Climate change is contributing to heavier precipitation, a major factor in flooding.

Parts of the United States’s eastern seaboard have been hit with massive floods this year, a phenomenon that’s expected to grow more common — and worse — as climate change warms the planet.

“It’s worse than a new normal. I call it a new abnormal,” says University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann.

Friday, New York City experienced intense rains that left parts of the city underwater. Over the summer, the Philadelphia suburbs were hit with heavy flash flooding that inundated roads and killed five people. Earlier this year, Vermont also experienced heavy flooding that trapped people in their homes and damaged roads and buildings. Nationally, tens of millions of people were under a flood watch in July, while globally, countries including South Korea, Pakistan, and Turkey have seen destructive flooding that has displaced millions of people and forced evacuations in the last year.

“Everywhere is susceptible to these impacts,” Mann said. “The western, central, and eastern US, Europe, and Asia — with one of the best examples being the Pakistan floods last year which displaced more than 30 million people.”

As the Earth gets warmer, the atmosphere is able to hold more water, leading to heavier precipitation when it rains, and a greater likelihood of flooding as a result. A 1 degree Centigrade increase in the atmosphere’s temperature corresponds to a 7 percent increase in water vapor that it’s able to hold, according to the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. And estimates suggest global temperatures could breach a 1.5 degree Celsius increase threshold sometime in the 2030s, meaning much more rain to come.

We spoke with four climate scientists about the factors behind the rise of extreme weather, and how the government could respond to both combat it and alleviate its impact. These interviews have been edited and condensed for clarity.

Is flooding getting more frequent and intense overall — and what is causing this, if so?

Richard Seager, Columbia: In general, we know that heavy intense precipitation is increasing pretty much everywhere around the world, as a result of rising atmospheric temperatures.

There’s never a complete one-to-one relationship between heavy intense precipitation and flooding of rivers. But you could certainly say that heavy, more heavy, and intense precipitation is more likely to cause the kinds of flooding that we’ve seen.

We know from climate models, and just simple theory, that the atmosphere can hold more moisture as it gets warmer. We’ve known that ... this can happen for decades now and it’s really coming true.

Daniel Swain, UCLA: Let’s back up a little bit. Before we get to flooding, let’s talk about extreme precipitation. That’s sort of what the proximal cause is with terrestrial flooding, as you get too much water too quickly from the sky, in the form of rain generally.

One of the signatures of climate change is an increase in both extreme heat and extreme precipitation. And this is true almost everywhere.

Flooding is a bit more complicated, because obviously, you need extreme, heavy rain for some sort of flooding, but then also, the antecedent conditions matter a lot. So if you had gone into [the New England storms], say, in an extreme drought, the soil was super dry, it might have taken longer for all of this water to saturate and the rivers wouldn’t have risen quite as much. But … the soils were actually unusually wet going into [the heavy rains in the northeastern US]. So they were primed to respond quickly to the precipitation.

Michael Mann, University of Pennsylvania: Climate change is leading to anomalous warmth around the planet in general, and warmer ocean waters mean more moisture in the atmosphere that is available to produce flooding rains.

But climate change is also altering the behavior of the jet stream, and some of our work suggests that it is leading to a wavier, slower jet stream associated with stalled weather systems that remain stuck in place for days or even weeks on end — that’s when you see the worst flooding events.

Mohammed Ombadi, University of Michigan: In general, global warming is increasing the intensity of heavy storms.

Up until recently, we thought in the climate community that the increase in rainfall intensity is constrained to about 7 percent per 1 degree of warming, but there is growing evidence in recent studies that the increase might be much higher than that.

Is this year an anomaly or is this the new normal?

Michael Mann, University of Pennsylvania: It’s worse than a new normal. I call it a new abnormal, and these flooding events will continue to become more extreme unless we reduce carbon emissions and stop the ongoing heating of the planet.

Daniel Swain, UCLA: I usually try and shy away from the term “new normal,” not because this isn’t related to climate change, but because it suggests that we’ve reached some semblance of a stable plateau.

Whereas really, the new normal is continued change, continued escalation, and extreme. So if we call it “a normal,” it sounds like, “All right, we’ve reached this tipping point, we need to adapt to it. And if we can deal with everything now, we’re okay.”

And unfortunately, the reality is, this is our temporary, new normal, but in 10 years, we’ll have a new normal that’s escalated beyond today’s. We will see events like this — and worse.

Richard Seager, Columbia: Increasingly, we’re going to be seeing events, whether they’re heat waves, flooding events, or droughts that we thought looking back at our climate records would never be possible. Because of human-driven climate change, that’s going to create situations where things that have never happened before are going to become routine.

[In] another 10 or 20 years, we won’t be thinking they’re so abnormal, because these things are going to be happening more and more frequently.

Mohammed Ombadi, University of Michigan: It is somewhat a new normal. In the future, we should expect to see more of these events occurring. However, it is important to note that this does not mean we will experience such floods every year going forward.

Can you explain the increase in severe rain in some places and the rise in droughts in other places?

Richard Seager, Columbia: They are two sides of the same coin. So when the atmosphere can hold more moisture, it also transports more moisture, from one place to the other.

So like, in the Southwest United States, where I do most of my work on drought, when there are high-pressure systems … [with] winds blowing out of that area, those are the conditions that set up droughts in those areas. And the atmosphere is extracting moisture from those regions. So when it warms up, [the atmosphere] can hold more moisture, and move more moisture out of those areas. So droughts can intensify.

In the warmer atmosphere, you can get both more extreme droughts and you can also get more extreme precipitation and they’re connected by the ability of the atmosphere to hold more moisture and therefore move more moisture from one place to the other, thus creating extremes on both ends of the spectrum.

How effective is forecasting when it comes to predicting severe flood events and warning people?

Daniel Swain, UCLA: I mean, absolutely critical. And it’s actually quite good for the most part.

If you look at the NOAA predictions for [the floods in the northeastern US], several days in advance, there were [public predictions] that were like, “A significant flood event is possible.” The day before, it was like, “We’re highly confident this event will be potentially as bad as what occurred with [Hurricane] Irene, potentially even worse” — which is exactly what happened.

So it’s hard to fault that level of accuracy and the consistency of messaging. I know it still doesn’t mean that everyone gets the message. But that’s not a forecasting problem so much as it is a ... communication and mass messaging problem.

How can people and governments respond to the rise in more severe flooding?

Daniel Swain, UCLA: Day to day, aside from being aware of the weather and taking warnings seriously, as an individual, it’s difficult to adapt to the increased risk of extreme precipitation, flash flooding. I guess, be mindful of where you are during events, know whether your home or your place of work or places you spend time for other reasons are at risk during these events, but I feel like that’s weak advice.

[The] local and regional government level is actually where the rubber really meets the road here, in terms of planning and adaptation.

Cities and counties and local governments do update emergency response plans, they do update infrastructure as things age out, rebuild new things, whether that’s storm drains, or culverts, or restoring floodplains so that there’s less risk to the adjacent populated areas. Whatever it is, all of these sorts of interventions need to be climate aware.

No city, no regional government should be building anything, or updating any infrastructure at this point, without taking climate change into account. And taking future climate change into account as well, not just how much things have changed to date, but how much they’re likely to change in the coming decades.

When it comes to flooding, specifically, one example would be in urban areas: You have storm drains and culverts that have a fixed maximum capacity; there’s a certain cubic feet per minute. They max out and then things go haywire when you exceed it. Part of it is having building infrastructure that has higher capacity.

But the other part of it is in some ways the opposite, which is allowing the water to kind of do its thing in a safe or at least a semi-controlled way. That’s why things like river and creek setbacks, levee setbacks, restoring floodplains [are important] because of course, if you build right up on the floodplain, guess what’s going to happen when there’s a flood, you’re gonna wash away the structures, that infrastructure you built right on the margins of this natural floodplain.

Michael Mann, University of Pennsylvania: Obviously better emergency response is critical, but we will exceed our adaptive capacity in dealing with these events if we don’t address the problem at its source, which is primarily the ongoing burning of fossil fuels for energy and transportation.

Richard Seager, Columbia: The lesson looking forward is to start planning for how we’re going to adapt to things that we have just never seen before.

[We need to think about] how populations are going to deal with extreme heat, how our infrastructure is going to deal with extreme precipitation and flooding. We’ve got to think through all of that and start making changes now based on what we expect will happen in the future.

What we’ve already done to the climate system is going to lead to more warming going forward. So a lot of these changes we’re talking about in the near term are pretty much inevitable.

Whatever we do in terms of prevention can certainly prevent it from getting as bad as it otherwise would. And the payoff in decades to come will be huge.

But by getting serious about reducing emissions right now, we’re not going to get out of this problem immediately because we have so much heating of the climate system that’s currently in the pipeline.

Mohammed Ombadi, University of Michigan: There is little that can be done at the individual level. Most of the efforts needed for adaptation must be taken at the local, state, and federal government levels. However, people can cope with those flooding events by avoiding building homes in regions that are vulnerable to landslides and hill slopes that can be severely impacted by such torrential downpours.

​​The big message here is that our infrastructure was designed for a climate that no longer exists. This is very clear with the ongoing floods in northeastern US as we hear news of washed-out roadways and bridges, damaged tracks in railroads, and swamped homes. We need to change the way we design and build infrastructure to be in line with the increase in rainfall extreme events predicted by climate scientists.

Update, September 29, 2:15 pm ET: This story was originally published on July 11 and has been updated to include news about new floods in the US and around the world.

The EU could backslide on its cage-free farming ban and more. Billions of animals hang in the balance.

Europe was on the cusp of an animal welfare revolution.

In the summer of 2021, European Union policymakers promised to phase out cages for 300 million farmed pigs, egg-laying hens, rabbits, and other species, which Vox contributor Jonathan Moens then called “the most ambitious plan ever by any government to end the cruel practice.”

But two years later, after pressure from the powerful European meat lobby and concerns over rising food costs due to inflation, extreme weather, and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, that legislation — along with a suite of other reforms that would reduce the suffering of potentially billions of farmed animals — has been thrown into doubt.

Earlier this month, three anonymous EU officials told the Financial Times that the European Commission (the executive branch of the EU) plans to entirely scrap the animal welfare legislation. Another anonymous official said the commission plans to scale back, though not entirely ditch, its policy proposals, the Financial Times reported.

Reineke Hameleers, CEO of the nonprofit Eurogroup for Animals, told Vox that “the animal welfare legislation has sort of become a victim of the political climate we are working in,” such as broader fights over Europe’s Green New Deal.

But, Hameleers added, “the truth of the matter is that no one really knows what will happen [with the legislation] now.” The Financial Times report “caused quite some commotion, but if you ask five different people in the commission about this legislation, you’re hearing five slightly different stories.”

In an email to Vox, a European Commission spokesperson firmly denied the allegations that it was abandoning the reforms. “We are not dropping the proposal,” the spokesperson said. “This preparatory work is ongoing, covering legislation for the welfare of animals at farm level, during transport, at the time of killing and to establish a voluntary European label for animal welfare.”

Jo-Anne McArthur/Animal Equality/We Animals Media

Copa-Cogeca, a prominent EU farming lobby, argues that a cage ban would significantly raise food costs, reduce farmer income, and make Europe reliant on meat and egg imports — conclusions animal advocacy groups contest. “The question is not on the timetable, but rather the content of the proposals,” said Pekka Pesonen, the group’s secretary general, in an email to Vox. “Impacts can be huge if this work is done in [a] rush based on political considerations rather than technical discussions.”

European Livestock Voice, a coalition of animal agriculture associations in Europe, did not respond to a request for comment.

Despite the European Commission’s stated commitment to following through on a cage ban and other major reforms to EU animal welfare regulations, animal advocates remain skeptical — and worry the commission is running out of time to get it done, pointing to signs that some EU officials are siding with the livestock industry, and causing delays that put the reform package at risk of falling through the EU’s policymaking cracks.

For example, earlier this month, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen expressed sympathy with agribusiness in her State of the Union address, but didn’t mention the animal welfare legislation.

Philipp von Ditfurth/picture alliance via Getty Images

Last year, the commission said that by the end of the third quarter of this year, it would publish its draft animal welfare legislation so the European Council and Parliament could begin reviewing it — a critical milestone to move it forward. But that deadline is about to pass, and animal advocates say the commission hasn’t even begun the internal consultation process required to advance the proposed legislation, which takes a few weeks.

When asked if the commission would meet its end-of-quarter deadline, the spokesperson said that such dates are tentative and “may change at any moment in time. Nothing can be confirmed for certain until closer to date.”

A weeks-long delay may seem minor, but the timing is incredibly tight, animal advocates say. Once the commission kicks the draft legislation over to the European Council and Parliament for review, that process could take well over a year, and then there are further steps required to finally enact it into law. But EU elections take place next June, and without significant progress made prior to election season, there’s no guarantee the next Parliament would pick it up, said Olga Kikou, European affairs manager for Compassion in World Farming, which led the campaign to ban cages EU-wide.

The delays and allegations of ditching the animal welfare reforms altogether underscore an obvious yet profound challenge of cracking down on animal cruelty in the political arena: Animals can’t lobby for themselves, and however abusive meat industry conditions may be, they’re often subordinated to concerns over food prices and business interests.

The global stakes of Europe’s animal welfare reforms

Animal advocates have characterized the potential policy reversal as a betrayal of EU citizens and the democratic process. The cage ban came about as a result of what’s called a European Citizens’ Initiative, in which EU citizens can propose a policy directly to the commission so long as they collect at least 1 million signatures in support of it. The commission doesn’t have to adopt the proposal, but it at least has to formally respond to it.

A coalition of animal welfare groups gathered 1.4 million signatures to put the cage ban before the commission, which then agreed to craft legislation to phase out cages for farmed animals across the EU’s 27 member states. Its supporters say it’s the only such initiative to win firm support from the commission since the citizens’ initiative system began in 2012 — and it would end a decades-long fight to wholly eliminate cages from Europe’s meat and egg sectors.

In the last few decades, the EU has taken some steps toward that goal. In 2007, it banned veal crates, and in 2012, it implemented a ban on tiny cages for egg-laying hens. But the EU still allows larger cages; in 2021, almost half of the 376 million hens in the EU were confined. The EU has also implemented a partial ban on cages for female breeding pigs, allowing pork producers to lock them in small crates barely bigger than their bodies for about a third of their four-month pregnancies, and for several weeks as they wean piglets.

A few individual EU countries have banned cages for pigs or hens, though Germany and Denmark are the only agricultural giants among them. Germany’s ban on cages for hens takes effect in 2025, and its near-total ban on cages for pigs will go into effect later this decade, while Denmark’s near-total ban for pigs goes into effect in 2035. France, another food giant, has instituted a partial ban on the sale of eggs from caged hens.

Andrew Skowron/We Animals Media

In addition to an EU-wide cage phase-out, the European Commission is also looking at a broader overhaul of its animal welfare regulations. Earlier this year, a leaked draft assessment of the commission’s proposals revealed that it’s considering phasing out painful mutilations routinely performed on farmed animals, like the cutting of hens’ beaks and pigs’ tails. The draft also included reforms to inhumane transport conditions, the brutal culling of day-old male chicks, fish slaughter, and the treatment of chickens raised for meat.

These changes wouldn’t create idyllic conditions, but they would eliminate some of the worst cruelties on animal farms. But now, amid rumors of a reversal or weakening of the proposals, animal advocates are alarmed.

“We are, of course, astonished by the fact that the commission … would backslide on its promises and its commitments,” Kikou said. “It’s not a good development for democracy because the citizens feel weak, they feel that they’re not listened to … This is not how a democracy should operate.”

Whatever the commission does next will reverberate outside the European Union.

A continent-wide overhaul of farm animal welfare standards would bolster momentum for such improvements in other countries and demonstrate to food companies that there’s public demand and political will to reform the treatment of animals in agriculture. In the EU, both animal advocates and farmers have been pushing for the new standards to also apply to food imported from outside the EU, which could reduce the suffering of millions of animals outside the continent.

Conversely, scrapping or weakening the plans would be a major setback to the movement for a more humane food system.

The meat industry versus democracy

The fracas over the EU’s animal welfare legislation highlights the anti-democratic spirit that’s come to pervade some segments of the industrialized animal agriculture sector. Recent US events mirror what’s transpiring in Europe.

In 2018, California voters overwhelmingly supported a cage ban at the ballot box, and meat industry groups then sued the state three times in an attempt to delay and overturn it. The US Supreme Court ultimately upheld the law after a more than three-year court battle, but meat industry trade groups are now pushing for federal legislation to overturn it, and in the process, strip states and municipalities from setting their own agricultural standards.

At every level of government, agribusiness has lobbied — often successfully — for exemptions to basic animal welfare, labor, and environmental regulations, giving it the unique ability to operate outside laws that other industries must follow.

Despite the repeated political roadblocks put up by agribusiness and its political allies, the animal welfare movement has been able to make some modest progress, and Hameleers, for one, isn’t ready to give up hope for a welfare revolution. The European public wants stronger animal welfare standards, and “there’s broad support in the European Parliament, there’s broad support among the member states,” she said. “The commission has invested so much in this, so it would be a real divestiture if they would not follow through on it.”

Soul City was meant to be an antiracist town in the American South.

In the 1960s, Floyd B. McKissick, a prolific civil rights activist, embarked on an ambitious idea: What if Black Americans could build and lead their own city? A place centered on the idea of racial equality and economic power, where everyone, especially people of color and the poor, could thrive? That idea turned into Soul City, North Carolina: the Black-led capitalist utopia that almost came to be.

At the time, the federal government was encouraging the idea of new cities. The US Department of Housing and Urban Development opened up a process to finance new towns built by private developers. McKissick took the opportunity to pitch his idea and hoped to secure federal funding to finally make his dream a reality. But to do it, he also made an unlikely ally: Republican President Richard Nixon. By 1972, Soul City was approved for funding, and McKissick broke ground on hundreds of acres of former tobacco plantation land in Warren County, North Carolina.

Designs were drafted. Land was cleared. An electrical grid and water system were constructed. Infrastructure was built, like roads, a public pool, a health clinic, and a massive industrial building called “Soul Tech One,” meant to be a manufacturing hub. But within just seven years of breaking ground, McKissick’s dream of Soul City was cut short. In the piece above, we explore what happened to this experimental town. With the help of McKissick’s son, former Sen. Floyd B. McKissick Jr., and one of Soul City’s first residents, Jane Ball-Groom, we look at what got built, what remains today, and the forces that came together to cause its end.

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

US providers are underusing the drug — and not just in high-risk people.

A few weeks ago, a colleague of mine got Covid-19. She was scheduled to board a cross-country flight the following week, with important meetings in two cities on her schedule. She really wanted to make it.

But the infection hit her hard, and on day two of her symptoms, she asked her doctor if she could get a prescription for Paxlovid. It’s currently the most effective antiviral medication on the market for treating and reducing the severity of outpatient Covid infections.

Her doctor said no — she wasn’t in the typical group for which the drug was recommended, she was told.

What followed, frankly, sucked: She was so sick, and her recovery took so long, that she ultimately delayed the trip by a week, causing significant disruption to her schedule and her life. (She’s fine now.)

Hearing her story, I wondered if withholding Paxlovid had really been the right call.

Yes, the drug is technically Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved for treating infection only in people at high risk for being hospitalized or dying as a result of Covid-19 infection, that is, those over 65 or with certain chronic medical conditions. And my colleague is not in that category. She’s in her 30s, with no risk factors for severe infection. And while the medication has interactions with lots of other drugs, which makes prescribing it a little tricky, my colleague doesn’t take any other medications.

But doctors prescribe medications off label (that is, for indications other than the ones they’re approved for) all the time. I sometimes did so when I practiced as a physician if there was good evidence to suggest a drug’s benefit in a certain patient outweighed its risk.

I myself am low-risk for severe Covid-19, but recently took Paxlovid to shorten the length of my illness and keep some important plans — and I’m hearing about lots of peers who’ve either done or prescribed the same.

There’s reason to believe that Paxlovid could have big benefits for healthier people: A small body of literature suggests that the drug’s effects may make it a good strategy for shortening the course of illness, reducing transmissibility, and lowering the risk of long Covid.

Although there’s no shortage of Paxlovid in the US, the drug has been underused among the high-risk populations who’d derive the greatest good from its use. But we also might be underusing it in the lower-risk people in whom the drug hasn’t been as rigorously studied — but who could have other benefits from its use.

Paxlovid is not a perfect drug — the usual five-day course isn’t enough to completely eradicate infection in some people who take it, occasionally leading to “rebound” Covid. And people taking certain medications or with certain kidney conditions might be unable to take the drug at all.

Still, if taking the medication enables low-risk Covid-infected people to feel lousy for fewer days, keep plans that really matter to them, and transmit fewer infections onward, shouldn’t prescribers be prescribing it more liberally? And do they really need to wait for a study to tell them to do so?

Understanding Paxlovid’s potential to benefit healthy people means rethinking what we want it to accomplish

A big reason why many doctors are hesitant to prescribe Paxlovid to lower-risk people has to do with how the drug was studied.

When experts try to understand whether any particular drug is effective, a key part of their question is to better define what “effective” really means to them. Are they trying to use the drug to make people feel a little better? Or to save lives?

It’s easier for scientists to determine a drug’s effectiveness if they define it very narrowly up front. But on the flip side, defining effectiveness too narrowly makes it hard to tell if the drug has other benefits they’re not looking for.

When it comes to Paxlovid, the drug was initially studied to answer the question, “Can this drug save lives and reduce hospitalizations in the people at highest risk from Covid-19 infection?” We now know the answer is a resounding “yes.”

But Paxlovid’s initial studies can’t answer all of our questions about the drug’s ability to achieve more modest goals in younger, healthier people. Scientists weren’t looking for those specific outcomes when they designed early Paxlovid studies — often called endpoints — so those studies can’t definitively tell them whether the drug can produce those outcomes.

Still, it’s reasonable to wonder how the drug could help other people, and whether it’s worth prescribing more broadly. And there is some data that speaks to this.

We know what Paxlovid does well in the highest-risk people — but less about what it does well in those at lower risk

Let’s first talk about what we know with some certainty: In people at highest risk for a bad outcome related to Covid-19 infection, Paxlovid saves lives.

Historically, having physical risk factors (including older age, chronic diseases, and immunosuppression) and being unvaccinated have put people at higher risk for the worst Covid-19 outcomes.

Clinical trials (most notably, the EPIC-HR trial) show Paxlovid is extremely effective at lowering hospitalization and death risk in people who both have physical risk factors and are unvaccinated.

It’s on the basis of this study that the FDA gave Paxlovid drug full approval earlier this year. (The agency first approved Paxlovid under an emergency use authorization in December of 2021 based on preliminary data.)

Less clear are Paxlovid’s benefits in lower-risk people.

“There are four things” we should think about as potential endpoints for Paxlovid treatment in young, healthy, vaccinated people, said Peter Chin-Hong, an infectious disease doctor at the University of California, San Francisco. Those include:

• Shortening the duration of illness;
• Reducing onward transmission;
• Reducing long Covid risk;
• Preventing infection altogether through pre-exposure prophylaxis.

Most of those endpoints haven’t been as rigorously studied in lower-risk people. Nevertheless, “there is enough data there to show me that it’s not harmful, and it’s potentially beneficial to some individuals,” Chin-Hong said.

Preliminary data from another trial (EPIC-SR; the trial was ended early and results have not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal) suggests the drug was less useful in people whose risk fell somewhere in between the highest and the lowest for severe Covid.

Let’s call these people “medium-risk” — it’s a group that includes people who are unvaccinated, or who’ve been vaccinated but have other risk factors.

In this trial, the drug wasn’t particularly powerful at lowering the number of days people were sick: The group who got Paxlovid had symptoms for around 12 days (a median) — only one day fewer than the non-Paxlovid group’s 13 days of illness. The drug also more meagerly reduced the risk of hospitalization or death, from 1.6 percent in the non-Paxlovid group to 0.8 percent in the Paxlovid group.

Another study (EPIC-PEP) tried to examine Chin-Hong’s last endpoint — Paxlovid’s ability to prevent infection if a person takes it after exposure but before symptoms start. In medium-risk people, it didn’t achieve that result.

In all of these studies, the drug was broadly safe. It had minimal side effects — the most common one, a nasty metallic taste in the mouth, was tolerable for most people.

Looking at this data, you could conclude: Paxlovid has clear benefits in high-risk people, and lower-risk people have less to gain from taking it.

But less isn’t nothing! Even if the drug shortens the duration of symptoms one day, “that one day is very meaningful to a lot of people,” Chin-Hong said.

With other infections, that’s reason enough to justify antiviral treatment. For example, the flu drug oseltamivir can reduce symptoms by about a day in healthy people. And that small gain is generally thought to be enough to justify the prescription.

“This concept does have legs,” Chin-Hong said, referring to the prospect of using Paxlovid to shorten disease course in young, healthy people. It just doesn’t have a broad evidence base.

Data from several small studies are mixed, but suggest Paxlovid could do some good in lower-risk people

So there’s some data on the “medium risk” people. Is there any data on the lowest risk?

Not directly: There’s no large, high-quality clinical trial out there to answer the question, “What are the benefits of Paxlovid treatment in young, healthy, vaccinated people?”

But a few studies can give us some clues.

One small study enrolled 36 vaccinated people aged 5 to 66 with the goal of understanding rebound Covid-19 infections. About one-third of the people in the study got Paxlovid treatment; some were healthy at baseline, while others weren’t.

The study wasn’t designed to understand how long each group took to test negative after infection. Still, the data it gathered showed people who took Paxlovid took only four days to test negative, compared to seven days for people who didn’t. That suggests Paxlovid reduced the number of days they were infectious.

Other studies of higher-risk people also suggest that in the noses of people treated with Paxlovid for certain omicron infections, viral populations waned several days sooner than they did in people who weren’t treated with Paxlovid.

Biologically, it makes sense that these findings would translate to benefit among low-risk people on two important endpoints, said Chin-Hong — specifically, shorter disease courses and lower likelihood of onward transmission.

There are also data suggesting Paxlovid could reduce the risk of long Covid after infection. Several studies are currently underway to evaluate the drug for preventing long Covid symptoms across a range of risk groups.

Bottom line: Health care workers should be prescribing more Paxlovid

Even though it’s biologically plausible that Paxlovid could help low-risk people in a variety of ways, it’s unclear how willing health care providers are to prescribe the drug to these populations. (As it is, not enough providers are on board with prescribing Paxlovid to the highest-risk people who should clearly be receiving it.)

Prescribers are often loathe to prescribe unfamiliar medications without clear guidelines and clear supportive evidence — especially medications like Paxlovid, which can potentially interact with a lot of other medications. Suggesting this kind of off-label use “might be heresy with some of my [infectious disease] colleagues,” said Chin-Hong.

When data are weak or mixed, doctors may in good faith withhold certain drugs from certain patients. The point here is that in the same situation, they can also in good faith do the opposite, and prescribe it.

At least one expert has expressed good reason to think both ways about the issue: Paul Sax, clinical director of infectious diseases at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston and author of a popular blog hosted by the New England Journal of Medicine. Last year, he wrote that given sufficient supply, “I’d certainly recommend [Paxlovid] even for low-risk symptomatic people.” He noted that among a young, healthy subgroup in the EPIC-SR trial, hospitalizations were 70 percent less likely.

But this June, Sax coauthored a retrospective study suggesting Paxlovid neither reduces hospitalizations nor symptoms for young, healthy, vaccinated people. In an email to Vox, he said these days, he’s not recommending the drug for mild cases.

There are a lot of takes on who the right patients are to get Paxlovid, and where providers practice may have as much to do with their prescribing habits as anything else. For example, last December, California’s state public health officer recommended providers consider all Covid-positive patients for Paxlovid treatment, whatever their baseline risk.

Although a Paxlovid study on younger, healthier people is unlikely, they can still get the medication. (And in any case, other options are on the horizon.)

There’s no high-quality study on the horizon aimed at measuring how well Paxlovid achieves low-stakes endpoints in lower-risk populations, said Chin-Hong. Pfizer, the drug’s manufacturer, is unlikely to ever do that trial, he said; “the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. And it’s FDA approved already, so people can use it off label.”

So for the foreseeable future, doctors and providers will have to make these decisions for themselves.

If he’d been seeing my colleague, Chin-Hong would have prescribed her Paxlovid, he said: It would have given her a chance to feel better sooner, and reduced her risk of transmission — both good outcomes, and at very low risk to her.

He noted this conversation may soon be moot: The oral antiviral drug ensitrelvir, already approved in Japan, shortens illness regardless of a person’s risk status — and lacks the drug interactions that complicate Paxlovid prescriptions. It’s been fast-tracked for FDA approval.

But in the meantime, he says prescribers should feel liberated to prescribe Paxlovid off-label even to young, healthy, vaccinated patients when there’s no risk of drug interaction, he said. “The absence of evidence doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have benefit.”

Feinstein died as she was preparing to pass the torch to a new generation of leadership.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the longest-serving woman in the US Senate and a vocal advocate for gun control measures, died Thursday night. She was 90.

Her death brings to an end a messy, long-running chapter of national politics centered on her age and health as stories and concerns spread over the last year about her perceived mental decline. The longtime Democratic senator announced in February of this year that she would not be running for another Senate term after frustrating members of her party, constituents, and the press for remaining quiet about that decision for most of 2022 and the first weeks of 2023.

She would have faced a primary challenge had she not announced her decision to retire at the end of her term. A host of moderate and progressive candidates had already begun to float their electoral challenges and gather support while Feinstein was peppered with questions about her future. Two of those challengers, Rep. Katie Porter (D-CA) and Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA), even launched their campaigns before Feinstein went public with her retirement news. A third, Rep. Barbara Lee (D-CA), announced her bid after Feinstein’s decision.

Those three still have five months before California’s primary day, when voters will decide which two candidates move on to a likely Democrat-versus-Democrat general election contest. But for now, there’s an opening in the Senate that California Gov. Gavin Newsom will need to fill — and he will face intense pressure over his decision.

Feinstein had planned to step away from the Senate

Underlying a lot of Democratic frustration in California and in the Senate were the many issues Feinstein’s deteriorating health and advanced age caused for normal Senate operations — excluding how those contributed to the idea of American gerontocracy.

After announcing that she would be retiring at the end of her current term, Feinstein left the capital for the Bay Area to recover from health complications due to a case of shingles. She remained away from the Capitol for two months — stymieing Senate Democrats’ agenda to confirm judicial nominations in the Judiciary Committee and putting the Senate Democratic majority at risk. Those limits, and Senate Republicans’ unwillingness to let Democrats replace Feinstein on the Judiciary Committee, led to calls for her resignation — demands that she ignored.

Feinstein eventually returned to the Senate in mid-May. She used a wheelchair at the Capitol and appeared to have partial facial paralysis. Her continuing health challenges created new conversation about ableism on the Hill as speculation increased about whether she could do her job, and why she wouldn’t retire early.

Feinstein’s death may complicate the California Senate race

California is one of 38 states that gives their governors the authority to fill vacant Senate seats with an appointment, and this power was used recently: California Gov. Gavin Newsom tapped the state’s secretary of state, Alex Padilla, in December 2020 to fill the seat that Kamala Harris would resign to serve as vice president — partially due to Feinstein’s backing.

Feinstein’s huge influence in the state (Padilla used to work for her, she mentored Newsom, and was good friends with former Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi) largely forced California Democratic leaders to remain quiet about how that appointment process would work. Still, Newsom had promised after Padilla’s appointment that he would name a Black woman to fill Feinstein’s seat, should she vacate it early.

There’s also an intense primary underway to fill Feinstein’s seat, in which Newsom’s promise has come up again and again: most recently, Newsom has said he won’t choose anyone currently running to fill the seat, telling NBC’s Meet the Press in September, “It would be completely unfair to the Democrats that have worked their tail off. That primary is just a matter of months away. I don’t want to tip the balance of that.”

Ahead of Feinstein’s death, Newsom had reiterated that he hadn’t changed his thinking on the issue. The Senate currently has zero Black women, and only two Black members.

But Barbara Lee quickly criticized Newsom’s remarks on Meet the Press, writing on X (formerly Twitter), “I am troubled by the governor’s remarks. The idea that a Black woman should be appointed only as a caretaker to simply check a box is insulting to countless Black women across this country who have carried the Democratic Party to victory election after election.”

She went on to say that if Newsom does indeed appoint a Black woman, he should install “the best possible person for that job,” seeming to imply that she was that person.

The governor, though, has made it clear Lee won’t be his pick, which potentially means selecting one of the state’s two highest-ranking Black female elected officials: Shirley Weber, who won a full term as secretary of state after replacing Padilla, or state controller Malia Cohen, who beat back a closer than expected Republican challenge last year. One other name that’s been floated is Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. However, she’s considered unlikely, as she just won her job during the intense 2022 midterms.

Whoever he chooses could decide to enter the primary themselves, in effort to keep the seat they’d been awarded; if they were to do so, they’d have an incumbency advantage the current lawmakers in the race might find hard to overcome. Or they could become a surrogate and endorse one of the current chief contenders, giving a boost to Porter or Lee, who are both within striking distance of the current leader of the pack, Schiff.

That would seriously shake up the race. At this point, we don’t have a lot of great data, but what we do have paints a picture of a race where no one is dominating. Porter and Schiff tend to poll within a few percentage points of each other, with Lee consistently coming in third place.

Before he launched his Senate campaign in late January, Schiff had the biggest war chest, with about $20 million in the bank compared to Porter’s $7 million and Lee’s $50,000 at the end of last year. By the end of the second quarter of 2023, Schiff and Porter reported huge numbers: Schiff had raised $8.2 million, for a total of $29.8 million of cash on hand, while Porter had raised $3.1 million, leaving her with $10.3 million available. Lee raised $1 million, for a total of $1.4 million.

“If you include all the finances, it reinforces what most people have observed and assumed going in: Adam Schiff is clearly the frontrunner, but not a prohibitive one,” Dan Schnur, a professor at UC Berkeley’s Institute of Governmental Studies and another longtime California political adviser, told me after the first-quarter results — which closely mirrored those of the second quarter — were released. “He’s got a tremendous fundraising base, mostly from his own career, but also from the support he’s gotten from the congressional delegation.”

While Schiff does have an advantage now, he doesn’t have the sort of firm grasp on his primary that former President Donald Trump does in the GOP. And that means the emergence of a new figure, temporary or not, could alter the dynamics of the race.

And, to further complicate matters, California law requires that a special election be held to fill an empty Senate seat for the time between the last statewide election and the start of the next congressional term (the time between the November 2024 election and the start of the new Congress in 2025). That contest will likely be put on the same ballot as the normal contest for a six-year term, meaning California voters will vote for this Senate seat four times next year: twice in March and twice in November.

It doesn’t have to be like this.

So it’s come to this: The US is facing another government shutdown.

Unless the GOP-run House passes stopgap funding before Sunday, the federal government will stop paying millions of workers and military servicemembers. Some services, like parks, will stop entirely, while other federal employees will simply be expected to work without pay.

Government shutdowns used to be reasonably rare — there were zero under George W. Bush, and only one under Obama — but seem to be getting more common. Two occurred under Donald Trump’s administration, the second of which was the longest in modern American history, spanning over a month.

It doesn’t have to be like this; the whims of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and the Republican Party’s hard-core members don’t have to determine whether federal workers get paid or not. Instead, we could eliminate shutdowns altogether using something called an automatic CR.

Usually, when the federal government shuts down or is on the verge of shutting down, the issue is resolved in the short term by passing a “continuing resolution” (or CR): a bill saying, basically, that the government should stay the course and keep spending what it’s been spending, maybe give or take a few minor tweaks. In the average year, CRs fund the government for 137 out of 365 days.

By extension, we could eliminate government shutdowns forever by enacting an automatic CR: a law that says that in the event that Congress fails to authorize funding for the government, things will just keep going along the way they’ve been.

This isn’t a purely hypothetical idea. In September 2013, just as the government was about to shut down, Congress passed and President Barack Obama signed an automatic CR that applied only to the US military. It was called the Pay Our Military Act, and it enabled the Defense Department to largely, though not entirely, avoid the worker furloughs and other cutbacks necessitated by the 2013 shutdown. The act applied only to that fiscal year, and some congressional Democrats have since called for it to be revived.

If we want to eliminate furloughs entirely, and avoid semi-regularly throwing the personal finances of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of government workers into turmoil, as well as the sundry other costs of government shutdowns, we should consider passing a permanent automatic CR that applies to the whole government, not just the military. Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA) already has a bill that would do this, fittingly titled the Stop STUPIDITY Act.

Shutdowns are a totally optional part of American government, just like disputes over increasing the debt ceiling. Eliminating the debt ceiling to avoid calamitous legislative showdowns over spending is a no-brainer. If done well, an automatic CR is worth adopting as well.

The pros and cons of eliminating shutdowns

Government shutdowns are bad.

They’re not “throw the entire global financial system into turmoil and risk a worldwide depression” bad, the way that debt ceiling fights are. But they’re bad. They require hundreds of thousands of workers to either lose work or work without pay until Congress gets its act together. Affected contractors are not always made whole.

The 2013 shutdown, according to the Office on Management and Budget, hurt economic growth and job creation and cost the federal budget in the low billions of dollars. The 2018-19 shutdown resulted in $11 billion in economic losses, per the Congressional Budget Office.

Arguably the biggest harms of shutdowns are to federal workers, who typically are either furloughed or forced to work without pay during shutdowns. While it’s normal for Congress to authorize back pay, that hardly makes up for the large disruption in cash flow for federal workers.

Shutdowns turn federal civil servants, who do crucial work for modest pay (especially under budget sequestration and the current pay freeze), into pawns in congressional politics. They, more than anybody else, bear the cost of budget brinkmanship.

An automatic CR would end that victimization. It would ensure regular, reliable payment for civil servants and avoid these periodic disruptions of federal employees’ lives.

Not every automatic CR plan would be an improvement for federal workers, of course. One plan, proposed by Sen. Rob Portman (R-OH) during the 2013 showdown, would hold spending constantly for 120 days but then cut federal appropriations by 1 percent every 90 days thereafter. Barring active congressional intervention, this would cut trillions from the federal budget over time, and liberal budget watchdogs like the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities quite correctly opposed the idea. It would make federal employees worse off by leaving the federal government with fewer resources to compensate them, barring (unlikely) congressional action to reverse the automatic cuts.

But a proposal that regularly increased appropriations using a formula tied to inflation or economic growth, to ensure federal agencies are not starved, would not have that flaw. Even Warner’s bill, which keeps spending constant, would be an improvement. That would be an acceptable alternative to the current cycle of budget standoffs. It would keep the government running indefinitely regardless of how responsible or irresponsible Congress chooses to be.

The idea is not without its pitfalls. Most critics of automatic CRs also oppose versions of the idea without automatic cuts. They worry that eliminating the potential for shutdowns would worsen an already dysfunctional appropriations process by lowering the stakes of failure, making it harder to raise funding for specific programs and improve program efficiency in the future.

This is a real concern that has to be weighed against the costs of frequent government shutdowns. In a world where shutdowns are genuinely rare, automatic CR opponents have the better of the argument. But shutdowns appear to be growing more frequent and costly, and as tolerance of shutdowns increases, their value as a way to force new budget agreements deteriorates. As that process continues, the cost of automatic CRs, and the harm they do to the budget process, decreases.

It’s true that Congress could become neglectful of budget challenges under an automatic CR. But they have already done little to improve the miserable state of funding for non-defense discretionary programs.

It’s hard for me to imagine an automatic CR that automatically boosted spending making that problem worse. If anything, it would force conservative opponents of spending increases to the table and spur them to strike a deal reducing spending hikes in some areas in exchange for greater hikes where money is needed more.

This idea is, admittedly, somewhat fanciful when Republicans control the House, and the entire shutdown is coming about due to their demands for steep spending cuts. Speaker McCarthy is certainly likelier to endorse a Portman-esque version of this idea, which would be a step backward, than a version that automatically boosts spending. And eliminating the debt ceiling is a much more important step than eliminating shutdowns.

But given Congress’s demonstrated inability to reliably keep the government funded, we should be thinking about ways to make the process more automatic and lower the costs of congressional dysfunction. A well-designed automatic CR would help.

Update, September 29, 2023, 9 am: This story was originally published in 2018 and has been updated to reflect news on the latest pending shutdown of the federal government.

University of Texas researchers, with help from Mark Cuban, find price transparency still has a long way to go.

When Dr. Peter Cram, the University of Texas Medical Branch’s chair of internal medicine, heard billionaire Mark Cuban bemoaning how difficult it is to figure out the cost of routine medical services, he thought he had good news to share.

Cram was listening to Cuban’s interview on Jon Stewart’s podcast, explaining his difficulty in pinning down a price for his own colonoscopy. So Cram reached out to let Cuban know about the new federal price transparency rules for hospitals. According to those rules, hospitals must post online prices for many or all of their services. But Cuban said he was skeptical that hospitals would give the same price when a patient called to check the price.

At that moment, Cram said, “a lightbulb went off in my head.”

We already know that shopping, ahead of time, for health care is harder than it should be. But despite the recent federal efforts to force more transparency for hospital prices, a new study to which both Cram and Cuban contributed reveals that it’s as difficult as ever to get a clear answer to what seems like it should be an easy question: How much is my MRI going to cost?

A simple study asked hospitals how much their services cost. The answer: chaos.

The new study, led by University of Texas medical student Merina Thomas and Cram and published in JAMA, compared the prices hospitals posted online (as required under new federal regulations) with the prices obtained in phone calls conducted by the team posing as potential patients.

They contacted 60 hospitals across the country, a mix of top-ranked facilities, hospitals that primarily serve low-income people, and the other hospitals in between. They asked about two procedures for which comparison shopping is more common: vaginal childbirth and a brain MRI.

The researchers went into their study optimistic, as Cram had been when he contacted Cuban, that things had changed since the price transparency rules took effect.

“I had hoped that perhaps things were improving with the new requirements around price transparency,” Cram told me over email. But: “Our results seem to show that we still have a long way to go.”

It was rare for the advertised price on the web to be the same as the price quoted over the phone. Less than 20 percent of hospitals provided the same price through an online price estimator as they did when someone spoke to a member of the billing department. In many cases, the disparity was significant, with more than a 50 percent price difference depending on whether you checked on a website or called for a quote.

And in a handful of cases, the price more than doubled depending on how you asked. At two hospitals, MRIs were listed online at $2,000, but “patients” were given a price of more than $5,000 when they called. Five hospitals offered a price of $10,000 for vaginal childbirth over the phone, but the price posted online were twice that much.

There didn’t seem to be a clear pattern of which quotes were higher. Sometimes they were higher over the phone, sometimes higher on the website.

The researchers said they took pains to make sure they were getting apples-to-apples comparisons, going so far as to give specific billing codes during their scripted calls with hospital staff. It didn’t matter.

They could not identify why exactly they found such a significant disparity. The authors theorized that, because a single “service” may involve multiple different billing codes, it was still difficult even under the transparency rules to communicate to the billing staff exactly what they were inquiring about. They also speculated hospitals are not adequately training their staff, though the authors noted a lack of research on that question.

The findings add to the evidence that US hospitals may not have “a cogent pricing strategy,” as the researchers put it, meaning hospitals set prices in a somewhat arbitrary manner.

Research had already found prices for the same services vary wildly at different hospitals. The top-line findings of this new study reveal that it can be difficult to even determine what the price for a given service is at a given hospital. That is a problem both for the 10 percent of the US population that is uninsured as well as people enrolled in high-deductible health plans, which are becoming more common.

On top of that, the researchers made one other note in their study: They found poor correlation between brain MRI and vaginal childbirth prices within an individual hospital. In other words, some facilities would have high MRI prices compared to others but low prices for delivering babies — with no discernible economic reason for that disparity. It’s chaos.

“This lack of correlation raises further questions about whether hospitals have a cogent pricing strategy akin to other businesses ... or whether this lack of correlation simply reflects a chaotic and disorganized pricing structure,” the researchers wrote.

Mark Cuban continues his quest for more transparent medical costs

These conclusions are familiar for another one of the study’s other coauthors: Cuban, entrepreneur, NBA owner, and founder of the Mark Cuban Cost Plus Drugs Company. Here, he continues to buff his bona fides as a health care provocateur by helping to conceive of the new study, and provide technical and material assistance to make it happen.

Cuban has been fixated on market failures in the health care industry for the better part of a decade, particularly for prescription drug prices.

Though he told me in 2016 that he did not have an interest in entering the market himself, he did start a drug company six years later, offering generic drugs directly to patients at a flat 15 percent markup. The company’s aim is to reduce the costs faced by uninsured people and people with higher out-of-pocket obligations under their insurance plan (a problem that can be exacerbated by the industry’s notorious middlemen, pharmacy benefits managers). Experts have compared it to a Costco business model.

The company has gotten a toehold in the market since its launch last year, selling 350 drugs to a customer base of about 1.5 million people. It is planning to begin manufacturing some generic drugs itself, similar to plans by the hospital nonprofit Civica Rx and states like California. It’s added pharmacy services, including mail orders. Researchers think it could save Medicare up to $1 billion a year if people start getting certain cancer drugs through Cuban’s company. It was named one of Time’s most influential companies of 2023.

Selling generic drugs at minimal markup is not a silver bullet for fixing America’s high drug costs, as experts are happy to point out. For one, that has no effect on new breakthrough medicines that are expensive but protected by patents. Still, most credit the company for offering genuine low-price options that particularly help people who face exorbitant costs otherwise.

Now with this hospital study, Cuban has lent support to exposing absurdities in another sector of the health care industry. Since he first started speaking out on drug prices during the scandals of the mid-2010s, as costs and public anger grew, Congress has finally started taking serious action to address the cost of medicine.

Hospital prices are another frontier for reform. Many experts see price transparency — a work in progress as Cram put it — as only the beginning. As the JAMA study’s authors observed in their paper, “absent improvements in customer service, public frustration with hospitals is likely to grow.”

The “child care cliff” marks the end of one of the last pandemic-era safety nets.

This weekend, parents and child care providers across the nation are bracing for the end of an instrumental federal program that has stabilized child care programs and reduced costs for families over the past three years.

Some $24 billion worth of child care funding — one of the last remaining Covid-19 emergency relief programs still in effect — is set to expire Saturday. Issued as part of the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan, the program marked the largest investment in child care in US history and allowed fragile businesses to cover rent and maintenance and raise wages for their notoriously underpaid staff. The Biden administration has reported that the grants helped 80 percent of US licensed child care centers stay afloat.

Frequently referred to as the “child care cliff,” the expiration of the grants is expected to renew strain on the child care sector, which already runs on tight margins, struggles to recruit and retain staff from higher-paying industries, and charges most parents far more than they can comfortably afford.

Many news organizations, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, Axios, Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, and MSNBC, have cited an estimate from the liberal think tank the Century Foundation stating that 70,000 child care programs will likely close, resulting in 3.2 million children losing access to care.

That figure was derived from an October 2022 survey of 12,000 early childhood educators that found 34 percent of child care programs reported that they would have closed during the pandemic if not for the emergency grants. The grants covered 220,000 programs and 9.6 million kids, so the Century Foundation multiplied those figures by 0.34 to arrive at its estimate.

Experts in child care policy told Vox, however, that the “cliff” may prove far less of a tumble for providers and families than that popular statistic suggests — partly due to poor data on industry supply and demand and partly because most states have made unprecedented investments in their child care systems over the last two years.

The federal grants were authorized to help child care programs during the extraordinary circumstances of the pandemic, after lawmakers deemed the child care sector “uniquely vulnerable” to the crisis, and less able to access relief loans through methods available to other small businesses. In a US Senate HELP Committee report issued this past spring, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Patty Murray (D-WA) noted that emergency relief was needed because child care providers began “hemorrhaging money during pandemic shutdowns” as fewer children attended and they faced unexpected costs to comply with reduced group sizes, cleaning materials, and personal protective equipment.

Today, programs are no longer struggling to enroll students nor needing to cover the costs of pandemic safety regulations. “Saying you would have closed during Covid if not for the grants is not the same thing, that you will close after Covid if the grants don’t continue,” said Matt Bruenig, founder of another left-wing think tank, the People’s Policy Project.

One leading child care expert declined to comment on the widely cited Century Foundation estimate (“We didn’t do the number and I don’t want to speak directly to that,” Sarah Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund, told Vox), while another said that they knew no one who expected the loss of programs to reach anywhere near 70,000, but did not want to say so on the record for fear of alienating other leaders in their child care advocacy coalition.

“Will there be some adjustments [when the funds expire]? Yes, obviously, that’s fairly true, but you see estimates that a quarter of American kids will lose their child care spots and I will gladly take any bet that anyone at the Century Foundation wants to place,” said Patrick T. Brown, a child care policy analyst at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank. “I do not think 25 percent of kids are going to lose their child care. People have a vested interest in using strong frames and narratives to say we have a broken market.”

Julie Kashen, director for women’s economic justice at The Century Foundation, defended her organization’s analysis but acknowledged that the estimate of program closures is unlikely to come to pass, telling Vox it’s more like a “worst-case scenario.”

“A number of states have put forward their own state funding and our analysis did not account for that,” she said. “We don’t have numbers yet of how much will be mitigated by state investments, but from Alaska to Maine to Illinois, they have put their own funding in, and that will make a decent difference in reducing the losses.”

Why Congress isn’t extending the Covid-19 child care grants

The federal pandemic grants were objectively successful in helping to stabilize the child care sector over the last three years, leaving many people baffled that Congress would choose not to renew the funding now. The Department of Labor recently reported that the price of child care rose 6 percent in July over the previous year, nearly double the rate of inflation.

From Republicans’ perspective, the child care grants, like other Covid-19 safety net programs, were passed as an emergency relief measure, and now that the emergency is over, the pandemic level of spending should not become the new federal baseline. A strong current among conservatives supports “going back to normal” and reining in spending more broadly to address inflation and the deficit.

Democrats and progressives argue that funding for child care was woefully low before the pandemic, and returning to the status quo now, amid a tighter labor market and fierce hiring competition from other industries, would be untenable. Reduced federal funding could mean pay cuts or hiring freezes, or hikes in costs that families can’t afford, leading to fewer children served and, ultimately, closure of some programs.

In response to the impending deadline, congressional Democrats earlier this month proposed a bill to give $16 billion to child care providers each year for the next five years. It has no Republican co-sponsors and even its own authors concede that it’s unlikely to go anywhere. The Biden administration has declined to lobby for additional child care funding in the fraught ongoing budget negotiations, arguing that it needs to bargain with Republicans only over emergency priorities to stave off a government shutdown.

One recurring challenge for Democrats is that because they have so many areas they want to see new big investments in, and because they work within broad advocacy coalitions, leaders often struggle to home in on a few specific priorities, instead championing lots of big social investments at once.

This dynamic was on display during the failed Build Back Better negotiations and amid Inflation Reduction Act talks. Child care investments were in competition with new spending on preschool, affordable housing, paid medical and family leave, and the expanded child tax credit. In the end, virtually none won out.

Child care programs face tougher staff recruitment. Parents face higher costs.

Over the last two years many states passed new legislation to support child care access, affordability, and quality, including red states such as Alabama, Louisiana, Montana and North Dakota, as well as blue and purple states like Minnesota, New Mexico, New Hampshire, Illinois, California, Alaska and Vermont. Most states were in strong fiscal positions and built on the political momentum for child care investments that coalesced during the pandemic.

Linda Smith, who heads early childhood research at the Bipartisan Policy Center, told Vox that the impact of the expiring pandemic funds will vary by state, but she expects that broadly, retaining child care workers will become harder. In 2019, the median child care worker earned $11.65 per hour. Today their pay averages $14.22, but without public subsidy, programs may have to raise rates for families to continue paying workers those higher wages. The survey released last October and cited by the Century Foundation found that 43 percent of child care centers and 37 percent of home-based providers expected that they’d have to raise rates when federal relief dollars dry up.

“In lower-income working families, passing those costs on to parents is not going to be an option,” said Smith. These increased costs will also overlap with the resumption of student loan payments in October after a three-year pause, and higher interest rates on credit cards, mortgages, and car loans.

Some states are already starting to see the effects of diminished funding. In June, the Republican-controlled legislature in Wisconsin started reducing its federal stabilization grants from $20 million a month to $10 million, and the remaining funds are expected to end completely in January. Ruth Schmidt, the executive director of the Wisconsin Early Childhood Association, told CBS that nearly 90 percent of day care centers are raising tuition in response. Some programs have closed.

Whitney Evans, the California director for ParentChild+, said she expects the decline in federal funding will affect low-income parents who are least able to work remotely. “For middle-income families, this is going to be a huge pain in the ass but they’ll figure out a way,” she told Vox. “But for children with the least access to resources, who won’t be able to pay more for slots if rates go up, there will be even less space available.”

Could this affect female workforce participation?

A big question looming over the expiring child care funds is whether a major disruption to the child care ecosystem would force parents — and mothers in particular — out of their jobs. Child care advocates have been saying for years that a failure to invest more in the nation’s child care system will result in that outcome; this was a key argument during the fight for the Build Back Better Act.

However, despite the failure of Congress to pass those new child care investments, workforce participation among moms, and even moms of very young children, has continued to rise. The latest data showed 66.6 percent of women who gave birth in the previous 12 months were working in 2022, up from 66.5 percent in 2021, and 61.6 percent in 2010. And more than 70 percent of mothers with kids under five were working this past summer — more than even before the pandemic. The expansion of remote work, which makes it easier for parents to juggle their jobs and child care responsibilities, is likely one major contributing factor.

Kashen, of the Century Foundation, credits the American Rescue Plan investments for staving off female workforce fallout, and said that the “reality is most parents have to work,” so even if moms are employed, it doesn’t mean they aren’t making hard trade-offs behind the scenes, including working later hours, facing declining mental and physical health, or spending less time with family.

Is there any chance child care funding will return?

The politics are challenging right now. Congressional Republicans are currently engaged in a fierce battle over cutting federal spending and have expressed little appetite for new social investments.

Still, the news isn’t all bad. Among parents, the child care issue is far less polarized. A recent poll of Kentucky voters and parents found strong support for investing more taxpayer money into child care programs, and a national poll conducted for the First Five Years Fund this summer found that 74 percent of voters, including 61 percent of Republican voters, back increased federal spending for child care.

Moreover, during the second Republican presidential debate earlier this week, the moderators pressed candidates on how they would expand access to care — even citing the expiring pandemic-era funds. South Carolina Sen. Tim Scott blasted the Biden administration for allowing day care costs to exceed $15,000 per child, and Doug Burgum, the GOP governor of North Dakota, stressed that “child care is workforce infrastructure.”

That bipartisan support for affordable child care is likely why Republicans, after rebuffing Democrats’ $400 billion child care proposal during the Build Back Better fight, agreed to a 30 percent increase last year of the Child Care and Development Block Grant, a federal program aimed at reducing child care costs for low-income families. And this past summer, Reps. Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Nancy Mace (R-SC) announced the launch of a new Bipartisan Affordable Childcare Caucus in Congress, and Reps. Salud Carbajal (D-CA) and Lori Chavez-DeRemer (R-OR) introduced a bipartisan bill to improve federal child care tax credits, legislation endorsed by advocacy groups and the US Chamber of Commerce.

Some Republican lawmakers remain ideologically against government involvement in child-rearing and oppose efforts such as increased spending on non-religious day care centers. This is partly why some Republicans are more open to expanding the federal child tax credit, which gives money directly to families to spend how they see fit. Expanding the tax credit is also a priority for Democrats, though it might be tough for lawmakers to secure new investments for child care and the child tax credit at the same time.

Progressives, for their part, are hopeful that they’ll have another opportunity to push new child care investments during the end-of-the-year omnibus tax package negotiations. Last year advocates secured new funding in this period for a maternal and child health home visiting program, doubling the amount of federal spending and reauthorizing the program for five years.

“The pandemic gave us all a better sense of what it means to have more money in the child care system,” said Rittling, of the First Five Years Fund. “We know that money needs to be sustained beyond Covid, and we’ll be looking at every possible way we can to make that happen.”

Why the FTC is going after your Prime subscription (and a few other things).

The Big Tech antitrust reform movement has come for Amazon. On September 26, the Federal Trade Commission and 17 states sued the Everything Store for “illegally maintaining monopoly power.” This comes after two different antitrust lawsuits against Google from the Department of Justice — one of which is currently on trial — and another one against Meta from the FTC.

Like the others, this lawsuit gets at the heart of some of the defendant’s business practices and how they work in concert to reinforce its dominance. In this case, Amazon is accused of using its monopoly on online shopping to make it impossible for other platforms to compete; force the many companies that sell products through Amazon to pay various fees and follow rules designed to enrich Amazon and disadvantage everyone else; and inflate prices on Amazon and beyond. Something called “Project Nessie” is thrown in there, too.

It will be years before the case goes to trial and even longer before we get a final resolution, assuming it isn’t dropped or settled first, so we’re only at the beginning of a long process. If the FTC wins, Amazon may be forced to do business differently or even be broken up. That might mean some changes to how you shop, too. If you’re wondering what exactly Amazon is accused of doing wrong and how all of this could affect you, we have some answers.

1) Why is the FTC suing Amazon?

The FTC is accusing Amazon of abusing its monopoly, harming competition, businesses that sell products through Amazon’s platform, and consumers. (The FTC is one of two agencies that enforces antitrust laws in the US. The other is the Department of Justice, which has its own Big Tech antitrust cases to fight.)

The FTC’s main argument targets Amazon Marketplace, where outside businesses, or third-party sellers, sell their products to Amazon customers. This platform has vastly increased the number of products Amazon can offer to consumers and accounts for the majority of Amazon’s sales. And Amazon, the FTC says, has implemented various rules and fees that sellers have no choice but to follow and pay. That has enriched Amazon at the expense of the sellers and consumers, who are paying inflated prices not just on Amazon but everywhere else, too. —Sara Morrison

2) What? How could I be paying higher prices on Amazon, a company that famously offers the lowest prices?

The FTC’s case is that the low prices on Amazon are a mirage, and the company is using several interconnected business lines to create it. There are two parts to this.

The first is that Amazon knows it has tremendous leverage over third-party businesses, whose survival depends on being allowed on the platform and having visibility to their customers. Over time, it has implemented rules and fees that sellers feel compelled to follow and pay. Those include search ads, commissions on sales, and using Amazon’s warehouses and shipping services.

Amazon has put more and more ads on search results pages, which means sellers feel compelled to buy ads if they want to get in front of customers. It has also made Prime an integral part of the shopping and selling experience. Lots of customers have Prime, so they look for products sold through Prime to save on shipping and get their subscription money’s worth. Amazon gives Prime products much more prominent placement on product pages, so sellers have to qualify for Prime if they want people to see and buy their products. But Amazon also makes sellers use its warehouse and shipping service, Fulfillment by Amazon, to qualify for Prime. This has resulted in sellers paying as much as 50 cents on every dollar in sales to Amazon, the suit says. To maintain their profit margin or make any profit at all, sellers have to pass those costs onto consumers.

But here’s the second part of all this: Amazon’s “fair pricing” policies say that sellers can’t really offer their products for less anywhere else. Sellers are afraid to run afoul of Amazon, which could mean their listings are suppressed or they’re kicked off the platform entirely. So even if a seller incurred fewer expenses and could price their products for less and maintain the same profit margin on another platform, they won’t.

The lawsuit also alleges Amazon makes it difficult for first-party sellers, or retailers that sell products to Amazon that Amazon then sells to consumers, to offer lower prices elsewhere. But it’s less clear how Amazon is allegedly doing this, as those sections are heavily redacted.

Kena Betancur/VIEWpress/Corbis via Getty Images

All these factors combined, the lawsuit says, mean that customers are paying more everywhere, sellers are being squeezed, other stores can’t compete with Amazon on prices, and Amazon doesn’t have to lower the various fees it charges sellers.

So while Amazon may have the lowest prices out there, those aren’t necessarily the lowest prices possible. —SM

3) What does Amazon say about all this?

David Zapolsky, Amazon’s general counsel and senior vice president of global public policy, released a statement in response to the FTC lawsuit, calling the suit “misguided” and arguing that, if successful, the lawsuit would increase prices, lead to slower deliveries, and hurt the small businesses that use Amazon Marketplace.

The statement responds to a couple of the FTC complaint’s arguments directly. One repeated theme throughout Amazon’s response is this: While Amazon might encourage sellers to, say, sign up for their Fulfillment by Amazon service or create listings that meet certain conditions in order to be prominently featured, they don’t actually require sellers to do any of those things in order to list there. And, they argue, giving merchants multiple ways to sell on Amazon increases competition and is good for businesses.

Amazon also argues that the FTC’s characterization of Amazon’s market share is too large because it doesn’t include physical retail stores as competition. —A.W. Ohlheiser

4) Who is Lina Khan and why does she matter?

Lina Khan is the current FTC chair, a position she’s held since 2021. As Vox has previously explained, Khan was best known at the time of her appointment for her law school paper titled “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox,” and was a prominent advocate for antitrust reform who was known, specifically, for criticizing Amazon’s business practices.

If you’re wondering how Amazon feels about Khan’s tenure as FTC chair, well ... after Khan’s appointment, Amazon petitioned the FTC with a complaint, arguing that Khan should recuse herself from participating in any actions that regulate Amazon as a company due to her past criticism. —AO

Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images

5) What is “Project Nessie?” I love cryptozoology, so how can something that sounds so cool be bad?

Project Nessie is some kind of algorithm, and that’s about all we know. It appears several times in the complaint, only to vanish before we can really determine what it is, much like the more famous Nessie. That’s because Amazon was able to get most parts of the complaint surrounding Project Nessie redacted, leaving big black boxes over what is presumably the explanation of the project and why the FTC thinks it’s bad. All we know right now is that it’s an algorithm and that the FTC believes it somehow gives Amazon more money at the expense of consumers.

It may not be redacted forever. Amazon will have to justify these redactions to a judge, who will ultimately decide what should be kept from the public. Nessie may surface after all. —SM

6) What does “Fulfillment by Amazon” mean? And what the heck is a “buy box?”

As the lawsuit indicates, there are a couple of different ways products are sold on Amazon. There are things sold and shipped by Amazon — whether they are products produced under an Amazon brand or purchased wholesale by Amazon from another company — and there are products sold by third parties through Amazon Marketplace.

Third-party sellers are exactly what you might guess: people or businesses that are not directly affiliated with Amazon using the retail site’s enormous platform to sell their products. Generally, third-party sellers control their own listings. Some third-party merchants on Amazon ship their products directly to customers. Others tap into Amazon’s infrastructure a little more deeply.

Enter the Fulfillment by Amazon service, where sellers can, for a fee, send their inventory directly to an Amazon warehouse and let Amazon process and ship the order. These products are generally eligible for Prime shipping. (It’s exceedingly difficult to get Prime shipping without using Fulfillment by Amazon.)

Being a third-party seller on Amazon doesn’t necessarily mean that your products will be visible to a wide audience of Amazon shoppers. Amazon encourages sellers to list their products in specific ways in order to maximize visibility. For instance: Third-party sellers who list the same item for purchase in Amazon Marketplace are competing with each other to show up in the “buy box” (also called the “featured offer”). The buy box is the box on an Amazon listing that contains the “add to cart” and “buy now” buttons, a.k.a. where you are generally going to click as a consumer if you want to buy the product.

In Amazon’s guide to getting a product featured in the buy box, it encourages sellers to price “competitively” or “at or below the lowest priced alternatives,” and to offer “fast and free shipping,” either through their own merchant shipping process or by signing up for the Fulfilled by Amazon service. A product is also more likely to show up in the buy box if it’s eligible for Prime shipping. —AO

7) Why should I care what Amazon does to third-party sellers?

It’s important to remember that Marketplace sales account for the majority of sales on Amazon and that these third-party sellers are paying fees to Amazon in order to sell there. Signing up for Fulfillment by Amazon comes with additional costs to the merchant. When Amazon raises those fees, consumers will generally have to pay more for that item going forward.

Amazon’s policies can also raise the prices of items on other sites. Because the company’s fair pricing policy gives them leeway to punish merchants who list a product on Amazon at a higher price than they might elsewhere — say, on a platform that does not charge the same fees Amazon does — sellers are incentivized to raise their prices everywhere in order to account for Amazon’s fees. —AO

Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

8) What will happen to Amazon if it loses the FTC lawsuit? How will it affect me?

In interviews with the press, Khan has been careful not to say much about what remedies the FTC will pursue if it wins the case. But the agency is asking the court to stop Amazon from engaging in illegal practices, issue monetary penalties, and provide any relief necessary to prevent Amazon from violating the law again in the future — up to structural relief, which means breaking the company up.

That doesn’t mean that an FTC win will break up Amazon, and we don’t know what that breakup would look like even if it did. A judge would make that decision, and we’re a long way away from even the possibility of it. The fact that the FTC played up the interconnected and interlocking nature of Amazon’s alleged violations in its complaint, though, indicates that the agency would say there’s no way to truly solve the problem if the company remains in one piece.

This also means it’s impossible to say, right now, how things would change for you, the customer. If Amazon isn’t broken up, it may well have to stop or significantly change its Prime service, which is one of the alleged weapons Amazon wields over sellers. The FTC will say that an agency victory will mean lower prices for you and more competition that will force Amazon to have to offer a better product or give you more or better shopping options elsewhere. The very fact that Amazon is now fighting a lawsuit could have a chilling effect on some of the ways it does (or wants to do) business, as was the case for Microsoft in the late ’90s and early ’00s. That said, Amazon isn’t going to do anything drastic unless it absolutely has to. —SM

9) But will Amazon lose? I mean, come on. Really?

We here at Vox don’t have a crystal ball, but history shows that antitrust cases are hard to win. Courts are business-friendly and have only become more so since the last Big Tech antitrust case against Microsoft. Khan’s FTC has had some high-profile losses with Big Tech so far. But those were about acquisitions and not, as this case is about, existing business practices.

This case does have something other cases against Meta and Google don’t: physical goods that, the FTC says, consumers are paying more for than they should. That’s something that courts, which have come to embrace the “consumer welfare standard” as a deciding factor in whether or not a company’s monopoly is harmful, will pay attention to. That still doesn’t mean the FTC will be able to convince them that Amazon is doing anything wrong. —SM

She’s Barbie. He’s just Jaws.

Summer 2023 was the summer of Barbie.

Warner Bros.

Everywhere you looked there was marketing — posters, ads, trailers. There were Barbie cafés, Barbie Progressive commercials, everyone was wearing pink! It was a delightful wave of cinematic energy.

Warner Bros.

Warner Bros.

Burger King

Barbie Burger.

And it was also completely overwhelming. At times it felt inescapable.

Barbie’s marketing felt different. And in some ways it was — but it owes a lot to the blockbusters that came before.

Universal

Jaws is considered to be the first summer blockbuster for a lot of reasons — but most importantly (and most symmetrically with Barbie) because of its marketing. It was the first time that a studio flooded the market with advertising. In the summer of 1975, Jaws was inescapable.

Getty Images

Since then, studios have tried to replicate that strategy pretty much every year.

But Barbie was different — because, unlike most blockbusters, Barbie was unabashedly feminine, fun, and pink. If you’d like to learn about how Barbie stole the summer, check out the latest Vox video.

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

“Die-ins,” Krazy Glue, and gridlock: The climate movement is embracing civil disobedience.

In the 2022 film How to Blow Up a Pipeline, a group of young climate activists get together to blow up a pipeline in Texas. The movie is fictional, but the book it’s adapted from is not. In the 2021 book, author Andreas Malm argues that sabotage and property damage are valid tactics to confront fossil fuel use and calls for an escalation in tactics.

We should “[d]amage and destroy new CO2-emitting devices,” Malm writes. “Put them out of commission, pick them apart, demolish them, burn them, blow them up. Let the capitalists who keep investing in the fire know that their properties will be trashed.”

Climate activists have yet to go that far, but they’re doing lots of other things.

Last week’s Climate Week events, timed to the UN General Assembly, drew thousands of protesters to New York. Over 100 people were arrested for blockading the entrances to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York while calling on financial regulators to stop funding fossil fuel companies. At the New York March to End Fossil Fuels, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) told a cheering crowd, “We must be too big and too radical to ignore.”

Climate activists have heeded that call. In recent months, they staged a die-in at New York’s Museum of Modern Art to draw attention to a board member’s investments in fossil fuel projects, blocked the entrances to the Philadelphia-area headquarters of investment manager Vanguard, and dyed the water of Rome’s Trevi Fountain black. Demonstrators disrupted rush-hour commutes everywhere from Boston and Washington, DC, to Berlin and the Hague, and even snarled traffic on the road to Burning Man, creating miles of gridlock.

Dana R. Fisher, a professor at American University, studies climate policymaking and climate activism. Her forthcoming book, Saving Ourselves: From Climate Shocks to Climate Action (Columbia University Press, 2024), investigates this growing radical flank and uses data to explain the increasing use of civil disobedience within the climate movement.

Fisher spoke with Today, Explained host Noel King about what she has learned from spending time with activists and where she sees the movement heading. Read on for an excerpt of the conversation, edited and condensed for length and clarity, and listen to the full conversation wherever you find podcasts.

Dana, I think there’s a sense that climate activism is becoming more radical. Is that true?

Since the Biden administration took office, we’ve seen a growing radical flank, which is those people who are engaging in more confrontational and radical tactics around climate change.

These are folks who are doing something that’s against social norms, like, for example, throwing food on the covering of a work of art. We’ve seen people using Krazy Glue in all sorts of crazy ways in the past few years, and that’s become much more common, even recently with the activist who glued his bare feet to the stands at the US Open, as well as an activist who glued his hand to the lectern [at a televised debate] in Switzerland recently. Other types of radical tactics include blocking traffic and slow walking, which is a really interesting new tactic.

But these are all radical in that they’re outside the norm of the ways that the environmental movement and the climate movement have worked in recent years, which tends to be much more institutional and much more focused on working through the political system rather than outside of it.

I saw a video recently of some climate activists who were in Washington, DC, where I live, and they were blocking traffic. People were walking up to them and saying, “I need to get to work.” I mean, these people were really upset. Do these kinds of actions help or hurt the cause of climate activists?

The people who are actually doing this type of confrontational activism — which I’m calling in my new book “activism to shock,” and I use the term “shockers” to refer to these activists — these shockers are actually trying to shock the general public into paying attention to the climate crisis. Now, is it going to piss people off? Absolutely. And there’s lots of evidence of that. But one of the things that we know from the research is that while specific actions in specific groups that engage in these more radical tactics tend to turn off people, research shows that it does shine light on the climate crisis and actually draws attention to and support for more moderate groups and more moderate forms of activism. So in the broader movement, it may be quite effective, but for these specific activists and the tactics they’re using and the groups that they’re working with — and I know the groups that were blocking traffic recently here in DC — it’s completely unpopular.

Well, what would they say? If you asked them, “Was that successful when you guys blocked traffic?” Is the answer, “We got media attention”?

The answer, they would say, is, “Absolutely.” They really want the conversation to start with their activism and continue into the climate crisis. They’ll basically say, “We tried going to a legally permitted march, we tried carrying signs, we tried going to our elected officials’ offices.” And I can tell you from data I’ve collected that they do all of those things. And what they’ll say is, it doesn’t work. It’s not gotten the attention. It hasn’t helped change the conversation. But sitting on the street or gluing myself to the tarmac — when the media starts to talk about it, it helps us to start to have these conversations about what’s needed to address the climate crisis.

You spend a lot of time with these folks. Who is a typical climate activist?

Generally, the climate movement is very similar to the left-leaning movements that we’ve observed over the past five, seven years here in the United States. And that is they tend to be highly educated, predominantly white, and majority female.

Is there a type of person who becomes radical or becomes radicalized?

We don’t have a lot of data on the people who are engaging in the radical flank or participating in the radical flank. There’s anecdotal evidence, and a lot of the anecdotal evidence is people who have been engaged for quite some time and then became really frustrated with the lack of progress, and so started thinking, “We need to be more engaged and more confrontational to get more attention.”

Other movements have started out less radical and then radicalized over time, right?

In my new book, I actually talk specifically about the civil rights period and the civil rights movement, which was also this broad-based movement.

The civil rights movement started out as working through much more traditional institutional channels in the hope of ending Jim Crow and also to give Black Americans the vote. And younger activists or younger members of the movement got extremely frustrated with that and basically decided they needed to do more, and they decided to engage in nonviolent civil disobedience. So we saw sit-ins, and they basically would just go places and sit in and occupy and refuse to leave, which is nonviolent activism. It’s similar to blocking the street. In response to that, there were counter-movements that mobilized — we call them white supremacists today — as well as law enforcement, both of whom were relatively aggressive and in some cases violent against these nonviolent activists who are engaging in civil disobedience.

And it was that process that led to more radicalization of more activists because they saw predominantly Black young people being beaten up on national television.

But in addition to that, it also mobilized and motivated sympathizers to get involved in supporting the movement. And that is what a lot of scholars who study the civil rights movement say is the reason why the civil rights movement was successful, but also why we saw this big shift in policymaking in the United States.

I think that we could see something very similar happen around the climate crisis, but we’re going to see a lot more civil disobedience before that happens, for sure.

On violence, let me ask you about How To Blow Up a Pipeline. This is a book released in 2021 by the writer Andreas Malm. What is the argument that’s being made in this text initially that then gets adapted into a movie?

The nugget that’s still in this adaptation is about frustration with the process of addressing the climate crisis and the degree to which incremental change, which is all that has been possible through policymakers, through business efforts thus far, is absolutely insufficient to solve the climate crisis.

And then we go down this road of these young people who are going to literally try to blow up a pipeline, right, and why they’re doing it.

Right. So this is what I’m really curious about is, the book has the most provocative title in the world. It’s like The Anarchist Cookbook.

And it’s a beautiful orange cover. I’m looking at it right now.

Then it becomes a movie. And so, from where I sit as somebody who is not a researcher but a journalist, it’s like, “Oh, that has made it into the zeitgeist.” And so the thing I’m curious about is, when that book comes out, does anyone proceed to then blow up a pipeline? Is anything moving in that direction?

I mean, are there people out there in the United States and around the world who are thinking about how they need to form these eco-terrorist cells because the climate crisis is real and nothing’s being done about it? Probably. But I don’t think that they read Malm’s work and they said, “Oh, an orange book. Now I’m going to radicalize.” I think they were already there and they were already thinking we are nowhere near where we need to be.

The more frustration we see people having with businesses and the state and the government because it is insufficiently addressing the problem, we’re going to see more people who get fed up to the point where they mobilize. And the more people who are mobilizing, the more that radical flank is necessarily going to expand.

The US government will shut down at 12:01 am ET on Sunday, October 1, 2023, if Congress doesn’t pass a short-term bill to keep the government funded while negotiations on spending for the next year continue.

The threat of a shutdown appears to loom over Congress every year. In fact, we previously explained why the government is so susceptible to this frustrating scenario here, as well as in this video, if you prefer to get your news in that way. Spoiler alert: It goes back to the Constitution and how the federal government funds its agencies.

This year, the main hold-up is House Republicans in-fighting. Congress doesn’t have time to pass full-year bills to keep the government open, so it’s looking at a short-term funding bill, also known as a continuing resolution (CR), in the interim. The latter is usually used to buy lawmakers time to reach agreement while avoiding a shutdown. The problem is the GOP conference is split on what should be in the short-term bill — and if there should be a short-term bill at all.

A shutdown would have widespread effects on government services. It would result in hundreds of thousands of federal employees being furloughed, the closure of important facilities like immigration courts, and potential staffing shortages in fields like air traffic control. Some agencies and programs, like the US Department of Agriculture’s SNAP food program, have enough money to keep operating for a few weeks past the shutdown date, but warn they’ll run out of cash shortly after.

Follow here for the latest news, explainers, and analysis on a potential government shutdown.

What is — and isn’t — closed during a government shutdown.

The US government sure looks like it’s on track for another shutdown.

Currently, the House of Representatives has yet to pass any legislation that would keep the government fully funded. If lawmakers fail to take action before midnight on October 1, the government will go into a partial shutdown that will result in hundreds of thousands of federal employees being furloughed, the closure of important facilities like immigration courts, and potential staffing shortages in fields like air traffic control.

It’s a completely avoidable outcome, but it’s one that appears increasingly likely since House Republicans haven’t been able to agree on a short-term spending measure.

Because Congress still hasn’t approved longer-term, full-year appropriations, it needs to pass a short-term bill, also known as a continuing resolution or CR, to keep the lights on and buy itself more time to negotiate.

Thus far, the Senate has made moves to pass a relatively “clean” continuing resolution that would keep the government open for about 47 days, and includes $6 billion in funding for Ukraine and natural disaster aid, respectively. This measure, however, has run into opposition in the House, where several conservative lawmakers like Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) are opposed to giving any more aid to Ukraine.

House Republicans have failed to provide any real counteroffer of their own. That’s partly because there’s a decent segment of their conference that isn’t interested in any type of short-term spending bill, due to concerns it won’t result in significant enough budget cuts. Led by Rep. Matt Gaetz (R-FL), a contingent of roughly seven Republicans — enough to blow up any GOP proposal brought to the floor — have promised to oppose any CR.

As a result, House Speaker Kevin McCarthy will likely need Democratic help to keep the government open (or end a shutdown). He’s avoided working with the opposition, however, because doing so could threaten his speakership. Gaetz, for example, is among those who has threatened to bring up a “motion to vacate,” which could depose the speaker, if he doesn’t subscribe to Republican demands. A majority of the House would have to vote in favor of McCarthy’s removal for it to actually take place, however. And, in exchange for Democratic help, McCarthy would likely need to accept some Democratic demands on Ukraine and other issues. That would only anger the segment of his caucus that’s against him further, adding to the general discontent with his leadership.

Due to this dynamic, the chances of House Republicans shutting down the government in the next few days remains pretty high.

How bad would a government shutdown actually be?

A government shutdown’s impact can vary based on how long it is. If it’s relatively short, there’s usually little disruption to federal employees and services.

If a closure drags on longer, however, as it did in 2019 — when the shutdown lasted 35 days — its effects can become much more noticeable. That year, tens of thousands of federal employees missed two paychecks, and many important services, including air traffic control, suffered from staffing shortages.

The government didn’t begin to experience modern-day shutdowns until Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti issued an opinion in the 1980s that required federal agencies to curb operations if Congress did not approve sufficient funding. Since then, the government has shut down 14 times, from as long as one day to 35 days.

During a government shutdown, federal agencies decide which employees will continue working and which services will continue at a regular level.

When it comes to staffing, federal employees are effectively separated into essential and nonessential workers, with the former required to keep working and the latter furloughed. Both types of workers have to go without pay, with narrow exceptions, including for lawmakers and the president. Essential workers are typically viewed as the ones needed to keep basic, fundamental government services functioning.

All told, roughly 2 million federal civilian workers and 2 million federal military workers would be impacted across the country in the case of a shutdown. That means regardless of whether they are essential or nonessential workers, they’re all likely to see delays to their paychecks if a shutdown goes on for longer than two weeks.

These delays can prove harmful to federal employees and potentially even more so for government contractors, who have not received back pay in the past.

Because agencies are operating in a more limited fashion, there’s also a reduction in government services. And on a broader economic level, these shutdowns have had costs for the country because they delay federal spending and reduce productivity. According to the Congressional Budget Office, $3 billion in GDP was lost as a result of the 2019 shutdown that won’t be recovered.

Which services are — and aren’t — affected?

Certain government services, like Social Security and Medicare, will keep operating much like they usually do, while others, like immigration courts, low-risk food safety inspections, and national parks will operate in a more limited capacity or not at all.

Some of those reductions are poised to include:

• WIC: Short for Women, Infants and Children, this social program helps 7 million pregnant people, parents, and kids pay for groceries; it could see its payments affected as early as next week.
• Immigration courts: Roughly 60,000 immigration court hearings were canceled during the last government shutdown, and could be canceled again.
• Civil courts: Most federal civil trials will be delayed, and new cases are unlikely to be considered.
• National parks and Smithsonian museums: These entities are some of the most visible to typically be affected by shutdowns. While they may stay open, they could limit their hours and access to facilities like bathrooms depending on how long the shutdown continues.
• Low-risk food inspections: Higher-risk food inspections for goods like meat have tended to continue in the past, while lower-risk reviews on items like cookies and crackers have been delayed.
• Small business loans: The Small Business Administration is set to pause reviews and approvals of new loans during a shutdown.
• Military efforts: The Pentagon is set to pause its recruitment efforts during a shutdown, and payments to contractors and suppliers could be delayed.

Other services, some of which operate based on mandatory spending each year, are expected to continue uninterrupted. They are:

• Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid: These are all slated to keep up their operations uninterrupted. All three programs fall under “mandatory spending” that the federal government has committed to — and are not affected by the annual appropriations process. (Medicaid also relies, in part, on state spending.)
• US Postal Service: Mail delivery, which relies on an independent source of revenue from the sale of products and services, will continue uninterrupted.
• SNAP food aid: The USDA says it has enough funding for food stamps — which are used by 40 million Americans — to last through the end of October. Should the shutdown extend into November, however, people may not receive benefits.
• FEMA: Available federal disaster aid will continue to be distributed, but the agency may not have the money to properly respond to any disasters that happen during the shutdown.
• Criminal prosecutions: Federal prosecutions, including the cases being brought against Donald Trump, will continue, while civil cases may be paused.
• Congress: The legislative branch will continue to work, though some staffers may be furloughed, leading to delays in certain constituent services. Additionally, lawmakers still collect paychecks even if others are delayed.
• White House: Though administrative aides are usually furloughed, the president, Cabinet members, and many executive offices, like the National Security Council, will continue working.
• Military: Service members will be required to stay at their posts, including the Army Corps of Engineers, which will continue to maintain key infrastructure like dams.

Why does the government shut down?

Every year, Congress is required to pass 12 new spending bills by the end of September that help fund different federal agencies as well as the legislative branch for the next year. If Congress doesn’t approve spending bills in time, the government shuts down. Both chambers must pass these bills, so if the Senate approves legislation but the House does not, the government goes into shutdown.

Often, Congress is unable to get its work done in time, so it passes a short-term spending bill that keeps funding levels the same as the prior year. That short-term bill usually keeps the government open for another few months — enough time for lawmakers to negotiate and pass the 12 spending bills.

This time around, the main issue is that the House has been unable to approve a short-term funding bill.

Republicans can’t agree on a bill they would support — with several conservatives balking at backing a short-term bill at all. At the same time, McCarthy has yet to ask for the Democratic support that would be needed to approve bipartisan legislation without these conservatives. That’s left Congress — despite the Senate’s efforts — on the road to a shutdown.

How could a government shutdown end?

Government shutdowns have historically ended with the party that instigated it caving once voters start blaming them for the impact they’ve had on services.

This was the case in 2019, when Trump pushed for the longest government shutdown in history by arguing that Republicans shouldn’t approve any bill that didn’t include $5 billion in funding for his border wall. That shutdown lasted for 35 days, and was extremely unpopular.

At the time, a Morning Consult poll showed that 54 percent of Americans blamed Trump and congressional Republicans for the shutdown, compared to the 35 percent who blamed Democrats. Beyond its unpopularity, another major reason the shutdown ended was because everyday life was becoming increasingly difficult.

In particular, a growing number of air traffic controllers called in sick in protest over the lack of pay and staffing shortages. Those absences made it unsafe to fly and land planes in prominent airports like LaGuardia in New York. Ultimately, Trump didn’t win much: he agreed to reopen the government without any funding allocated to his border wall.

A similar scenario played out in 2013 as well, when House Republicans were blamed for shutting down the government for 16 days. That year, they shut down because they wanted to defund Obamacare, another push that failed. Public sentiment also grew against the shutdown, with 53 percent of people putting the blame on Republicans at that time.

All this has made some Republicans wary of another shutdown in 2023 due to concerns that it makes the party look bad and gives Democrats another talking point to highlight their dysfunction. As Sen. Rick Scott (R-FL) told the Washington Post, in a sentiment that seems common on the Senate side, if not in the House: “That’s what’s crazy about this, you should never shut down the government.”

Beyond the possibility of Republicans ultimately caving, there are other efforts lawmakers are working on to try to find a resolution to the shutdown. One is a discharge petition, which can be used to force a vote on a bill without the speaker’s permission. A majority of the House would need to back the petition for that to happen, however, and it takes time to move through the House.

And although some moderate Republicans have signaled openness to it, it would still be significant for them to vote in a way that directly undercuts their party’s leadership. Doing so could affect their standing in their caucus, make future work with other members of their party more difficult, and leave them vulnerable to primary challenges.

Using a motion to the previous question is another possibility that’s been floated. This motion, if it passes, also allows the minority to force a vote, circumventing the speaker. It requires a simple majority in order to be enacted as well, creating the same concerns as a discharge petition for moderate Republicans contemplating working with Democrats to invoke it.

Trump is exaggerating his union support.

Donald Trump has long made it clear that he sees himself as not just the true voice of the working class, but also the rightful standard-bearer of the union vote. His rally Wednesday night in a Detroit, Michigan suburb just reconfirmed that. “Tell your UAW leadership — no problems with them — but they have to endorse Trump because if they don’t, all they’re doing is committing suicide,” he said. He was talking to a crowd of auto workers, some unionized, but mostly not, at a nonunion manufacturing plant about why he deserves both the union vote and the support of auto workers in general.

This is the crux of Wednesday’s rally: Trump doesn’t care about the specific demands of the striking United Auto Workers members — he wants their votes, and because he says he supports manufacturing jobs and opposes electric vehicle development, that should be enough to back him. But union voters, including in Michigan, have long sided with Democratic candidates — UAW’s leadership itself refused to meet with Trump but joined President Joe Biden 50 miles away a day earlier, when he became the first sitting president to join a picket line.

Trump’s track record with unions isn’t as simple as he’d like to paint it. Though he spent much of the 2016 campaign railing against free trade deals and neoliberal economic policies that contributed to the decline of the American manufacturing sector and the outsourcing of blue-collar jobs, that’s just about the limit of his union-friendly perspective. As president, he sided with capital and managerial interests over labor at nearly every turn, appointing corporate-friendly lawyers to the National Labor Relations Board, supporting right-to-work laws that limited union organizing and dues collections in Republican states, and promising to veto the PRO Act, a bill that would override those state laws and boost labor organizing rights. Even at his rally, he talked up the tax cuts he passed in 2017, without mentioning that they disproportionately benefited corporations and corporate leaders.

Nevertheless, Trump has branded himself as a union champion, claiming that the rank-and-file have flocked to his cause. But a close examination of voting trends over the last few presidential cycles, as well as the changing nature of the labor movement, show that Trump’s standing union voters is mainly a product of his own mythmaking.

Yes, he’s had some success with union voters before — his 2016 presidential victory was buoyed in Midwestern swing states in part by making gains in union households. But union voters aren’t a monolith; they’re a far more diverse group than what Trump (and the nation’s popular conception) would have you believe. And while Trump made gains in 2016, Biden took much of them back in 2020 — suggesting that maybe Trump was never the union whisperer he’s claiming to be.

Democrats have long counted on union support — though 2016 was different

The idea that Trump can make gains among union voters in 2024 has its roots in 2016. That election was defined by two unpopular presidential candidates: in Hillary Clinton, the epitome of an establishment, pro-free trade, and neoliberal politician; and Trump, who pitched himself as a populist outsider who’d renegotiate the nation’s trade deals to save manufacturing jobs.

Much was made about Trump’s appeal to white, working-class voters, and his ability to flip the Midwestern states that made up the so-called Blue Wall that was expected to deliver Clinton the White House. News analyses after the fact explained one key reason: “Donald Trump Got Reagan-Like Support from Union Households,” read one Washington Post headline, while HuffPost declared “It Looks Like Donald Trump Did Really Well With Union Households.”

Those headlines aren’t wrong: Clinton did better among union households than Trump, but it was the smallest margin of victory for a Democrat since 1980, according to exit polls. [First, an aside: There isn’t very good data to track how union voters specifically have voted (believe me, I tried hunting it down), so the best data we can use to understand recent elections is from the exit polls collected by Edison Research for the National Election Pool. They ask respondents if anyone in their household belongs to a union, and track that metric. It’s imperfect, but it’s the best we have.] While Clinton still won the national union household vote (51 percent), Trump posted a two-percentage-point improvement compared to Mitt Romney in 2012 (from 40 to 42 percent). For context: Obama’s margin of victory over Romney was 18 points; Clinton’s was just 9.

But that doesn’t mean Trump posted tremendous national gains. “Trump kind of simply continued a slight slow upward trajectory of Republicans making inroads in the union household that dates back to Bill Clinton’s first race in 1992,” Jake Rosenfeld, a sociology professor at Washington University in St. Louis and labor author, told me. “Roughly speaking in recent elections, Republicans get about 4 in 10 voters in unionized households. That’s down from Ronald Reagan’s successes in 1980 and ’84.”

That trend, of Republicans winning about 40 percent of the labor household vote goes back to 1976, with dips in 1992 and 1996 due to Ross Perot’s third-party candidacy.

Trump’s gains among union household voters, however, didn’t prove sustainable. In 2020, Biden restored the Democratic-union household margin back to double digits, with 56 percent to Trump’s 40 percent.

That rebound suggests something unique happened in 2016: a combination of an appealing Trump message to unionized and nonunionized blue-collar voters in the Midwest, a fumble in the Clinton campaign’s organizing and mobilization in the region, and, most importantly, flaws in Clinton’s candidacy itself, unable to convince voters to ignore her close alignment with her party’s free-trade wing.

The picture gets even more complicated when you zoom in on state-level data. In 2016, Trump cut into Democrats’ union household support significantly across the Midwest. He won a significant majority of union household voters in Ohio: 54 percent to Clinton’s 41 percent according to exit polling. He then held that majority in 2020. It’s a similar story in Pennsylvania, where he made gains in 2016 and held them in 2020.

But in Wisconsin and Michigan, Trump’s 2016 gains were erased in 2020. Biden nearly doubled Clinton’s showing in 2016, winning the union household vote 62 to 37 percent; similarly, in Wisconsin, Biden won the union vote by 19 points, up from the 10 points Clinton won in 2016.

Those differences complicate the question of whether Trump has some unique appeal among union voters, or if 2016 was driven more by the flaws of the Clinton campaign.

White, working-class voters are not the same as union voters, since unions themselves are changing

Aside from his track record, there are two important pieces of context to understand why Trump isn’t likely to inherit the mantle of union hero: Private-sector union membership, the kind he is going after, has been on a decline over the last few decades. At the same time, public and private sector union membership has been diversifying over that same time — making them much less male and white than they have historically been.

Those trends explain why it’s important to not conflate union members, and especially auto union workers, with the category of “white working-class American” that Trump claims to be a champion for, and which media and politicians often use interchangeably with “union worker,” Rosenfeld told me. As private sector unionization rates have declined (that rate sits at a historic low of 6 percent of workers), including in manufacturing and industrial occupations, public sector unionization rates, among school teachers and police officers for example, have remained higher (at about 33 percent nationally). And both sectors are much more female and more Black and Latino than in previous decades.

“In a lot of politicians’ minds, when they talk about the importance of unions, they’re conjuring up images of a UAW auto worker. But that’s just not who your typical union household is, and it’s certainly not who your typical union member is today,” Rosenfeld said. “Today, it’s much more likely that your union household is comprised of a public school teacher than it is an auto worker or manufacturing worker.”

He told me that this moment, with the UAW strike, shows the paradox of how much attention is given to a shrinking subset of voters. “Overall, auto union membership today is something like 16 percent … and that contrasts with about 60 percent back in the early to mid-1980s,” he said. That same dynamic applies to Michigan, as well, where private manufacturing jobs used to be an anchor of the labor movement. While about 4 in 10 manufacturing workers belonged to unions in the 1980s, less than 20 percent do so now. Even the union at the center of this week’s dueling Michigan visits isn’t as monolithic as it used to be, or as Trump thinks of it. Four in 10 UAW members work outside the automotive industry, and that growing segment is now being fueled by unionizing researchers, university workers, and other academic student workers.

The growing diversity in profession, gender, and race among union members is another defining feature of the modern labor movement, one that experts told me has benefitted Democrats and poses a challenge to Trump and Republican candidates.

“If you took the union movement of 1950, and kept it the same — it was still mostly construction, industrial, white men — it would probably be a pretty conservative movement today,” Paul Frymer, a political scientist focused on labor and political movements at Princeton University, told me. “A lot of what has contributed to the longevity of the Democratic Party with it is the shift of demographics, both race and gender, and the shift to the public sector and the service industry.” Frymer and his colleagues have also found that increasing diversity among public and private sector unions also has effects on racial animosity: that class solidarity can help white people feel less racial resentment against nonwhite counterparts — and aligns with traditional Democratic messaging.

Why Biden and Trump are headed for a union showdown

So why are Biden and Trump set to duel over a shrinking pool of voters that are still more likely to vote for Democrats — and simply don’t have the same numbers they did in their heyday?

It hasn’t always been this way, Frymer told me. “2023 is a different moment. There is competition for the labor vote. When was the last time that happened? Trump doing this is going to push Democrats to do the same, and getting Biden to march in a protest,” he said. “There hasn’t been a Democratic president who really saw themselves as a union supporter since maybe Truman. The union movement was taken for granted a lot in the Democratic Party. They were an important part of the party, but they weren’t the group that presidents and senators were worried about.”

The bipartisan desire for union support is amplified by how important small margins are in battleground states, where labor voters are still crucial in delivering victory to Democrats — or defecting in numbers large enough to boost a Republican. As Michael Baharaeen at The Liberal Patriot has analyzed, shoring up union household support in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin offers Democrats a clear pathway to hold those states in 2024 — and an opening for Trump to neutralize a Democratic advantage.

The changing partisan affiliation of union members also creates ripe ground for a contest: Polling data aggregated and analyzed by Gallup for Vox over the last 20 years show that though Democrats still hold an edge (31 percent of members) in the number of union members who identify as Democrats, Republicans have seen an increase in affiliation since Trump’s election (27 percent today, compared to 20 percent during the 2016 election). More union members identify as independents — and when asked to which party they lean, Democrats still hold an advantage, though it has shrunk.

Adding to this moment is the historically high popular support for organized labor among Americans nationally — nearly 7 in 10 Americans approve of labor unions, according to Gallup’s most recent surveys, a number not seen since 1960. That offers ripe ground for candidates of both parties to campaign as pro-labor, even if, in the case of Trump, that doesn’t mean passing legislation or enacting policies to materially help labor unions specifically.

The specifics of Trump’s speech Wednesday night lend this theory more credence. Trump allies and much of the political press have characterized the Michigan visit as an attempt to persuade working class and union voters, even though the address was hosted at a nonunionized facility, to a crowd of mostly nonunion or former union manufacturing workers. An anti-free trade, anti-electric vehicle, and nominally pro-worker speech seems more like an attempt to use the aesthetics of the traditional labor movement than a serious attempt to help union workers.

It’s disingenuous of Trump to pretend to be a union champion, but his success in selling that image — or Democrats’ success in dispelling it — is likely to have a significant bearing on who wins the next election.

Linda Yaccarino used to sell TV advertising. Selling Elon Musk is a whole different deal.

Linda Yaccarino is angry.

Not at Elon Musk, the man who hired her to be the CEO of Twitter, the company he subsequently renamed X. Yaccarino says he’s a brilliant leader who is turning his company into something that has more ambition than “any other company likely on earth.”

Instead, Yaccarino is furious that my colleagues at Vox Media announced a last-minute programming update before her on-stage interview at the company’s Code Conference: They would also host a session featuring Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter who resigned shortly after Musk bought the company last year.

In his interview with Code co-founder Kara Swisher, Roth recounted the story of his departure from Twitter — focusing on a tweet Musk wrote that wrongly accused him of pedophilia — and how that forced him to leave his home and fear for his safety.

He also questioned Twitter/X’s claims that hate speech had dramatically declined at the company under Musk’s ownership, and warned Yaccarino that she could one day face Musk’s wrath: “Look at what your boss did to me,” he said, when Swisher asked him to offer advice to Yaccarino. “It happened to me. It happened after he sung my praises publicly.”

Apologies for the long meta-backstory. (While we are at it, I’ll disclose that I conducted two interviews at Code this year but wasn’t involved in any other speaker bookings.) But you need it to understand the set-up for the combative tone Yaccarino brought to the stage. It’s also a little embarrassing for a writer to write this but: you’ll want to watch the video of this when it’s available to get the whole gestalt.

The reason any of this matters is that Yaccarino, a veteran TV advertising executive, long accustomed to making persuasive pitches on behalf of her clients, is now trying to do the same for Musk. But convincing the world that Elon Musk — or at least the version of Elon Musk who owns Twitter — is someone they should invest in, financially, emotionally, and otherwise, is a much different task than getting them to buy NBC’s fall TV line-up. And Wednesday’s appearance suggests just how different that task will be. In Yaccarino’s previous life, for starters, she’s never had to represent someone who is feuding with a Jewish anti-hate group.

On to the substance of the interview: You may be under the impression, in part because of reporting about the company, and in part because of Musk’s own commentary on his platform, that since Musk bought Twitter, users and advertisers have fled and that the site has seen a spike in hateful content. You may also believe that, although Musk hired Yaccarino to be CEO of the company — a move he essentially leaked while she was preparing to give a major advertising presentation at NBCUniversal, her last employer, and before she had told NBCU execs about her plans — it’s not a real CEO job because Musk still controls major parts of the company. And also because Musk doesn’t seem capable of restraining himself from tweeting things like his belief that the Anti-Defamation League has a vendetta against him.

None of these things are true, Yaccarino explained to interviewer Julia Boorstin at the Code Conference. Some excerpts from her interview:

On the health of Twitter’s platform under Musk: She repeated earlier claims that the company now has more than 540 million users — more than double than the user base Musk cited last November. “When you look at the length of time spent, engagement on X, the key metrics are trending very, very positively,” she said.

On Twitter’s financial status: While Musk has previously said more than 60 percent of Twitter’s US advertising had vanished since he bought the company, Yaccarino said large and small advertisers are now returning since she arrived on the job. “Why are they returning? They are returning because of the power and significance of the platform,” she said.

Yaccarino also said that contrary to Musk’s previous suggestions that Twitter was in danger of bankruptcy, things had bounced back. “From an operating cash flow perspective, we are just about break-even,” she said, and projected that the company would be profitable early next year.

On Yaccarino’s position in the company and in Musk’s eyes: She said that she and Musk “talk about everything,” including his recently floated plan to convert Twitter from a free service to one that would require all users to pay, and that it was only right for him to tweet the way he’d like. “The foundation of X is based on free expression and freedom of speech,” Yaccarino explained. “Everyone has the opportunity to speak their opinion. Including Elon.”

Yaccarino also dismissed the idea that her power was diminished by Musk’s control of the tech company’s product. “Who wouldn’t want Elon Musk sitting by their side running product?” she asked the audience.

And in reference to Musk’s erratic nature and tendency to slip into “demon mode” — a phrase that surfaced in the new Musk biography by Walter Isaacson — she said she has yet to see that. “When you get inspired and pushed by Elon Musk, you do the things that you’d think were never normally possible,” she said. “I’ve been there 12 weeks. I am still somewhat in awe of his availability to me.”

On Twitter prior to Musk’s ownership: Yaccarino, like Musk, said that while she liked Twitter and had previously partnered with the company when she ran advertising at NBCUniversal, it was a deeply flawed company. “Twitter at the time was operating on a different set of rules … different philosophies and different ideologies, [it was] creeping down the road of censorship,” she said. Musk’s new company, she repeated a few times, “is a new company, building a foundation based on free expression and free speech.”

Again, you’ll want to watch the video for this one. It’s quite something.

Does any of this matter when it comes to the future of Twitter under Musk, and Yaccarino’s tenure there? There’s no way of knowing. Yaccarino has deep ties with the advertising business, and there are still many people in the industry hoping she can return Twitter to something they can spend (some) money on. Maybe that will happen. Note, for example, this recent public hug from the head of the NFL’s media operation, a very important Twitter partner:

But watching Yaccarino’s appearance on stage also reminded me of the Trump administration, when members of Trump’s circle would go on TV knowing that their primary mission was to please the president, who was famously glued to TV news. If Elon Musk sees Wednesday’s event, he’ll see, at a minimum, that his CEO is happy to share her displeasure with a media company in a public forum. Maybe he’ll like that?

And the adventures scientists go on to better understand our enigmatic seas.

The Earth is mainly a water world — more than 70 percent of its surface is covered by oceans — and yet we know so little about what resides beneath the waves.

The ocean, in this light, is like an alien world within our own. Many of its creatures are still unknown to us — both in kind and number. Their behaviors and adaptations remain inexplicable. Even the very contours of this world are still unmapped: We probably know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the ocean floor.

Understanding the sea is to understand our planet better, at a fundamental level. “There’s so much about how the planet works that is basically preserved in this sort of underwater museum,” Vicki Ferrini, senior research scientist at Columbia University, told Vox’s Mandy Nguyen in 2021.

But not only is the ocean a source of mystery, it’s also a place of adventure. On Unexplainable — Vox’s podcast about big mysteries and all the things we learn by investigating the unknown — we’ve been talking to the scientists who have gone on journeys to understand this watery realm. They’ve come across fearsome creatures like the giant squid, conducted forensic investigations of mysterious deaths, visited octopus cities, and ventured down as deep as humanly possible.

“How could you not be excited about it?” Ferrini said of ocean exploration. “People have this passionate enthusiasm for outer space, which is totally understandable. But the ocean is equally if not more exciting to me because it’s here. It’s the same planet that we’re on.”

And there are countless discoveries yet to make in it. So let’s dive in! Here are seven great ocean mysteries we’ve uncovered, starting at the surface, and then going down deep, deep into the dark.

For more mysteries, listen to and follow Unexplainable wherever you listen to podcasts.

Where did Earth’s water come from?

Alexander Gerst/ESA via Getty Images

Before we dive into the ocean, there are questions about why Earth has them to begin with. Really: Scientists don’t fully understand how water came to cover two-thirds of the surface of our world.

The problem is simple. When the Earth was forming, it was extremely hot. Any water that was around at the beginning would have boiled away.

“So how do you get so much liquid condensing onto the surface of a planet that should be really, really hot?” Lydia Hallis, a planetary scientist at the University of Glasgow, tells Unexplainable’s Noam Hassenfeld.

Scientists can think of a few plausible options. Was it delivered by comets crashing into our world? Or more fantastically, do we only have water due to the extremely circumstantial event of planets like Jupiter wandering toward the sun from the outer solar system? Or was it, somehow, deeply buried within the early Earth?

The possibilities matter because they can help us understand why there is life on Earth. Without water arriving on Earth, life as we know it would not exist.

Hallis has been traveling the world to investigate and try to find some samples of the very oldest water on Earth.

Here’s what she’s learned so far:

Further reading: The Unexplainable origins of life on Earth

Where is plastic pollution in the ocean hiding, and how does it get there?

Fred Tanneau/AFP via Getty Images

Now, an ocean story that starts on the surface, on land.

Every year, tons of plastic manufactured on land is dumped into the sea. But scientists have yet to complete the work of figuring out all the nooks and crannies our plastic pollution nudges its way into.

“Ninety-nine percent of all the plastic is missing,” oceanographer Erik van Sebille says on Unexplainable. “We have dark plastic. Like the astronomers have dark matter and dark energy, we oceanographers, we don’t have an idea where most of the plastic in our ocean is. We’ve lost it.”

Researchers like van Sebille want to know where the plastic is going so they can better understand its effects on marine life. What harm is this plastic causing to marine life, and can it be undone?

Further reading: Oops, cleaning the Great Pacific Garbage Patch was probably a bad idea

What powers rogue waves?

VCG Wilson/Corbis via Getty Images

At the surface of the ocean, rogue waves can seem to come out of nowhere. These walls of water are at least twice the size of the biggest waves around them, sometimes towering over 100 feet. Unlike tsunamis, they are not set off by an obvious event like an earthquake. And for a long time, scientists weren’t even sure rogue waves existed; perhaps they were just a convenient myth to explain the mysterious disappearances of many ships over the years.

But all that changed in 1995 when one was recorded for the first time.

Since then, scientists have been trying to figure them out. How do these giant waves form, and what sustains their towering height? “Anything out of the ordinary deserves scientists’ attention,” Ton van den Bremer, who studies fluid mechanics at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, tells Unexplainable’s Meradith Hoddinott.

By probing the extremes of rogue waves, scientists like van den Bremer are hoping to gain a deeper understanding of the physics underlying many types of waves.

Further reading: The grand unified theory of rogue waves in Quanta Magazine.

Why do whales strand themselves on beaches? And are humans to blame?

VCG via Getty Images

Diving deeper, we find marine life. Scientists are constantly asking questions about their most peculiar behaviors.

For example, every year, thousands of marine mammals like whales end up trapped on beaches or in the shallow waters near shore. According to some studies, these strandings have been increasing.

But why do the animals do this? And are humans to blame?

It’s an incredibly difficult question to answer because while we know that humans are affecting the ocean environment, it can be hard to parse how those effects impact individual species.

But it’s important to figure it out. Because how do you protect animals when you’re not sure exactly how you’re harming them?

Enter Darlene Ketten, (a.k.a. “Dr. Doom”), a Woods Hole researcher who specializes in forensic investigations into whale deaths. She conducts Law and Order-type investigations into whale deaths. “What keeps us in the lab and on the beach is looking for more and more information,” Ketten says on Unexplainable, where she explains how she conducts her investigations.

Further reading: The curious case of the ancient whale bones

Can a human really be friends with an octopus?

A. Martin UW Photography/Getty Images

In 2020, the documentary My Octopus Teacher provoked a fascinating question: Can a caring relationship form between humans and a sea creature like an octopus? It’s not known whether the friendship in the documentary was genuine from the octopus’s perspective. The interior lives of animals may never be fully understood.

But it’s a fascinating question to think through. “It’s like interstellar travel,” science writer Ferris Jabr says on Unexplainable. “It’s like the closest we can come to that kind of alien contact moment.”

If we can connect with an octopus, what else could we connect with?

Further reading: Why do we care how smart animals are?

How many fish live in the ocean’s mysterious “twilight zone”?

Amanda Northrop/Vox

As you dive deeper into the ocean, less and less sunlight shines through. About 200 meters beneath the surface, you reach an area called the mesopelagic, or the “twilight zone.” Sunlight fades almost completely out of view, and our knowledge about these dark depths fades too.

“It’s almost easier to define it by what we don’t know than what we do know,” Andone Lavery, an acoustician at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, told Vox’s Byrd Pinkerton. “It’s remote. It’s deep. It’s dark. It’s elusive. It’s temperamental.”

Yet this region of the ocean is extremely important. It’s possible — but not certain — that more fish are living in the twilight zone than the rest of the ocean combined, and these creatures of the dark ocean play a large role in regulating the climate.

Further reading: Scientists are probing the depths of the ocean’s Twilight Zone. So are commercial fisheries.

Why do so many sea creatures glow?

NOAA’s National Ocean Service /Flickr

It’s wrong to say there’s no light in the depths of the ocean. There’s light, it just doesn’t come from the sun. Deep in the ocean (and also on the surface), divers find other-worldly displays of bioluminescence, sparkling like fireworks in the dark. Almost every deep-water creature lights up in some way.

“There was just all of this flashing and glowing and sparkle all around me,” marine biologist Edie Widder recounts on Unexplainable about her undersea adventures. “You’re not viewing it at a distance. You’re in the center of the display. In fact, you’re part of it because any movement you make triggers flashes all around you.”

Widder has spent her career trying to figure out why so many marine creatures glow. The quest has led her to confront some of the weirdest, most elusive creatures on Earth.

Further reading: The underwater “eye” that is unlocking ocean secrets

Only 20 percent of the ocean floor has been mapped. What’s down there?

Berann, Heinrich C., Heezen, Bruce C., Tharp, Marie./Wikimedia commons

Currently, only 20 percent of the seafloor has been mapped, making it a more mysterious place than the surface of the moon or Mars. That means every time explorers go down to the bottom, they are potentially seeing things no human has ever laid eyes on before. More people went on the Apollo missions to the moon than have been to the Challenger Deep, the deepest part of the deepest trench in the ocean.

Nicole Yamase is one of those lucky explorers. She told Unexplainable what it’s like down there.

Further reading: The bizarre deep-sea creatures living on the Endurance shipwreck

What secrets are buried in the mud at the bottom of the ocean?

National Academy of Sciences; Amanda Northrop/Vox

Scientists’ curiosity doesn’t just stop at the bottom of the sea. They’re also interested in what lies beneath it.

Sixty years ago, geologists tried to drill down through the seabed to pull up a piece of the Earth’s mantle, a deep layer of the Earth no human has directly observed. Their mission didn’t go exactly as planned. But it sowed the seeds for a new field of science that has helped rewrite not only the history of the planet but, potentially, our definitions of life itself.

Further reading: How an ill-fated undersea adventure in the 1960s changed the way scientists see the Earth

If you have ideas for topics for future shows, send us an email at unexplainable@vox.com.

Update, September 28, 9:40 am ET: This post has been updated to include newer episodes of the Unexplainable podcast.

Despite record power demand, the grid largely avoided blackouts. Don’t take this for granted. 

With little acknowledgment and no applause, the power grid across the continental United States this summer quietly pulled off what may have been its most impressive feat ever.

On July 27, the US power grid served nearly 15 million megawatt-hours of electricity across the lower 48 states, about 1.6 times the electricity produced by every nuclear power plant in the world on a given day. It kept lights, fans, and air conditioners running in every home, office, factory, school, hospital, and store on one of the hottest days ever. For comparison, the average daily electricity use in 2022 across the whole country was roughly 11 million MWh. At 6 pm ET, US energy demand reached an all-time high hourly peak of 741,815 MWh.

Energy Information Administration

It’s even more remarkable when you consider the context: July 27 was just the Mount Everest in a month of Himalayan demand peaks. July 2023 was the hottest month on the planet since at least 1880, possibly the hottest in 100,000 years. The US, being a country on Earth, burst through numerous temperature records. In Death Valley, California, temperatures reached 127.7 degrees Fahrenheit.

Energy Information Administration

Weeks of relentless heat all day and even through the night sent millions of Americans indoors where they devoured electrons as they desperately tried to cool off.

“It really has been pushing the grid into uncharted territory with these record levels of demand,” said Mark Olson, manager for reliability assessments at the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC), a power industry nonprofit that works to keep the grid running smoothly.

When temperatures reach extremes, in both hot and cold directions, it creates a ravenous appetite for energy. “It really is the determining factor for what kind of stress the grid was placed under,” Olson added. “And so we saw, certainly, this summer, many areas were put under unprecedented levels of stress.”

At the same time, the scalding weather evaporated some of the electricity supply as generators struggled to cool off, transmission lines moved less power, and transformers faced overheating risks. And this all happened on a power grid that isn’t getting any younger. More than 70 percent of transmission lines are more than 25 years old, and aging hardware has raised reliability worries for years, even outside of extreme weather.

NERC warned in May that this combination of factors would put most of the US at an elevated risk of blackouts over the summer. “The assessment finds that, while resources are adequate for normal summer peak demand, if summer temperatures spike, [grid operators] may face supply shortages during higher demand levels,” according to NERC’s May outlook.

Prolonged power outages during this summer’s heat waves would have been devastating. Global average temperatures are rising due to climate change from burning fossil fuels, increasing the frequency, duration, and severity of heat waves. During such high temperatures, cooling is not a luxury but a necessity for survival. A June heat wave in India with temperatures reaching 113°F led to power outages, forcing hospitals to go without air conditioning and fans. The heat killed close to 170 people. The 2021 heat wave in the Pacific Northwest contributed to 159 deaths and led to rolling blackouts.

An outage during a future heat wave would be even worse. A study published earlier this year in the journal Environmental Science and Technology examined a blackout scenario in Phoenix, Arizona, during a major heat wave. The researchers estimated that this scenario would kill close to 13,000 residents and require nearly 800,000 people to seek emergency medical care.

Caitlin O’Hara/Bloomberg via Getty Images

Fortunately, nothing that dire happened in the US this year. Hundreds of thousands of utility customers in places like Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana did lose power for several days due to damage from intense storms, leaving them without cooling as high temperatures set in over the summer. But for the most part, the heat itself did not lead to major blackouts, despite the intense strain on the grid.

Is this a victory? Or is it a near-miss catastrophe?

“Sure. It’s great that there have not been outages,” said Doug Lewin, a power grid analyst and author of the Texas Energy and Power Newsletter. “They landed the plane, but there’s warning lights all over the place. You wouldn’t want to take that plane into the air again unless you actually fixed it up.”

Grid operators and utilities did anticipate that this summer would be a scorcher and took some steps to prepare. But while the lights stayed on, the situation still turned dicey as power companies issued emergency energy conservation alerts to their customers.

Forecasters now warn that next year will be even hotter. And while the US is heading into cooler autumn weather, the power grid in parts of the country remains in a precarious state as heating needs bring new pressures on the power grid. The tests are only getting harder. “As climate scientists are quick to point out, it’s not going to get better,” Lewin said. “We really have to get prepared for summers that are worse than this one.”

The higher stakes question is whether the lessons from this year will help the power grid better handle the next one. That the US power system withstood its highest demand period ever is a feat of engineering and planning, but also a matter of luck. It’s not something anyone can afford to take for granted.

How the US power grid survived its toughest challenge yet

Though we talk about “the grid” as a monstrous monolithic machine, it’s actually a mosaic of different energy systems. There are three major power grids across the continental US broken down further into regional transmission operators who route electrons mobilized by moving air, rushing water, photons from the sun, fragments of atoms, and the residues of lives lived millions of years ago.

Which makes it all the more remarkable that in this huge, complicated structure, very little buckled under the record-breaking temperatures this year.

A big reason was that grid operators anticipated that blackout risks would be unusually high this year. NERC’s summer reliability assessment looked at how much power could be put on the grid through June, July, and August, accounting for energy supplies, maintenance downtime, and unexpected shutdown scenarios. They also forecasted what kinds of weather conditions would materialize in the warm months, as well as the impacts of long-running problems like drought.

“It’s not a prediction of what will happen, but it is an analysis of conditions that could happen, and then serves as a warning to industry and stakeholders,” Olson said. “When we looked at more severe scenarios like extreme demand levels or low resource conditions like what happens when gas-fired generators are forced offline for outages or low-wind scenarios, we found more parts of the grid geographically were at risk than in past summers.”

Of course, this summer was not a normal one. Signs of an exceptionally hot season, like a brewing El Niño weather pattern in the Pacific Ocean, also materialized early.

The warnings gave grid operators time to prepare. They were able to refine their energy usage forecasts, procure extra electricity generation, and model expected wind and solar power output. In the runup to heat waves, operators also ensured that power plants rescheduled any planned outages and dispatchable backup power was ready. They also reached agreements with neighboring power grids to purchase power in case there were any shortfalls.

Frederic J. Brown/AFP via Getty Images

Another factor was the oodles of new cheap renewable energy added to the grid. Last year, renewable sources like wind and solar power made up 74 percent of new utility-scale generating capacity in the US. Solar is poised to make up more than half of new power capacity this year, more than 29 gigawatts. The US power grid as a whole has about 1,250 GW of generating capacity. Solar and wind power helped cushion the blow of intense heat waves during the hottest times of day in many parts of the country.

On the other side of the equation, grid operators and power utilities leaned on their customers too. Instead of just pumping more electrons into power lines, they created incentives in some markets for offices, factories, and homes to dial down their power use during challenging times. This is a tool called demand response, and it’s becoming a more important way to balance energy needs. During especially dire times, people also responded to emergency alerts to limit power usage by turning down unnecessary appliances.

The US power system thus managed to stay on its feet in the scorching heat, but it was getting woozy and uncomfortably close to blacking out. “I think we’ve seen a number of instances this summer of conclusive evidence that we’re operating near our limits,” Olson said.

And then there’s Texas, America’s postcard from the future

The Lone Star State deserves its own mention because more than 90 percent of its demand is met with its internal grid that has few connections to outside states, effectively turning Texas into an island. This grid, powered by more than 11,000 generators, is run by the nonprofit Electric Reliability Council of Texas, or ERCOT.

While Texas baked in the same heat as much of the rest of the country, it couldn’t count on its neighbors for help. ERCOT had to issue several emergency appeals to customers asking them to cut back on power use to protect the grid, including earlier this month.

Texas is the largest oil and gas producer in the US. It’s also the state with the most wind energy, and this year, it’s on track to add more solar than any other state, nearly double what California is installing. In fact, wind and sunlight patterns in Texas complement each other exceptionally well, smoothing out variability when the wind slows or when clouds pass overhead. In 2022, Texas generated more than 40 percent of its electricity from zero-emissions sources: nuclear, wind, and solar.

It’s odd then that a state with so much energy still ended up scrounging for power and asking customers to step up. These alerts and appeals began to frustrate Texans. “ERCOT’s popularity is not super high, so when they ask people to reduce, I see this all over Facebook and Twitter online, people saying, ‘No, like, I’m making it colder in my house. You guys figure this out,’” Lewin said. “People get angry.”

Brandon Bell/Getty Images

Part of the reason that Texas sometimes struggles to make enough electricity is that it has a freewheeling power market with fewer interventions from regulators than those in other states. The priority is to sell electricity in real time at the lowest possible cost, with little backup margin, although that’s starting to change. Spurred by the 2021 blackout in Texas from Winter Storm Uri that cut off power to 4 million customers and killed at least 246 people, ERCOT implemented rules to encourage more reserve power on its grid.

Still, there is a lot of untapped potential for increasing reliability in Texas and in much of the rest of the country. According to Lewin, one of the biggest opportunities is mandating more energy efficiency. “Not just conservation, not just asking people to sweat in their homes, but actually replace old HVACs, put in more insulation,” Lewin said. “All of that would make the grid more reliable.”

Though the Texas grid is unique, many other parts of the country will likely follow its trends: more extreme heat, growing populations, rising energy demand, fast-blossoming renewables. Texas is also leading in new clean technologies like carbon capture and hydrogen production that, while they do have massive energy requirements, can help address climate change. Energy may be abundant in Texas, but it’s still a challenge to get it where it needs to go. “I often refer to ERCOT as kind of a postcard from the future,” Lewin said.

The power grid has more obstacles ahead this year and into the future

Even with temperatures now dropping, there are still challenges for the power grid. Late-season heat waves remain a possibility in states like California and could increase the chances of a blackout like they did last year.

Electricity production is also likely to face constraints in the coming months. Shorter days mean less solar power is available. Many utilities also schedule repairs and upgrades for power plants in the winter. Most power plants in the US require water for cooling and for making steam to spin their turbines, but huge swaths of the country are still facing severe drought conditions. That could impair electricity production.

National Integrated Drought Information System

Meanwhile, electricity use is growing during the winter as more electric cars, water heaters, stoves, and furnaces plug in. “As electrification is taking hold, we’re seeing those winter peak demands increasing,” Olson said. El Niño is likely to drive a milder winter in the US than is typical, but a sudden cold snap could still cause outages.

The extreme heat this year also exposed flaws in the conventional wisdom around grid reliability, namely that coal, oil, and gas are dependable stalwarts and that wind and solar are too mercurial to be useful. Fossil fuel infrastructure experienced equipment failures amid the high temperatures and extreme heat impaired both conventional and renewable generators.

“The idea that we need more coal and gas to supplement renewables I think is being shown to be a myth that is being propagated by certain fossil fuel interests and their political allies,” said Joshua Basseches, an assistant professor of public policy and environmental studies at Tulane University. “I think it’s starting to change, but it has a long way to go.”

2023’s super-hot summer also raised the salience of scrutinizing decisions about the future of the power grid and the people who make them. “Transmission organizations and independent system operators have an accountability problem,” Basseches said. The people who decide where to build power lines, what sources should provide electricity, what energy storage mechanisms are necessary, and how to distribute the costs are overseen by the federal government, but they aren’t elected by the people most directly affected by their choices.

“That’s why you hear people calling for ‘energy democracy,’ this idea that there should be more voices at the table,” Basseches said.

It’s critical to plan now for the next time temperatures reach the far ends of the thermometer. The decisions made now will shape whether we can stay comfortable in the next chill or scorcher, or whether we’ll be left in the dark.

The House is having its first impeachment hearing. What they don’t have is proof of their allegations.

Whatever you may think about the impeachments of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, they were at least impeached for things they verifiably did.

But Joe Biden may become the first president to be impeached entirely because of an unproven theory.

Republicans, and allies of Donald Trump in particular, have spent five years searching for the proof that will vindicate their long-held assertion that Joe Biden was corruptly in cahoots with his son, Hunter — being paid off by foreign interests and skewing US policy to support them.

Yet while much has emerged about Hunter’s sordid personal life and dubiously ethical behavior, Republicans have been unable to hang anything significant on his father.

Don’t take it from me. Take it from Rep. Ken Buck (R-CO), who wrote this month: “What’s missing, despite years of investigation, is the smoking gun that connects Joe Biden to his ne’er-do-well son’s corruption.”

Of course, the GOP’s impeachment effort isn’t really about what the evidence shows — it’s political. What’s really behind this is that the hard right has been demanding aggressive action against Biden, Trump wants payback for his own two impeachments, and Speaker Kevin McCarthy is struggling to hold off threats to his speakership. The evidence is largely beside the point.

Still, some of Buck’s GOP colleagues assert that, actually, they’ve found a ton of damning information on Joe Biden — in their own investigation, and from the infamous abandoned “laptop” containing Hunter’s emails and messages, around which a sort of oppo research industrial complex has sprung up on the right.

But their grand corruption theories hinge either on uncorroborated or outright discredited accusations from questionable figures, or on Hunter throwing his father’s name around in private. The hard proof that Joe was in on Hunter’s schemes remains lacking.

What we know of Joe and Hunter Biden’s financial relationship

For nearly his entire adult life, Hunter Biden has been in the business of being Joe Biden’s son — first as a lobbyist, and then in the more opaque world of advising and consulting for high-paying foreign clients.

Viewed in isolation, it seems like one of many examples of a politician’s relative cashing in on his name. But Republicans argue there’s more to the story — their grand theory is that, really, Joe and Hunter were actively in business together, with Joe helping Hunter’s clients in exchange for a large share of the loot.

But the picture that’s emerged from the investigation so far doesn’t exactly seem impeachment-worthy.

As far as Joe’s relationship with Hunter’s business partners, the investigation has revealed the following: the vice president occasionally spoke to some of Hunter’s business associates at golf outings and dinner events. Sometimes he called Hunter to say hello during Hunter’s business meetings, and Hunter put him on speakerphone, but Joe wouldn’t talk business. Officials in Biden’s office forwarded information about White House events to Hunter. Joe once wrote a college letter of recommendation for the son of a Chinese executive in business with Hunter.

How about the money? Republicans point to a January 2019 text from Hunter to his daughter (typos included):

I love all of you. But I don’t receive any respect and thats fine I guess -works for you apparently. I Hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family Fro 30 years. It’s really hard. But don’t worry unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.

But did Joe actually make Hunter give him half his salary?

In the laptop material, there are many resentful tirades from Hunter about how much he does for his family and how unappreciated he is, often laden with exaggerations and persecution fantasies (usually coming when family members were trying to get him off drugs).

There is evidence of some intermingling of Joe’s finances with Hunter’s. Eric Schwerin, who Hunter had hired to help with his finances in the mid-2000s, also assisted Joe Biden with managing his finances when he was vice president. Hunter covered some expenses for Joe, like home repairs and cell phone bills.

And Hunter claimed in another text that his dad had long used one of his bank accounts. “My dad has been using most lines on this account which I’ve though the gracious offerings of Eric [Schwerin] have paid for past 11 years,” he texted in 2018.

But there’s no documentation of anything remotely near half Hunter’s (sizable) income, or any sort of set percentage, going to Joe. The covering of expenses that’s been documented seems to have been more informal — Hunter, the highest-earning Biden, picking up the tab for his dad, or setting some bills on autopay.

Burisma and the firing of Ukraine’s prosecutor general

Many GOP theories of Joe Biden’s corruption center around Hunter’s work for the Ukrainian gas company Burisma — which you may remember being discussed quite a bit during the first impeachment of Donald Trump back in 2019.

Hunter served on the board of Burisma and was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year by the company starting in 2014. By that point, the first phase of Ukraine’s conflict with Russia had begun, and the US government was providing aid — but US officials had concerns about corruption in the Ukrainian government. So the US, and specifically Vice President Biden, pressured Ukraine’s president to fire the nation’s prosecutor general, Viktor Shokin — which he did.

In recent years, Shokin has been telling a very different story. He asserts he was forced out because he was investigating corruption — Burisma’s corruption. That’s the only reason Vice President Biden urged his firing, he says: to protect Hunter and Burisma.

But Shokin’s story seems plainly false.

Shokin was appointed prosecutor general in February 2015, and US officials indeed initially had high hopes he’d be a reformer, since he was moving to set up an anti-corruption office. But in July of that year, that anti-corruption office investigated two of Shokin’s prosecutor appointees, including his former driver, and found millions in diamonds and cash in their homes. Shokin then “went to war” trying to destroy the new office, in an attempt “to destroy anybody connected with that effort,” US State Department official George Kent has testified.

So the US soured on Shokin. In September 2015, Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt gave a speech denouncing “corrupt actors within the prosecutor general’s office,” alluding to the diamond prosecutor affair. Pyatt also criticized certain prosecutors for working corruptly with Mykola Zlochevsky — the founder of Burisma — to help him regain $23 million that had been frozen abroad (though this had happened before Shokin’s appointment).

By November 22, 2015, the official position of the US government was that Shokin had to go, according to a State Department document meant to prep Biden for an upcoming trip to Ukraine, which stated:

The time is ripe for President Poroshenko to reanimate his reform agenda. You should recommend that he give a state of the nation speech to the Rada in which he reenergizes that effort and rolls out new proposed reforms.

There is wide agreement that anti-corruption must be at the top of this list, and that reforms must include an overhaul of the Prosecutor General’s Office including removal of Prosecutor General Shokin, who is widely regarded as an obstacle to fighting corruption, if not a source of the problem.

During his December 2015 trip, Biden privately told Ukraine’s president that the US would not provide a new tranche of loan guarantees unless Shokin was fired, and publicly stated that Shokin’s office “desperately needs reform.” On February 11, 2016, Biden called Ukraine’s president — and, a few days later, Shokin’s ouster was announced.

Now, it does indeed seem that, concurrently with all this, Burisma became increasingly concerned about legal jeopardy it faced from Shokin’s office — and tried to get Hunter to help.

On November 2, 2015, a Burisma executive emailed Hunter about a plan to hire a US lobbying firm to advocate for Zlochevsky to US officials, who they hoped would then intervene with Ukrainian officials on his behalf. “The ultimate purpose,” the executive wrote, would be “to close down for any cases/pursuits against [Zlochevsky] in Ukraine.”

Devon Archer, a former business partner of Hunter who also served on Burisma’s board, has testified that another exchange took place at a December 4, 2015 board meeting. According to Archer, executives told Hunter they were concerned about pressure they were getting from Ukrainian investigators, and asked if Hunter could help with that pressure. Later, Archer said, he was told that Hunter had called “DC” to try and help. But by this point the US had already concluded that Shokin had to go for its own reasons, as shown in the State Department document dated two weeks earlier.

Then, on February 2, 2016, the prosecutor general’s office seized Zlochevsky’s property — just two weeks before Shokin’s ouster. After Shokin was gone, the investigation continued, but eventually, prosecutors cut a settlement deal that activists criticized as too lenient.

Again, though, there’s no evidence that the US policy of pushing for Shokin’s ouster was meant to protect Burisma. As many US officials testified back during the Trump impeachment inquiry, the US government had concluded Shokin was corrupt for other well-documented reasons, and wanted him gone.

The totally unsubstantiated claim of a Burisma bribe

We’re not finished with Burisma just yet.

In June 2020, a confidential FBI informant reported back to the Bureau about some conversations he’d allegedly had with Zlochevsky several years back. According to the informant, Zlochevsky claimed that in addition to paying $5 million to Hunter Biden, he’d also paid $5 million to “another Biden.” An FBI document summarizing the informant’s claims reads:

Zlochevsky stated he didn’t want to pay the Bidens and he was “pushed to pay” them... Zlochevsky responded he did not send any funds directly to the “Big Guy” (which CHS [confidential human source] understood was a reference to Joe Biden)... Zlochevsky responded it would take them (investigators) 10 years to find the records (i.e. illicit payments to Joe Biden).

... Zlochevsky said he had a total of “17 recordings” involving the Bidens; two of the recordings included Joe Biden, and the remaining 15 recordings only included Hunter Biden. CHS reiterated that, per Zlochevsky, these recordings evidence Zlochevsky was somehow coerced into paying the Bidens to ensure Ukraine Prosecutor General Viktor Shokin was fired.

Obviously, if Zlochevsky had secretly agreed to pay Joe Biden $5 million while he was vice president, that would be a huge scandal. But did it actually happen?

Currently, there’s not a shred of evidence that it did happen. Of course, Zlochevsky did say it was done so amazingly secretly that it will be impossible to find, which is... convenient.

Here’s another problem. The FBI document states that the informant had already briefed the Bureau on one of these talks with Zlochevsky several years ago. Back then, though, the informant didn’t mention any salacious bribe claims. Only years later, well after Trump had publicly been trying to make Biden and Burisma a huge scandal, and that the Justice Department was investigating it, did the informant “recollect” these juicy Zlochevsky claims.

Another issue is that the informant says he barely knew Zlochevsky, so this level of purported candor may seem odd. “CHS explained it is very common for business men in post-Soviet countries to brag or show-off,” the document reads.

In any case, all we have here is a claim. No evidence has emerged to prove that claim true.

The Chinese energy deal (“10 held by H for the big guy ?”)

Hunter’s other big business deal that Republicans have been trying to tie to Joe involves a Chinese energy company, CEFC, which was trying to expand its business in the US and seeking political connections.

In 2017, Hunter and his associates discussed setting up a new company to handle their proposed deal with CEFC. A now-infamous email sent by one of those associates lays out a proposed equity split, including 20 percent for Hunter, 10 percent for Hunter’s uncle Jim Biden, and “10 held by H for the big guy ?”

Tony Bobulinski, who was involved in talks over this proposed deal, has since said that “the big guy” was Joe Biden, and that he was led to believe that the then-former vice president was deeply involved.

Yet Bobulinski cannot confirm this for sure. By his own account, he only briefly met Joe Biden once, when Hunter introduced him at a conference where Joe was speaking. Bobulinski has said Joe appeared to be aware that Hunter was working on a deal with Chinese businessmen, but did not claim to be involved himself and did not discuss any business (though Joe did urge him to “Keep an eye on my son and brother,” he’s claimed).

That version of the CEFC deal did not come together. But Hunter and Jim cut Bobulinski out and continued talks with the company. By July 2017, an executive for CEFC messaged Hunter that, “based on their trust on BD family” — the Biden family — they would give them a $5 million interest-free loan.

But the money was slow showing up. A few days later, Hunter messaged back, “I am sitting here with my father and we would like to understand why the commitment made has not been fulfilled.” He continued in a threatening vein: “I will make certain that between the man sitting next to me and every person he knows and my ability to forever hold a grudge that you will regret not following my direction.”

It reads like a shakedown, and indeed, the Chinese company would send over $5 million a few days later. Was Hunter actually speaking on behalf of his father, as he appeared to imply, or again simply throwing his name around without his knowledge? When these messages emerged, an attorney for Hunter said that “any verifiable words or actions of my client, in the midst of a horrible addiction, are solely his own and have no connection to anyone in his family.”

The deal proved to be ill-fated. One CEFC associate was arrested in the US in November 2017, and charged with trying to bribe government officials in Chad and Uganda. Then, in early 2018, the tycoon behind CEFC, Ye Jianming, was detained in China under corruption suspicions, and has not been seen publicly since.

All of this is extremely messy and shady on Hunter’s part. It’s clear Hunter Biden wanted people to think his father was deeply involved in his dealings.

But again, evidence of Joe Biden’s actual involvement is absent.

As with GOP assertions about the fired Ukrainian prosecutor and the Burisma bribe, the Joe Biden-China connection remains a supposition lacking proof.

And if they can’t turn up that proof, then this impeachment effort will be proceeding based on the imaginings of Republican House members, rather than on verifiable conduct by the president of the United States.

It’s a lot more than Verizon treating all broadband traffic equally.

Five years after net neutrality’s (temporary) demise, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) is set to fulfill the Biden administration’s vision of re-implementing the Obama-era policy. That means the effort to reclassify broadband internet from an information service to a common carrier, subject to increased oversight and regulations just like phone companies, is back, too.

The agency just got its third Democratic commissioner, Anna Gomez, after waiting nearly two years for the Senate to confirm a Biden appointment (a previous Biden nominee, Gigi Sohn, withdrew in March). The 2–2 deadlock that prevented the agency from making any politicized changes has now been broken, and FCC chair Jessica Rosenworcel clearly doesn’t want to waste any more time. Net neutrality, which she’s a longtime proponent of, is first on the agenda.

Rosenworcel announced plans to restore the policy on Tuesday, saying that the Trump-era repeal of net neutrality “put the agency on the wrong side of history, the wrong side of the law, and the wrong side of the public. It was not good then, but it makes even less sense now.”

“Today we begin a process to make this right,” she said.

And so begins the next battle in a years-long war that has spawned mass protests, one (likely soon to be two) agency reversals, and major lawsuits — and was part of the reason why the FCC under President Biden didn’t have its full complement of five commissioners until now. It’s also the subject of a well-moneyed campaign from telecommunications companies, who like to frame net neutrality as simply forcing broadband providers to treat all traffic equally, something they say they already do (which isn’t entirely true), and argue that there’s no need to mandate it. But net neutrality — or, to be more exact, the reclassification of internet service providers that makes net neutrality possible — is about a lot more than that.

CNN Business refers to net neutrality as a “third rail of broadband policy” because it’s somehow become a controversial, politicized issue. That makes it harder for the average person to know exactly what net neutrality is and what it would mean for them. Net neutrality’s opponents, which include most Republicans and the telecommunications companies whose services would be governed by the rule, say it will subject internet service providers to overburdensome regulations and stuffy government oversight, which will stymy innovation and competition in an industry that already provides great service (some might disagree with that assessment) to the American people. Proponents, including most Democrats, consumer advocates, and internet services like Netflix, say that the internet has become a vital and necessary part of American life and should be classified accordingly under the FCC’s purview, just like the telegraph and telephone services that came before it were.

“There is a misinformation campaign associated with net neutrality,” Tom Wheeler, the chair of the FCC when net neutrality was first passed, told Vox. He added that it distracts from “the broader question, which is that it is absolutely absurd that there would be no public interest oversight of the most important network of the 21st century.”

The long fight to oversee the internet like the telephone

Net neutrality — or network neutrality, if you want the longhand — means that internet service providers like Verizon and Comcast must treat all traffic equally. They can’t speed up traffic to some sites or slow it down (or block it) to others. They can’t charge extra to visit sites or services, nor can they give any sites or services priority. This is how our phone lines work; carriers can’t charge extra or block calls to different carriers without cause, for example. And while internet service providers have largely done the same, without net neutrality there’s nothing on a federal level requiring that they do. The FCC, however, can’t require net neutrality from internet service providers if broadband isn’t classified as a common carrier under Title II of the Telecommunications Act. We know this because when the agency tried to issue net neutrality rules in the past, Comcast and Verizon sued to stop it, and they won.

After that, the FCC moved to reclassify high-speed internet under Title II. In 2015, it did so with the Open Internet Order. Then Trump took office and put Ajit Pai in charge of the FCC, where he quickly set about undoing net neutrality. He accomplished that in 2018 with the Restoring Internet Freedom Order, which re-reclassified broadband internet from a Title II carrier back to an information service under a “light-touch regulatory scheme” with a few transparency requirements.

Now the FCC wants to reclassify broadband — actually, this would re-re-reclassify broadband — and has the votes to do it. It might seem like 2015 again, but a lot has happened in the intervening years, Rosenworcel said, that only helps make the case that broadband needs to be a common carrier.

The pandemic “made it crystal clear that broadband is no longer nice-to-have; it’s need-to-have for everyone, everywhere,” she said. “It is not a luxury. It is a necessity. It is essential infrastructure for modern life. ... Yet even as our society has reconfigured itself to do so much online, our institutions have failed to keep pace. Today, there is no expert agency ensuring that the internet is fast, open, and fair.”

There may be no greater example these days of the internet’s importance and the need for real regulation than the war in Ukraine. The success of some Ukrainian military operations is dependent on internet service, yet a mercurial business owner has the sole authority to pick and choose where and when it’s available.

“We should not have to live with broadband as a ‘best efforts’ service where your internet provider decides whether or not to invest in needed maintenance and upgrades,” Harold Feld, a senior vice president for consumer advocacy group Public Knowledge, told Vox.

“For the purpose of promoting safety of life and property”

So, what, exactly, does it mean to be a Title II carrier besides the net neutrality part? Primarily, it gives the FCC more oversight and authority. As Rosenworcel said, it means that technology that has become as — if not more — important than the phone will have the kind of agency oversight that many other essential industries and services have had for a long time. It’ll give the FCC the ability to make privacy rules, ensure that people have access to internet services, require more transparency and accountability from providers, and regulate rates (though the FCC expressly said it would not do this back in 2015 and it will likely do the same now). The FCC will be able to act sooner and more thoroughly on national and cybersecurity issues, too.

“If you do not have authority over broadband networks, then how do you deal with what happens when there’s an effort to weaponize those networks by adversaries?” Wheeler asked. “How do you deal when those networks trample on the privacy rights of their users? How do you deal with the fact that every single cyberattack at some point in time goes across a public network? If you don’t have jurisdiction over those networks, how can you put protections in place?”

Republicans, unsurprisingly, have labeled the move a power grab that will make internet service worse and more expensive; Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) said in a statement, “FCC Democrats simply want control. They desperately want to micromanage providers’ pricing and terms of service, and collect billions in new USF taxes at the expense of investment, economic growth, and consumer choice.” (Again, the new FCC rules are likely to say that the agency won’t regulate rates, just as they did in 2015.)

But you can judge for yourself if America’s broadband internet is the best it can possibly be, with the choice, service, access, and investment that a crucial technology can and should have. Ending net neutrality back in 2018 may not have destroyed the internet, like some net neutrality supporters thought it would, but did it make it any better? Do we want a future where access to a vital service is controlled by relatively few companies, governed by even fewer rules?

“We didn’t invent the FCC because it was a boring Tuesday in 1934 and FDR said ‘I know what will perk things up!’” Feld said. “We did it, in the words of Section 1 of the Communications Act, ‘for the purpose of the national defense, for the purpose of promoting safety of life and property,’ and to ensure to all people of the United States the best communication network possible.”

“We need an internet that works predictably and reliably so we can get on with our lives,” he added.

Assuming the re-re-reclassification goes through — the process will likely take several months — we can expect it to be challenged in the courts and possibly even by a future Republican Congress (which basically overruled the FCC’s attempt to make privacy rules during the short window when broadband was a Title II carrier). So if and when the FCC finalizes the return of net neutrality, we won’t know for sure that rule is, in fact, final. History shows us that it may not be, but something has to stick sometime, right?

Hungry for money, hackers in Vietnam have hacked into thousands of Meta accounts.

Jessica Sems was on Facebook at 2 am when hackers struck in a series of attacks. First, she was locked out. Then, her account data — photos, posts, even her name — were all gone. Within a few minutes, the entire profile looked like it belonged to celebrity portrait photographer Jerry Avenaim.

Feeling overwhelmed, Sems logged in to Netflix instead, only to realize she’d been locked out of that too. When she called customer support, Netflix said they had no record of her email address being associated with an account, despite her having been a Netflix customer for eight years. She was able to get back on Netflix after chatting with support for an hour, but as of late September, her Facebook account had still not been recovered since the initial hack six months earlier.

“For me, it’s more than the photos and memories,” said Sems, who lives in the Midwest and is in the midst of a custody dispute. “I need those messages to prove my husband should not have our children. Now, I don’t have a case. I’m lost now.”

For decades, hackers have conned people into clicking on malicious links, luring them in with spam-ridden emails that boast fake credit card offers or request false password resets. But what happens when someone hijacks your entire Facebook profile? What would a hacker even want with photos of your friends, your list of likes, or your years’ worth of status updates? The answer is simple: money.

Around the world, sometimes hiding in plain sight, a digital black market worth millions of dollars is thriving. While many people might think of Russian state-sponsored hacking groups when it comes to infiltrating social media platforms, there’s actually a global network of hackers participating in an underground economy where things like Facebook and Instagram accounts are commodities. Through forums and private chat rooms on apps like Telegram, hacking tools and access to these accounts can be bought and sold, often in exchange for cryptocurrency. The accounts themselves can then be repurposed for all kinds of nefarious schemes. The more prominent or more verified the account, the more it’s worth.

“It’s all about the easy money,” Hieu Minh Ngo, a prolific ex-hacker turned cybersecurity researcher, told Vox. “A new Facebook account has no value at all, but an old Facebook account is so valuable on the market.”

Ngo, who is based in Ho Chi Minh City, was arrested in 2015 after participating in a scheme to gather and sell the personal data of hundreds of thousands of US citizens. He now works as a threat hunter at the National Cyber Security Center (NCSC) in Vietnam, in addition to serving as the co-founder of Chống Lừa Đảo, an anti-scam nonprofit.

Exactly how hackers go after legitimate accounts varies. Some take advantage of users with weak passwords, while the majority of hackers who lurk in these Telegram groups break in via cookie theft. Cookies aren’t inherently bad. These small files placed on your computer or phone by a website function as the site’s short-term memory, but when those cookies get into the hands of bad actors, they allow for easy access to a slew of apps and even credit cards.

This is how cookie hijacking works. Once hackers gain access to a user’s cookies, either by buying the files or stealing them, they effectively have access to that person’s accounts. From there, the hackers can change passwords and add security keys or two-factor authentication, and usually, they proceed to commit a crime. For some, that’s stealing money and credit cards linked to the accounts, while others scam new victims. They can also purchase new bank accounts via Telegram and use cryptocurrency for quick and easy transfers, which makes it easier for them to stay under the radar. Over time, they may keep the account to continue committing fraud or just return to the black market and sell it.

Meanwhile, the users whose accounts have been compromised can’t access them. They often lose years worth of posts and photos, and if they’ve connected their account to any payment methods, they could lose money too. And sometimes, it’s not entirely clear how Meta, Facebook’s parent company, could put a stop to this. Because when hackers do things like exploit weak passwords and hijack cookies, they’re doing it on the open web, outside the reach of a given platform’s security team.

“We’re aware of instances where people got locked out of their accounts in this way, often due to email compromise, off-platform phishing, or downloading malicious browser extensions. Our teams continue to take steps to help people recover their account access,” a Meta spokesperson told Vox.

Fake or stolen Facebook accounts used to be somewhat easy to spot. These fake profiles were typically drenched in spammy posts related to crypto and Cash App, and profile names were usually misspelled or wonky mashups of a few names. But things have gotten muddier over the years as hacking groups have gotten more sophisticated. They may get even worse now that Facebook is allowing users to create and manage multiple profiles without switching back and forth to log in. Though users must use their original name for the first account, they can use any name of their choosing for the others. On top of all this, with the arrival of paid verification options that let people buy blue check marks, it’s harder than ever to tell which accounts are genuine and which just want to appear so.

The black market for Facebook accounts, explained

It’s easy to get started in the hijacked account trade. In Vietnam, for instance, getting stolen cookies or session tokens is relatively inexpensive. Users can spend $80 for 1,000 US cookies or $70 for the same amount of European cookies. One Telegram channel on the digital black market offers 100 fake Facebook support email addresses for only $50, with a discount given to buyers in Vietnam, China, Indonesia, or Thailand. These fake Facebook support emails are designed to look like they’re coming from Facebook or Meta support — but they’re bogus and just one more way scammers are able to infiltrate more accounts. It also doesn’t seem like there’s much local authorities can do about it.

“Vietnam police have enforced and arrested a few but it’s still not enough,” Ngo explained. “Since there are so many, lots of them may just get a fine or a very light sentencing.”

To gain a deeper understanding of what drives Facebook account theft, Vox spoke with nearly 100 victims from at least 14 countries as well as Facebook page administrators about the trend. Analyzing clues, including phone numbers, ID cards, and business names, led us to a ring of hackers, largely made up of 20-somethings based in Vietnam.

Interestingly enough, these young hackers use stolen Facebook accounts to showcase their hacking wins on the platform. Many of these hackers even claim to work at Meta or for a Facebook support agency. Some are sloppy, though. One of the hackers, in particular, didn’t realize a photo of his ID card was still stored in the “hidden photos” section of a few victims’ accounts. A reverse image search led to a government database that revealed the hacker’s real name and place of residence in Cao Lãnh, a city in southern Vietnam.

These hacking groups have been bolstered by how easy it is to get paid verification check marks on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (now known as X). Hackers have also targeted accounts with blue or gold check marks, which Ngo says helps them appear legit when reaching out to secondary victims. Some hackers are also stealing everyday users’ accounts and then changing them to make it look like they belong to a celebrity. They can then opt to pay for a blue check if they wish. But hackers are especially keen to buy legacy checkmark accounts: profiles or pages that obtained a blue check due to their status as a public figure or verified business.

The Vietnamese hacker ring filling Facebook feeds with fake celebrities

Since the end of January, hackers — many of them hailing from Vietnam — have targeted users on Facebook and Instagram in a series of celebrity hacks that involve taking control of users’ accounts and changing profile pictures, names, and business page names to those of public figures. Victims have tried logging in only to discover that they’re locked out and their profiles were changed to those of celebrities, including Lily Collins, Jennifer Lopez, the late Paul Walker, and a handful of other household names.

Jane Lee, who worked at Facebook on the trust and safety team in 2020, told Vox she saw similar cases out of Southeast Asia during her time at the company. Hackers would run fraudulent ads on hacked accounts in order to sell “low-quality products” that were otherwise banned on Facebook. And when she heard that victims’ accounts were being used to create and run new ads, she immediately recognized the tactics. In this recent spate of account takeovers, the hackers went further, compromising email accounts, credit cards, business pages, and more.

“I think when you’re at the scale that Meta is at, fraud and spam — they don’t know any boundaries,” Lee said. “It’s just the type of abuse that happens in Vietnam.”

For Dale Berry, the owner and head teacher of Berry English, a preschool English academy in Japan, getting his Facebook account stolen led to him racking up thousands of dollars in ad fees when he was hacked in late February — and his school’s reputation was tarnished along the way. Berry, who is originally from London, has since regained access to his account, but ads have been disabled due to the fraudulent campaigns run by the hackers.

It’s not entirely clear how the Vietnamese hacking ring is stealing so many accounts. In the beginning, the hack seemed to progress mostly via malware found in fake ChatGPT downloads and ads for these bogus extensions right on Facebook. But more recent victims say they were simply scrolling when they found themselves suddenly locked out. In some cases, Instagram’s automated system reported back that they saw nothing wrong with the compromised accounts that were affected by these celebrity hacks.

In the absence of help from Meta, thousands of victims of account theft have come together in Facebook groups, on X, and in Reddit threads, where they share tips and information about the hacks. The groups are filled with concerned users, but they’re also filled with even more hackers hiding behind AI-generated photos and stock images. Facebook does not have a customer support line, so users seeking to report these issues must rely on the online help center or report the problem to a support email address, which they say has not been effective.

“This is again why my beef is more with Facebook and Meta than with the hackers,” Erik Honoré, a sound engineer and the co-artistic director of the Punkt Festival in Kristiansand, Norway, said back in March. “Because these are challenges that are almost impossible to solve with a standardized web form but would be very easy to explain to a human.”

Reporting these hacks through the channels that exist can be rigorous and confusing. For instance, some victims end up reporting the real Facebook and Instagram accounts of the celebrities their old accounts are now impersonating. In addition to reaching out to Meta via multiple channels, many users have turned to lawmakers. Linda Thompson, one of the victims based in Glasgow, Scotland — who had two-factor authentication enabled when she was hacked — contacted her MP and provided screenshots — 28 pages worth that were then forwarded to Meta. Her account was restored about a month later, but she was hacked a second time shortly after. Others who had success say they contacted their local attorney general or the attorney general of California, where Meta is based. They also said they filed claims with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and even notified the FBI.

The situation has proved taxing for internet users like Amanda Clothier, an Oklahoma resident and military wife of 25 years. Clothier told Vox that her account was stolen on March 25 and that she had never violated Facebook’s community standards nor did she recall clicking on any unusual links.

“I documented as much as I could,” she said. “I had memories and photos of soldiers who didn’t make it home — and their Gold Star Families. All gone. It’s heartbreaking.”

How to take security into your own hands — as best you can

The trend of stealing Facebook accounts and making them look like they belong to celebrities has taken hold this year, but unfortunately, incidents like these aren’t new, nor are they unique to Meta. No tech company is immune to these types of exploits, in which hackers find multiple ways to break into and steal user accounts.

“It feels like an uphill battle that employees will never be able to solve,” said a former Meta contractor, who spoke to Vox on the condition of anonymity in late March. “We just clean up the mess ... There’s so many that I don’t know if anyone would be able to actually get on top of it.”

The scale of these kinds of hacks is enormous. And because of that, companies like Meta have struggled to restore victims’ accounts and data after the fact. Some security experts say people should take things into their own hands by frequently backing up their data and performing safety checks to avoid getting hacked in the first place. That also means being aware of common online scams — everything from phishing emails to malicious links — and knowing how to avoid them.

“No matter what Facebook or Instagram or TikTok does, if your device or browser are compromised — it doesn’t matter what these companies do, you’re still going to continue to get compromised,” Lee said.

Protecting yourself online includes taking some simple steps, like always using strong passwords and setting up two-factor authentication on your devices. You should also avoid clicking on unknown links, regularly run a malware scanner on your devices, and use a password manager — especially considering that unique passwords can help prevent future incidents that are beyond tech companies’ control.

At the end of the day, you should accept some responsibility when it comes to maintaining good cyber hygiene, according to Adam Marrè, a former FBI cyber special agent and the chief information security officer at Arctic Wolf.

“The way technology works today, that’s not really something that the social media company can protect — those are things that the user should protect,” Marrè said. “They lock their door when they leave their house, they lock their car when they walk away ... oftentimes, people don’t think about their online life in the same way.”

As some on Capitol Hill have pointed out, the answer to some of these problems could lie in the regulation of Big Tech. Most recently, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) introduced the Digital Consumer Protection Commission Act in July. The legislation’s primary goal is to create a new federal commission that oversees tech companies in the US, while also investigating and prosecuting any misconduct related to users’ personal data, privacy, and online activity.

While the US has the FCC for radio and TV and the FTC for consumer protection, a commission directly related to social media and Big Tech is currently nonexistent. But it’s something people in the US should think about, Marrè argues.

“These social media companies have a very powerful effect on our societies,” he said. “We need to be thinking about what our recourse is to make sure that they’re doing the right things across the whole spectrum. How they handle security, how they handle complaints, is also one of those things.”

Big Tech companies have become a huge part of people’s everyday lives, from how they bank to how they connect with loved ones. That means a certain amount of trust is being built between users and these platforms, including Meta. But trust dissolves when users feel they could very well be the next victim of account theft or other cyber schemes. Some may say it’s not worth it. Others say it’s time for an intervention.

For folks like Jessica Sems, the Facebook user from the Midwest who hasn’t been able to access her account for most of this year, being locked out means losing a huge part of her life online. It’s something she and other victims of these celebrity hacks may never get back.

Victims of these and other hacks can visit facebook.com/hacked or instagram.com/hacked to secure their accounts. If a user discovers their email address has been changed without their permission, they can reverse that change here. Users may also continue to report accounts and other suspicious activity at the Help Center.