the bus or train themselves, many still appreciate transit’s ability to mitigate congestion, grow local economies, and reduce greenhouse gasses and air pollution.

“It’s essential that transit lead people to drive less in order to win a statewide coalition,” said Monica Tibbits-Nutt, the undersecretary for the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. “When talking to people who don’t use the T [Boston’s rail system], I’ve always said, ‘The more people who ride the T, the more people who get off the road.’” The same argument was lampooned by The Onion in a 23-year-old headline, “98 Percent of US Commuters Favor Public Transportation for Others,” but it’s true — subsequent research found that many people really do support transit subsidies in the hopes that others will drive less.

Although pre-Covid transit was far from perfect in megalopolises like Chicago, New York, and Washington, DC, agencies’ ability to offer service competitive with car travel set them apart from peers in the rest of the country, which primarily serve low-income riders with limited (if any) access to a car.

Then came the pandemic.

After Covid, big transit systems’ finances fell off a cliff

Few parts of the American economy were upended by Covid as much as public transportation. Ridership nationwide plummeted around 80 percent in March 2020, shrinking farebox revenues as it fell.

That decline was less crippling for smaller transit agencies than those of major metros. A system that collects only 11 percent of its operating budget from fares (like Austin’s Metro did pre-pandemic, for example) could endure a massive drop in riders without incurring a significant budget deficit. But similar ridership declines would — and did — devastate bigger agencies that were far more reliant on fares. Adding to their pain, the largest systems often endured the steepest drops in ridership because their relatively more affluent passengers were more likely to work from home or have access to a car. By April 2020, transit trips in metro areas with over 2 million residents were down 83 percent, compared to 66 percent for smaller regions.

Boston Globe via Getty Images

Seeking to avoid a repeat of transit’s near-death experience in the mid-20th century, Congress threw agencies a lifeline in 2020 by approving the first of several Covid relief packages, ultimately totaling $69 billion. That aid broke with federal precedent by directly funding big agencies’ operating costs, which allowed them to minimize service cuts even with far fewer riders.

But now the federal money is running out, while fare revenues remain low as ridership in big metros like Boston is barely half its pre-pandemic level and downtowns are still suffering from the remote work trend. “We’re calling it the ‘big red,’” said Randy Clarke, general manager of WMATA, the transit system of the DC region, which is projecting a deficit of over half a billion dollars by fiscal year 2025. New York City’s MTA faces an even larger gap, estimated at $2.5 billion in 2025 and increasing thereafter.

At the same time, ridership patterns have been scrambled, requiring agencies to navigate a fast-changing environment. Downtown lines have generally seen ridership fall the furthest and recover the slowest, but demand for routes connecting neighborhoods has been more resilient, especially during off-peak hours.

Facing a financial cliff, transit agencies are raising the alarm. In a blog post last December, Chicago’s Regional Transportation Authority, a financial oversight body, warned, “If no action is taken, the CTA, Metra, and Pace [Chicagoland’s three major transit systems] will be faced with difficult choices to cut service, raise fares, or both.” The Bay Area’s BART recently created a public website titled “Financial Crisis” to draw attention to its plight. “We can’t afford to lose transit,” it proclaims. “Don’t let BART go broke!”

To keep BART running, the agency says it needs more financial support from California — not, notably, the federal government. David Bragdon, the executive director of the nonprofit TransitCenter, doesn’t expect Congress to ride to the rescue again. “I don’t think there’s ever been — or will be — a point in time when federal funds are transit’s primary source of revenue,” he said. “Politically, that’s not how this country works with regard to its urban areas. Even in the most flush times, the vast majority of mass transportation funds are generated regionally and at the state level.”

To avoid a downward spiral of falling revenue, curtailed service, and lower ridership, transit agencies will need to convince governments and voters to give them more money. To do that, they need to focus on transit’s competitiveness with driving — and not be distracted by other priorities.

Eliminating fares sends transit in the wrong direction

During the pandemic, popular discourse about public transportation’s societal value underwent a shift. With so many people staying home, transit’s ability to mitigate traffic by replacing car trips seemed less urgent. Instead, public discussions focused on its role providing mobility for low-income “essential workers” who would otherwise be unable to reach jobs that housebound residents relied on them to perform.

“The people using transit now are working in hospitals that are saving lives,” wrote transit consultant and author Jarrett Walker in Bloomberg CityLab in April 2020. “They are creating, shipping, and selling urgently needed supplies. They are keeping grocery stores functioning, so we can eat.” A few months later, anti-racism protests in the wake of George Floyd’s murder also contributed to discussion of access to public transportation as an equity and justice issue.

With transit users increasingly perceived as an economically vulnerable group, a rising chorus of activists, along with influential urban officials like Boston Mayor Michelle Wu and Washington, DC, Councilmember Charles Allen, spearheaded policies to eliminate fares entirely, rejecting the more targeted approach of providing discounts only for low-income riders, which was adopted in places like New York.

Transit riders are more likely to be poor than the general public, so dropping fares is a progressive policy move, although most low-income riders still say they would rather see agencies prioritize faster and more reliable trips. But eliminating fares requires transit systems to find even more outside funding to be able to function, making it harder to provide high-quality service. And it’s not clear that equity-based appeals will resonate in the suburbs and rural areas. There is no evidence that fare-free transit can meet the key goal of reducing driving, because those with car access typically care more about trip times and reliability than the cost of a transit trip.

“The fare-free dialogue can make it more difficult to win statewide support” for funding transit, said Tibbits-Nutt, the Massachusetts undersecretary of transportation. “It continues to focus the conversation on the city of Boston” rather than the interests of those living outside the city.

Forgoing state and regional funds wouldn’t be a problem if big cities, whose elected leaders are often the most bullish on fare-free transit, could themselves provide the additional money that their transit systems need. Joshua Schank, a research associate at San Jose State University’s Mineta Transportation Institute, said he would welcome a new emphasis on equity, even if it upends transit’s historical alliance of corporate, suburban, and state interests. “Maybe transit would function better if you blow up that old coalition,” he said. “You’d lose some funding in the short term, but it’s not as though transit was thriving before the pandemic. That coalition wasn’t working.”

But Bloom, the Hunter College professor, thinks it would be a catastrophic mistake to focus funding appeals on inequality. “There’s this idea of having a social equity awakening about transit,” he said. “As someone who spent the last 20 years studying public housing, social equity has not impressed me as a way of getting consistent, high funding for important and crucial public services. I just don’t see it.”

Taylor, the UCLA professor, agreed. “When framed as a social service, transit hasn’t done well securing funding,” he said. “But when it’s framed as an environmental benefit or as getting people off the road, that can work.”

Jeffrey Tumlin, the leader of San Francisco’s transit system, is already building his case for aid around the beneficial effects of replacing car trips. “Part of the argument is about climate,” he said. “Here in California, transportation is 47 percent of emissions, and of that, 72 percent is private cars and trucks. Transit is absolutely essential.”

Compared to climate change, transit’s ability to mitigate congestion and strengthen downtowns seems even easier to grasp. But the credibility of both appeals rests on transit’s ability to reduce driving. And that requires providing trips that are reliable and rapid, with the next bus or train only a few minutes away.

Let transit agencies focus on providing good service

Despite acute staffing challenges during the last year, thanks in part to an uptick in retirements, many transit agencies have found ways to improve service, enhancing its appeal to those who could otherwise travel by car. In the Washington, DC region, for instance, WMATA in February managed to deploy additional weekday rush hour trains in response to rebounding demand.

San Francisco’s Muni, meanwhile, revamped its schedule to drop peripheral routes and boost frequency on core lines like the 22 and 49 that serve neighborhoods including the Marina District, the Castro District, and the Mission District, which have always had relatively high ridership and, Tumlin said, are now seeing more passengers than before the pandemic. Neither route serves San Francisco’s Financial District, suggesting that agencies could grow ridership (and reduce driving) by adding service in areas that are within central cities but outside of downtowns.

Service improvements like these are indispensable, but some of the other priorities transit agencies are currently balancing are not. For instance, with ridership still depressed, now seems like a good time to deprioritize expensive capital projects like vehicle purchases and rail expansions, and reallocate the money toward maintenance that makes service more reliable and frequent. Or better yet, agencies could find ways to transfer money from their capital budgets to their operating budgets, where it can help them hire desperately needed operators. (President Biden’s new budget proposal would give agencies temporary authority to make such transfers with federal funds.)

With ridership still recovering and dollars scarce, it’s also unclear why transit agencies should be spending money on pricey service expansions. Massachusetts residents, for instance, might question why MBTA is planning an extension of its Silver Line at a time when ridership is still so far below pre-Covid levels that the system faces a 2024 budget deficit of up to $421 million, and when wait times between Red Line trains have increased from 90 seconds in the 1940s to 4.5 to 11 minutes today.

Another dubious move: prioritizing bus electrification, as California has done by demanding that all buses within the state emit zero emissions by 2040. Although their adoption makes for good headlines (and is eligible for generous federal subsidies), electric buses force already stretched transit staff to navigate a thicket of operational challenges, such as figuring out where to place charging stations and how to handle extreme weather. “Mandatory fleet and facility conversions should not come at the expense of the survival of transit operations,” Tumlin said.

To meet climate goals, state and local officials would be better off focusing on nudging people out of cars and into buses instead of electrifying their bus fleets. The OECD has found that diesel buses produce fewer emissions per passenger mile than even electric cars. “Getting someone on the bus is already green,” said WMATA’s Clarke. Creating Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines with dedicated lanes and priority for buses at traffic signals can cost far less than purchasing new vehicles, and unlike electric buses, it measurably improves transit service in ways that win over new riders.

John Lamparski/Getty Images

BRT is just one of the smart, low-cost ways that cities and states could strengthen transit service. Another is the adoption of onboard bus cameras that automatically photograph and ticket car drivers who illegally block bus lanes, slowing down service and making schedules less reliable. New York City was the first big US city to use such cameras at scale, and initial evidence suggests it has substantially sped up bus trips.

States and cities could also give transit a lift by assuming responsibility for managing rising concerns over public safety on buses and subways, which can suppress ridership. Agencies are increasingly being forced to reallocate precious dollars away from operations and toward public safety, which is the core competence of mental health and law enforcement departments. Such departments, not transit agencies, should be handling transit’s growing safety and social services needs.

“I can either hire operators or hire security staff,” said Tumlin, noting that in the last year, his agency created 50 new security positions. “That’s a few bus lines’ worth of people.” In fact, high-frequency transit service is itself a powerful countermeasure against crime because it allows riders to exit uncomfortable situations without enduring a lengthy wait for the next vehicle.

“If we had a more functioning society, we would be focused more on being a transit operator,” said Clarke of WMATA, which recently paid for DC police to patrol Metrorail stations following the shooting death of an employee. “If you go to Singapore, the agency’s staff are not doing these things. They’re running transit.”

Inequality, global warming, and crime are obviously critical societal challenges. But transit agencies can help solve all three simply by providing the fast, frequent, reliable service that lies at the core of their mission. New mandates risk distracting transit officials, undermining their ability to deliver on the very goals that advocates most want.

“MBTA staff are not only being asked to address our crisis with congestion; they’re being asked to address asthma rates in low-income communities,” said Tibbits-Nutt. “They’re being asked to electrify their entire system, to open up to those who can’t afford a car, to modernize stations. There is so much being asked of them right now that it’s making it hard for the system to operate.”

Cities can’t function without robust transit

As transit’s perceived responsibilities multiply, federal dollars are dwindling. The most immediate and obvious way for state and regional governments to help is by establishing recurring sources of funding. For that reason, implementing New York City’s congestion pricing plan, which will charge motorists up to $23 to enter Manhattan’s central business district and add around $1 billion annually to MTA’s capital budget — funding that could improve maintenance and service quality — can’t happen soon enough.

New York is an exception; for most large transit agencies, obtaining necessary funds will require months if not years of negotiation and advocacy. The stakes could not be higher — not only for transit riders, but for everyone who benefits from mass transportation. We can’t have vibrant cities without it.

Those who want to see transit not just survive but thrive, including public officials as well as everyday citizens, can improve agencies’ chances for success by doing two things. First, support staff who are working to provide maximally useful service, so that residents are more likely to leave their car at home (or maybe even get rid of it). Bus Rapid Transit, bus lane enforcement, and prioritizing maintenance over service expansions are all consistent with that goal.

Second, they can resist the temptation to complicate agencies’ challenges with well-intentioned but counterproductive mandates to go fare-free, electrify buses, or spend their own money on public safety.

The focus must be on providing the high-quality service that reinforces transit systems as assets worthy of investment. The alternative — widening budget deficits and deteriorating service — would be a tragedy for some of America’s greatest cities.

“Right now we are still in a crisis,” said Bloom. “But if you want to make today’s low the permanent low, cut the transit service.”

“You won’t get it back.”

Lucas Peilert contributed research assistance.

David Zipper is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Taubman Center for State and Local Government, where he examines the interplay between cities, transportation, and technology.

What’s fair — and unfair — about the intense scrutiny she’s received as vice president.

Ever since she became vice president, critiques — both fair and unfair — have plagued Kamala Harris.

There have been questions about how she’s represented the administration as a spokesperson, concerns about staff turnover, and most recently, worries about whether she’s been effective as a VP, and what that could mean for her future as a leader of the party.

The latest wave of criticism featured a number of unnamed Democrats disparaging her and worrying that she wouldn’t be able to win an election at the top of the ticket. As a particularly stinging line in a February New York Times piece put it: “Even some Democrats whom her own advisers referred reporters to for supportive quotes confided privately that they had lost hope in her.”

Such intense scrutiny has been driven, in part, by a heightened focus on Harris as President Joe Biden’s successor. Given the president’s age, and the possibility that Harris may actually have to step into the presidency, there’s been a much bigger spotlight on her record than there otherwise might be. Harris’s identity — she’s the first woman, first Black person and first South Asian person to hold the VP’s office — has also contributed to an unprecedented level of attention relative to her predecessors, historians told Vox.

To better understand Harris’s performance as vice president, and what to make of these critiques, Vox spoke to more than two dozen sources, including White House officials, top Democratic strategists, activists, and academic experts. The White House did not respond to a request for comment and the vice president’s office pointed to a public statement from press secretary Kirsten Allen, who highlighted what Harris has done so far in a Twitter thread.

The conversations revealed four things fueling the criticisms against Harris. First, she’s had a few early public missteps and gaffes. Second, there are lingering questions about how she’s defined her role as vice president. Third, Harris has been held to a higher standard than other VPs, given both her identity and the expectation she may succeed Biden (either imminently or in 2028.) And fourth, some of the criticisms against Harris have overlooked the inherent limitations of the vice presidency.

In response to her detractors, Harris’s supporters note that she’s had several big accomplishments — including serving as the administration’s lead on reproductive rights — that have been overlooked, and they raise another issue: that there’s an outsize focus on her due to racism and sexism.

Ultimately, there are valid critiques of Harris that speak directly to how she would lead as president, and how responsive a Democratic Party led by her could be. At the same time, the discourse on her record doesn’t always capture the full scope of what she’s achieved in the role, or the nuances of the job itself.

The critiques of Harris, briefly explained

Questions about Harris’s effectiveness as a spokesperson reached their peak early during a June 2021 interview with NBC News’s Lester Holt, when she was repeatedly pressed about going to the southern US border during a visit to Guatemala, and offered a confusing response.

“At some point, you know, we are going to the border. We’ve been to the border. So this whole thing about the border, we’ve been to the border. We’ve been to the border,” Harris said when asked about the issue. At the time, Harris had not yet visited as vice president, prompting Holt to note, “You haven’t.”

Since then, other Harris statements have been pilloried. In October 2022, the Daily Show mocked her as serving up a “word salad” when discussing climate change or talking about broadband access.

Harris’s stronger rhetorical performances, like an address about the urgent need for police reform at the funeral for Tyre Nichols, or a fiery speech that marked the 50th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, haven’t received as much attention. This has helped calcify some Democrats’ perception that she’s a poor public speaker. “It doesn’t help that she’s not [that] adept as a communicator,” Jacquelyn Bettadapur, a former head of Georgia’s Cobb County Democrats, told the Washington Post in January, for example.

Beyond questions about these public appearances, critics claim that they don’t know what Harris has done — and that she needs to carve out a niche. “She has to find an issue she owns,” a Democratic strategist told the Hill in January. “She’s not the Recovery Act person or the COVID person or the voting rights person. She could be the champion of women’s rights. But she and her team have to be dogged in approaching that.”

White House officials note that Harris has led both publicly and privately on reproductive rights and voting rights, pointing to the 40 public events she’s held on the former and the 60 engagements she’s had on the latter. And that she’s launched a new effort to address the root causes of migration from Central America.

Still, for some, confusion about Harris’s contributions seems to be driving disenchantment with her vice presidency. “I think some Democrats are disappointed. There was a lot of excitement around her candidacy and the historic nature of her candidacy. And since she’s taken office, that excitement has fallen flat,” says Carly Cooperman, a Democratic strategist.

Staff departures and statements from anonymous sources have also fueled longstanding concerns about Harris’s management skills. In July 2021, former staffers, including some from her time as California’s attorney general, anonymously complained to Business Insider about what they described as a difficult work environment. And amid a presidential campaign that reportedly had some top-level management issues, Harris’s state operations director cited poor staff treatment as a reason for her decision to resign in late 2019.

In June 2021, roughly six months after inauguration, a person with direct knowledge of the office told Politico that it was “not a healthy environment and people often feel mistreated.” This included a culture of blame that stemmed from the top, the person said.

In December 2021, chief spokesperson Symone Sanders, and three other staffers left their roles. And since then, any personnel changes that have occurred have been put under a microscope.

The White House has argued that these departures are standard for roles that are fast-paced and susceptible to burnout. Former staffers who immediately transitioned from the campaign to the administration, for example, said that they needed a break from the constant grind or wanted to spend more time with their families. Multiple former staffers also told Vox that Harris held staffers to a high standard, but was a fair boss.

Harris’s office also isn’t the only one to have senior staff depart after one or two years. The Biden White House overall has seen 8 percent of senior staff leave in the first year and 32 percent leave in the second year, according to an analysis by Brookings Institution fellow Kathryn Dunn Tenpas, a turnover rate on par with that of President George W. Bush’s and President Bill Clinton’s. Vice President Mike Pence’s team also saw several high-level departures in his first year including the exodus of his chief counsel, chief of staff, domestic policy adviser, and press secretary.

Kelly Dittmar, a political science professor at Rutgers, said it was vital to hold elected officials and lawmakers accountable for how they treat their staff. But she added that women, particularly women of color, faced outsize attention for issues related to management. “We see women who are managers in these roles, who get scrutiny of treatment of staff and turnover,” says Dittmar. “That’s a fair critique, but are we making the same critique of Mike Pence, of Joe Biden, of anyone who’s holding these roles?”

There’s a looming question posed by Biden’s age

Harris isn’t the first vice president to make public missteps. During his time as vice president, Biden, a self-proclaimed “gaffe machine,” was constantly making life difficult for his administration.

She is, however, different from other vice presidents in that she’s serving alongside the oldest president ever. Biden will turn 81 this November. Trump was 72 at this point in his presidency; Obama was 49. Biden’s advanced age puts pressure on Harris: perhaps more so than any vice president in recent history, there’s a real chance she’ll need to step into the role of president.

That’s led to her being evaluated not just as a vice president, but as a potential president. But the vice presidency isn’t set up to spotlight presidential skills — it’s a support role, at best.

“I think it’s nearly impossible as a vice president to use the position to your political advantage in a calculated way,” says Kate Andersen Brower, a journalist and author of First in Line, a book on the vice presidency. “The most successful modern vice presidents, Dick Cheney and Joe Biden, were devoted to the presidents they served.”

Despite the Biden administration’s attempts to elevate Harris by referring to the executive branch as the “Biden-Harris administration,” achievements like the Inflation Reduction Act tend to be solely attributed to Biden. That doesn’t mean Harris had nothing to do with those successes, as White House officials repeatedly pointed out in interviews.

Biden’s outgoing Labor Secretary Marty Walsh, for instance, told Vox, “When you think about all these legislative pieces that were passed in Congress, the vice president was part of the conversations with the president, with the Cabinet, whether it was the infrastructure bill, or the IRA, or the CHIPS bill.”

Other officials stressed that Harris pushed people internally to consider the full range of responses to issues that had no hope of legislative solutions, like the end of Roe. “She’s been the one who is always asking the question, ‘Have we thought of everything? Are we doing everything we can, you know, running down every policy?’” one official said, adding that she was deeply involved in discussions about executive actions on reproductive rights.

Outside groups that work on voting rights and reproductive rights offered similar thoughts: “What I don’t think she gets enough credit for is all the work she’s doing behind the scenes. And in some ways that’s the role of the VP,” says LaTosha Brown, a cofounder of Black Voters Matter, who pointed to Harris wielding her influence to make sure voting rights stayed a priority inside the White House and on Capitol Hill.

But because she is a second-in-command, doing much of her work “behind the scenes,” some of these contributions have been less visible. Needing to serve as the tie-breaking vote in the Senate, until recently, also meant that she’s been tied to DC and unable to travel more widely.

There have been some vice presidents who have stepped out of the traditional support role and taken more obvious control of an issue. Vice President Dick Cheney, a former secretary of defense, for instance, had so much influence on the war on terror and national security that he was seen as running a shadow government at times.

For a VP to take on such a prominent position is uncommon, however. Biden was perhaps more typical, serving as a key congressional liaison during the Obama administration. Harris, experts say, is an important envoy on the issue of reproductive rights, including rallying voters ahead of the midterms. However, that role doesn’t give her the sort of concrete legislative victories Biden’s work on the Hill gave him during the Obama era, like the passage and implementation of the administration’s Recovery Act stimulus package.

As a woman, and a woman of color, Harris also faces standards that other vice presidents have not. “There were a lot of expectations heaped on her as the first woman, the first Black person, the first Asian person in this job,” says University of Maryland public policy professor Niambi Carter.

Those expectations have been evident in the volume of negative stories she’s faced, the response to her gaffes, as well as gendered and racist attacks against her. Republicans, for instance, have repeatedly tried to paint her as the cause of problems along the border, even though she’s not singularly responsible for these policies. Both the attacks and the heightened scrutiny Harris has encountered are classic examples of misogynoir, a compounded form of misogyny and racism that Black women face, as Vox’s Fabiola Cineas has previously reported.

“I just can’t recall a single story that’s been written about her predecessors at the volume and persistent basis that she’s seen,” said Laphonza Butler, the president of Emily’s List and an adviser for Harris’s 2019 presidential campaign.

When it comes to Harris’s approach to the role itself, there’s a constant catch-22, former staffers say. If she is too vocal and visible, coverage would suggest that she’s trying to control the presidency, something her predecessor Cheney was accused of. If she’s not visible enough, coverage focuses on what she’s not doing, as is her problem now. If she picked a single policy lane, they say, she’d be perceived as unable to handle issues outside that subject.

The vice presidency comes with its own limitations

Harris’s supporters have one consistent rebuttal to her critics: stop treating the vice presidency as something that it’s not. “I actually think they’re kind of funny,” said Walsh. “Anyone who’s being critical of this vice president could be critical of any vice president for what their role is.”

Modern vice presidents typically follow the approach to the job pioneered by Vice President Walter Mondale, who worked under President Jimmy Carter in the 1970s, according to Joel Goldstein, a law professor at Saint Louis University who’s written a book on the vice presidency. Goldstein said Mondale created “a vision of the vice president as an across-the-board adviser and troubleshooter.”

Those who’ve worked in the White House say that’s what Harris is for Biden. “I think that the president, in my experience, sort of recognizes the comparative advantages that the two of them have, and has in the past sought out and taken to heart the vice president’s counsel on a wide range of different issues,” says one former White House official.

Stepping into such a role, however, creates an awkward tension between being vice president and bolstering your own political prospects down the line. There’s a reason only three former vice presidents have been elected president in modern times, despite more than a few attempts. In some ways, a VP job is the ideal springboard for future political ambitions given both the experience and exposure; Biden and Vice President Al Gore are among those who’ve tried to use it in this way. In others, it’s a very limiting job, because it’s a role with little opportunity to tout your own accomplishments.

Harris does have accomplishments under her belt, like launching and overseeing a program known as Central America Forward, which includes helping secure over $4 billion in investment commitments from businesses in hopes of improving living conditions in the “Northern Triangle” countries, and reducing the number of US-bound migrants from the region. She’s also been engaging in high-profile diplomacy abroad, and has been credited with mobilizing women, voters of color, and young voters over the last two cycles.

Barring any major changes, and based on comments Democrats have made to the press, as well as the general perception of her — according to the FiveThirtyEight polling aggregator, her approval rating is at 38 percent as of March 24 — those accomplishments seem unlikely to clear the way for her to clinch the presidential nomination unchallenged in the future, however.

“Look, for the nomination, there is absolutely no way that the ambitious Democrats who ran in 2020, or those who want to run for the first time, will stand by and say, ‘Well, it’s her turn,’” says University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato. “She will have to work for it, no question about it.”

As of now, though, two things can be true. Like any public official, Harris can and should be held accountable for her record and how she operates her office. But she’s also getting judged more harshly than her predecessors, and facing unreasonable expectations that the limitations of her role prevent her from meeting.

It’s Logan Roy’s birthday party and he’ll further alienate his kids if he wants to.

Note: This article contains spoilers for several Succession episodes, particularly season four, episode one, “The Munsters.”

The first episode of the fourth and final season of HBO’s Succession finds us — not for the first time — at the birthday celebration of Logan Roy (Brian Cox). This year, it’s not clear who organized it. Not his wife, Marcia (Hiam Abbass), who left him in season two and is now “in Milan shopping, forever.” Maybe it’s Kerry (Zoe Winters) — the new girlfriend who introduces herself as Logan’s “friend, assistant, and advisor.” Or perhaps Connor (Alan Ruck), the only one of his children that he’s currently on speaking terms with, planned it. The party looks more like a work function or a political fundraiser than a birthday celebration — adult kids Kendall (Jeremy Strong), Roman (Kieran Culkin), and Shiv (Sarah Snook) are conspicuously absent, and we don’t recognize most of the people in attendance. And Logan is miserable. “Munsters,” he grumbles, eyeballing the guests. “Meet the fucking Munsters.”

It’s a not-so-subtle callback to the very first episode, which began at Logan’s 80th birthday. Marcia has planned a “surprise” party for him. He’s surrounded by his family. Even Kendall, who’s trying to close a media acquisition deal that he hopes will please his father, takes a breather from the touch-and-go negotiations to join the festivities. Of course, it’s not all sunshine and cake — when is it ever where Logan’s involved? At the party, Logan tries to steamroll his kids into accepting a change to the trust that will give his wife Marcia more power — but there’s no doubt that the billionaire CEO of Waystar Royco is enveloped by people who care about him and know him intimately.

If Logan is having a bad birthday in the season four premiere, however, that’s of his own making. In last season’s finale, Kendall, Shiv, and Roman tried to stop him from selling Waystar to the streaming video company GoJo. First, they tried to force his hand. When that didn’t work, Roman pleaded with him, invoking love as a reason why a parent who has all the power in the world might still stand down, show compassion, and not crush his children. “You come for me with love?” Logan scoffed ferociously. “You bust in here, guns in hand, and now you found they’ve turned to fucking sausages. You talk about love?”

In denying the possibility of his kids ever taking over the family business, Logan crossed the Rubicon. This time, the Roy children don’t even deign to show up for their beloved father’s birthday. On what looks like the opposite side of the country, Kendall and his siblings are strategizing for the launch of their own venture, a brand-spanking new digital media outlet called The Hundred that promises to be “Substack meets MasterClass meets The Economist meets The New Yorker.” A lot has changed since Italy and the end of season three, where the kids were left sick to their stomachs at the thought that their own father would lock up Waystar forever and throw away the key. They’ve all written resignation letters for Waystar and seem (somewhat) excited about starting their own company as they prepare to meet with potential investors.

Macall B. Polay/HBO

Succession has always been largely about the ruthless competition between the Roy siblings — scions of a powerful media mogul inspired by real-life media families such as the Murdochs — to inherit the top position at Waystar from their aging father. Kendall, Shiv, and Roman have each suffered a litany of betrayals, manipulations, and cruelties from Logan; trauma that would be worth it in the end, the children told themselves, if Logan chose one of them to follow in his footsteps. That all seems to have changed, perhaps irrevocably, in season four. (For a more complete backstory on the Roys, check out Vox’s pre-season preview.)

The trio, who are usually at each other’s throats, are suspiciously in sync. Throughout the episode they’re affectionate; they still rib each other, but it doesn’t have quite the same bite. They actually listen to what the others have to say, instead of waiting for the perfect moment to inject a devastating insult. “Let a thousand sunflowers bloom, Romie,” Kendall says early on — meaning, let’s throw all our ideas at the wall. It’s not clear if he recognizes that this phrase (attributed to Mao Zedong) is an echo of something his father said in season three, egging on his terrified advisors to suggest someone to replace him temporarily: “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” Logan tells them, though it underscores how little Logan actually listens to other people. The kids, on the other hand, might earnestly be equals in this new partnership and already look lighter now that they’re no longer under Logan’s thumb. It’s jarring to see and also a little sad — a glimpse of who these people might have been if they hadn’t grown up the way they had.

The kids bag a minor victory against their father

Then Shiv gets a call from Tom (Matthew Macfadyen) that sets off the drama of episode one. He gives his estranged wife a heads-up that he’s just had a drink with Naomi Pierce (Annabelle Dexter-Jones), who is not only a cousin of Pierce Global Media owner Nan Pierce (Cherry Jones) — the Roys tried to buy PGM in season two — but also Kendall’s ex. Tom makes it sound like it was a date, all while claiming it was not a date. He’s toying with her a bit, which is understandable considering how much of a head start Shiv has had in the “play mind games with my spouse” department. It works, momentarily, until Shiv realizes what “a drink” actually means: Logan is trying to buy PGM again.

As a reminder, here’s the latest on the business side of things in Succession-world: Logan is, pending a shareholder vote, selling Waystar to tech company GoJo, but retaining control of ATN, their broadcast news network. In season two, the Roys spent a lot of energy trying to buy PGM, a rival, but it fell through as the Pierces realized the Roys (and especially Logan) were toxic and about to be embroiled in scandal.

Back at the birthday party, Tom and Logan confirm that they’re once again close to a deal with PGM. This time around, things aren’t going well at PGM, apparently. Nan seems to have lost interest in running the business, according to whispers from her own family members. “Savages,” Logan says without a hint of irony. “They eat their own.”

Logan, ever the doting father, asks after his children. “Have you heard from the rats?” he asks Tom. Tom lies that he hasn’t, and then in his typical unsubtle way probes Logan about whether their relationship might change if he and Shiv divorce. “Whatever happens, we’ll always be good, right?” he asks, making the mistake of so many Roy children in seeking reassurance from a family patriarch who purposely ensures they’re never on sure footing.

Just a whisper of what their father is up to, and the kids are back in his orbit, ready to abandon The Hundred to make a rival bid for PGM. They’re all addicts of the family feud and can’t seem to resist scoring on their dad. Roman worries about his siblings’ vengeful motivations: Kendall wants to get back at Logan. Shiv wants to get back at Tom. Roman, as usual, is the only one who “doesn’t want to fuck anyone.”

Kendall leans on Roman’s penchant for mischief. “Just think about how fucking funny it would be if we screwed Dad over his decadeslong obsession,” he points out. Unbeknownst to them, they actually do have the upper hand for once. Logan is downright despondent over his absentee children and also angry that he misses their presence.

Back at the party, Kerry calls Roman, and the kids are absolutely vicious to her, but she suffers the humiliation of asking them to give their father a call. They want their father to call them, but that’s unlikely. Kerry says she could maybe get him to text a request for a call. It’s just one more business-like negotiation to the Roys, yet another game of one-upmanship.

Claudette Barius/HBO

After Logan is informed there’s a rival bid for PGM, some of his verve returns — there’s work to do. Logan’s war council — Gerri (J. Smith-Cameron), Karl (David Rasche), and Frank (Peter Friedman) — soon suss out that it’s the kids, but how did they find out about the PGM bid? Tom tries to cast off any suspicion, but his tip to Shiv is probably going to come back and bite him in the ass.

Kendall, Shiv, and Roman travel to Nan Pierce’s home. Naomi, who is now rocking a wolf cut, tells them Nan needs five minutes because she has a headache. In other words, she’s spotted that the Roys will pay any price to destroy one another and plans on milking every cent out of it. Nan also worries that one of the new owners of PGM might be married to Tom, who heads its rival, ATN. Without missing a beat, Shiv says, “I’m getting a divorce.” It doesn’t seem like she’s announced it to anyone else. Kendall looks surprised.

The bidding war for PGM begins, with each side trying to figure out how high the other has gone. Logan low-balls. The kids go much higher, offering a conversation-ending number: $10 billion. (“Eight, nine,” Nan hints earlier in the episode, “who knows what someone will say next?” “9b?” Roman guesses.) Logan is told that Nan is not accepting any more bids. “Tell them I’ll go up,” Logan says. “She says they’re content,” replies Tom. Logan can’t fathom how someone could be content when there’s an offer for a bigger number.

Logan finally gets on the phone with his kids. “Congratulations on saying the biggest number, you fucking morons,” he tells them. The kids know that this is a concession, of sorts. Shiv and Kendall actually do a fist bump, while Roman looks relieved.

Shiv and Tom call it quits

At night, Shiv returns to a dark New York apartment. Her dog barely recognizes her. We learn that Shiv and Tom aren’t living together anymore. Shiv is full of rancor, needling Tom with crass questions regarding his love life. She’s jealous, and has been all day, of the other women Tom may or may not be sleeping with. She may also be on a mission to push forward the divorce she promises Nan earlier, which Tom doesn’t know about. But Tom is in a rare moment of blunt honesty. “Do you really want to get into a full accounting of all the pain in our marriage?” he asks gently. Shiv has no comeback to that.

Tom has mostly been a buffoon on Succession; he’s a social climber who has weaseled his way into one of the most powerful families in America, and his usual obsequiousness is often played off as comic relief. But his hurt here is palpable, and his sincerity is clear. No one can doubt that Tom really loves Shiv, even if part of what he loves is her power and status — and maybe Shiv realizes now, when it could be too late, that what she feels is love, too. Why else would his betrayal still hurt so much that she can’t even talk about it? Tom wants to discuss things, but she shuts it down. She doesn’t want to probe through her feelings. “I think it might be time for you and I to move on,” she says, holding back tears. Tom doesn’t beg and plead. They both lie to each other, claiming they gave it their best try.

Logan doesn’t find life funny anymore

At the end of a very long, strange day, Logan is still up watching TV. He calls Cyd Peach (Jeannie Berlin), an executive at ATN, to complain about the channel’s late-night coverage. “Are you losing it, Cyd?” he asks.

It’s a question Logan would be better off posing to himself. During his party, he escapes the apartment for a lonely evening walk in the park, his bodyguard Colin (Scott Nicholson) trailing behind him. At a diner, Logan tells Colin that he’s his best pal. He’s suddenly an old man bitter about the turning of seasons. “Everything I try to do, people turn against me,” he says. “Nothing tastes like it used to, does it? Nothing’s the same as it was.”

It’s his birthday, and the man normally allergic to existential waxing asks his employee, “You think there’s anything after all this?”

“I don’t know,” replies Colin.

“We don’t know. We can’t know,” says Logan. “But I’ve got my suspicions.” It’s the first time we’ve seen Logan meditate on the reality of nearing the end of his life, and what his legacy might be. He’s shown before that he doesn’t like to think of the past, but in this episode, he’s full of nostalgia for the way things were before. In an interlude during the PGM bidding war, Logan abruptly says to the room, “Nobody tells jokes anymore, do they?” Karl, Frank, Tom, Gerri — a room full of sycophants — look at him like deer caught in headlights.

“Come on, roast me!” he orders. The king wants a jester. He turns to Greg.

“You’re mean,” Greg offers feebly. “You’re a mean old man, you’re a mean old bastard. And you scare the life out of folks, that’s your thing — you’re scaring me right now, and that’s why I don’t even know what to do.” Logan mocks Greg, pushing him to go further.

“Where are your kids?” Greg asks. “Where’s all your kids, Uncle Logan, on your big birthday?”

It’s a direct hit, but Logan knows how to hit harder. He throws Greg’s absent father right at his grand-nephew’s face. It’s just too easy. No one can wound Logan the way he can wound his peons, no one can beat him at a game he invented: When they go low, he goes to the ninth circle of hell. It’s a place reserved for very few people — and he wonders why he feels so alone.

Though the US is pushing to intervene, international meddling hasn’t helped Haiti.

Gang violence has killed more than 530 Haitians this year and 187 in the past two weeks alone, as the security and political situation in the Caribbean nation continues to devolve. Decades of corrupt leadership and weakened democratic institutions — supported by the United States — have brought a state of terror and lawlessness to Haiti without an achievable political solution or even an end to the violence in sight.

The violence, concentrated in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince and the surrounding areas, is caused by political and economic factors including the decimation of the country’s largest economic driver, agriculture and subsequent urban migration, small arms proliferation, and a political class willing to weaponize Haiti’s struggles to cling to power. The person nominally in charge of the country, acting Prime Minister and President Ariel Henry, lacks a true mandate to power and has proven incapable of managing the chaos, instead proposing to deploy the country’s young and fragile military to maintain order.

Haiti has faced serious and compounding crises, including a devastating 2010 earthquake, floods, cholera outbreaks, hurricanes, and corrupt, dictatorial, and incompetent leaders. But the current crisis affects everyday life to a perilous degree; ordinary Haitians are afraid to leave their homes even to access food and water. A fluid network of violent gangs controls nearly every aspect of life for thousands of people, government officials are either beholden to the gangs or attempting to use them for their own self-interest, and the international community has proven unwilling or unable to help Haitians, both those who leave and those who stay, find peace and safety.

The thread running through many of these crises is external, and particularly originating with international interference in Haiti’s affairs, dating back to its independence in 1804. As is the case in many nations in Latin America and the Caribbean, the US has repeatedly tried to sway or command Haitian politics to its own liking, with devastating results for Haitians themselves and the country overall. The actions of the broader international community, too, have often been cruel, incompetent, or both, starting with French insistence on reparations from Haiti post-independence.

Though conversations about further US intervention in Haiti are already ongoing, continued interference is unlikely to produce a stable, flourishing democracy. Just last week, US President Joe Biden and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau met to discuss, among other issues, what to do about the violence in Haiti. While the US is pressuring Canada to lead an international military coalition to try and control the violence, Trudeau has not warmed to the idea given how poorly previous interventions have gone, according to the Washington Post.

The rise of the criminal gangs, explained

Violence by groups and gangs connected to the state is not new in Haiti, but a number of factors have contributed to the gangs’ power at the present moment. Political leaders as far back as François “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Haiti’s populist elected leader-turned-dictator from 1951 through 1971, have formed and utilized armed groups external to national security forces for protection or to enforce their own agendas and self-interest, according to an October report from the Global Initiative against Transnational Organized Crime.

The present gangs are primarily affiliated with two groups, G-Pep and G9, which fight for control of Port-au-Prince. An estimated 60 percent of the capital is under the control of these groups, which terrorize civilians not only with threats of murder, but also abduction for ransom, extortion, and sexual violence, often at random.

The current gang structure arguably began under the auspices of former leader Jean-Bertrande Aristide, Daniel Foote, the former US special envoy to Haiti who resigned in 2021 over the Biden administration’s policy of deporting Haitian migrants, told Vox in an interview.

“Aristide started them on purpose in the early 1980s, as a voice, as a way to get some power” for ordinary Haitians, Foote said, “and they morphed over the years.”

Aristide formed armed groups called the Chimères, which offered protection rackets. In the intervening two and a half decades, former soldiers from the Haitian military (disbanded under Aristide’s second period in office, from 1994 to 1996) joined armed groups; during the earthquake in 2010, imprisoned gang members were able to escape, either rejoining old neighborhood gangs or forming new groups within camps intended for people displaced by the natural disaster. United Nations peacekeeping troops, stationed in the country in some capacity from 1993 till 2017, failed to contain the violence or stop the gangs from developing and growing — all the while engaging in multiple scandals including sexual violence.

Moïse, who came to power in 2017 after a controversial election, allegedly operated in concert with the gangs, with members of his government “allegedly assist[ing] in massacres by providing gangs with government support in attacks in Port-au-Prince,” according to the Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.

Foote said that Moïse aligned with G9, who worked as a security force for him until his assassination. Afterwards, the US imposed a de facto prime minister in Henry.

“He doesn’t have a great relationship with the gangs, because he’s kind of a clown,” Foote said of Henry. “They in several instances have made them pay him a bunch of money in order for him to attend an event or hold a ceremony — and then they won’t let him do it.”

The international role in Haiti’s crises can’t be ignored

Since Haiti established an independent nation in 1804, international actors have imposed grief and suffering on the nation, instigating crises or exacerbating existing ones. French slaveholders demanded reparations amounting to billions of dollars in today’s money, which Haiti was unable to pay off till well into the 20th century, despite its agricultural riches.

As Marlene Daut, a professor of French and African diaspora studies at Yale University, explained in a recent article for the New Yorker, Haiti was dealt another serious economic blow in 1981 during an outbreak of swine fever in the Dominican Republic, which occupies the island of Hispaniola alongside Haiti. US officials, agencies, and international actors like the International Development Bank worried that the disease would infect the US hog population and pressured Haitians to kill their prized Creole hogs, the backbone of Haiti’s agricultural sector.

The Creole pigs “once served as bank accounts for Haitian families,” Daut wrote, describing a scene from the 2009 documentary “Poto Mitan: Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy.” A family with a fat, healthy Creole pig “could pay for food, clothing, and education” before the 1981 swine fever outbreak.

After Haitians were forced to kill their pigs, they were promised USAID compensation funds and replacement hogs from North America; however, the animals were unable to survive in the new climate. The country’s pork industry collapsed, Creole pigs went extinct, and Haiti’s economy changed forever, displacing people from the countryside into Port-au-Prince, entrenching economic instability, and creating the overcrowding and unemployment conditions that have allowed gang violence to proliferate.

The international community’s meddling in political affairs, too, has helped lead to this moment, Foote said.

“From the time the US Marines landed in 1915 until today — with a couple of exceptions — the US has chosen every leader, in different ways. And each time we do that, Haiti gets marginally worse because [the leaders] come in and turn into corrupt, if they weren’t already, knuckleheads, and then they start running a kleptocracy,” Foote said. “This is generational, this has been pent up for decades.”

Both Foote and Daut point to the Montana Accord, a document written by Haitians themselves outlining a political and institutional path forward after Moïse’s assassination, as a possible alternative to the Henry government and, potentially, the current state of terror. The accord, which was unique in unifying disparate aspects of Haitian society, chose a caretaker government, offered a plan for elections no later than this year, and demanded an end to foreign interference in Haiti’s domestic affairs.

An end to the present crisis and the beginning of a livable future, as Daut points out in her New Yorker piece, is complex, but both are possible with some creative steps, such as moving the government from Port-au-Prince to Cap-Hatïen, which could destabilize the gangs’ structure and help dissolve the government’s relationship to the gangs. But it also requires financial investment to allow Haiti’s economy to grow on its own terms, as well as investment in Haiti’s infrastructure and its young people.

Instead, there are calls for US and Canadian military intervention in Haiti, both from external and internal actors, while both the US and Canada crack down on asylum seekers — including those fleeing the violence in Haiti.

A non-stressful approach to figuring out what guides you.

It might have been a minute since you paused to consider your life’s purpose — if you ever have at all. It can be an overwhelming question, lofty and existential, and according to the people who study it, one that is frequently misunderstood.

“‘Purpose’ is conflated with lots of other words,” says William Damon, a professor of education at Stanford University, “like ‘meaning’ and ‘passion.’” Purpose, however, is something different — it’s broader than a goal, but it’s the guiding motivation that gives your life a sense of direction.

According to Damon, a life purpose has three components: It’s a long-term calling, act, or way of life that interests you; it’s something you have some competence in; and it makes a marginal difference in the world. Striving to be the best parent you can is a purpose — raising kids to become caring, respectful, and happy adults is your way of making a material impact — whereas wanting to make a lot of money with the sole intention of satisfying your every whim is not. It’s also common to have multiple purposes in life, Damon says: Your faith, your family, the satisfaction you get from your job are all common sources.

Considering your purpose may seem like a project for the privileged, that you must have enough time and money to seriously consider your values. However, purpose can relate to practical matters, such as keeping your family safe, as well as the broader contours of your interests. You can work toward your purpose in incremental ways without sacrificing resources.

If you struggle to define your purpose, to clearly articulate the thing — or things — you excel in that also leaves a mark on society, don’t fret. In his 20 years of research on life purpose, Damon finds most people falter for a bit before landing on the activity that lights their fire — about a quarter of participants in almost all of his studies did not have a purpose, he says. But gradually, he adds, over time, people do become more purposeful. “Out of all the things I’ve studied in terms of capacities and skills that young people develop,” Damon says, “purpose is the slowest one because it doesn’t really come to fruition until for most people until the late 20s, early 30s.”

Purpose isn’t fixed, either. As your life and values change, your purpose may, too. Throughout their lifespan, people’s purpose shifts according to their circumstances. Those parents who found purpose rearing their children may feel untethered and without meaning once they become empty-nesters. Or, an adult in their 40s may realize their creative hobby brings joy to an audience beyond their inner circle and decide to devote their time to sharing their talents.

Having a purpose in life isn’t simply a fanciful pursuit. Research has found that having purpose can prolong life, reduce depressive symptoms, and improve life satisfaction. Whether you’re faltering or flourishing, you can cultivate a purpose — or align your interests to live more purposefully. All it takes is some mining of the soul.

How to cultivate purpose in your own life

Thinking as broadly as possible, ask yourself some potentially challenging questions. What do you care about? What do you hope to accomplish? What difference do you want to make? What do you have to offer? What skills do you have that support the issues you’re passionate about? “It’s an ongoing process of reflecting on the things that you want to address in your life, the things you want to accomplish, or make progress toward in your life, and thinking about what you can uniquely contribute to that issue,” says Kendall Cotton Bronk, a professor of psychology at Claremont Graduate University. “And it doesn’t happen overnight.”

As counterintuitive as it may sound, purpose shouldn’t be something achievable, says Patrick Hill, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Washington University in St. Louis. Goals, even long-term ones, are still more short-term than purpose, which is a lifelong framework under which to organize those goals, Hill says. “If your purpose in life was to perform on Broadway and the first time you perform on Broadway, you’ve succeeded,” he says. “Then it’s like, what do I do now?” Instead, take that specific goal, such as performing on Broadway, and think bigger. Instead, your purpose may be to share unique and diverse stories with a wider audience.

In a 2010 study, Hill developed four categories of life purposes: creative, prosocial, financial, and personal recognition. For example, people with creative purposes are fulfilled by various artistic pursuits throughout their lives — performing in school plays as a kid, writing for the college newspaper, or pursuing a career as a copywriter. Prosocially focused people have goals of helping others, people with financial purposes are motivated by economic well-being, and personal recognition orientation is marked by a desire for respect from colleagues and peers. While the means of living out your purpose changes depending on your age and circumstances, Hill found that the same motivation drives you. “Whatever your purpose in life is, you’re probably going to pursue it and progress towards it in different ways across the lifespan,” Hill says. “Which doesn’t necessarily mean your purpose has changed, but just the way that you engage with it changed.”

One of Hill’s recent studies outlined three ways people nurture their purpose. Some are proactive in their quest: they define a goal — to mentor others, for example — and work toward achieving it. Others stumble onto their raison d’être and upon deeper reflection, realize their actions have been serving their purpose all along. People also take inspiration from their peers and attempt to pursue a passion in the same manner. While these frameworks aren’t necessarily prescriptive in nature, Cotton Bronk says, intentional thinking may lead you down one of these paths of discovery.

Your job can be purposeful, but not your sole purpose

One of the most common ways of living out purpose is through work. This isn’t inherently a bad thing: When people pursue their passions, they tend to end up in jobs they enjoy and give them meaning. But because American society values work above leisure, art, and community, people tend to lose themselves in labor. “If your job is your sole source of meaning and identity, and you lose it, what’s left?” says Simone Stolzoff, author of the forthcoming book The Good Enough Job: Reclaiming Life from Work.

Untangling work from purpose can be difficult. For instance, if your purpose is to support your family, working an unfulfilling yet well-paying job is still meeting your purpose, Damon says. You should never feel ashamed for trying to get by. But if you can, try to foster purpose during non-working hours. Stolzoff stresses the importance of engaging in meaningful activities outside of work: coffee dates with friends, tending to a community garden, playing on a recreational sports league, exploring your faith. Regardless if your job gives you purpose or if it’s simply a way of funding the rest of your life, you can meet your need for passion (which is not the same as purpose, but is good to have) outside of work through enjoyable hobbies, like reading, knitting, or playing music — all energizing activities, but ones you do for yourself, and not for the greater good.

It is possible to tie your job to a greater purpose. In a study of cleaners in a hospital, those who saw themselves as integral to the patients’ healing process found more meaning in their jobs than those who did not. “Connecting what you do to a greater sense of ‘why’ can often make the daily tasks and fluctuations of your job more pleasurable,” Stolzoff says. “Just be clear about why you care about what you’re doing, and how those values are reflected in your behaviors, and how you choose to spend your time.”

Because many people do find purpose in their work, retirement or periods of unemployment can be unmooring. During this phase of life, think back on the core purpose your job fulfilled — perhaps educating people — and find ways to achieve that elsewhere, Damon says, like substitute teaching, babysitting grandchildren, or volunteering at a youth organization.

Ways to pursue purpose regardless of your circumstances

So how do you nurture purpose when life is always changing? If you’re in the middle of a major move, in an unfulfilling job, or are dealing with new circumstances — like parenthood or retirement — living purposefully can seem like a daunting task. Hill recommends paying attention to the activities in your day-to-day life that motivate you, excite you, or make you feel goal-oriented. “Organize your life in a way that allows for you to make those things more habitual,” Hill says. “Ultimately, that can be a way to help people think about developing a purpose from the ground up, eventually.”

If you struggle to identify anything that enlivens you at work or at home, take it as a sign that you may not have purpose in this domain, Hill says. You shouldn’t quit your job if you find no excitement in it, but how can you manufacture motivation in other areas of your life? Maybe that means joining an activist organization that fights for systemic change or teaching piano lessons to neighborhood kids.

Since purpose tends to materialize well into adulthood, Damon suggests looking back on previous moments in your life when you had a sense of fulfillment: when you were captain of the basketball team, when you helped a lost tourist find their hotel, when you tutored your cousin in math. “It gives them clues about the kinds of experiences that offer them this satisfaction and what they’re capable of,” Damon says. How can you recreate these circumstances where you thrive within your current life?

Clearly defining the areas where you make the most impact can be difficult. Enlisting the help of trusted friends or loved ones gives you an objective view of your strengths, Cotton Bronk says. Try asking five people — mentors, colleagues, friends, family — three questions, she suggests: “What do you think I do particularly well?” “What do you think I really enjoy doing?” and “How do you think I will leave my mark?” Often, those in your inner circle can more easily identify your talents and passions than you can.

Cultivating a purpose and marching on the path of progress looks different for everyone. What you value and excel in will be unique to you and the various seasons of your life. Just make sure your purpose is what matters to you.

“The important part is that you’re actively choosing,” Stolzoff says. “Opposed to, as is all too often the case, inheriting the values of the institutions that we’re a part of. We start climbing ladders that we don’t actually want to be on, or playing games we don’t actually want to win because we haven’t taken the time to think critically about, what is it that I actually value?”

Five years later, David Hogg and Rep. Maxwell Frost reflect on the impact of the March for Our Lives demonstration in Washington, DC.

Last week marked the fifth anniversary of the 2018 March for Our Lives demonstration in Washington, DC.

The student-led demonstration brought the issue of mass shootings to the forefront of American conversation and reignited a longstanding debate on what to do about the pervasive issue of gun violence across the country.

Now, five years later, its first national organizing director, Maxwell Frost, is a first-term Congress member representing Florida’s 10th District.

Today, Explained hosts Noel King and Sean Rameswaram sat down with Frost and David Hogg, a co-founder of March for Our Lives. Hogg and Frost are part of America’s increasingly politically influential Gen Z generation. They shared what they think their generation cares about when it comes to gun violence, climate change, and the 2024 presidential election. Plus, Rep. Frost walks us through the details of a new bill he co-introduced with Sen. Chris Murphy, which would create the first federal office dedicated to gun violence prevention.

Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so find Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen.

Sean Rameswaram

How are you feeling right now about the five-year anniversary of the March for Our Lives?

David Hogg

Complicated. I wouldn’t say that I’m always hopeful by any means, considering what happens every day in this country with this issue. But I also am not entirely pessimistic either. How could you be? We were a group of high school students that started out five years ago, who many people said would never do anything and would never amount to anything. But now I’m sitting in this room with you all five years later, with the first member of Congress from our organization to be elected as the youngest member of Congress.

Maxwell Frost

You want to organize on the ground, but you want a movement that permeates the culture, bridges the gap between cool and consciousness, and builds an environment where people want to do it because it’s the thing to do or it’s cool or whatever. And that’s really what March for Our Lives did, especially that whole year. It was cool to go to the march. I remember going to mine and seeing a ton of people I didn’t see in a long time. They were like, “Yeah, I just felt like I had to be here. Like it’s the moment.” And that’s why I always say, the way you know the strength of a movement, it’s what they’re doing when no one gives a shit, when it’s not in the news, when no one cares. Because when it is on the news and people care, the way you organize the infrastructure you built, that’s what matters. And so that’s what we see March for Our Lives doing today,

Noel King

What was the objective five years ago? I mean, you have, as you say, millions of young people out in the streets. But at that point, you also need them to do something. What was it you were trying to get out of this moment?

David Hogg

One, it enabled us to help register voters. Two, it helped set the tone for a generation and a cultural shift in that generation to say, this is who we are. I think one of the most important things the marches have done is offer survivors solidarity and in knowing that they’re not alone. I think that’s one of the really hard things about this is survivors, because of the guilt that they feel, put so much pressure on themselves that they have to solve this that it crushes the movement because those people end up not being able to take care of themselves and they end up feeling crushed. When you’re there with your friends and your allies and you make new friends, you know that you’re not alone and you know that you can have the permission to step back when you need to rest. And it’s not reliant on any single one of us.

Noel King

March for Our Lives sent me and Sean this very tantalizing fact, which is that this movement has won the passage of 250-plus gun laws since it began. That’s an extraordinary number. What are those laws and where would we see them out in the wild?

David Hogg

One of the laws that we did pass after Parkland was the thing called an extremist protection order or a red flag law that enables you to disarm somebody that is a risk to themselves or others. An instance where this was actually used was for my own mom. Somebody threatened to kill my mom and sent her a death threat that said F with the NRA and you’ll be DOA. We used the law that we passed after Parkland to disarm that individual that lived, I think, only like 20 minutes away from us. That law has now been used at least, last I checked, I think it was around 9,000 times. There’s a lot of people, the detractors out there say, well, you know, gun laws don’t work. But the reality is no law is perfect. I will fully admit that. But, you know, that law may have helped prevent me from having to bury my own mom.

Sean Rameswaram

How do you go about taking credit for 250 laws when there’s been this preexisting movement for decades?

David Hogg

I would say that we are part of it and helping to reignite a movement that was already there before us, especially a movement pioneered by Black women in places like Jamaica, Queens, in New York City, like Erica Ford. I like to think that part of the change that March for Our Lives helped bring, from really the beginning when we started this work, was about making sure it’s not just about Parkland, it’s not just about Sandy Hook, or any community that goes through mass shootings. It’s about communities that go through all forms of gun violence, and not speaking for them, but making sure that people understand that they have always been in this conversation and they have to be part of the conversation. It can’t just be about how we stop gun violence inside of schools.

Noel King

Rep. Frost, I hear that you’re getting ready to introduce your first piece of legislation. Can you tell us what’s in it?

Maxwell Frost

We’re releasing a piece of legislation that’s bicameral, introduced in both the Senate and the House, with Sen. Chris Murphy, who I’ve known for a long time from my work going to the Sandy Hook vigils and everything. This is a piece of legislation that’s pretty simple. What it does is it creates a federal Office of Gun Violence Prevention, which is really important for many different reasons. Number one, the federal government does not have a coordinated approach to ending gun violence. And so what this would do is have a coordinating office department that works with DHS, ATF, HHS, all these different agencies to provide a coordinated response to ending gun violence that’s both preventative and reactionary and looks at the root causes and provides data for members of Congress. Most of the data and research that comes from this issue does not come from our government. It comes from outside organizations, third-party organizations, nonprofits. That’s important work but [government work is needed] for an issue that takes 100 lives a day. In this country, right now, the leading cause of death for children is gun violence. So this would be a federal coordinated approach to ending gun violence, looking at the causes, providing real data after these horrible situations happen. So that way members of Congress, state legislatures, municipal governments have real data from the government, so that way they can act upon it.

Sean Rameswaram

Do you have any idea how this is going to land?

Maxwell Frost

I think we have a really good opportunity to get this done, whether it’s through Congress or through executive action, because the president can also create the office himself. So we’re hoping that one of the two will end up happening.

Sean Rameswaram

What else is on Gen Z’s agenda?

Maxwell Frost

I don’t think Gen Z cares about different values or issues more than other Americans, right? If you were to ask people of past generations about moments that were defining for their generation, no matter who they are, you hear about the moon landing, post 9/11. Where the country came together for our generation, you ask them and you’re gonna hear Parkland, Pulse, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, death, death, death, trauma. It really changes the way a generation thinks about the issues because we’re kind of confused, like why are we still dealing with these issues? And we want to be a part of the solution. We’re not here to play the blame game.

I think we care about the existential climate crisis that we’re seeing the effects of. We care about ending gun violence because we see that young people are really at the front lines of this issue a lot of the time, especially when it comes to, yes, mass shootings, but also, unfortunately, what many folks call daily gun violence, that’s in a lot of our communities — especially Black and brown communities, that stems from underinvestment in our communities, poverty, and the economic status of a lot of our people. I think the age of the single-issue voter is kind of dying because young people really see things holistically and they really care about everything because they know everything is connected.

Noel King

In order to enact the agenda that you are talking about, a Democrat needs to be president of this country. Right now, two of the biggest threats to that happening in 2024 come from your home state — former President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis — who, Maxwell, you have accused of engaging in, um, fascism.

Maxwell Frost

Number one, I think Ron DeSantis is the greatest threat to democracy in this country right now. This governor took the New College of Florida, a small liberal arts college, less than 1,000 students, and he wants to make an example of them. So he abused his power as governor and completely took out the board of trustees, put a bunch of conservative lap dogs on it, fired the president of the university, and installed a new interim president who is the former Republican speaker of the House, who is not qualified to be the president of the university. DeSantis also changed the salary from $200,000 to $699,000 a year. Then the state allocated $15 million in like a few days to this university for “institutional changes,” which they’re going to use to market to a lot more conservative areas to change the demographics of the students. I say that to say, this is not something that governors do. He’s using his power to close down businesses and attack teachers. There’s this atmosphere of fear in, not just in Orlando, but across the entire state, because of what he’s doing.

Sean Rameswaram

What does it say to you guys that this individual you define as a fascist is exceedingly popular?

Maxwell Frost

We have to realize that a lot of these polls poll likely voters who are not the entire population of a state. I’m not saying he’s not super popular in the state of Florida, but there’s a difference between policy and politics. When you have enough money and when there’s voids in democratic organizing in a state, you’re able to shift the narrative. Most people would hear about permitless carry and over 70 percent of Floridians say, “No, that’s a stupid idea. We don’t want that.” But then a lot of the same people would say, “Yes, I want to vote for DeSantis.” It’s because he’s effective at separating those two things.

David Hogg

What’s happening is Republicans are doubling down on their efforts to fuel voter suppression to change who can vote, to change who the voters are instead of changing their policies. It’s going to backfire on them eventually when those demographics that they’re relying on die out because they are inherently older and our generation can come in to start replacing them.

Noel King

But Joe Biden does not represent your generation per se. Joe Biden is not a young progressive, and young progressives have argued he’s not even that progressive. We’re looking at a situation in which potentially the Democratic nominee is in his 80s. You are both in your 20s. Should Joe Biden run again or is it time for someone new, someone younger?

Maxwell Frost

I always have the same answer to this because I truly believe this. If the president wants to run again, which it seems like he does, I’m gonna support him. Do I agree with him on everything? No, I worked for Bernie Sanders in the primary. I’m definitely to the left of the president. But I’m very pleasantly surprised. The president just took this executive action on gun violence. He signed into law the bipartisan Safer Communities Act. Is it everything that we need to end gun violence? No, but it’s going to save lives. You look at something like Build Back Better — the fact that the president put that forward, free universal tuition, free college, two-year college for all of our people, free child care for all of our people. Everything that was in Build Back Better, I think if we would have passed it, Democrats would still have the House right now. I think we’ve seen a president that’s really surprised me as a young progressive. Do we agree on everything? No, but I’ll support him.

Sean Rameswaram

When you see President Biden approving new oil drilling in Alaska, do you feel like you can come out and speak out against him? Or is the race in 2024 too fragile to risk speaking ill of the sitting president?

Maxwell Frost

I spoke out against the Willow project, and a lot of times in life, you have to hold multiple truths, especially in politics. The president who signed the law, the most money ever going to defeating the climate crisis, also approved a drilling project, which is going to be really bad for our environment. Both things are true, at the same time in our reality. It’s just something we have to hold and we figure out, how do we move forward? Does it mean we don’t work to hold them accountable? No. I talked about the fact that part of the reason Gen Z turned out is because of the president’s bold vision on the climate crisis and ending it and so I was honest about that. But that’s not to the detriment of 2024.

David Hogg

I think there’s two ways that you can look at this. You can either look at what’s going on in Florida as, “Oh my gosh, everything’s turning back and we’re losing,” which is what they want us to believe, that there was absolutely nothing that we as people can do to stand up for the founding principles of our country. Granted, the men who talked about them are very, very, very deeply flawed. Nonetheless, I still think that most of us agree on those principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It means that all of us can succeed together because we all know and care about each other, not as Democrats or Republicans, but as Americans that want a better future for all of us, because we know the best is ahead and not behind us.

Without treaties to rein in their use, a dangerous escalation between countries becomes much more likely.

The US Department of Defense is pouring money into hypersonic weapons after years of defense officials’ warnings that China is gaining superiority in that arena. But a 21st-century arms race is a major risk, especially without a full picture of Chinese weapons development and amid the increasingly poor relationship between the two nations.

Hypersonic weapons, or vehicles and missiles that travel faster than Mach 5, or five times the speed of sound, aren’t new; the US has been developing and testing those weapons since the 1950s. But there’s been relatively little US investment in these systems in recent decades, while China and Russia have developed their hypersonics programs. Russia even used six of its hypersonic Kinzhal missiles in Ukraine earlier this month, the largest number the country has deployed in one strike in the war. Other countries including Australia, Iran, both North and South Korea, Brazil, Germany, Israel, India, and Japan are developing hypersonic programs. However, the increase in funding and tempo of the US program comes as relations between the US and China are the worst they’ve been in decades.

The DoD’s proposed budget for Army and Air Force hypersonics development and requisition for the years 2023 through 2027 sits at $15 billion, according to a January report from the Congressional Budget Office. That figure doesn’t include the Navy’s hypersonics development program, which in February announced a $1.1 billion contract with the defense manufacturer Lockheed Martin to add a hypersonic system to Zumwalt-class destroyers.

Defense officials have been arguing for years that the US is “behind” China in its hypersonic weapons development, and that may be true. China fielded a test in 2021 of a hypersonic, nuclear-capable weapon which at the time took many in the defense community by surprise and showed astounding development in China’s hypersonics capabilities.

“Once, American technological predominance was regarded as all but unassailable, and China tended to be dismissed as a copycat that was unlikely to close the gap,” Elsa Kania, an adjunct senior fellow with the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, told Vox in an email. “Today, recognition of China’s potential to lead in new frontiers and strategic technologies is heightening the urgency behind U.S. efforts and programs on several fronts.”

Worryingly, there are no multilateral or bilateral treaties regarding the use of hypersonic weapons — a situation which, as the Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated in October 1962, can lead to global panic or even catastrophe. And there’s no current indication that any such treaty or agreement is on the table, given that the major players in the hypersonic space are on the outs with little desire to negotiate on much of anything, much less a burgeoning battlefield threat.

Still, that hasn’t stopped US defense officials, legislators, and weapons manufacturers from pushing ahead with lobbying for hypersonic technology — and as of now, the government is ready to pour money into the project.

Hypersonic weapons are pricey, but they do have some advantages

The US military began working on hypersonic systems back in the 1960s, mostly looking at hypersonic flight capabilities for carrying people, not necessarily just weapons. But in the 1980s, that began to change, as Popular Science reported last year. That’s when the Air Force tested the Maneuvering Reentry Vehicle (MaRV), showing that missiles going at Mach 5 or faster as they re-entered Earth’s atmosphere could be maneuvered to hit a target. The US started pursuing hypersonic weapons development in earnest in the early 2000s, as part of its conventional prompt global strike program.

There are two main hypersonic weapons system concepts — the glide vehicle and air-breathing missile — that the US is developing. While the weapons systems themselves are conventional, or non-nuclear, China is developing nuclear-capable missiles, as the 2021 tests showed.

“China has been seeking ways to counter US missile defense systems for decades; China’s always felt that US missile defense systems undermine China’s nuclear deterrence,” Lyle Morris, fellow for foreign policy and national security at Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis told Vox in an interview. Starting in the early 2000s, China ramped up its hypersonics development in response to the dissolution of the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty, originally signed by the US and the Soviet Union. With anti-ballistic systems development now unfettered, China felt the need for a different kind of deterrent.

Glide-type weapons, which China has tested, are launched from a ballistic missile, Timothy Heath, a senior international defense researcher at the RAND Corporation, explained. “The way their system works is you launch a ballistic missile with this hypersonic glider sitting on top of it. At a certain point, the glider separates from the ballistic missile and goes on this hypersonic trajectory, which is in the atmosphere, unlike a ballistic missile, and travels at hypersponic speeds, maneuvers, and strikes its target primarily using inertia from the launch.”

According to Heath, China says they’re ready to deploy their hypersonic weapons, which is “a step or two beyond where the US program is right now, we are still in the testing phase of hypersonic missiles, so the Chinese do appear to have made faster progress than the US.” China’s ballistic missile program is also highly sophisticated; given that, and the US’s concurrent underinvestment in ballistic missiles, it’s not surprising that China was able to outpace the US in developing these weapons.

Where hypersonic weapons really differ from ballistic weapons aren’t necessarily their speed, but their maneuverability in flight and their ability to evade missile detection and defense systems like the Patriot, one of the US’s most advanced missile defense system which is also used in 17 other countries besides the US. They evade detection during parts of their journey by exiting or nearly exiting the earth’s atmosphere, and by shifting their course during flight.

“In the near term, hypersonic weapons systems are expected to have the potential to overcome even the most sophisticated air and missile defense systems,” Kania told Vox.

There are serious consequences to a new arms race

Given China’s successful hypersonics testing and the hostile mood between Beijing and Washington, it’s reasonable to be concerned about the acceleration in both weapons development and hostile rhetoric. But in reality, there are several roadblocks to widespread use of these weapons in battle, given how expensive they are — about $15 million to $18 million per missile, according to the Congressional Budget Office — and the reality of the battlefield, where basics like artillery are much more useful.

Some experts, including Morris and Heath, expressed doubt about the actual utility of hypersonics on the battlefield; according to a February report from the Congressional Research Service, critics of the US’s hypersonics development program say the weapons “lack defined mission requirements, contribute little to US military capability, and are unnecessary for deterrence.”

Of course, there’s also the concern that China could share technology with US adversaries like North Korea and Iran, and particularly Russia all of whom are standing up their own hypersonics programs. “As China and Russia seem to be on track to expand defense and technological cooperation, at least covertly, the transfer or sharing of data or research related to hypersonics development would be unsurprising,” Kania told Vox. “Certainly, Beijing has more leverage at this point and strong interest in learning from Russia’s experiences in Ukraine.”

Part of the concern about China’s hypersonics program in particular is the idea that the US is being caught flat-footed, and that looking anything less than absolutely dominant is a problem for US defense. That concern was particularly evident in 2021, after China’s successful hypersonic missile tests. Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff, referred to the tests as a precursor to China’s “Sputnik moment,” comparing the test to the Soviet Union’s launch of the first artificial Earth-orbiting satellite in 1957.

If there were a conflict between the US and China or another adversary with hypersonic weapons, Heath said, hypersonics wouldn’t be the deciding factor “given that the US has such an advantage in other military technologies like stealth aircraft, long-range bombers, aircraft carriers, submarines — all of these conventional capabilities that allow the US to deploy forces far from the US and fight and dominate their adversaries without the need for long-range missiles.”

Still, as the US pours money into hypersonics, and other nations develop their capabilities, it’s critically important to find a way to agree on how these weapons should be used in battle. That’s not likely to happen, Morris said, until there’s a major escalatory event — China’s military and the US defense apparatus are in a particularly touchy phase, and that lack of communication increases the risk of misunderstanding and miscalculation.

Furthermore, most major weapons agreements have been between the US and Russia or the Soviet Union; since Russia pulled out of the New START, the last remaining major nuclear arms control treaty, the possibility of any kind of agreement to limit defense technologies is probably a pipe dream.

Utah’s strict new social media laws have some scary implications for the whole country.

If everything goes according to the government of Utah’s plan, around this time next year, there will be some big changes on social media platforms for the state’s residents. Especially — but not exclusively — for the younger ones. They may also, possibly, have an effect on social media users beyond Utah’s borders.

In a ceremony on Thursday, Utah Gov. Spencer J. Cox signed two bills regulating minors’ use of social media, denoting how important and significant he believes these two pieces of legislation are. Combined, the new laws call for social media platforms to verify all users’ ages. Those under 18 will have special rules for their online activity, including curfews; more privacy from advertisers but less from their parents or guardians; and the ability to sue platforms over certain harms, including addiction.

The laws are the first in the country to place such restrictions on kids’ usage of social media. They likely won’t be the last, however, as other states and the federal government are increasingly considering legal restrictions in the name of protecting minors as the potential for harm those platforms pose gets more attention. But opponents of such laws say they will have unintended consequences for the free speech and privacy of people of all ages.

Both laws, which are collectively known as the Social Media Regulation Act, are set to take effect on March 1, 2024. The first, SB 152, requires social media companies to verify the age of any Utah resident with an account on their services. Those under 18 will have to get their parent or guardian’s permission to sign up for an account and to access it at all between the hours of 10:30 pm and 6:30 am, and social media companies can’t advertise to or collect data on minors. The second, HB 311, requires social media companies to ensure that they are not designed to cause minors to become addicted to them, and gives Utah’s minors the right to sue social media companies if they believe they’ve become addicted to or otherwise somehow harmed by a social media platform they have an account on.

At the signing, Cox cited studies that showed how poor mental health in young people can be caused or exacerbated by their use of social media platforms.

“I think we need to do something,” the governor said. “These are first-of-their-kind bills in the United States. That’s huge.”

Nathan Howard/Getty Images

There are a lot of things that can happen in the year before most of the legislation’s provisions take effect, including courts striking them down in part or entirely, as the companies or platform users affected by the laws are sure to take legal action to prevent them. The new laws also don’t totally spell out how platforms are supposed to verify users’ ages, as those details will be hammered out in consultation with the companies affected. But it’s pretty clear that they’ll go much further than the easily bypassable age verification services social media platforms currently use to comply with COPPA, the federal children’s privacy law, which depends on underage users telling the truth about their age.

This is a problem for privacy advocates, who point out that identity verification rules take away consumers’ rights to use these services anonymously, while companies get to collect even more of their data than before. And that goes for users of all ages, as the only way to prove you aren’t a child subject to these rules is to verify that you’re an adult. The provisions allowing parents to see everything their child posts and messages are a clear privacy issue as well. The laws are also a problem for free speech advocates, who believe the lack of anonymity will suppress everyone’s speech. That may include children in abusive situations or LGBTQ children who could be harmed if their parents snooped on their online activities.

“These bills radically undermine the constitutional and human rights of young people in Utah, but they also just don’t really make any sense,” Evan Greer, the director of digital rights advocacy group Fight for the Future, told Vox.

Defenders of Utah’s new laws, including some children’s advocacy groups, believe that social media platforms are harmful to children and their mental health and that the tools those platforms have implemented willingly aren’t enough. That’s a complaint we’ve been hearing a lot more of lately, especially after Meta whistleblower Frances Haugen revealed that the company knew its platforms harmed minors’ mental health but didn’t do enough to prevent it. In his two State of the Union addresses, President Biden has said that social media platforms are “experimenting” on children. Several bills aimed at children and online services, including social media, have been introduced in recent Congresses. None have passed, but they have bipartisan support, and it appears that both houses of the current Congress are determined to get something over the finish line. Several members of Congress in the recent hearing about TikTok stressed the dangers of all social media platforms on children.

“I suspect that you will see lots of bills like these, and of course we are working with our federal partners as well,” Cox said. “This is one of those rare areas today where we see broad agreement amongst both Republicans and Democrats.”

Indeed, several states are considering children’s social media laws, including Arkansas, Connecticut, New Jersey, and Texas. California passed a law last year that would increase privacy protections for children online. It takes effect July 1 of next year. And Louisiana has a law that requires websites that have a certain amount of pornographic content on them to verify that users are at least 18 before they can view it.

So even if you don’t live in Utah, you should prepare yourself for the possibility that the state you do live in — or even the federal government — will pass something similar. That seems especially likely if Utah’s law survives the inevitable court challenges. There is also a chance that some of these platforms apply Utah’s rules to the entire country, as the borderless nature of the internet makes it difficult to set rules for just one state (see: how several companies have applied provisions of California’s online privacy laws to all Americans).

TikTok and Snapchat did not respond to a request for comment about Utah’s new laws. Meta didn’t say if it intends to challenge the law or if it would simply stop offering its services in Utah to avoid having to comply with it. Instead, the company noted that it already has “more than 30 tools to support teens and families, including tools that let parents and teens work together to limit the amount of time teens spend on Instagram, and age verification technology that helps teens have age-appropriate experiences” and that it will “continue to work closely with experts, policymakers and parents on these important issues.”

Greer believes that “very real harms” are caused by social media companies with business models based on the collection of data, but that there are other, better ways to deal with those harms.

“Rather than pushing for legislation that actually weakens kids’ online safety and security, lawmakers should focus on passing comprehensive privacy legislation,” Greer said. “The FTC and state regulators should crack down on predatory design practices like autoplay and infinite scroll, the use of personal data for algorithmic recommendations, and intrusive notifications.”

OpenAI’s GPT-4 shows the competitive advantage of putting in safety work.

On March 14, OpenAI released the successor to ChatGPT: GPT-4. It impressed observers with its markedly improved performance across reasoning, retention, and coding. It also fanned fears around AI safety, around our ability to control these increasingly powerful models. But that debate obscures the fact that, in many ways, GPT-4’s most remarkable gains, compared to similar models in the past, have been around safety.

According to the company’s Technical Report, during GPT-4’s development, OpenAI “spent six months on safety research, risk assessment, and iteration.” OpenAI reported that this work yielded significant results: “GPT-4 is 82% less likely to respond to requests for disallowed content and 40% more likely to produce factual responses than GPT-3.5 on our internal evaluations.” (ChatGPT is a slightly tweaked version of GPT-3.5: if you’ve been using ChatGPT over the last few months, you’ve been interacting with GPT-3.5.)

This demonstrates a broader point: For AI companies, there are significant competitive advantages and profit incentives for emphasizing safety. The key success of ChatGPT over other companies’ large language models (LLMs) — apart from a nice user interface and remarkable word-of-mouth buzz — is precisely its safety. Even as it rapidly grew to over 100 million users, it hasn’t had to be taken down or significantly tweaked to make it less harmful (and less useful).

Tech companies should be investing heavily in safety research and testing for all our sakes, but also for their own commercial self-interest. That way, the AI model works as intended, and these companies can keep their tech online. ChatGPT Plus is making money, and you can’t make money if you’ve had to take your language model down. OpenAI’s reputation has been increased by its tech being safer than its competitors, while other tech companies have had their reputations hit by their tech being unsafe, and even having to take it down. (Disclosure: I am listed in the acknowledgments of the GPT-4 System Card, but I have not shown the draft of this story to anyone at OpenAI, nor have I taken funding from the company.)

The competitive advantage of AI safety

Just ask Mark Zuckerberg. When Meta released its large language model BlenderBot 3 in August 2022, it immediately faced problems of making inappropriate and untrue statements. Meta’s Galactica was only up for three days in November 2022 before it was withdrawn after it was shown confidently ‘hallucinating’ (making up) academic papers that didn’t exist. Most recently, in February 2023, Meta irresponsibly released the full weights of its latest language model, LLaMA. As many experts predicted would happen, it proliferated to 4chan, where it will be used to mass-produce disinformation and hate.

I and my co-authors warned about this five years ago in a 2018 report called “The Malicious Use of Artificial Intelligence,” while the Partnership on AI (Meta was a founding member and remains an active partner) had a great report on responsible publication in 2021. These repeated and failed attempts to “move fast and break things” have probably exacerbated Meta’s trust problems. In surveys from 2021 of AI researchers and the US public on trust in actors to shape the development and use of AI in the public interest, “Facebook [Meta] is ranked the least trustworthy of American tech companies.”

But it’s not just Meta. The original misbehaving machine learning chatbot was Microsoft’s Tay, which was withdrawn 16 hours after it was released in 2016 after making racist and inflammatory statements. Even Bing/Sydney had some very erratic responses, including declaring its love for, and then threatening, a journalist. In response, Microsoft limited the number of messages one could exchange, and Bing/Sydney no longer answers questions about itself.

We now know Microsoft based it on OpenAI’s GPT-4; Microsoft invested $11 billion into OpenAI in return for OpenAI running all their computing on Microsoft’s Azure cloud and becoming their “preferred partner for commercializing new AI technologies.” But it is unclear why the model responded so strangely. It could have been an early, not fully safety-trained version, or it could be due to its connection to search and thus its ability to “read” and respond to an article about itself in real time. (By contrast, GPT-4’s training data only runs up to September 2021, and it does not have access to the web.) It’s notable that even as it was heralding its new AI models, Microsoft recently laid off its AI ethics and society team.

OpenAI took a different path with GPT-4, but it’s not the only AI company that has been putting in the work on safety. Other leading labs have also been making clear their commitments, with Anthropic and DeepMind publishing their safety and alignment strategies. These two labs have also been safe and cautious with the development and deployment of Claude and Sparrow, their respective LLMs.

A playbook for best practices

Tech companies developing LLMs and other forms of cutting-edge, impactful AI should learn from this comparison. They should adopt the best practice as shown by OpenAI: Invest in safety research and testing before releasing.

What does this look like specifically? GPT-4’s System Card describes four steps OpenAI took that could be a model for other companies.

First, prune your dataset for toxic or inappropriate content. Second, train your system with reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and rule-based reward models (RBRMs). RLHF involves human labelers creating demonstration data for the model to copy and ranking data (“output A is preferred to output B”) for the model to better predict what outputs we want. RLHF produces a model that is sometimes overcautious, refusing to answer or hedging (as some users of ChatGPT will have noticed).

RBRM is an automated classifier that evaluates the model’s output on a set of rules in multiple-choice style, then rewards the model for refusing or answering for the right reasons and in the desired style. So the combination of RLHF and RBRM encourages the model to answer questions helpfully, refuse to answer some harmful questions, and distinguish between the two.

Third, provide structured access to the model through an API. This allows you to filter responses and monitor for poor behavior from the model (or from users). Fourth, invest in moderation, both by humans and by automated moderation and content classifiers. For example, OpenAI used GPT-4 to create rule-based classifiers that flag model outputs that could be harmful.

This all takes time and effort, but it’s worth it. Other approaches can also work, like Anthropic’s rule-following Constitutional AI, which leverages RL from AI feedback (RLAIF) to complement human labelers. As OpenAI acknowledges, their approach is not perfect: the model still hallucinates and can still sometimes be tricked into providing harmful content. Indeed, there’s room to go beyond and improve upon OpenAI’s approach, for example by providing more compensation and career progression opportunities for the human labelers of outputs.

Has OpenAI become less open? If this means less open source, then no. OpenAI adopted a “staged release” strategy for GPT-2 in 2019 and an API in 2020. Given Meta’s 4chan experience, this seems justified. As Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI chief scientist, noted to The Verge: “I fully expect that in a few years it’s going to be completely obvious to everyone that open-sourcing AI is just not wise.”

GPT-4 did have less information than previous releases on “architecture (including model size), hardware, training compute, dataset construction, training method.” This is because OpenAI is concerned about acceleration risk: “the risk of racing dynamics leading to a decline in safety standards, the diffusion of bad norms, and accelerated AI timelines, each of which heighten societal risks associated with AI.”

Providing those technical details would speed up the overall rate of progress in developing and deploying powerful AI systems. However, AI poses many unsolved governance and technical challenges: For example, the US and EU won’t have detailed safety technical standards for high-risk AI systems ready until early 2025.

That’s why I and others believe we shouldn’t be speeding up progress in AI capabilities, but we should be going full speed ahead on safety progress. Any reduced openness should never be an impediment to safety, which is why it’s so useful that the System Card shares details on safety challenges and mitigation techniques. Even though OpenAI seems to be coming around to this view, they’re still at the forefront of pushing forward capabilities, and should provide more information on how and when they envisage themselves and the field slowing down.

AI companies should be investing significantly in safety research and testing. It is the right thing to do and will soon be required by regulation and safety standards in the EU and USA. But also, it is in the self-interest of these AI companies. Put in the work, get the reward.

Haydn Belfield has been academic project manager at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk (CSER) for the past six years. He is also an associate fellow at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence.

We asked four political strategists and pollsters about what could come next.

Before heading to Waco, Texas, for the first rally of his 2024 campaign Saturday, former President Donald Trump spent more than a week signaling he thinks being indicted on falsifying records charges related to hush money payments to the porn star Stormy Daniels will be good for him politically. So much so that he reportedly wanted to be seen in handcuffs. But it’s not clear he’s right.

Trump’s indictment, which at this point appears to be delayed until at least next week, could strengthen support among the Republican base for his 2024 reelection campaign. But it could also turn off voters who have come to see Trump as a liability given his refusal to accept his 2020 election loss, the resulting fallout of the January 6, 2021, insurrection at the US Capitol, and the bevy of additional criminal and civil investigations he’s facing. Those include probes into his business dealings, interference in the 2020 election in Georgia, withholding of classified documents after he left office, and his role in inciting the insurrection, which could lead to additional indictments.

Even if an indictment earns him votes over his Republican Party challengers in the primary, it’s unclear whether the same would be true in the general election. The news has already splintered his own party, with some of his political opponents, including Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, invoking it in their lines of attack; others have rushed to the former president’s defense in the face of what they frame as a politically motivated case.

We spoke with pollsters and political strategists from both parties about what they think an indictment could mean in the months ahead.

The case that an indictment may help Trump

Robert Cahaly, senior strategist and pollster at the Trafalgar Group and former Republican political consultant:

With all the stuff that’s out there brewing that could turn into some kind of legal action against Trump, this is probably the weakest case. I think it’s very beneficial for Trump that something so superficial and silly is the first example.

It’s one thing when OJ [Simpson] is in the headlines, and everybody thinks that what he did was horrible. It’s another thing when somebody’s in the headlines and everybody doesn’t think going after them is fair. Trump’s best role has always been a conservative martyr. And this falls right in that ... Literally, I can see them selling millions of T-shirts with his mug shot as a badge of honor.

There are a lot of people who really like Trump, but they just don’t think he can win. They just think they need somebody different. This is taking some of those people off the sidelines and making them consider Trump even now in the primary ... Whoever’s galvanizing your opposition the most is most likely someone that your fans are going to rally behind.

Whit Ayres, ​​founder and president of the polling firm North Star Opinion Research and adviser to GOP congressional and gubernatorial candidates:

Anything I say is rank speculation completely uninformed by data or evidence. We’re talking about something that has never ever occurred before in American history. There is no data on the political implications of indictment of a former president and leading presidential candidate.

I am skeptical that a charge about a years-old event that everybody has already known about for years is likely to have much impact on anything, other than it will probably rally Republicans and supporters of Trump around him, at least in the short term. This would be a very easy case to frame as a partisan political indictment. Much easier to frame that way than, say, the Georgia voting case or the classified documents or January 6.

It will force every other Republican candidate to react to it, which of course, keeps Trump directly in the spotlight — as he usually is.

The case that an indictment hurts Trump (and his party)

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist among the few who correctly predicted the results of the 2022 midterms:

I think it will help [Trump] in the Republican primary, but will continue to degrade him with the broader electorate. MAGA has underperformed in three consecutive elections, and we know it doesn’t work in the battlegrounds. And if the Republicans present themselves as the party all for MAGA in 2024, they’re gonna have a very, very hard time winning the presidency.

Trump coming in as the nominee, having been indicted potentially two or three times — there’s no scenario where that’s helpful to him in a national election. It perhaps will help him crowd out DeSantis and other challengers in the primary. But of course, that would be a disaster for the Republican Party. I’d much rather be us than them heading into this next election.”

Matt Dole, an Ohio-based Republican strategist:

Trump faced an uphill battle before this for the nomination. I think [his indictment] probably just adds to that. A lot of folks in the Republican coalition want an option that espouses [Trump’s] policies without bringing the antics. Ron DeSantis, obviously, is the model for that.

Over the long term, I think this probably helps Trump’s opponents in the Republican primary. There’s certainly a lot to be said for political attacks on President Trump. But I think throughout the entire Republican coalition, this probably hurts him more than it would help.

There is a subset of Republicans who are going to support Donald Trump to the very end. And they are loud. And they are well-covered by the media. There will certainly be blowback. But again, all of this is feeding into the fatigue about Donald Trump. So I could personally believe that this is a politically motivated indictment. And I could also believe that it’s just another thing to add to the long list of things that I’m tired of having to defend and deal with as a Republican.”

Rahul Gandhi’s expulsion from the Lok Sabha is the latest sign of Indian democracy’s decline.

For years, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has attacked the foundations of his country’s democracy. His government has rewritten election rules in its favor, assailed the rights of the Muslim minority, jailed anti-government protesters, and reined in the free press.

On Friday morning, it took another major step in an authoritarian direction: kicking Modi’s principal rival, Congress party leader Rahul Gandhi, out of office and disqualifying him from competing in future elections.

The pretext for this move was Gandhi’s conviction on defamation charges a day earlier.

In 2019, in the midst of national elections, Gandhi made a joke about people with the last name “Modi” being thieves — citing a wealthy fugitive, a crooked cricketer, and the incumbent prime minister as examples. In response, a politician from Modi’s BJP party named Purnesh Modi filed a criminal complaint in which he accused Gandhi of defaming the “Modi community.”

On Thursday, a court ruled against Gandhi, sentencing him to two years in prison for his attempt at campaign trail humor (a sentence that won’t be implemented for at least 30 days). The BJP-controlled Parliament moved swiftly to boot Gandhi and prevent him from holding office again.

If this all seems fishy, that’s because it is.

India’s defamation law is notoriously punitive, owing partly to the legacy of British colonial speech restrictions. Historically, Indian governments and other powerful actors have used it as a tool to suppress speech they don’t like. Under Modi, these longstanding problematic laws have been deployed as part of a systematic campaign to strengthen their hold on power.

“This government has not invented any new tools; they’re just much more purposive and efficient in deploying them,” says Milan Vaishnav, director of the South Asia program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. “They campaigned on a pledge to bring about a ‘Congress-mukt’ Bharat (Congress-free India). This is just one element of this larger strategy.”

It’s a risky move. India’s citizens still have very favorable views of democracy; there’s a potential for something as nakedly authoritarian as kicking your chief political opponent out of office to backfire against Modi. But that’s very much still an “if”: Modi is extremely popular, and Gandhi is not known as an especially adept politician.

There’s a real possibility, then, that Modi’s government gets away with yet another brazen assault on the country’s beleaguered democracy.

What happened with Gandhi

To understand the importance of Gandhi’s disqualification, we need to first understand how it happened and what it says about modern India that it happened at all.

The defamation provisions used against Gandhi, parts 499 and 500 of the Indian Penal Code, date back to the 1860s, when India was a British colony. Section 499 presents a fairly loose definition of “defamation” and what is required to prove it in court; Section 500 makes the crime punishable by up to two years in prison.

While many advanced democracies retain criminal defamation laws, and some even occasionally use them, India’s law is strikingly broad and subject to abuse. After India’s Supreme Court upheld the legality of criminal defamation in a 2016 ruling, legal scholars and political scientists warned that the laws would continue to pose a serious threat to free speech in the country.

“The law as it stands exposes India to ridicule; it is so out of sync with the law in the democratic world on all the major points in issue,” Indian lawyer and political commentator A.G. Noorani wrote in The Hindu newspaper.

In the years since, the political context has shifted in ways that make these laws even more dangerous.

Narendra Modi, who primarily campaigned as a principled economic reformer when he first won office in 2014, has demonstrated increasingly authoritarian tendencies. This has included a willingness to wield criminal law in order to silence his political opponents. One example: a series of 2020 prosecutions targeting opposition politicians, civil rights activists, and academics under sedition and counterterrorism laws.

In its 2023 report, the pro-democracy watchdog Freedom House noted that such tactics had become a consistent feature of Modi’s increasingly authoritarian rule — noting, for example, data suggesting a 28 percent increase in sedition charges between 2014 and 2020.

“Authorities have used security, defamation, sedition, and hate speech laws, as well as contempt-of-court charges, to quiet critical voices in the media,” Freedom House finds. “Activists, Muslims, and members of other marginalized communities are routinely charged with sedition for criticizing the government and its policies.”

Saikat Paul / Eyepix Group/Future Publishing/Getty Images

The case against Gandhi is a continuation of this pattern. Though initially filed in 2019 in the city of Surat, located in Modi’s home state of Gujarat, it had been put on hold for years — only to be revived in February of this year. The timing is suspect: The Wire, an Indian online outlet, notes that the motion was filed by a Modi ally only a week after Gandhi launched a major attack against the prime minister’s ties to disgraced businessman Gautam Adani.

The Wire also notes that the case has serious legal flaws. In criminal allegations that a group is being defamed — like people named Modi — it needs to be shown that the group constitutes a distinct entity with collective interests and a group reputation that could be besmirched.

“[I]t is difficult to contend that those with the surname Modi constitute a community, which was distinct from others, and that Rahul Gandhi intended to defame such a community,” its analysis concludes.

For this reason, it is entirely possible that Gandhi’s conviction is overturned on appeal.

But to the Lok Sabha, the BJP-controlled lower house of India’s Parliament, that didn’t matter. The chamber acted almost immediately after conviction to kick Gandhi out of its ranks. The swiftness of the move was striking to Indian observers, effectively giving Gandhi no grace period to contest the dubious ruling.

“Despite the ridiculous conviction for defamation for 2 years by the Surat court, the sentence was stayed for 30 days for Rahul to appeal. But within a day, the Lok Sabha sect has disqualified him!” eminent Indian litigator Prashant Bhushan noted on Twitter.

“All to prevent him from speaking on Adani.”

What the Gandhi disqualification says about India’s democracy

Gandhi’s conviction and removal from Parliament illustrate, more than anything else, the continuing deterioration of India’s democracy and Modi’s and his allies’ authoritarian bent.

In 2021, V-DEM — the leading academic metric of democracy around the world — found that India no longer met its minimal standards for qualifying as a democracy of any kind, downgrading it to an “electoral autocracy.” In its explanation for the change, V-DEM noted the use of sedition and defamation laws as integral to India’s anti-democratic slide.

“India’s autocratization process has largely followed the typical pattern for countries ... over the past ten years: a gradual deterioration where freedom of the media, academia, and civil society were curtailed first and to the greatest extent,” V-DEM argues.

But even in this broader context, attacking the leading figure in the opposition is unusually brazen. Rahul Gandhi leads the Congress party, the dominant political faction in India for decades after independence and the traditional champion of Indian secularism and liberal democracy (with some glaring exceptions). He is the direct descendant of India’s most famous post-independence leaders, Jawaharlal Nehru and Indira Gandhi.

Though long seen as an incompetent and out-of-touch leader, that reputation had reportedly started to change in recent months. Between September 2022 and January 2023, he embarked on a pilgrimage — called the Bharat Jodo (“Unite India”) Yatra — across 2,200 miles of Indian territory. The demonstration, which evoked a tradition of political yatras in India, was designed as an act of protest against Modi’s politics of division and targeting of the Muslim minority. It seems to have done real work in rehabilitating Gandhi and his buckling Congress party in general.

In this context, then, going after Gandhi poses significant risks for Modi. His regime has not formally repudiated democracy in the way that older authoritarian movements like fascism did. Like similar modern autocrats in places like Hungary and Israel, he still depends on support from a public that believes in the basic ideals of representative government.

Therefore, he needs to sell his government as authentically democratic, not nakedly repressive. Kicking Gandhi out of Parliament does not formally weaken Congress in any sense, and it creates an opportunity for the opposition to highlight the true nature of Modi’s regime.

“This is largely a psychological blow to the opposition,” Vaishnav tells me. “Rahul Gandhi can still command media and popular attention when he is not a member of Parliament,”

Yet for such a tactic to work, it requires Gandhi to translate it into more than just sympathetic coverage. And observers of India are skeptical that he and his allies in Congress leadership have the power to make that happen, especially given the BJP’s increasingly tight control over the Indian political system and mass media.

“He has the potential to exploit his ‘victimhood’ for political gain, but I am not confident he will be able to do this,” Vaishnav continues. “Even after his yatra, pundits said Bharat Jodo Yatra would be step 1 of a larger rehabilitation plan only if it was followed by additional steps to sharpen the opposition’s ideological positioning and build the Congress organization. We have not seen much headway on either of those fronts.”

Gandhi’s arrest has the potential to be a turning point in the dark post-2014 story of Indian democracy. But Modi is a capable and canny authoritarian, and putting a real dent in his political armor will be a difficult challenge for India’s weakened opposition.

The debate in France over raising the retirement age is also happening in the US.

Mass protests continued to roil French cities on Thursday, with more than a million people turning out to oppose a new policy that raises the retirement age from 62 to 64 and requires workers to contribute to the pension system for longer. The new law is a priority of President Emmanuel Macron, who used a constitutional loophole to force the change into effect after it became apparent parliament would reject it.

The weeks of French protests have been mostly peaceful and led by union leaders. Piles of trash, left out on the streets by striking garbage collectors, have become an emblem of the opposition, and there have also been disruptions to transportation, air traffic, oil refineries, and schools.

But violence broke out Thursday as protesters set fire to the front door of the Bordeaux city hall and newsstands across Paris, hurled smoke bombs, and damaged property. Police tried to quell them with tear gas and water cannons late into the night. At least 149 police were injured and 172 people were arrested. It’s not clear how many civilian injuries there were, and we don’t yet have estimates as to the extent of the damage.

Macron, who narrowly survived a vote of no confidence this week, has said he has no intention of reversing the law. He claimed in a television appearance Wednesday that he needed to convince the public that the reforms were necessary to save what he frames as the country’s endangered pension system, especially given higher life expectancy. But it’s not at all clear that current pension spending is out of control, and in making his claims, only added to protesters’ fury.

It’s difficult to imagine the same kind of mass protests breaking out in the US over raising the age at which people can start collecting Social Security, which is projected to potentially become insolvent by 2033, meaning that beneficiaries could see their checks diminished by 25 percent thereafter. France’s size and strong unions help with protest cohesion, and the US has struggled to maintain intense public protests over time in recent decades. But they do offer a warning to those Republicans who have been agitating for reforms to Social Security, which they have also misleadingly framed as the only means of ensuring the program’s survival.

“It’s the same conversation in the sense because it’s a way to cut benefits,” said Alicia Munnell, director of the Center for Retirement Research at Boston College.

Raising the retirement age is effectively a cut to benefits

The Republican Study Committee, a group of House conservatives, proposed in their 2023 budget to gradually raise the retirement age in the US from 67 to 70 in light of longer life expectancies. Republicans have tried to frame such proposals as reforms that would keep the system solvent for future generations without touching the benefits for any current retirees or those close to retirement age.

Though there was speculation that this idea would be a sticking point in debt ceiling talks, Republican House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy took the issue off the table last month following backlash from moderates in the party and relentless Democratic attacks. The idea, however, remains a topic of discussion among some Republicans, including the party’s presidential candidates.

“It is unrealistic to say you’re not going to touch entitlements. The thing is, you don’t have to touch it for seniors and anybody near retirement. You’re talking about the new generation, like my kids coming up,” Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley said earlier this month.

One common misconception in the US is what the retirement age is. Though an American can start claiming benefits as early as 62, they will only reap their highest monthly benefits at age 70 under the Delayed Retirement Credit, which was implemented in the early 1970s. The average American currently retires at age 64, but that might partially be because they don’t know that they will get a higher benefit if they hold off.

Also, raising the retirement age further, despite what Republicans may say, is a cut to benefits, given that a retiree gets less money over a shorter period.

According to an analysis by CBS’s Aimee Picchi, the average retiree would lose out on three to four years in benefits under Republicans’ plan, amounting to a minimum of $65,000. That’s critical, especially given that other sources of retirement income such as ​​employer-provided pensions have dried up over the years, that taxes on Social Security benefits have increased, and that Medicare premiums have risen.

“When we talk about raising the retirement age, you have to put air quotes around it because most people hear that and they’re actually hearing the wrong thing,” said Alex Lawson, executive director of the advocacy group Social Security Works. “What they’re actually saying is, we’re going to cut your benefits so that rich people don’t pay more in taxes.”

Though France’s retirement system is more generous than the US’s, Lawson’s argument is the same one French protesters have levied against their government over the course of recent demonstrations: Raising the retirement age would put an undue burden on low-income individuals and the working class, without exploring other tax solutions or tapping into other accounts.

There are some solutions, however, being floated in the US that would avert those burdens and the widespread public outrage that we’ve seen in France.

There are many ideas about saving save Social Security that don’t involve raising the retirement age

At the moment, Republicans are largely proposing ways to reduce the money doled out through Social Security, but they aren’t talking about ways to increase amounts flowing into the program.

There are myriad ways to do that, including by extracting more Social Security taxes from payroll. The government could raise the Social Security tax cap, under which income over a certain amount — $160,200 in 2023 — is not subject to Social Security payroll taxes of 6.2 percent for both workers and their employers. About 6 percent of Americans earn more than that amount.

Democratic Sens. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have proposed making people who earn over $250,000 pay Social Security taxes on their income, as well as subject investment and business income to Social Security taxes. That would ensure Social Security’s survival through 2046, according to projections by the Congressional Budget Office.

Congress could allocate some general revenues to support the program in recognition of the fact that much of the Social Security trust fund was spent on the first generation of retirees after the Great Depression, Munnell said.

“To sort of recognize that ongoing burden because of the decision made decades ago, you could put in some general revenues, and I don’t think it would erode the relationship between contributions and benefits in the sense of an earned right,” she said.

It’s the latest move by the Biden administration to take a harsher approach on the issue.

In his first state visit to Canada since taking office, President Joe Biden is expected to announce an immigration deal with Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that enables both countries to turn away unauthorized asylum seekers.

This deal, which was first reported by the Los Angeles Times, closes a loophole in the two countries’ policies and is the latest in a series of moves underscoring the Biden administration’s harsher approach toward those seeking asylum. Previously, a 2004 agreement allowed both countries to turn away asylum seekers at official ports of entry but did not address unofficial entry points. That’s led to a surge in activity at unofficial border crossings, like Roxham Road in New York.

Under this new agreement, Canada will be able to send unauthorized asylum seekers who are apprehended within 14 days of crossing the border back to the US, with the US able to similarly send asylum seekers back to Canada in that time frame. As part of the deal, Canada is also poised to announce a program that will take in 15,000 migrants from the western hemisphere as people continue to flee countries in Central America for humanitarian reasons. That’s a small fraction of the asylum seekers expected this year; Canada saw nearly 10,000 asylum claims and border apprehensions in the first two months of 2023.

The agreement comes as unauthorized crossings of the US’ northern border have increased in both directions. According to NBC News, unauthorized border crossings from Canada into the US are at “historically high” levels, though still significantly lower than the number taking place at the southern border. Between October 1 and December 31, 2022, apprehensions in one section of the US-Canada border increased to 1,146 from 136 in 2021. In some cases, migrants from Mexico and Central American countries have gone to Canada first in an attempt to enter the US at the northern border.

Unauthorized crossings from the US into Canada have also gone up, with roughly 40,000 people entering the country in 2022, almost twice the number of crossings in 2019, per the New York Times. Under the Safe Third Country Agreement the two previously signed, asylum seekers are required to file in the first country they arrive in whether that’s the US or Canada. The legality of that agreement is currently before Canada’s Supreme Court.

The new deal between Biden and Trudeau underscores a tougher stance on immigration from both leaders, who’ve faced pressure from conservatives to address the issue of unauthorized migration. This deal also marks the Biden administration’s latest move to take a more punitive approach to asylum seekers amid a surge in migrants from Central America last year.

“It builds on ongoing efforts by the Biden administration to roll back protections for asylum seekers, most recently with the proposed asylum ban rule that would prevent many seeking protection from persecution from finding safety,” says Sabrineh Ardalan, the director of Harvard Law’s Immigration and Refugee Clinical Program.

This deal underscores the administration’s harsher approach to immigration

This agreement follows other restrictions the Biden administration has imposed on asylum seekers. As one source told the Los Angeles Times, a goal of the policy is to “reduce incentives” for unauthorized crossings of the northern border between the two countries.

Broadly, the administration has sought to curb unauthorized entry into the US while also trying to provide an avenue for legal immigration for certain asylum seekers, something this deal tries to do as well. As NPR’s Joel Rose reported, the administration rolled out a “carrot and stick” approach targeting migration at the southern border in February:

The new measures include a legal pathway for up to 30,000 migrants per month from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela — if they qualify. At the same time, the administration announced it would begin to quickly expel migrants from those four countries under the pandemic restrictions known as Title 42, if they crossed illegally.

The administration’s February announcement also included a new restriction that’s prompted swift blowback from immigration activists for how punitive it is. Because Title 42, which allowed rapid expulsion based on the Covid-19 public health emergency, is set to expire in May, the administration will soon lose its most efficient tool for getting rid of asylum seekers.

To offset that loss, as Vox’s Nicole Narea explained, a new rule that mirrors a Trump administration proposal would require migrants to either set up an appointment via a government app in order to enter at an official border crossing, or prove they had already been denied asylum in Mexico or a third country they’d traveled through.

That proposal has been roundly condemned by immigration activists who’ve described it as dangerous for asylum seekers, who’d likely have to deal with long waits in their home countries as they seek approval — if they are able to access the smartphone app at all. Beyond questions about reliable internet access, the app has been criticized as being riddled with technical issues. The rule may also ultimately be struck down in court: Trump was never able to institute his version of the rule due to legal losses.

The White House has dismissed its critics and questions around whether its efforts have successfully reduced unauthorized crossings — a claim Republicans loudly dispute — citing a major decline in apprehensions at the southern border in January 2023 compared to December 2022. The Canadian agreement, ultimately, is the administration’s latest move to reduce the number of asylum seekers attempting to cross into the US without authorization.

And how the US influences which weapons Ukraine gets and which ones it doesn’t.

When Russia first invaded Ukraine in 2014, the US was hesitant to send more than supplies to the Ukrainian army. But when Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022, the US changed its tune. President Joe Biden quickly began approving huge packages of weapons to help Ukraine stymie the Russian attack. And for the first couple of weeks, it worked. The Ukrainian army used weapons from the US and its Western allies to stop Russia from capturing Kiev.

As the war progressed, so did US help. It sent heavy artillery in the spring, and then sent tanks in winter 2023. But each time, it deliberated over whether Ukraine can effectively use what was being sent, and whether the new weapons would provoke Russia to escalate the conflict.

So far, that hasn’t happened, and the US and its allies are now considering sending Ukraine long-range missiles and F-16 fighter jets. Both would be game changers for Ukraine.

You can find this video and the entire library of Vox’s videos on YouTube.

Keanu Reeves is a celebrity for all times.

It started in the pub, as all the best research does: Media studies professors Renee Middlemost (University of Wollongong) and Sarah Thomas (University of Liverpool) found themselves wondering where all the stars had gone. In an age of fractured media landscapes and niche celebrities everywhere, does anyone in Hollywood have truly universal name recognition and appeal? Does there still exist a public figure whose persona can unite and speak to fragmented audiences without excluding or alienating anyone?

Tom Hanks, they asked? Nah, too rooted in nostalgia. Leonardo DiCaprio? Or Denzel Washington? Maybe, but can you see either of them playing to a crowd of people steeped in video games or YouTube culture? Will Smith or Samuel L. Jackson? While their careers span decades, neither of them seems to have the current cultural staying power they once did.

But what about Keanu?

Erin Combs/Toronto Star via Getty Images

Ding ding ding.

Keanu Reeves has long been an icon, but over the last several years, he has reached a career peak — a period of activity that became known as “the Keanaissance.” Pop culture has exploded with a new respect for him at the precise moment that his career has been on an upswing. Beginning with the John Wick franchise, which kicked off in 2014 and is now on John Wick 4, released in March 2023, Keanu has reemerged in a huge way. The past years have seen him starring in a string of hits ranging from films like Always Be My Maybe and The Matrix: Resurrections to popular game Cyberpunk 2077. The Keanu resurgence has generated one think piece after another, each suggesting a culture enamored of his versatility and enduring career — but even more in love with his very human likability and relatability.

Keanu is a martial arts master, a romantic fantasy, a gaming hero, a relatable geek — one who’s reportedly in perpetual demand for superhero franchises — but he’s also still a fun-loving bro who sticks close to his bass-playing stoner roots. He’s even something of a Jesus figure, his renewed visibility reimagining him as a nigh-mythical force that has transcended any specific archetype. Through the Keannaissance, Keanu has become a true everyman: an actor, and a meme, for all seasons.

But what makes Keanu so different, so likable? And why did it take so long for cultural recognition of his talents to shift toward profound respect? Why is it that Keanu’s moment is happening right now, and in full force?

Middlemost and Thomas embarked on a quest to find out. In 2019, they issued a call for papers to their academic journal, Celebrity Studies, for a special edition focused entirely on Keanu Reeves. At a glance, there’s plenty in his filmography to discuss; there may be no one else at Reeves’s level who’s appeared in such diverse, culturally dominant films over such a sustained period of time. Reeves has made his mark in every film genre — and most of that work has made him progressively more endearing as a talented, relatable, fun, even wholesome celebrity.

What’s notable about the list of themes and sample topics in Celebrity Studies’ call for papers, though, is how many of them have nothing to do with Keanu’s tremendous film output and everything to do with “Keanu” himself. There are requests for pieces on “tragic Keanu” and Keanu-as-meme; Keanu as “reluctant celebrity”; Keanu’s relationship to queer and Asian American identities; and one topic that just says “authenticity and ordinariness.”

Pascal Le Floch/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images

All of this tells us it’s not just Keanu’s roles that have made him into the modern era’s wholesome star: It’s also his offscreen persona. On Twitter, for example, 210,000 follow the account Keanu Doing Things, while on Reddit, 350,000 people are devoted to celebrating his general awesomeness. There, you can find recent stories like Keanu helping a lost stranger find her way, Keanu leaping out of a car to sign a fan’s banner and then pose for family photos, Keanu secretly donating millions to charity, and Keanu being as humble now as he was nearly 30 years ago, before he’d had any huge hits to his name.

Clearly, we’re waking to the discovery that the hero we needed has been among us all along — and what we learn about Keanu’s tremendous career revival can tell us a lot about the larger moment we’re in.

The seeds of Keanu’s current image were in his career all along

The Keanu we know today was with us from the very beginning — like the moment he drawled, “My daaaaad!” while beaming wholesomely at us in a 1983 Coke commercial, when he was just 18 years old. Here was an all-American boy who loved sports, loved his family, and, of course, loved Coca-Cola.

Born in Lebanon in 1964 to an English mom and a Chinese-Hawaiian dad, Keanu eventually settled in Canada with his family and began acting at the ripe old age of 9. He made his (hilarious) screen debut at 16 as an extra in a Canadian sitcom and wound up riding horses and juggling as a teen reporter for the CBC, among other things. Here he is getting attacked by a teddy bear.

Nearly three decades later, it wouldn’t seem out of character for Keanu Reeves to get attacked by a teddy bear today. That’s what’s striking about all these early roles — just how Keanu they all are. The Keanu Reeves on display in these early segments is the Keanu Reeves we know and love today, someone characterized in large part by his goofy, self-effacing demeanor, uber-chill attitude, and slow drawl joined with weirdly perfect enunciation. Keanu rarely appears to be acting in these early segments and roles; he’s just being himself.

Keanu continued to offer an air of unique authenticity during his breakout role in 1988’s Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure — the movie that gave us an indelible image of Reeves as a blissed-out stoner within whom resides the ineffable wisdom of a philosopher. In retrospect, it’s clear to us that persona came both from the scripted role of Ted and from Keanu himself. Take an appearance on Stephen Colbert’s Late Show, where he exuded the same Zen energy by taking a question intended to lampoon his Unlikely Mystic persona and turned it on its head by answering it seriously.

And in a way, that tiny moment — when the audience sets out to laugh at Keanu and winds up appreciating him even more — is a microcosm of Reeves’s second life as a public figure.

The Matrix made us start taking Keanu seriously. And we never stopped.

Keanu’s role as unlikely purveyor of Zen wisdom got its ultimate boost from The Matrix. If 1994’s Speed, in which he starred as an imperturbable bomb squad cop, embodied the optimism and humanism of the ’90s, then 1999’s Matrix, along with other iconic films from that year like Fight Club and The Blair Witch Project, marked a turn toward new-millennium unease. It also made Keanu Reeves even more relatable: There he was, stuck in the Matrix right alongside us, navigating a new era of technology and a host of looming existential questions.

The Matrix created a permanent link between Reeves and geek culture. His character, Neo, was the ultimate geek fantasy: an obscure office drone who morphs into a badass, leather-clad, kung-fu-fighting messiah. Because the Keanu we saw onscreen as Neo was so much like the reticent but philosophical geek we saw offscreen, it was easy, if you were a Matrix fan, to view Keanu as synonymous with his character — someone who was just like you but who had learned to manipulate and transcend the whole system, in his case by becoming the biggest action star there was while still retaining humility and grace.

While The Matrix inadvertently went on to become a tool for the most toxic internet communities, Keanu escaped all the contemporary negative associations we have with the film. Neo’s status as a Messianic figure, with all his innate spiritual wisdom, became associated with Keanu himself — and just as with Bill and Ted, it was impossible to know whether the role or the actor came first.

The increased focus on Keanu Reeves as a person superseded any discussion of whether he was a “good” or a “bad” actor. During the 1990s, when Keanu was still largely dismissed by the Hollywood establishment, he was in a string of flops and garnered three of his six Razzie nominations for Worst Actor and Supporting Actor. But by the aughts, it was becoming clear to all of us that Keanu Reeves doesn’t do “bad acting” or “good acting” but rather bends every part into the mystifying shape of Keanu. Is it intentional? Is it oblivious? It doesn’t matter; Keanu himself transcends the question of acting quality.

In 2005, Time observed of the Matrix star:

His voice has a certain forced, hollow depth, like a 12-year-old trying to sound grownup. His talent is hard to pin down, which is one reason a lot of critics think he doesn’t have any. But they’re wrong. ... Something about that mysterious reserve, the total earnestness, the unwinking way he commits to the most absurd scenarios, makes free falls from planes and wire-fighting cyberninjastics feel like a philosophy lesson.

Thomas agrees that the biggest shift in Keanu’s cultural reception after the ’90s was in how seriously audiences now take his image. “The Zen-action guy image has absolutely been around for years,” she said in an email. “But running throughout public responses to Keanu during those younger years was also a sense of not really taking him seriously. It’s the idea of the ‘whoa’ persona, or in those debates about ‘how good an actor is he really,’ et cetera — that there was something dumb and silly about him and his characters. But that image has also slowly been interpreted as genuine, vulnerable, and authentic too.”

In other words, the Keanu Reeves of 1983, 2003, and 2023 are all, more or less, the same Keanu Reeves. He hasn’t changed; instead, 40 years after his career took off, the culture has finally caught up to the idea that the actor who embodies some of our most rigidly masculine cinematic tropes — the badass action hero, the unstoppable cop, the martial arts master, the guy who levels up to save the world and get the girl — can also be a gentle, soft-spoken, wholesome dude who eschews those tropes in his own life.

Chris Pizzello/AP

The audience’s awareness of Reeves’s authenticity grew throughout the aughts — in 2008, the Guardian labeled him a “Teflon thespian,” implying that he was incapable of losing the public’s love despite a wide-ranging number of roles. “A long, long time ago, those of us who love Keanu Reeves decided that no matter how many dismal movies like Johnny Mnemonic he made, and no matter how inept his acting in A Walk in the Clouds, and no matter how inappropriate his casting in Much Ado About Nothing and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, we would never stop being thrilled when news of an exciting new Keanu project was announced,” declared writer Joe Queenan. “There was something about Keanu Reeves that we liked, and nothing could ever change that.”

We saw that phenomenon play out in early 2019, when Reeves actually had the worst box office opening of his career to date — for Replicas, a movie no one’s heard of, even though it opened on more than 1,000 screens that January.

The box office failure didn’t seem to deter Reeves, though; his fandom seems to be completely divorced from his box office receipts at this point. That’s because of Keanu’s longest-lasting role, which began to take off in the earliest days of social media: Keanu as meme.

Like all his roles, the meme version of Keanu and IRL Keanu fuel each other

Reeves’s saintliness was perhaps the earliest Keanu meme. Tales of his enormous generosity, alongside reports of him taking pay cuts and funding production budgets, became a self-perpetuating viral myth in the post-Matrix era. Like all Keanu’s real-life actions, these wound up fueling his meme persona; see this meme from 2008:

Banana Scoop

Keanu’s relatability, however, was what really put him on the meme map. Most famously came the Sad Keanu meme, which consists of a photograph, taken in 2010, showing Reeves eating a sandwich alone on a park bench. Not all of this was entirely invented by the internet; In 2011, Reeves coincidentally published Ode to Happiness, an illustrated book celebrating small ways of dealing with depression and melancholy. (The belief that Keanu is painfully lonely is sourced from a lie, but profiles implying that he does have issues with loneliness and depression have been with us for years.)

The Sad Keanu meme resonated because of its sincerity and, again, relatability: Keanu Reeves was just like us, eating a sandwich, lost in thought, having a bad day. The meme became so well-loved that it prompted the creation of Cheer Up, Keanu Day that same year. And it seemed to work: In 2011, Keanu was happy! Just like us!

Perhaps in conjunction with this positive counterpoint to the Sad Keanu meme, the 2010s began to proffer numerous stories of Reeves’s kindness, along with recirculating all the earlier stories of his on-set goodness and charity work. In 2011, he was spotted not only riding the subway like mere mortals but giving up his seat. Simultaneously, memes suggesting that Keanu was just like us in other ways began to circulate: Keanu is a geek, just like us; Keanu is humble, just like us; Keanu is perpetually respectful to women, as many of us would like to be. (He’s also immortal. Yeah, we can’t explain it either.)

“Publicly at least,” Thomas noted, “he’s not enamored by the trappings of fame — e.g., traveling on the subway, taking pay cuts, [being] bemused by his cultural resonance, etc.” Thomas sees this as a contrast to other examples of stardom that are “all about directly courting attention, fame, and materiality.” In other words, he’s wholesome. In a sea of wholesome memes, in fact, Keanu has somehow managed to transcend them all to become “the most wholesome person alive.”

The memetic amplification of Reeves’s good-guy real-life behavior has reached critical mass, in conjunction with his tremendous career revival — though for his part, he seems unaware of much of the buzz. He once told People he had no idea he’d been dubbed “the internet’s boyfriend” and described the honor as “wacky,” before adding that “the positivity’s great.” In 2023, he went a step further, gently breaking the news to us that he’s not perfect.

The moment is a handy encapsulation of the way his offscreen image has evolved through memes: He’s become someone who’s kind and generous but also someone who’s withdrawn, painfully human, self-aware about it, and still proactively seeking ways to be happy.

“In this contemporary media realm of very heightened performativity, construction, and commodification of the ‘authentic’, those stories and images all appear to convey a lack of performance, construction, and a genuine sense of selfhood,” Thomas said. “I think that to many people, he can come to embody one of the closest examples of the authentic self and star image around.”

Thomas also notes that Reeves has a unique ability to embody two very different ends of the star spectrum — the affable nice guy and the aloof cool guy.

“Coolness and aloofness doesn’t always come with this sense of ‘niceness’, vulnerability, and approachability,” she wrote. “Someone like Steve McQueen was always ‘too cool’ to really be vulnerable and approachable; Will Smith is almost too approachable to really sell the idea of deadliness and hardness; Hugh Jackman can do both, but does not convey that shyness and has very much swung away from steeliness as he gets older; Paul Newman played around with the ordinariness/extraordinariness to extremes as well, but always conveyed confidence with both, which Keanu doesn’t.”

This paradoxical, memefied version of Keanu’s authenticity, mixed with his strange reserve, set the stage for the role Keanu has most recently embodied: the ever-cool, ever-tragic John Wick.

In the era of John Wick, all the Keanus have converged into one transcendent Every-Keanu

2014’s John Wick was an unlikely hit because of its mid-tier production budget, lack of a star ensemble, and absence of huge marketing campaign, but critics hailed it as a major triumph both for Keanu as the title character and anyone who liked sleek, pure, slickly choreographed action cinema. (The Razzies even offered him the Redeemer award for actors who’d turned around their Razzie-filled careers with a great performance.) More importantly, John Wick shared traits Keanu had become known for in his post-Matrix life: his dry humor and his slick, cool persona mingled with a real, relatable sense of personal loss and sadness — all these things were there, plus dogs!

“The ‘hardness and deadliness’ of Keanu has come with age,” Thomas told me. “It isn’t there before [John Wick] in the same ‘authentic’ way, and both screen roles and what we know of his personal life (the tragic aspects of it) combine to give a sense of this as a believable trait.”

Tobias Schwarz/AFP/Getty Images

These elements helped fuel the cult love of John Wick, and arguably boosted Reeves into the public’s consciousness yet again. The film’s following spread rapidly, and when John Wick: Chapter 2 appeared in 2017, the audience for it was there; critics raved about it, and the box office take doubled that of the first movie. “The film’s status as a ‘little one that could’, taking on bigger-budgeted and bigger-hyped films, really linked into the star’s identity of the underdog ‘good guy,’” Thomas argued. By now, as she notes, “questions of, ‘Is he a bad actor?’ have greatly diminished in favor of, ‘look at how he’s really [doing] all those stunts and choreography in the John Wick films, especially at his age!’”

But while age hasn’t slowed Reeves down, it’s lent an obvious nostalgic element to many of his roles, past and present. 2018’s Destination Wedding reunited Reeves with Winona Ryder, whom he first co-starred with in 1992’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and got tongues wagging. Then there’s Bill & Ted Face the Music, the third sequel to Bill and Ted. What’s significant about these roles is that they’re actively nostalgic: Keanu is not a thing of the past, but rather an ongoing evolution. “He’s been around so long that he’s taken on a more symbolic meaning for audiences — connecting older ones with their own youths and reflecting on their own journeys through life and identity,” Thomas said.

Ron Galella Collection via Getty Images

In other words, the Keanu of the past is the Keanu of the present, and the Keanu of the present is also the Keanu of the real world as well as the Keanu of the screen. As GQ writer Alex Pappademas put it in his April 2019 profile of Reeves, “Every generation gets its own Keanu Reeves, except every generation’s Keanu Reeves is this Keanu Reeves.”

The Keanaissance, then, is arguably the convergence of all these different Keanus grabbing the spotlight before our eyes. First came John Wick, which reminded us that Keanu could still be the ultimate everyman: badass, soulful, worldly, and wise. Reeves’s subsequent cameo in Always Be My Maybe set the internet atwitter over his boyfriend potential. His 2019 appearance at gaming expo E3, when he arrived like a god descending to earth, was a geek culture bombshell. All of these things, combined with a series of offscreen viral moments and the revival of the “Keanu is awesome” meme, gave Reeves a renewed cultural omnipresence.

In addition to all of this, Keanu’s Asian American identity, subsumed through his longstanding branding as an essentially “white” actor, took center stage with his casting in Always Be My Maybe, a film with a predominantly Asian cast. This reclamation of his racial identity, combined with his ongoing status as a queer icon, thanks to his early role in the cult classic My Own Private Idaho as well as queer and trans readings of several of his other films, has also made him a vital part of the recent conversation around Hollywood diversity.

Keanu is emblematic of our new interest in reevaluating and reassessing what we value most in our most beloved actors. As we embrace and encourage diversity onscreen and off, celebrate nostalgic cultural touchstones, and scrutinize everyone’s public and private lives, Keanu is directly at the center of the Venn diagram of what makes a truly likable celebrity.

“It’s been amazing to be a small part in this international explosion of Keanu fandom,” Sean Welsh told me. Welsh organized the world’s first film festival devoted to Keanu, Glasgow’s KeanuCon, in 2019. “We had people travel from all over the UK and Europe to KeanuCon, and fans from across the world got in touch either begging for tickets or asking us to bring the festival to them next.”

Welsh speculated that the current wave of love for Keanu is due in large part to the public’s collective sense of camaraderie with him. “[He has] this communion with the audience that extends beyond [his] film roles.”

In other words, after a career full of one cultural ascension after another, from stoner mystic to mythical Jesus figure to badass action hero who just wants to be left alone to play with his dog, Keanu has now ascended to his final form by becoming an unlikely mythical Jesus figure himself. He simultaneously illuminates and evolves the very DNA of pop culture tropes while also bringing light to all who seek him — reminding us all that it’s still possible to be rich, powerful, and a self-aware good guy. Who also knows kung fu.

“Perhaps it was really only a matter of time before he ascended to internet godhood,” Welsh told me. “We probably only have a couple of years before he sheds his corporeal form to travel the cosmos as a boundless and benevolent emissary of humanity.”

Go forth, Keanu. Go forth.

Mark Ralston/AFP/Getty Images

Update, March 24, 2023: This story, originally published on August 16, 2019, has been updated with the latest John Wick movie information.

What the Medicine Wheel, an indigenous American model of time, shows about apocalypse.

Part of Against Doomerism from The Highlight, Vox’s home for ambitious stories that explain our world.

In the dead of winter of late 2020 in the city of Shikaakwa, on the frozen shores of Ininwewi-gichigami, there is no pandemic. The high-rise buildings downtown are vertical forests, with balconies and rooftops designed as an outgrowth of nature. The Anishinaabe people bustle through a city of their own design. They watch the championship game of baagaadowewin in sports bars on high-definition flat-screens. They speak Anishinaabemowin into their smartphones on crowded public transportation, drink coffee, debate politics, argue with their families, and gather around communal fires in the middle of the downtown area.

Shikaakwa doesn’t exist. I made it up. It’s the setting of my first novel, The Peacekeeper, an alternate history in which the Americas were never colonized. Shikaakwa is in the place of the city now most often called Chicago. Ininwewi-gichigami now appears on maps as Lake Michigan. Anishinaabe is what my people, the Ojibwe/Chippewa, and my tribe, the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, call ourselves. The Anishinaabemowin language, also known as Ojibwe, was suppressed and, in many cases, illegal to speak until the 1970s. The sport of baagaadowewin was eventually appropriated into lacrosse.

Shikaakwa as I imagined it could never exist — I created it from my 21st-century perspective, which is inescapably shaped by the trajectory the world actually took. Native societies experienced centuries of forced removal and genocide, and much of what we once had is lost and can’t be re-created.

Lately, the news has felt particularly doomy, dominated by fears of a looming apocalypse due to climate change or nuclear war or artificial intelligence. This is understandable — any of these existential threats could irrevocably change the world, and what would lie beyond is unknowable. Native people know a thing or two about that; the world as we knew it ended long ago, and it continued to end again and again and again. Yet we also know that there’s a future even after the apocalypse has come and gone. Rather than conceptualizing time as a linear march toward calamity (or, for optimists, toward the dream of utopia), it can be viewed as a wheel that we cycle through repeatedly, from creation to destruction to recreation.

The Indigenous experience embodies this cycle, providing evidence of a future after disaster. We’re still here, after all, even if the context we live in would be just as unimaginable to our pre-colonial ancestors as a city on the present-day Great Lakes truly untouched by colonial history is to me.

The world we know today will eventually be destroyed, too, whether by our changing climate or some other world-altering force we can’t predict or imagine. But the problem with the doomerist streak that’s taken hold of so much of our zeitgeist is that it just stops there, creating a moral hazard that lets us stop imagining the future. Something new will always be rebuilt on top of what’s destroyed, and we can never abandon our obligation to keep creating it.

The medicine wheel, an Anishinaabe model of time

There’s a stereotype that Native people are stoic and steeped in wisdom. I am no authority and certainly no expert, and I don’t purport to have any wisdom to share. I’m an urban Anishinaabekwe from Michigan’s Upper Peninsula who’s lived most of her life in California. I cannot speak for every Anishinaabe person, let alone every Native person. Our experiences and perspectives are as varied as any other group of people.

In Anishinaabe tradition, as well as in many other Native cultures, the medicine wheel represents the ever-churning cycle of life. Broken into four equal segments of yellow, black, red, and white, it starts on the right-hand side, reflecting the east as the source of the rising sun and beginning of all things. The four segments represent, among other things, the four directions, the four seasons, the four sacred medicines (tobacco, cedar, sage, and sweetgrass), and the four stages of life (birth, youth, adulthood, and elder).

The medicine wheel can also represent the repeating cycle of creation, destruction, and re-creation that has defined all of human history but has particular resonance for Indigenous communities. This cycle is reflected in the Anishinaabe creation story: The world was created by Kiche Manitou (the Great Spirit), then destroyed in a great flood, and then re-created by the Sky Woman, who fell from the sky while pregnant, clutching a handful of seeds. Seeking refuge on the back of a turtle, she created Turtle Island, the Earth anew.

Our histories have been one never-ending turn of this wheel: We create, they destroy, and we create something new out of the ashes of what was left behind, saving what we can, and creating new things from the memories of the old. What’s re-created isn’t necessarily superior or inferior to what was destroyed. It is simply different.

In hindsight, the Americas’ pre-colonial past can be imagined as a generative period of creation. For centuries, we were a continent of self-governing tribes that responsibly managed and lived in concert with the land. We built cities, trade networks that stretched from the Arctic to the Andes, and a system of governance so sophisticated that it eventually influenced American democracy. There was no reason to believe we wouldn’t live this way forever.

Anishinaabe tradition teaches that when you create something, you’re not just creating for the moment — you’re creating for the future as well. We learn to make decisions from a seventh-generation perspective, which you may recognize as a green marketing slogan, but, like so many aspects of American culture, it was our idea first. It’s taught a couple of ways: One is to consider how each decision you make will impact others and the Earth seven generations in the future. We’re also taught to consider the impact of decisions in the context of the three generations that came before you, your own generation, and the three generations ahead of you: Will it honor your past and lay the foundation for a good future?

In either case, you are taught to look beyond the horizon of what you can see and consider the kind of world your decisions will create. But we also recognize that the present is like smoke: visible and real, but ephemeral and impossible to hold on to. What we create lingers until either something replaces it or it is destroyed.

Colonialism brought destruction, but also re-creation, to Indigenous America

It’s easy to feel as though the world is in a unique period of destruction. Housing, health care, and education are increasingly unaffordable; hard-won civil rights are being stripped away; democracy is under threat each day by a major American political party; climate change will have devastating global impacts, however much we do now to mitigate it.

These things aren’t exactly comparable to Indigenous history, but they do share a feeling of senseless and irrecoverable loss. Over the centuries, my people have been the victims of a coordinated effort to destroy us culturally, ethnically, and biologically. The dispossession of Indigenous people did not end with the Battle of Wounded Knee in 1890, though that’s usually when US schools stop teaching Native history because it is generally regarded as the end of the Native armed resistance against the American government. In the early 20th century, two of my great-grandmother’s cousins were sent to an Indian boarding school, where they were forcibly sterilized. In 1953, less than a decade after my Anishinaabe grandfather and his brother fought in World War II, the US government began a formal program of tribal termination, with the goal of eliminating Native nations’ independence and requiring Natives on reservations to move to urban areas and assimilate into American life and culture. This practice continued until well into the Vietnam War era and did not officially end until it was repealed by Congress in 1988.

The United States has tried to breed us out of existence through blood quantum laws, which classify people as Native only if a certain percentage of their ancestors were “full-blood” Native Americans, whatever that means. If you fell below the required threshold, you were no longer legally Native. After a few generations of intermarriage, that’s pretty easy to do.

The blood quantum system still exists, both officially and informally. If you want to get a tuition waiver as a tribe member in Michigan, you must be at least one-quarter Native. I don’t look the way most people expect an Anishinaabekwe to look; whatever you’re picturing, I’m probably not it. When I share my affiliation and heritage, the first question I am often asked is what percentage I am. As the old saying goes, only dogs, horses, and Indians are classified this way.

Indigenous sovereignty continues to be attacked and contested, like just last year, when the US Supreme Court partially walked back a ruling that held that most of Oklahoma was Indian land. It will be like this as long as our persistence as independent nations is seen as in conflict with the United States. Rates of violence against Indigenous women are appallingly high and under-covered compared to white victims. The name of the sports teams at my mother’s high school in Marquette, Michigan, is still the Redmen, despite decades of debate and requests for change.

You could say, and many people do, that the past five centuries have constituted one long period of destruction. It absolutely has been. Entire nations, cultures, and languages have been lost, and so much has been lost even among those of us whose traditions and cultures survived. At the same time, you might also see it as part of a cycle of destruction and re-creation, of Native people re-creating and facing the destruction of what we’d rebuilt, only to rebuild it again and again and again. The US government did everything it could to destroy us, yet we are still here.

More than 100 years ago, pursuant to the Dawes Act, which converted the Native American system of communal land ownership into a private property system, the US government came to the Anishinaabeg across Michigan, including to my family in the Upper Peninsula. They offered a deal: My family could stay on the land that had been theirs for at least the past 5,000 years, but they had to stop communal farming and parcel out the land in individual 160-acre allotments for each nuclear family. If they wanted to stay, they would have to forget who they were and start living like white people. After each family got their 160 acres, the remaining land was taken by the government and made available for purchase by white settlers. While it had been US policy since the time of George Washington to “assimilate” and “civilize” Native peoples by forcing them to give up collective life and farming, this attempted to enforce it once and for all.

My family took the deal. Because of that difficult choice, my great-great-grandparents, great-grandparents, grandparents, father, aunts, uncles, cousins, and their children lived on and continue to live on the land. Their allotments have been bought, sold, and traded over the last century, and our ideas of culture, identity, and self have been both destroyed and rebuilt over that same period. Yet we are still fishing the same lakes and streams, still hunting in the same woods, still sitting around fires telling stories long into the night. You can even hear Anishinaabemowin spoken, though it’s often learned far later in life. My father didn’t learn to speak it until he was in his 60s.

White people bought the land that remained after it was parceled out, farmed it, paved over it, built landfills and factories and power plants, and hollowed out what was inside with pipelines and mines, belching smog and carbon and CFCs into the sky. The same thing was done to the Odawaa, the Haudenosaunee, the Neshnabé, the Hocągara, the Diné, the Myaamia, the Mamaceqtaw, the Maskoutench, the Meshkwahkihaki, the Othâkîwa, the Giiwigaabaw, the Shawanwaki, the Wyandot, the Lakota, and the more than 500 other nations living on land now under US jurisdiction.

This has happened on a wide scale — Native perseverance and reinvention alongside ongoing colonialism that threatens to swallow up what we have left. Native Americans have integrated into settler colonial society, too. We obtain college degrees, work in offices and hospitals and government and retail shops, fly in airplanes, drive cars, write novels, direct movies and television, talk on cellphones, paint portraits and landscapes, compete in the Olympics, and walk in space. I’m a lawyer and a published author, and I’m also Native. As a percentage of both professions, the share of Native Americans rounds to zero. This means that, statistically speaking, I don’t exist, yet obviously I do.

Perhaps it’s colonial society’s drive to destroy and replace that makes it inclined to see today’s global challenges as apocalyptic. For us, though, extinction was never an option. Because Native people maintained and continue to fight for self-determination, we still have a future.

Indigenous futurism re-creates a Native-centered world

I’m often asked how, in the world of The Peacekeeper, colonization was avoided; it’s never directly addressed in the book. To my mind, so many things had to go wrong for it to happen that any number of small differences in the course of history could have led to vastly different outcomes, and therefore any and all theories can be true. Thinking through these contingencies is important, but I find it more valuable to see the alternatives that could’ve existed. Colonialism wasn’t inevitable. The horrors of the past 500 years did not have to happen. The potential calamities of the next 500 years can likewise be avoided.

Indigenous futurism is a movement in art and literature, particularly through speculative and science fiction, that explores the present and future through an Indigenous-centered lens. This is what I aimed to do in creating Shikaakwa, considering what Indigenous communities might look like today if the historical fact of colonialism had gone differently, the benefits and limits of a Native restorative justice system, and how our relationship to the earth would drive urban development.

Some Indigenous futurist literature explicitly responds to the idea of apocalypse, and of Indigenous people having lived through one. I wanted to write a story in which the apocalypse was more or less inconceivable, where Indigenous people engage with one another and with their own value systems rather than with colonial invaders. Creating the world in The Peacekeeper was an act of re-creation like in the medicine wheel; it imagines a world radically unlike our own; at the same time, it’s a re-creation of what still might be.

Earth is a resilient planet that knows how to re-create out of destruction. Over 4 billion years ago, it collided with the planet Theia and created the moon. Volcanic eruptions eventually yield flower-covered meadows. We humans are a clever species; we eventually walked on that same moon born of destruction. One day we, with all of our conflicts here on earth, will be gone, too.

Viewing the universe through cycles of creation, destruction, and re-creation gives a wider, more expansive sense of time in which an individual life is a tiny part of a greater whole. Even human existence is just one blip in this greater scheme. Rather than viewing this as something tragic, there is some comfort in being able to see our impermanence and insignificance in the history of the world.

There’s no way of knowing where we are on the turn of the wheel; it’s too big for us to see at any given moment. But it will turn again — and we have the power, and the obligation, to give the best options to humanity and to all creation.

B.L. Blanchard is an author, lawyer, and enrolled member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians. Her debut novel, The Peacekeeper, was named a 2023 Michigan Notable Book.

The Netflix dating show’s contestants are not okay.

Like a golden ticket from eccentric chocolatier Willy Wonka to “visit” his factory, the fourth season of Netflix’s Love Is Blind is not what it pretends to be. It’s not an “experiment,” it’s not about love, and — like the international moppets who got sucked into Wonka’s chocolate pipes or exploded into something huge and blue — it’s only an opportunity to experience humiliation, destruction, and dashed dreams.

To be fair, little has changed.

This year, as the show has done for the past three seasons, contestants — men and women separated by sex but united by their search for love — still enter “pods,” small rooms with a Wayfair-looking sofa and a shared wall. There, they talk to their prospective matches, every interaction filmed, in the hope that they’ll find love through conversation.

“Positano is my favorite place,” one of the female contestants this season yells in her windowless couch room. She hopes that the person on the other side of the wall also shares a favorable view of the luxurious Italian beach town on the Amalfi coast.

I’m not entirely sure what she’s worried about. No one on the show has ever said, “I hate Positano,” or, “I love to vacation among sewer rats.” But she is worried, making sure a man she can’t see finds her acceptable.

The ultimate goal for the Positano-lover and her cohort is to find love (sight unseen), and then advance out of the pods and see their match. But to do so, contestants must first get engaged. After that engagement, they have a mini vacation to test physical attraction, and four weeks to decide if they’re going to get married. The first season yielded two couples that are still married to this day, proving that, in certain cases, love can be blind.

But as time has gone on, the show has pivoted away from its initial questions about whether it’s possible to find true connection under these unusual circumstances and whether that’s preferable to the current real-world dating economy. Not unlike Wonka’s factory, Love Is Blind has morphed into something fearsome and self-contained: a look at just how dysfunctional relationships created under these extremely unrealistic pressures can be. Season four, full of villains, backstabbing, and multiple addenda to the initial rules, is perhaps the most cynical yet. Obviously, I cannot stop watching.

Love Is Blind is leaning into its villain era

Unlike seasons past, the fourth season of Love is Blind goes into the depths of what life is like for contestants in the pod stage of the show. Not only in the pods, where cast members do things like draw or listen to music or play games with each other through the wall (if you consider a version of beer pong a game), but also in their segregated living quarters.

While watching a man and woman color together in the pods isn’t particularly romantic or stimulating, there’s plenty to see in their common living space, which effectively amounts to a college dorm.

In the women’s area, everyone lounges around at all hours, faux fur throws wrapped around their shoulders or waists. It seems that women who aren’t currently in a pod talking to a man are encouraged to hang around talking about what just happened in said pod with one or two of the other dozen female strangers they’re living with. There’s barely any kind of Bechdel test-passing conversation between the women, no talk about personal hobbies or what the FTC’s duties are or what day of the week it is — only the men have those conversations.

This familiarity with one another — and one another’s love lives — creates tension because, in many cases, multiple women are going after the same guy (and vice versa). More than we’ve seen in any other installment of the show, cliques are formed. The sharpest division on the women’s side is between the women who dislike a contestant named Irina and the two who like Irina, one of whom is Irina herself.

Courtesy of Netflix

“I think I’m a bombshell, but when I was younger I had really, really bad acne,” Irina says in her introductory confessional. The show identifies her as “25” and a “business owner” but does not elaborate on what kind of business Irina runs. (In my heart, I believe it’s soup-based.)

“Like, really, really bad acne. And I would always be like, ‘Guys don’t wanna date me because I have really bad acne.’” she continues. While Irina goes on to say that it’s who she is on the inside that counts, all the audience knows about who Irina is on the inside is someone still preoccupied with how she had, like, really, really bad acne.

The other women in the house do not dislike Irina because of her past acne but because she is constantly gossiping with her bestie Micah. At one point, the two find out one of their castmates has been rejected. Irina cackles, then sneaks up closer to hear the woman detail the gory bits of her dumping. That gives us something else we know about Irina: She deeply enjoys other women’s failures.

Irina’s psychological warfare escalates when she tells Zach, her No. 1 match, that Bliss, her rival for his affections, is treating Irina poorly. Zach isn’t privy to what’s going on at the Love Is Blind women’s residence hall; he hasn’t seen Irina bully and gossip. She paints herself as the victim and Zach takes her side.

The show has had problematic contestants before — women who wanted the same man, couples with palpable incompatibility, men who deserve to be single — but a villain who is actively sabotaging her fellow contestants is a first.

I found myself rooting against Irina for all her sneakiness but slowly realized that that implies there’s actually some kind of prize to be won on Love Is Blind. The show is much more cynical than that. Given what we’ve seen over previous seasons — emotional terrorism, divorce, constant miscommunication, a man with flies in his toilet, a woman who forced her fiancé to wear a full-body corn costume — there are no winners on Love Is Blind. Even if Irina “wins,” she still loses.

How Love Is Blind abandoned its gimmick

The word that comes up in Love Is Blind over and over, no matter the episode or season, is “experiment.” It’s a convenient way of making the television show sound more scientific and less exploitative than it is. Over the course of the four seasons, however, that experiment has shifted somewhat as the results produced other findings.

The possibility of “finding true love sight unseen,” it turns out, makes for less addictive television than some of the other hypothetical outcomes of gathering together a bunch of people who want to be on TV and letting them know they need to fall in love if they want camera time. It’s possible to find couples that will get married and stay together, but it’s also possible that much more chaotic dynamics will form. In the case of first-season cast member Jessica, her unrequited feelings for an already-engaged co-star and her determination to stay on the show despite all good sense eclipsed the show’s happy endings. Sure, co-stars Cam and Lauren seem like actual soulmates, but during a bout of sadness, Jessica fed her dog wine. That’s what we all remember.

The messiness continued in season two with a love triangle between Shaina, Shayne, and Natalie. Shayne chose to marry Natalie instead of Shaina even though Shaina and Shayne talked about her crop tops a lot. Similar disaster ensued in season three when Cole chose Zanab over Colleen, but verbally told Colleen, the woman he explicitly did not choose, that he was more attracted to her.

Courtesy of Netflix

Off the top of my head, I couldn’t name the happy couples from those seasons. But I could easily name all the unhappy people and their damage. I don’t think I’m alone.

Producers figured out that it was easy to manipulate these contestants’ feelings and expectations into spiky melodrama. In each season, the powers that be pulled levers, like increasing the amount of time the cast would hang out with one another or doing away with the unspoken assumption that contestants wouldn’t be in contact with their exes from the pods.

Seeing someone outside of the pods, being attracted to them, and then making a move on them theoretically defeats the entire purpose of the show. But man, it’s good TV.

Given the psychological drama, it’s not a surprise that none of season two’s couples survived and only two of season three’s couples are still standing (for now). The third season also featured the first time a couple — Raven and SK — didn’t get married at the altar, got back together after the show stopped filming, and then broke up because of a cheating scandal. Since producers amped up the emotional chaos and the number and type of interactions on the show, cast member animus and fantastically rancid relationships have also increased.

The fourth season follows suit, continually bringing together the couples in the hope of sparking unrequited attraction-fueled clashes. The show also, for the first time, allows someone to break their engagement and ask their second choice to marry them. That’s not how it’s supposed to go! You can’t just have do-overs! The title of this show isn’t Love Is Blind, But Whoa Did You Get a Look at Her?!

These wrinkles complicate the already-existing, extremely complicated relationships, stirring up the potential for even more drama and sabotage. Aside from one pair, everyone seems much better off single. I suppose there’s relief in failure because, if the gimmicks of Love Is Blind efficiently worked, then viewers at home would have to ask ourselves questions about our own ideas of relationships and romance.

This isn’t to say that the emotional terrorism of season four isn’t entertaining, because it extremely is — much more so than watching people gush about Positano to each other. But the experiment in season four isn’t about whether love is blind anymore. It’s about what people will endure to be on this show.