Preview: Paramount Global reports its quarterly earnings Monday.

Preview: Earnings reports this week from Meta, Alphabet and Snap showed a solid recovery in the online ad market.

Preview: Borge Brende, president of the World Economic Forum, gave a stark outlook for the global economy.

Preview: TipRanks' analyst ranking service highlights Wall Street's best-performing stocks, including Netflix and General Motors.

Preview: Hussain Sajwani, the chairman of Damac Properties, one of the United Arab Emirate's largest private real estate developers, sought to downplay the severity of flooding.

Preview: Prosecutors called Rhona Graff, Trump's personal secretary and a banker who recounted the details of a payment at the heart of the case.

Preview: The last batch of inflation news that Federal Reserve officials will see before their meeting next week is in, and none of it is very good.

Preview: Braden Fiske, drafted by the Los Angeles Rams in the second round of the 2024 NFL Draft, says he already has a financial advisor and a Roth IRA.

Preview: Rob Scores and his wife, Julianne, didn't spend much time planning or saving for their Puerto Rico vacation. Selling old jewelry helped them take off.

Preview: ARK Invest's chief futurist Brett Winton lists five groups in the heart of tech innovation.

Preview: • Fox-Dominion trial delay 'is not unusual,' judge says • Fox News' defamation battle isn't stopping Trump's election lies

Preview: The judge just announced in court that a settlement has been reached in the historic defamation case between Fox News and Dominion Voting Systems.

Preview: A settlement has been reached in Dominion Voting Systems' defamation case against Fox News, the judge for the case announced. The network will pay more than $787 million to Dominion, a lawyer for the company said.

Preview: • DeSantis goes to Washington, a place he once despised, looking for support to take on Trump • Opinion: For the GOP to win, it must ditch Trump • Chris Christie mulling 2024 White House bid • Analysis: The fire next time has begun burning in Tennessee

Preview: • 'A major part of Ralph died': Aunt of teen shot after ringing wrong doorbell speaks • 20-year-old woman shot after friend turned into the wrong driveway in upstate New York, officials say

Preview: Newly released body camera footage shows firefighters and sheriff's deputies rushing to help actor Jeremy Renner after a near-fatal snowplow accident in January. The "Avengers" actor broke more than 30 bones and suffered other severe injuries. CNN's Chloe Melas has more.

Preview: It's sourdough bread and handstands for Jake Gyllenhaal and Jamie Lee Curtis.

Preview: A tiny intruder infiltrated White House grounds Tuesday, prompting a swift response from the US Secret Service.

Preview: An arrest warrant has been issued for controversial Biden administration official Sam Brinton in connection with a second alleged theft at an airport in Las Vegas. Brinton, who works for the Department of Energy, was already placed on leave after he allegedly stole a woman’s luggage at Minneapolis-St. Paul (MSP) International Airport late last month. ...

Preview: Inside the Illinois State Capitol sits a display of several religious exhibits for the holiday season, which includes a Jewish menorah, the Christian nativity scene, and the “Serpent of Genesis” from the Satanic Temple, as reported by local radio media. Consisting of a leather-bound copy of astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus’ “De Revolutionibus Orbium Coelestium” — which ...

Preview: The latest release of the “Twitter Files” Thursday evening revealed that leftists at the highest level of the company, who have all since been fired or been forced to resign, targeted one of the most popular right-wing accounts on the platform with repeated suspensions despite the fact that they secretly admitted that she did not ...

Preview: The second installment of the so-called “Twitter Files” was released Thursday evening after the company turned over documents to a journalist who then started to publish the findings on the platform. Musk released internal company communications through journalist Matt Taibbi on Friday about the company’s censorship of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story ...

Preview: The transgender community has turned on a once revered surgeon specializing in sex change surgeries after a patient posted graphic photos of an allegedly botched operation. Dr. Sidhbh Gallagher, a Miami-based surgeon specializing in double mastectomy surgeries for transgender-identifying patients, has been heavily criticized for performing the elective surgery on minors. She has also earned ...

Preview: Video emerged Thursday afternoon of Brittney Griner being swapped on a runway for convicted Russian terrorist Viktor Bout after Democrat President Joe Biden agreed to the trade. The video showed Griner, who is wearing a red jacket, walking across the tarmac with three men while Bout walked toward her with a man standing next to ...

Preview: After a woman claimed to be the daughter of a serial killer in a recent interview, a search of the supposed location of buried remains has turned up nothing. Federal, state, and local authorities did not find any evidence or remains after scouring the earth for several days in Thurman, Iowa, a small town just ...

Preview: A FedEx contract driver strangled a 7-year-old girl after hitting her with his van in Texas late last month, according to arrest warrant documents. Tanner Horner, a 31-year-old from Fort Worth, has been arrested and charged with capital murder of a person under 10 years old and aggravated kidnapping in the death of Athena Strand, ...

Preview: Disabled veteran Congressman Brian Mast (R-FL) took issue with fellow Congresswoman Sheila Jackson Lee (D-TX) over the way she chose to transport her American flag while she was moving from one office to another. Mast, who lost both legs and his left index finger in 2010 when he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED) while ...

Preview: Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, slammed President Joe Biden Thursday for releasing notorious terrorist Viktor Bout in exchange for Brittney Griner. Griner, who has a criminal record in the U.S. stemming from a domestic violence incident several years ago, was arrested in Russia back in February on drug charges, ...

Preview: ANOTHER severe outbreak from Texas to Missouri... (Top headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: CLEANUP BEGINS... Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: CLEANUP BEGINS... (Top headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: ANOTHER severe outbreak from Texas to Missouri...

Preview: BIDEN ROASTS 'SLEEPY DON' (Main headline, 1st story, link) Related stories: 'MY VP ACTUALLY ENDORSES ME' 'STORMY WEATHER' VIDEO

Preview: 'MY VP ACTUALLY ENDORSES ME' (Main headline, 2nd story, link) Related stories: BIDEN ROASTS 'SLEEPY DON' 'STORMY WEATHER' VIDEO Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: 'STORMY WEATHER' (Main headline, 3rd story, link) Related stories: BIDEN ROASTS 'SLEEPY DON' 'MY VP ACTUALLY ENDORSES ME' VIDEO

Preview: VIDEO (Main headline, 4th story, link) Related stories: BIDEN ROASTS 'SLEEPY DON' 'MY VP ACTUALLY ENDORSES ME' 'STORMY WEATHER'

Preview: Protesters Swarm White House Correspondents Dinner... (First column, 1st story, link) Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: WEINSTEIN RUSHED TO HOSPITAL... (First column, 2nd story, link) Related stories: Health spiral...

Preview: Health spiral... (First column, 3rd story, link) Related stories: WEINSTEIN RUSHED TO HOSPITAL...

Preview: BORN AGAIN: Russell Brand announces baptism... (First column, 4th story, link) Drudge Report Feed needs your support!   Become a Patron

Preview: A manhunt continues for Xavier L. Tate Jr., 22, after he was identified as the suspect in the fatal shooting of Chicago Police Officer Luis Huesca on April 21.

Preview: A Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy was pronounced dead after he was unresponsive at a station Saturday afternoon, according to the sheriff's department.

Preview: A Georgia man allegedly fatally shot his ex-wife before shooting her new husband and himself at a shopping plaza Saturday night. The suspect was in critical condition.

Preview: Nearly four months after her son David Harrington was found frozen in Jordan Willis' backyard after an NFL watch party, Jennifer Marquez bemoans a dearth of answers in his death.

Preview: James Parker was granted parole last week after serving nearly 25 years for the 2001 stabbing deaths of Dartmouth professors Susanne and Half Zantop.

Preview: A 16-year-old girl believed to have been killed in 1969, has finally been identified 21 years after her remains were found after her DNA was matched to a relative who died on 9/11.

Preview: Anti-Israel activists marched through the streets of Washington, D.C., to take aim at the White House Correspondents' Dinner Saturday as they rail against U.S. support of Israel.

Preview: A New York man allegedly hid hidden cameras inside a public female restroom in a public park, capturing hundreds of explicit images of prepubescent children.

Preview: These mugshots were taken for arrests made throughout the U.S. the week of April 21-27, 2024.

Preview: Aleah Wallace, a mother of four who lives in Tarrant County, Texas, won't be charged with shooting a 14-year-old intruder last December.

Preview: Chants of 'shame on you' greet guests at White House correspondents' dinner shadowed by war in Gaza  The Associated Press White House correspondents' dinner features jabs at Biden's age, Trump's legal woes, mainstream media  Fox News Joe Biden, Colin Jost jab Donald Trump: Correspondent dinner takeaways  USA TODAY President Biden's best jokes at the White House correspondents' dinner  The Washington Post ‘I’m a grown man running against a 6-year-old’: Biden jokes about his age and Trump at Correspondents’ Dinner  CNN

Preview: Anti-Israel protesters sue Columbia, claiming they're the real victims  New York Post A leader of ’68 protest at Columbia sees ‘enormous’ parallels today  NJ.com College protesters seek amnesty to keep arrests and suspensions from trailing them  Yahoo! Voices Columbia students caught between graduation celebrations and protests  The Washington Post ‘A focal point of hate’: Pro-Israel activists at Columbia decry campus hostility  The Times of Israel

Preview: Tornado outbreak in Oklahoma prompts calls to take cover as the threat of severe storms continues from Missouri to Texas  CNN Breaking: Tornado Turns Deadly Overnight In Oklahoma - Videos from The Weather Channel  The Weather Channel Oklahoma Tornadoes: At least 16 twisters hit state; number to rise  KOCO Oklahoma City Overnight tornadoes, storms leave heavy destruction in Nebraska, Iowa  NBC News Tornadoes devastate Oklahoma amid threat of severe storms from Missouri to Texas  The Hill

Preview: Minden, Iowa, tornado shuts down city, homes destroyed  Des Moines Register Scenes of Devastation: Aftermath of Iowa Tornado Unveiled - Videos from The Weather Channel  The Weather Channel Nebraska leaders provide update on recovery efforts  KETV Omaha Nebraska tornadoes: Omaha airport damage won't interfere with big weekend ahead  WOWT TRACKING: Possible strong to severe storms Sunday | Top Stories | kwwl.com  kwwl.com

Preview: Democrats are worried. But will RFK Jr take more votes away from Trump?  BBC.com 2024 Election: RFK Jr. on Michigan Ballot Calls Biden, Trump Campaigns to Action  Bloomberg RFK Jr. challenges Trump to debate after 'Democrat plant' accusation  Fox News Trump rails against RFK Jr., calling him a 'wasted protest vote'  POLITICO Smerconish: The RFK Jr. factor changes direction  CNN

Preview: Trump's Trial Could Bring a Rarity: Consequences for His Words  The New York Times Trump on trial: Personal anguish, political defiance and a loss of control  The Washington Post Donald Trump Is Used to the Finer Things in Life. At the Courthouse, 'He's Miserable.'  The Wall Street Journal A lower Manhattan courtroom just dealt a fatal blow to the Trump mystique  Yahoo! Voices Donald Trump Is Being Ritually Humiliated in Court  The New Yorker

Preview: Pro-Palestinian student protest at Northeastern University in Boston cleared by police  CBS Boston Police raid encampments, arrest over 100 people during protests at Northeastern University  NBC Boston Howie Carr: Hey, Emerson kids! Don’t do the crime if you can’t do the time.  Boston Herald Northeastern University: Police clear 100 protesters from pro-Palestinian encampment  The Boston Globe 102 protestors arrested at Northeastern University  WPRI.com

Preview: New York trans advocate, park ranger falls to her death while ice climbing Alaska mountain path 'the Escalator'  New York Post Climber Is Killed in Fall at Denali Peak in Alaska  The New York Times Adirondack Forest Ranger Robbi Mecus died while ice climbing in Alaska  North Country Public Radio Climber dies after 1,000-foot fall in Alaska, another climber injured  USA TODAY Climber who died in Alaska national park ID'd as noted N.Y. forest ranger  NBC News

Preview: ‘This is not a joke’: Sidner reacts to Republican governor’s anecdote about killing her dog  CNN Conservatives condemn Kristi Noem for ‘twisted’ admission of killing dog  The Guardian US Comedian Matt Friend brutally mocks 'puppy killer' Kisti Noem at White House correspondents' dinner  Hindustan Times Comedian Matt Friend draws gasps at White House Correspondents' dinner with dog-killing joke  Entertainment Weekly News Trump VP contender Kristi Noem defends shooting her dog  NPR

Preview: Justice Thomas raised crucial question about legitimacy of special counsel's prosecution of Trump  Fox News Supreme Court knocks Mark Meadows 'just following orders' defense  Business Insider Our Institutions Exist to Oppose Trump, Right?  National Review Fact check: Trump’s false courthouse claims about his trial  CNN Shocker From Top Conservative Judge: Trump Likely To Skate Completely  The New Republic

Preview: The Department of Education has agreements with every university in the country where students receive federal student financial aid. Nondiscrimination is a condition for receiving that aid.

Preview: Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) on Sunday declined to say if he would bring in the National Guard to college campuses amid the mass pro-Palestinian protests, arguing college presidents should be the "first line of defense." Asked on CBS News's "Face the Nation" if he agrees with some GOP calls to bring in the...

Preview: Numerous tornadoes ripped through Oklahoma and other parts of the Midwest over the weekend, leveling homes and buildings as severe storms continue to threaten the region. Dozens of tornadoes began Friday in at least six states, with twisters hitting multiple parts of Oklahoma, including Davenport and Sulphur late Saturday, according to the National Weather Service...

Preview: How can the U.S. meet its 30x30 methane goal? Tapping America’s massive organic waste streams as a renewable energy resource.

Preview: Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) called for donations to stop and for resignations of officials at Columbia University amid protests gaining steam at college campuses around the nation. “If you’re a donor to Columbia University, stop,” Scott said in an interview that aired Sunday on radio show “The Cats Roundtable” with hosts John Catsimatidis and Rita...

Preview: The Biden administration's crackdown on power plants' planet-warming emissions will accelerate a shift away from coal, and potentially speed the U.S.'s adoption of renewable energy sources. The administration this past week announced a new rule that will require coal plants and new gas plants to install carbon capture technology to mitigate 90 percent of their emissions — or...

Preview: The 2024 general election is heating up, with President Biden and former President Trump traveling the country as their parties’ presumptive nominees. Both candidates have made several stops in the key battleground states already and will be a regular presence there for the next 6 1/2 months. Even as tens of millions of people will...

Preview: Recent breakthroughs in U.S.-China ties are already starting to fray over Beijing’s support for Russia in Ukraine. Despite renewed communications between Washington and Beijing, championed since late last year, the U.S. is angry about China’s growing role in the Russia-Ukraine war, specifically its commercial support of Moscow’s military production. The Biden administration is now looking...

Preview: Rep. Summer Lee’s primary victory over a more moderate Democrat in Pennsylvania this week offered a jolt of momentum for progressives and dialed up the urgency for those targeting the “Squad.” It was a promising result for fellow Squad members, especially Democratic Reps. Jamaal Bowman (N.Y.) and Cori Bush (Mo.), who are both trying to...

Preview: Saturday Night Live (SNL) star Colin Jost roasted politicians and praised journalists at the annual White House Correspondents’ Association Dinner on Saturday night, bringing humor at a time of political tension at home and deadly conflicts overseas.  Jost, 41, kicked off his Saturday night address by throwing slight digs at both President Biden and former...

Preview: “Thank you for making me better at my craft and giving me a place, however temporary, in this world," Kidman told the crowd of multigenerational A-listers.

Preview: The "Weekend Update" co-host paid tribute to his late grandfather, who voted for the president back in 2020.

Preview: The president spotted what journalists have to take "seriously" regarding his predecessor following the deadly Capitol riot.

Preview: Protesters said they returned to their cars and found their vehicles had been scratched with words like "baby killers" and "murderers."

Preview: College students across the country are protesting Israel’s attacks on Gaza. But what exactly are they demanding from their universities?

Preview: A spokesperson with the New York City Department of Correction said in an email that Weinstein remains in custody at Bellevue Hospital.

Preview: After being stuck stuck in shallow water for weeks following her mother's death, the young killer whale is heading towards open water.

Preview: Trillions of red-eyed periodical cicadas are emerging from underground in the eastern U.S. this month. The broods emerging are on 13 or 17 year cycles.

Preview: Metropolitan Police Department Assistant Chief Ramey Kyle said officers were called after a dispute started inside the nightclub and “spilled into the street.”

Preview: The courthouse action involved more than half a dozen cases in four states and the nation’s capital.

Preview: “When we agreed to help, it was with the understanding that this debt would be paid back with his share of inheritance.”

Preview: “We live in a very strong housing market in Los Angeles so we’re not worried about it losing value.”

Preview: “When she died, we were told by her attorney that we were responsible for the taxes and property insurance during the time when the life tennant lives in the home.”

Preview: “My mother has a durable power of attorney for Sam’s healthcare and is his primary representative. No one has financial POA.”

Preview: “Should I even let them know that there is a will in which they are mentioned?”

Preview: ”I expect to inherit close to $500,000, but I am not counting on that in my planning.”

Preview: Americans showing more skepticism towards affirmative action and open immigration.

Preview: “We’re definitely not doing what you would think somebody with our income could do with the money,” one six-figure earner said.

Preview: The large number of buyers seeking a low-cost, entry-level vehicle are underserved in today’s market.

Preview: If recent stock-market weakness has you on edge, this might be your problem.

Preview: At the 2024 White House Correspondents' Dinner, President Joe Biden took the stage to make some self-deprecating jokes — and more at Donald Trump's expense.

Preview: Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie recently commented that Biden is past his “sell-by date,” and that he doesn't believe Biden is up for another term.

Preview: For days, National Enquirer David Pecker was a start Trump trial witness in the People of the State of New York v. Donald Trump. There's a reason for that.

Preview: President Biden took the podium at the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner in Washington D.C. on April 27. Biden cracked jokes about his age, Donald Trump's legal woes, and members of Congress. He also thanked the free press and mentioned the vitality of journalism.

Preview: Saturday Night Live’s Colin Jost headlined the annual dinner in Washington D.C. Jost joked about Donald Trump's criminal trial, President Biden's age, members of Congress, Taylor Swift, and his marriage to actress Scarlett Johansson.

Preview: The annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner kicks off this Saturday night. Prime yourself for this year's host, "Saturday Night Live" cast member Colin Jost, by watching highlights from the hosts who came before him.

Preview: Morehouse students, faculty and alumni have expressed anger at the school's decision to invite President Joe Biden to give a commencement address May 19.

Preview: Now that Rep. James Comer and his fellow House Republicans have failed to prove Biden is corrupt, they want you to forget they tried.

Preview: John Earle Sullivan, a Jan. 6 rioter who filmed the insurrection, including the fatal shooting of Ashli Babbitt, was sentenced on Friday to six years in prison.

Preview: Kristi Noem, South Dakota governor and possible Trump running mate, has not one but two detailed stories about putting down animals in her forthcoming memoir.

Preview: It’s the wheel deal.  Blade — the helicopter company that shuttles city elites to the Hamptons for  $1,000 a flight — is rolling out a swank coach service as a more affordable, but still luxe, alternative.  “We’re excited about the ‘white space’ that exists between a $40 Jitney ride and $1,000 helicopter flight,” Blade’s CMO Roisin...

Preview: "It's like pick up a paper, find out what's going on and just navigate around it," the standup comic suggested.

Preview: We're projecting huge savings!

Preview: The NASCAR Cup Series heads to Dover, for Sunday's Cup Series race, and we have four best bets.

Preview: The former Dancing With the Stars contestant urged his followers to "go get your skin checked."

Preview: Joel Embiid's massive game got the Sixers on the board after they dropped the first two in their first-round series with the Knicks.

Preview: Yaya claims her dad would use the "bible to manipulate" the community and even did so behind bars until she escaped in December 2000.

Preview: “It’s great teaching kids who are enthused about tennis, to see how happy they are and how they improve,” Chris DeStefano said.

Preview: The firm -- known as The GEO Group -- wants to open an immigration detention facility in Newark, New Jersey. But the state ban is getting in the way, it claims.

Preview: Spencer isn't making the return that some viewers hoped for.

Preview: International development agencies have been meeting with Middle East business interests and urban planners to map out an economic future for the territory.

Preview: The police made arrests at Washington University in St. Louis, Northeastern, Arizona State and Indiana, as more schools move in on encampments.

Preview: A crackdown on demonstrators at Columbia University in New York spawned a wave of activism at universities across the country, with more than 700 arrests.

Preview: The former president has spent decades spewing thousands and thousands of words, sometimes contradicting himself. That tendency is now working against him in his Manhattan criminal case.

Preview: As they return with physical and psychological wounds stemming from torture by their Russian captors, soldiers are being sent back to active duty — often without adequate treatment.

Preview: Frustrated at the growing protest movement, the opposition leader defends his country’s “existential” war.

Preview: Journalists and politicians schmoozed over filet mignon at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner as pro-Palestinian protesters gathered outside.

Preview: Scarlett Johansson, Colin Jost and Senator John Fetterman made their entrances at the annual journalism celebration in Washington.

Preview: Reshaping the drug war in one of Central America’s most lawless corners, the fentanyl boom has devastated the trade in opium poppies used to make heroin.

Preview: The State Supreme Court cleared the way for a part of Baton Rouge to become the city of St. George. Critics say the white, wealthier enclave separating from the capital could have devastating consequences.

Preview: It’s better than a hostel or an Airbnb.

Preview: I can't see past my rage.

Preview: Ready for some wordplay? Sharpen your skills with Slate’s puzzle for April 28, 2024.

Preview: Private equity is involved in pet health, and the results have not been good.

Preview: When my girlfriend accused me of canine favoritism, I balked. Then I wondered if she was on to something.

Preview: The new tennis movie brings together three of Hollywood’s hottest young stars. Do they achieve a grand slam?

Preview: It’s a sign of the Anthropocene.

Preview: It was genuinely shocking to hear those words come out of a justice’s mouth.

Preview: 4/28/2015: Obergefell v. Hodges argued.

Preview: AI developer Andrew Mayne explains why technology could create more jobs and lead to unprecedented economic growth.

Preview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IBoNDRuyLww Here's the transcript; on balance, the message seems to me to be correct (though I would be inclined to say that such encampments, if they violate content-neutral rules—as they usually do—should be removed more promptly): Hello, everyone. As you surely know, campus communities across the country are struggling to cope with strongly contending views…

Preview: The decision departs from what most courts have done in such Title IX cases—but tracks what most courts do in the many other cases where disclosing a plaintiff’s name might damage the plaintiff’s reputation and professional prospects.

Preview: but throws out a similar award against another professor who backed the student's allegations. (A jury had concluded the student's allegations were false and defamatory.)

Preview: 4/27/1822: President Ulysses S. Grant's birthday. He would appoint four Justices to the Supreme Court: Chief Justice Waite, Justice Strong, Justice Bradley, and Justice Hunt.

Preview: Uncovering Big Beer’s crafty campaign to limit consumer access to canned cocktails.

Preview: "Today it is highly centralized, where a few people at the top control everything," the former five-term congressman tells Reason's Nick Gillespie.

Preview: We shouldn't assume that student political movements necessarily have a just cause. Far from it.

Preview: "A plainly anti-Semitic poster received just a handful of complaints from Jewish staff and students"

Preview: See who's running

Preview: All four cases explained

Preview: The Crossword

Preview: Start the day smarter ☀️

Preview: After Hurricane Idalia made landfall on Wednesday, Florida communities are emerging to see its destruction with hopes and plans to recover.

Preview: Downgraded to a tropical storm, what had been Hurricane Idalia powered across Georgia and the Carolinas on Wednesday evening.

Preview: The 81-year-old Republican Senate minority leader struggled to answer reporters' questions in Kentucky, requiring help and drawing questions about his health

Preview: Nebraska volleyball set a women's sports attendance record Wednesday night as 92,003 fans descended on Memorial Stadium to watch the match vs. Omaha.

Preview: At least 73 people died when a fire ripped through a multi-story building in Johannesburg overtaken by homeless people, authorities said Thursday.

Preview: As the storm moves away from the shore, it can cause an additional life-threatening hazard: inland flooding. Georgia and the Carolinas are at risk.

Preview: Getty Images Here’s how to understand the difference between everyday anxiety and an anxiety disorder. When you run a therapy practice called the Center for Anxiety, as David H. Rosmarin does, you encounter a breadth of anxiety-related experiences. Sometimes, after talking with new patients, Rosmarin will determine their distress may not be related — or solely related — to anxiety at all. Because anxiety intersects with so many other aspects of mental health, like depression and substance abuse, Rosmarin says, many people are quick to attribute their emotional pain to anxiety alone. They may even mistake anxiety for something else entirely. He’s told patients they’re not anxious at all, but stressed. “I’ll say, sleep eight hours a night for the next two weeks,” he says. “Come back and tell me how you’re feeling. I’ve tried that trick many times with stressed-out patients, and they’re at 50 percent of their stress level two weeks later with no therapy at all.” More Americans are seeking professional mental health treatment than ever before. Nearly a quarter of adults visited a psychologist, therapist, psychiatrist, or other mental health professional in 2022, compared to 13 percent who did so in 2004, according to a Gallup poll. No longer stigmatized or discussed in secret, mental health terms — and mental health-adjacent terms — have trickled out of the therapy room and into casual conversation. “Narcissism,” “gaslighting,” “and “boundaries” are just as readily discussed at brunch or online as in clinical settings. Self-diagnosis based on simplified videos and memes on social media can result in pathologizing seemingly mundane behaviors and thought patterns. Normalization of mental health is undoubtedly positive: More people can feel empowered to seek care and to openly discuss their experiences. However, increased awareness has resulted in more people confusing “milder forms of distress as mental health problems,” according to one academic paper. Despite therapy’s wider cultural acceptance, we still don’t have a grasp on what we really feel. Without a nuanced vocabulary to describe these experiences, complex emotions are flattened with blanket terms. “We don’t have a sophisticated lexicon,” Rosmarin says. “We end up labeling everything as anxiety.” When we don’t accurately define our emotions, we don’t know how to properly address them. If we approach our feelings with curiosity, we can improve our emotional intelligence. What is anxiety? Anxiety is both a normal response as well as a pathological experience, says psychiatrist Tracey Marks. People often endure everyday levels of anxiety or nervousness before a first date or if they have to make a presentation at work. You might have physiological effects, like sweating, racing heartbeat, or butterflies in your stomach. Momentary anxiety can be functional, a signal to be on the lookout for potential danger or to prepare for that work presentation. After the nerve-wracking event is over, the feeling usually passes. In an increasingly anxiety-inducing world, where climate change, wars, and a contentious upcoming presidential election instill plenty of anxiety, “it’s normal for us to have some kind of distressing reaction to something that is threatening to us,” Marks says. A sign of an anxiety disorder is when anxiety interferes with your daily life. If the thought of going to a social event elicits physical symptoms like vomiting and/or persistent worried thoughts of how others will perceive you, you may have social anxiety, Marks says. Avoiding people, missing work or school, a baseline level of fear (that may not be logical), and inability to relax are some of the signs of generalized anxiety disorder. “One of the characteristics of generalized anxiety,” she says, “is that you can worry about anything. You can worry about world peace.” Someone with debilitating anxiety might want to work with a therapist to better cope. People may mistake anxiety for stress. Stress is when you have too many demands and not enough resources, like time or money to outsource some responsibilities, Rosmarin says. “Anxiety often happens in the context of an abundance of resources,” he says. You may be getting enough sleep, have a supportive partner, and a job you love, for instance, but still spiral over would-be worst-case scenarios that may never materialize. Even fear can be confused with anxiety. Fear is in response to a concrete threat, whereas anxiety is triggered by an amorphous or future risk. The importance of emotional intelligence The boundaries of anxiety are blurry and subjective, says Nick Haslam, a professor of psychology at the University of Melbourne, so it makes sense that lay people would label all of their upsetting experiences as “anxiety.” But we can stand to improve our emotional intelligence — the ability to accurately identify what we’re feeling, Haslam says. Because many don’t receive emotional education beyond primary school, says Rosmarin, we have a limited emotional vocabulary. Feeling “bad” is a significantly different experience from feeling “distressed,” “frustrated,” “jealous,” “overwhelmed,” or “anxious.” An emotional binary of “good” and “bad” emotions actually makes matters more confusing. “You don’t understand how you should respond to what’s going on,” Haslam says, “whether you should flee or fight, whether you should bite your tongue.” People who struggle to put their emotions into words have more difficulty coping with complex feelings, Haslam says. When we don’t have a deep knowledge of common human emotions, we may pathologize normal experiences. Feeling uncomfortable in a room of new people is incredibly common. It is not, however, social anxiety, Marks says. Online and social media content created by non-professionals may paint anxiety with broad strokes, leading viewers to self-diagnose as having an anxiety disorder. “Even if you do have anxiety, it doesn’t necessarily mean that you have an anxiety disorder,” says psychologist Juli Fraga. What’s often at the root of situational anxiety — like feeling anxious in social scenarios — may be relational trauma dating back to unhealthy social interactions during childhood, Fraga says. What’s lost when every experience is “anxiety” Labeling yourself as an anxious person, even if you do have a diagnosis, can make it more difficult to overcome your emotions. If anxiety is so baked into how you see yourself, you could use it as a crutch or an excuse to avoid social situations, new experiences, or other potentially enriching events. “As soon as you attribute some sort of noun label to yourself — I’m an anxious person or anxiety is who I am,” Haslam says, “people tend to infer that they’ve got something deep-seated and lasting and a reason not to engage with the world.” Avoidance is generally the wrong way to address anxiety, Haslam says. Believing you have social anxiety, for example, may lead you to isolate, which only entrenches the anxiety. Avoidance may offer temporary relief, but doesn’t offer a long-term solution. When we don’t have the appropriate vocabulary to describe our emotions, we lose the ability to effectively intervene, Rosmarin says. “Imagine going into a board meeting with a sophisticated company that has a lot of different projects,” he says, “and you have one word to describe anything negative that’s going on in any of those projects.” Determining whether we’re stressed or anxious greatly impacts how we move forward: It’s the difference between getting a good night’s sleep and moving your body (effective ways to manage stress) and working with a therapist to confront what makes you anxious. How to get a little better at defining anxiety Getting to the root of emotions takes some thought. When it comes to anxiety, Marks says to consider how much disruption it causes. Do you feel anxious in certain situations or does it significantly impair your ability to perform day-to-day tasks? For example, if you experience such intense, constant distress about the safety of your loved ones — even if there is no present threat to their safety — that it actually damages your relationships, you may feel inspired to seek professional help for your anxiety. If you have trouble sleeping and feel nervous during exam time, you may be stressed. “Maybe [try] exercising more, or making sure that you’re trying to get the best sleep you can,” Marks says, “things that you can do to help you cope better as these situations come.” Whenever feelings of anxiety do arise, get curious about its causes, Fraga suggests. Think about what it is about parties that deters you from social gatherings. Maybe you don’t like talking to strangers. Again, ask yourself why. Perhaps you had an embarrassing rebuff in the past. Anxiety isn’t a truth-teller. Just because you had a negative previous experience doesn’t mean you’re doomed to repeat the same patterns or should feel afraid of repeating those patterns. Rather than relying on labels to describe our emotions, we owe it to ourselves to use a vocabulary as vast and complex as our experiences. Accurately describing the causes of anxiety, how it physically manifests, and when and how often it occurs, allows us to pinpoint the exact form of support we need, too, whether it’s therapy or just talking to a loved one. That’s how we move forward. It can be helpful to depersonalize anxiety. Try reminding yourself, “Yes, I’m anxious but that’s a temporary thing which I can do something about, and I’m actually pretty courageous to be able to deal with it,” Haslam says. “I’m not just a damaged individual.”

Preview: Getty Images Derek Thompson on what the end of monoculture could mean for American democracy. Is damn near everything a cult now? That’s a glib distillation of an interesting idea I recently encountered. The basic thesis was that the internet has shattered the possibility of a monoculture and the result of that is a highly fragmented society that feels increasingly like a loose connection of cults stacked on top of each other. To say that everything is a cult is a bit of an overstatement, but as a general framework for understanding the world at the moment, it is helpful. The way we consume content, the way fandom works, the ways we sort ourselves into tribes and camps online, even the way lots of industries work, including the news business — it all has shades of culthood. This is easier to see if you set aside the more extreme examples of cults, like the ones that end in mass suicide or shootouts with the ATF, and instead think of cults as movements or institutions that organize themselves around the belief that the mainstream is fundamentally broken. Understood this way, there are lots of cults, or cult-adjacent groups, and not all of them are bad. But if society keeps drifting in this direction, what will that mean for our shared democratic culture? How much fragmentation can we sustain? To think all of this through, I invited Derek Thompson to The Gray Area. He’s a staff writer at the Atlantic, the host of the podcast Plain English, and the person who originally floated this idea about the cultification of society. Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. Sean Illing Tell me why you think everything’s become a cult. Derek Thompson I’ve always been very interested in culture, which I suppose is worth defining. Culture is the way that we think about the world and the way that we influence each other’s thoughts about the world. And that can be through entertainment, it can be through religion, it can be through fashion and clothes, but it’s the memes and ideas and ideologies that not only influence our own sense of reality but other people’s sense of reality. And I’ve always been interested in how people’s sense of reality comes to be. So you can start with the late 19th century when the concept of a national reality was first possible, at least in America. You had technologies like the telephone and the telegraph that allowed newspapers to share information and report on information that truly was national. It allowed information to travel much faster than it had ever traveled before. And so suddenly in the late 19th century, we had the possibility of a national and even international real-time shared reality. And that shared reality might have come to its fullest expression in the middle of the 20th century with the rise of television technology. You had just a handful of channels that were reaching tens of millions of people. At the same time, you also had the rise of national newspapers and maybe the apogee of national newspapers in terms of their ability to monopolize local advertising revenue and become enormous machines for getting tens of millions of Americans to read about a shared reality. And so you move from the 19th century with the birth of this possibility of a shared reality, to the 20th century, where you really have the rise of a kind of monoculture, which was never really possible for the vast majority of human history. What I’m interested in is the possibility that the internet has forever shattered that reality, that we are in a way going back to the pre-20th century where culture is actually just a bunch of cults stacked on top of each other, a bunch of mini local realities stacked on top of each other. Sean Illing How do you define a cult? Derek Thompson I think of a cult as a nascent movement outside the mainstream that often criticizes the mainstream and organizes itself around the idea that the mainstream is bad or broken in some way. So I suppose when I think about a cult, I’m not just thinking about a small movement with a lot of people who believe something fiercely. I’m also interested in the modern idea of cults being oriented against the mainstream. They form as a criticism of what the people in that cult understand to be the mainstream. And cults, especially when we talk about them in religion, tend to be extreme, tend to be radical, tend to have really high social costs to belonging to them. Today, especially in the media and entertainment space, we have this really interesting popularity of new influencers or new media makers adapting as their core personality the idea that the mainstream is broken, that news is broken, that mass institutions are broken, that the elite are in some way broken and elite institutions are broken. The fragmentation of media that we’re seeing and the rise of this anti-institutional, somewhat paranoid style of understanding reality, I see these things as rising together in a way that I find very interesting. Sean Illing You were talking about the phone and the telegraph earlier, but the thing about newer technologies like radio and TV, for instance, is that they helped create something like a mass culture. The public was more or less watching the same movie we call reality, and for all the downsides of that, and there were many, it did have the benefit of grounding society in a shared reality. Do you think of that loss as a genuine cultural and political crisis? Or is it possible that this is just another period of technological change, not that different from earlier periods and we’ll figure it out? Derek Thompson I do think that in so many ways, we’re just going back to the middle of the 19th century. We’re going back to the historical norm rather than being flung into the exosphere, into some unprecedented state of popular discombobulation. The idea that a shared reality, a shared national reality in real time, is even possible is so historically young. Just one quick aside, I was doing some reporting for the book that I’m writing right now and saw in an Eric Hobsbawm book called The Age of Revolutions that when the Bastille fell in 1789, a Canton 30 minutes away from Paris didn’t realize the French Revolution had happened for a full month. That was the speed at which information used to travel. It was the speed at which a man could ride a horse or walk next to his horse. You need a whiz-bang technology that can somehow transmit at something like the speed of light, certainly one would hope the speed of sound, information across vast distances. You only had that with the invention of the telegram and the telephone, and then later radio. So if you want to know where we’re going, look where we came from. In the 19th century, of course, we had lots of chaos, but we also had an American democracy for decades and decades. So it’s not obvious to me that the erosion of the monoculture or the erosion of the news mainstream is anathema to American democracy. Sean Illing I don’t think it’s incompatible with American democracy as such, but it might be incompatible with the model of liberal democracy we’ve become accustomed to since mid-20th century or so, which is also a historical aberration. Derek Thompson You might be totally be right. This is one place where the bridge goes too far for me to have a ready-made answer. I’m not exactly sure why a more riotously antagonistic and fragmented news ecosystem would be perilous to liberal democracy. It’s possible that it would be, but what’s the causal mechanism by which a wildly fragmented media leads to a backlash in liberal democracy? Sean Illing I guess I’m thinking about how this environment creates a collective action problem that makes dealing with the sorts of challenges we’re dealing with today almost insoluble. Martin Gurri had a useful metaphor in his 2018 book The Revolt of the Public. The way he put it was to say that for a long time we looked into the same mirror of mass culture and the internet shattered that mirror into a billion little pieces, which meant that governments could no longer dictate the stories societies were telling about themselves, which is a great thing in lots of ways, but it also produced a lot social turbulence. Derek Thompson I agree with the idea that we’re all looking into fewer mirrors, but it’s not obvious to me that the mirrors we were looking into were reflecting reality. They were reflecting a version of reality that left out a lot. The news of the 20th century did not report on racial justice at anything like the level of quality that we now expect reports in racial justice to do. The mirrors of the 20th century and news reports of the 20th century did not, I think, uncover all sorts of problems of governance that took years to understand. Didn’t report on the environmental degradation of industrial America in the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s. Protests had to fill the void of media that was under-representing minorities in urban America. None of this is to accuse you personally of overlooking those problems because I’m sure you would agree with all of them, but it’s to remind all of us that when we feel nostalgia for the media environment of the 1940s and 1950s, we are feeling nostalgia for a news media ecosystem that in many ways was inferior to and even blind to the problems that we know to pay attention to today. And I do think that in many ways, the fragmentation of the media can sometimes create competition that allows us to see behind corners and understand things, root out problems that we didn’t see before. I’m a capitalist overall, and I think that more competition in most markets is good. I just think it’s important to understand, as we do in some markets, that there can be negative externalities. A huge gaping negative externality of abundance in media is that superabundant media creates a scenario where news entrants feel like they have to be antagonistic. A news environment like that is going to create a lot of distrust, it’s going to create a lot of disharmony, it’s going to confuse a lot of people, and it will replace a world with a small number of flawed mirrors with a riotous and unthinkable number of mirrors, some of which are absolute bullshit mirrors and some of which are quite good. Sean Illing The problem of “distrust” is what I was getting at. I never liked the phrase “post-truth” because it implied there was a golden age in which we lived in truth. That’s bullshit. So I’m not nostalgic in that way and I’m not making the case that we understood our world better, or that society was more just, when everyone was watching the same handful of networks or reading the same handful of newspapers. I’m just saying that was a period where there was more trust in authority, in part because of this near-monopoly on information at the top. And when that near-monopoly shattered, people could see and hear more and that eroded trust in authority, trust in experts, trust in information. Is that a good thing in the long term? Probably. I don’t know. But I don’t think our institutions were equipped to manage the transition from that world to this one. Derek Thompson I think I agree with a lot of that. What I most want to hold down on is the idea that almost all nostalgia for a past golden age is nostalgia for a world that did not exist or a world that we would find inexcusably terrible today. If someone believes that the world of 1950s or ’60s was better in this way, then why didn’t that shared reality lead to a world where we fixed our problems faster? Why didn’t a shared reality more expeditiously reveal the injustice of Jim Crow and voting laws before the 1965 Act? Why didn’t it help us see the terrible things that we were doing to leaded gasoline and the air and the water? Why, essentially, was the world of monocultural news so flawed if monocultural news is so useful for showing the electorate what’s important in the world? That’s the question that I feel like is never answered when people start waxing nostalgic about the middle of the 20th century. To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Preview: Jared Bartman for Vox Dangerous, polluting SUVs and pickups took over America. Lawmakers are partly to blame. Cars, you might have noticed, have grown enormous. Low-slung station wagons are all but extinct on American roads, and even sedans have become an endangered species. (Ford, producer of the iconic Model T a century ago, no longer sells any sedans in its home market.) Bulky SUVs and pickup trucks — which have themselves steadily added pounds and inches — now comprise more than four out of every five new cars sold in the US, up from just over half in 2013, even as national household size steadily declines. The expanding size of automobiles — a phenomenon I call car bloat — has deepened a slew of national problems. Take road safety: Unlike peer nations, the US has endured a steep rise in traffic deaths, with fatalities among pedestrians and cyclists, who are at elevated risk in a crash with a huge car, recently hitting 40-year highs. Vehicle occupants face danger as well. A 2019 study concluded that compared to a smaller vehicle, an SUV or a pickup colliding with a smaller car was 28 percent and 159 percent, respectively, more likely to kill that car’s driver. Car bloat also threatens the planet. Because heavier vehicles require more energy to move, they tend to gulp rather than sip the gasoline or electricity that powers them, increasing greenhouse gas emissions. Extra weight also accelerates the erosion of roadways and tires, straining highway maintenance budgets and releasing microplastics that damage ecosystems. Al Seib/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images SUVs and pickup trucks make up more than 80 percent of new car sales in the US. Their height and weight make them significantly more likely to injure pedestrians, cyclists, and other road users, and they also make it harder to see pedestrians crossing the street. Here, a pickup truck crashed into and seriously injured a pedestrian before smashing into a storefront in Los Angeles in 2014. What lies behind this shift? Some Americans prefer bigger cars, especially when gas prices are low, for their ample storage space, ability to see over other vehicles on the road, and perceived safety benefits (more on that later). But shifting consumer demands tell only part of the story. For half a century, a litany of federal policies has favored large SUVs and trucks, pushing automakers and American buyers toward larger models. Instead of counteracting car bloat through regulation, policymakers have subtly encouraged it. That has been a boon for car companies, but a disaster for everyone else. Here are some of the most egregious examples. Why we let bigger cars pollute more After the 1970s OPEC oil embargo triggered a spike in gas prices, the federal government adopted an array of policies intended to reduce energy demand. One of Congress’s most consequential moves was creating the Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) standards, which require that the average fuel economy (miles per gallon, or MPG) of a carmaker’s vehicles remain below a set threshold. Pressed by auto lobbyists, Congress made a fateful decision when it established CAFE. Instead of setting a single fuel economy standard that applies to all cars, CAFE has two of them: one for passenger cars, such as sedans and station wagons, and a separate, more lenient standard for “light trucks,” including pickups and SUVs. In 1982, for instance, the CAFE standard for passenger cars was 24 mph and only 17.5 mpg for light trucks. That dual structure didn’t initially seem like a big deal, because in the 1970s SUVs and trucks together accounted for less than a quarter of new cars sold. But as gas prices fell in the 1980s, the “light truck loophole” encouraged automakers to shift away from sedans and churn out more pickups and SUVs (which were also more profitable). Car ads of the 1980s and 1990s frequently featured owners of SUVs and trucks taking family trips or going out with friends, activities that could also be done in a sedan or station wagon. The messaging seemed to resonate: By 2002, light trucks comprised more than half of new car sales. In the early 2000s, the federal government made these distortions even worse. During the George W. Bush administration, CAFE was revised to further loosen rules for the biggest cars by tying a car model’s efficiency standard to its physical footprint (which is basically the shadow cast by the vehicle when the sun is directly above it). President Obama then incorporated similar footprint rules into new greenhouse gas emissions standards that are overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Dan Becker, who led the Sierra Club’s global warming program from 1989 to 2007, told me that he and others warned federal lawmakers that adopting footprint-based standards was a mistake. “People like me were saying, ‘give carmakers another loophole and they’ll use it,’” he said. “But we lost.” Those concerns proved justified. The average vehicle footprint expanded 6 percent between 2008 and 2023, a “historic high,” according to an EPA report, which also found that some carmakers, such as General Motors, actually had lower average fuel economy and higher average carbon emissions in 2022 than in 2017. To its credit, the EPA recently announced revisions to its vehicle GHG rules that would narrow (but not close) the gaps between standards for large and small cars. But the shift toward electric vehicles may further entrench car bloat. The EPA’s rules assume that all EVs, regardless of their design, generate no emissions — a questionable assumption, because EVs create emissions indirectly through the production and transmission of power that flows into their batteries. A huge or inefficient battery requires more electricity, which can lead to significant pollution (especially in regions where fossil fuels dominate the energy mix). The EPA’s policy of treating all EVs equally makes a monstrously wasteful vehicle like the Hummer EV seem cleaner than it is, encouraging carmakers to manufacture more of them. To counteract EV bloat, Peter Huether, a senior research associate at the American Council for an Energy-Efficient Economy, would like to see the EPA revise its GHG rules to consider emissions from power generation and transmission: “If these standards look at upstream emissions, it could have a downstream effect on shape and size of EVs.” Blocking smaller cars from abroad What does a 60-year-old trade dispute have to do with car bloat? More than you might imagine. In the early 1960s, Europe raised the ire of American officials by slapping a 50 percent tariff on chicken exported from the United States. In retaliation, the US enacted a 25 percent tax on pickup trucks imported from abroad. The dispute is long forgotten, but the “Chicken Tax” lives on. Although the tariff was initially aimed at Germany’s immense auto industry (Volkswagen in particular), it also applies to pickups imported from newer automaking powers such as Japan and South Korea, where carmakers are often adept at building vehicles much smaller than those available to Americans. Toyota’s Hilux Double Cab pickup, for instance, weighs several hundred pounds less than a 2024 Ford F-150 Tremor or Lariat and is about half a foot shorter. But Americans who might want it are out of luck. Toyota does not sell the Hilux in the US (but does in countries like India and Britain); the 25 percent tariff would make it prohibitively expensive. “The Chicken Tax has prevented competitive Asian or European truck makers from entering the US market,” said Jason Torchinsky, a co-founder of the Autopian, a media outlet focused on the auto industry. “American manufacturers have really never had to compete.” John Krafcik, who previously led Hyundai, has called the Chicken Tax “one of the most important determinants of how the [auto] industry looks today and how it operates today in the US.” The tariff has been condemned by everyone from the Libertarian Cato Institute, the center-right American Enterprise Institute, and the left-leaning Tax Policy Center. “Tariffs in general hurt consumers, and the Chicken Tax is no exception,” wrote Robert McClelland of the Tax Policy Center. There are other protectionist rules blocking smaller vehicles from abroad: Carmakers from China, an emerging automaking behemoth, face a 25 percent tariff enacted by Donald Trump. As a result, Americans cannot buy small Chinese EV sedans like the BYD Seagull that cost around $10,000, barely a fifth the price of an average American car. VCG/VCG via Getty Images The Seagull, a small, low-cost electric sedan from Chinese automaker BYD Nicolas Datiche/AFP via Getty Images Refrigerators are transported on a Japanese mini truck, also known as a kei truck. These often have bed lengths comparable to American-style pickup trucks but are much shorter in height, lighter, and safer for other road users — yet they’re exceedingly hard to obtain in the US. And those hoping to import a kei truck, a miniature pickup common in Japan, must navigate a labyrinth of federal and state rules. (Even Afghanistan seems ahead of the US in minitruck offerings, as the Wichita Eagle’s Dion Lefler noted in a tongue-in-cheek 2023 column: “In the land of the free, why can’t we have mini-pickup trucks like the Taliban?”) These policies have established a regulatory moat protecting US automakers whose profits disproportionately come from pricey, hulking SUVs and trucks. The Hummer Tax Loophole In 1984, Congress stopped allowing small business owners to take a tax deduction for the purchase price of cars used for work. But the bill included a giant loophole: To protect those who need a heavy-duty vehicle (think farmers or construction workers), Congress made an exception, known as Section 179, for cars that weigh over 6,000 pounds when fully loaded with passengers and cargo. Today such behemoths are eligible for a tax deduction of up to $30,500, while business owners who opt for a smaller car can claim nothing at all. Few car models were heavy enough to qualify for the tax break 40 years ago, but that is no longer the case: A Hummer 1, for instance, weighs about 10,300 pounds (leading Section 179 to be dubbed the “Hummer Tax Loophole”). Other huge cars, such as a Chevrolet Suburban or an F-250 Ford Super Duty truck can qualify, too. “Few folks at EPA know about Section 179,” said Becker, the former Sierra Club executive. “But every auto dealer does.” Some car dealerships even offer handy Section 179 guides on their websites. The tax advantage of buying a behemoth may be powerful enough to tilt the vehicle purchase decisions of individuals like real estate agents, who use their vehicles for both professional and personal use. And as cars electrify, the added tonnage from batteries will allow more models to qualify for favorable tax treatment. If Section 179 sounds crazy, consider another federal loophole that has endured for decades. In 1978, Congress established the “Gas Guzzler Tax,” requiring automakers to pay between $1,000 and $7,700 for every car produced that gets less than 22.5 miles per gallon. But the tax only applies to passenger vehicles like sedans and station wagons. SUVs and pickups, which often have much worse gas mileage, are exempt. That omission makes no sense from a policy perspective, but it is good news for carmakers producing inefficient behemoths. Freezing the gas tax Every time a car owner fills her gas tank, a portion of the bill goes into the federal Highway Trust Fund, a central source of funding for roads and mass transit. That tax rate is set at $0.184 per gallon, a level that has been frozen since 1993, when Bill Clinton was less than a year into his presidency. Congressional proposals to increase the gas tax to close a yawning highway budget gap, or at least tie it to inflation, have gone nowhere. Over the last 31 years, consumer prices have risen 113 percent, making the real value of the gas tax less than half what it was in 1993. That decline has reduced the cost of powering a huge SUV or truck with abysmal gas mileage, like the 6,270-lb 2024 Cadillac Escalade that gets around 16 mpg. A 2018 OECD study found that the US had the lowest average gas tax (including both federal and state taxes) among rich nations, which averaged $2.24 per gallon — four times the typical US rate. “Why are European cars so small?” said McClelland, of the Tax Policy Center. “One reason has got to be the much higher gasoline tax.” Federal policy ignores crash risk for anyone outside a car A vehicle’s design affects not just the safety of its occupants, but also people walking, biking, or inside other cars. Although seemingly obvious, this basic truth has eluded federal regulators for decades. Car safety rules are laid out in the encyclopedic Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), which touches on everything from power windows to seat belts. But the FMVSS revolves around protecting a vehicle’s occupants; nothing within its 562 pages limits a car’s physical design to protect someone who might come into contact with it in a collision. That omission invites an arms race of vehicle size — precisely what the US is experiencing. Nor does the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) consider pedestrians, cyclists, or other car occupants when calculating its safety ratings from crash tests. Unlike safety ratings in Europe and elsewhere, the American crash ratings program also ignores the danger that vehicle designs pose to those walking and biking. NHTSA’s myopic focus on car occupants is a boon for the heaviest and tallest cars, which pose disproportionate risk to those outside of them. Weightier vehicles exert more force in a crash, and they require additional time to come to a halt when a driver slams on the brakes. A 2023 study by the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) found that vehicles with tall, flat front ends (common on big pickups and SUVs) are significantly more likely to kill pedestrians in crashes. An earlier IIHS study found that large cars also make it harder to see pedestrians at intersections. Mindy Schauer/Digital First Media/Orange County Register via Getty Images The US is in the midst of a car fatality crisis, exacerbated by the risks large cars pose to pedestrians. Here, a pickup truck driver in Santa Ana, California, quickly applies brakes as two pedestrians cross in front. One is not visible. With pedestrian and cyclist deaths now soaring, NHTSA last year took its first, tentative step toward protecting so-called vulnerable road users by proposing that its vehicle safety ratings be revised to include an evaluation of automatic pedestrian braking technology, which can force a vehicle to halt before striking someone on foot. But even if adopted, it would not affect NCAP’s 5-star safety rating, the hallmark of the program. And NHTSA’s focus on automatic pedestrian braking, an imperfect tech fix, ignores car bloat, a root cause of America’s traffic safety crisis. Earlier this year, a paper co-authored by former NHTSA executive Missy Cummings gave an ominous assessment of automatic braking systems, concluding that they did not work consistently. By contrast, the potential safety benefits of constraining vehicles’ weight and height have been well established. Why can’t we fix things? All of these policies have distorted the US car market, leading the 278 million vehicles plying American roads to become ever bigger, more dangerous, and more destructive. So why have they remained on the books after the growing societal costs of car bloat became impossible to miss? To find an answer, consider who benefits from oversized vehicles. American carmakers like Ford and GM (which are headquartered in Michigan, a crucial swing state) rely on juicy margins from big SUVs and pickups, which are more expensive and profitable than smaller models. They enjoy protection from foreign competition through tariffs like the Chicken Tax, as well as favorable policies like CAFE’s light-truck loophole. The regulatory status quo suits domestic automakers just fine — and they act as a roadblock to even modest attempts to change it. In 2022, for example, the largest auto industry association lobbied District of Columbia council members against a proposal to charge owners of the most egregiously oversized cars $500 per year, seven times more than a light sedan (the District adopted the policy anyway). Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images SUVs and trucks now overwhelmingly dominate the offerings of US carmakers. Here, a Cadillac SUV is on display at the 2019 North American International Auto Show in Detroit. As American sales of big SUVs and trucks have surged, their owners are likely to resist policy moves they see as penalizing them. Many are likely to be unaware of the federal loopholes and policy oversights that have distorted their vehicle choices. The negative externalities of supersized cars — in emissions, crash deaths, and the erosion of tires and pavement — are what economists call a market failure, since their costs are borne by society writ large, not the people who buy big pickups and SUVs. Left unaddressed, those societal costs will grow as more people replace their modest-sized cars with big SUVs or trucks. After all, everyone else seems to be doing it — why not do the same, if only for self-preservation? Regulation can end such a cycle toward enormity. Countries including France and Norway have enacted weight-based taxes to counteract car bloat’s collective costs and avoid giving huge vehicles implicit subsidies. But American policymakers have done the exact opposite, and they rarely even acknowledge the problem. Asked explicitly about ways that the Department of Transportation could address car bloat, Secretary Pete Buttigieg ducked, calling merely for “further research.” With the feds refusing to lead, it has fallen on state and local leaders to try and address car bloat themselves. Colorado and California, for instance, have proposed weight-based vehicle registration fees, following the District of Columbia’s lead. But such moves are an imperfect solution to a national problem (vehicles can, after all, be driven across state lines). A true policy fix will require action from Congress, NHTSA, and the EPA. It need not begin with new regulations or taxes. Federal leaders could do a world of good if they simply unwind the ill-advised policies already on the books. Kendra Levine contributed research assistance.

Preview: The US approved a Texas power emergency as a blackout threat loomed due to a brutal heat wave in fall 2023. | Sergio Flores/Bloomberg via Getty Images High temperatures across the US have the potential to increase risks for drought, wildfires, and hurricanes. The United States could be in for another scorcher this summer, per a new study from the National Weather Service (NWS). And that could mean more extreme weather events — as well as heightened health concerns. The NWS outlook, released this month, found that many parts of the US — including New England and the Southwest — are likely to have higher than average temperatures from June through August. In recent years, hotter summer temperatures have been driven by climate change and, in some cases, the arrival of a climate pattern known as La Niña, which contributes to drier conditions in certain regions in the US. According to the Weather Channel, there’s a possibility this summer could even wind up being one of the hottest on record, adding to existing milestones. National Weather Service Much of the country could see higher than expected temperatures this year. A hotter summer could have serious environmental consequences, including a higher risk of drought, hurricanes, and wildfires in some areas. Additionally, it could pose more health threats to people, with heat-related fatalities — including those tied to cardiovascular disease — increasing in the US in the last decade. Broadly, warmer summers have prompted people to take more precautions when it comes to the activities they engage in, become more dependent on resources like air conditioning, and remain on guard for extreme weather events affecting their water supplies and air quality. This summer is expected to be no different, which is why the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and the CDC recently rolled out tools aimed at forecasting when extreme heat waves will strike this summer, with the goal of alerting people about these events so they can better prepare for them. The reasons this summer could be so hot Climate change is a major factor in the overall warming that the Earth is experiencing — including hotter summers, experts say. “The big obvious player is greenhouse gases that are producing long-term climate change,” William Boos, a UC Berkeley earth and planetary sciences associate professor, told Vox. As a Washington Post analysis found in 2022, the average summer temperature from 2017–2021 was 1.7 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average US summer temperature from 1971–2000, an increase that coincided with record-breaking annual temperatures overall in recent years. The outlook for this year could well make this summer a continuation of that trend. The La Niña climate pattern could also be a contributor to higher heat levels this year if it occurs in the coming months. La Niña is an atmospheric phenomenon involving strong winds that result in cooler temperatures in the Pacific Ocean. The cold water alters the course of high altitude air currents known as the jet stream, which contributes to weather changes. While La Niña can lead to a “cooling down of global temperatures ... it causes changes in wind patterns that can cause some areas to be warmer than normal in summer,” says University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann. In the US, the areas that are most likely to see increased temperatures due to La Niña tend to be in the West and South, and that’s poised to be the case this time as well. Heat could mean more drought, wildfires, and hurricanes Higher temperatures in the summer can directly contribute to the proliferation of droughts because heat increases water evaporation and the loss of moisture from plants. Droughts often reduce water supplies for people and animals, and impact the ecosystems of flora and fauna that live in bodies of water as well. According to the National Weather Service, the Southwest, part of the Pacific Northwest, and Hawaii are a few of the regions susceptible to drought this coming summer. National Weather Service Drought outlook for this summer highlights areas that are more susceptible. A hotter, drier summer season can also increase the likelihood of wildfires in certain areas because it means the ground is drier and the area is more likely to catch fire. When the temperature is warmer, there can be a higher frequency of lightning, too, which can ignite more wildfires. According to projections from the National Interagency Coordination Center, which has published an outlook through July, the Southwest, Mountain West, and Hawaii are similarly areas that are poised to see greater wildfire risk this summer. California, meanwhile, could have a reduced risk compared to past years, in part because of the precipitation it’s experienced this year. National Interagency Coordination Center An outlook for July captures an area with higher likelihood of wildfires. In recent years, wildfires have disrupted nearby communities, damaging people’s homes and displacing them, while also affecting people hundreds of miles away. Wildfires in Maui last year — which were sparked partly because of ongoing drought — killed around 100 people, and many of those who lost their homes have yet to find new ones. A major wave of wildfires in Canada affected large swaths of the US as well when smoke drifted over and reduced the air quality. [Related: How Maui’s wildfires became so apocalyptic] Higher temperatures could also lead to a more intense hurricane season, according to a group of University of Pennsylvania climate scientists led by Mann. In an analysis published this week, they noted that this Atlantic season could feature the most named hurricanes on record due partly to warmer ocean temperatures. The scientists estimate that there could be anywhere between 27 and 39 named tropical storms, roughly twice as many hurricanes as occur in a standard season. Because evaporation increases when it’s hotter, hurricanes can pick up more moisture from oceans under these circumstances, leading to a higher frequency of more aggressive storms. Generally, higher temperatures also raise worries about health issues and fatalities people may face due to conditions like heat stroke. As the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention notes, cities like St. Louis and Philadelphia have seen increases in death rates during heat waves in the past, and hospitals tend to see a spike of admissions related to cardiovascular and respiratory diseases in these times. Since people’s hearts are under more strain when it’s hot, this puts additional stress on those navigating preexisting health issues as well as vulnerable groups like the young, elderly, and pregnant people. Additionally, people’s standard mechanism for cooling themselves — sweating — can be insufficient when it’s especially hot and particularly when there’s high humidity. “In an average year in the U.S., heat kills more people than any other type of extreme weather,” Kristina Dahl, a senior climate scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, previously told Scientific American.

Preview: George Washington University students camp out on campus to demand that their university divest from Israel and call for a ceasefire in Gaza, on April 25, 2024, in Washington, DC, United States. | Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images Campus protests for Gaza may be the biggest of the 21st century. Protests against the war in Gaza have spread to college campuses across the country in the days since students at Columbia University were arrested last week, evoking images of historical student protests that were met with similar backlash. Recent protests have not yet reached the scale of the major student protests of the late 1960s against the Vietnam War or the 1980s against South African apartheid. But on campus, they may be “the largest student movement so far” of the 21st century, said Robert Cohen, a professor of social studies and history at New York University who has studied student activism. In recent decades, there were mass protests against the Iraq War, as part of the Occupy Wall Street movement, and after the killing of George Floyd, but they were primarily happening off campus. Just like the protesters that came before them, the students who are now being arrested, and in some cases suspended, for setting up encampments on their campuses in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza have been demonized by politicians. The vast majority are peaceful protesters who have been overshadowed by a minority of bad actors, some potentially not even affiliated with the universities where these demonstrations are taking place. Some of their demands, including divestiture from firms that support Israel’s war and occupation, mirror demands that past protesters made to divest from South Africa’s apartheid government. And their discontent has similarly intensified in the face of police crackdowns. But there are key differences as well. Besides their smaller size, the present-day protests have faced swifter suppression than their predecessors dealt with. In perhaps the most extreme example at the University of Texas-Austin, administrators quickly dispatched police with horses and riot gear absent any signs of violence at a pro-Palestinian protest; charges were later dropped against all 57 arrested. And that signals a deterioration of schools’ commitment to protecting free speech that emerged in the 1960s. “I think that the fact that this has happened so quickly is unprecedented. And the call for suppression of speech is much more public,” Cohen said. These protests are only getting started, and it’s too early to tell just how large they might get before classes let out for the summer. But the opposition they’ve faced from their inception could make it harder to build the kind of momentum that their predecessors had — and to achieve their goals. What today’s protests do and don’t have in common with the antiwar protests of the 1960s Columbia students famously occupied university buildings in 1968 in protest against segregation and the Vietnam War before the police forcibly removed them. They wanted Columbia to end the construction of a segregated gymnasium nearby in Morningside Park and to cut ties with the Institute for Defense Analyses, which was researching weapons development for the US government’s war effort. This all happened against a backdrop of broader anti-war and anti-racism protests across the US, both on and off campuses, that helped energize the student movement. Student protests swept college campuses in the 1960s, involving thousands of students and hundreds of universities. Those protests remain the biggest in history; the current protest movement is “clearly growing, but it’s nowhere near that scale,” said Angus Johnston, an adjunct professor at the City University of New York studying student protests. The tactics employed by protesters in the 1960s were also vastly different. While many started and remained peaceful, at their most extreme, students rioted, barricaded themselves in buildings, fought with police, burned down ROTC buildings, and raided draft boards to steal or destroy files. They culminated in the Kent State massacre in 1970, when members of the Ohio National Guard shot at a crowd of unarmed student protesters, killing four and injuring nine. The recent protests, on the other hand, have not gone anywhere near as far. “What we are seeing in this spring’s wave of protest is students who are not engaging in property damage. They are not for the most part occupying buildings. They are certainly not initiating physical altercations on any large-scale level,” Johnston said. “In the late ’60s, what we were seeing was protests that were much more aggressive in their tactics than the ones that we’re seeing today.” Some students vocally opposed these tactics in the 1960s. Notably, Donald Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr was among a group of Columbia students, known as the Majority Coalition, who banded together to defend the university buildings from protesters and were incensed that they could not attend class. Student opposition to today’s protests has highlighted antisemitic incidents at or around some protests, raising concerns about their safety. For instance, one student at Columbia wrote an op-ed in Haaretz with the headline, “Jewish Students are No Longer Safe at Columbia University.” He wrote that a masked student on campus showed him a Hamas insignia and said he was “with them,” and that another protester near campus shoved him against a wall. At the same time, Jewish students have also participated in the protests, which have been largely peaceful. “One of the weapons that can be used now by students who don’t like what’s happening around them to say, ‘I don’t feel safe. I’m scared,’” said David Farber, a history professor at the University of Kansas who has studied American activism. “I think that certainly didn’t occur in the 1960s.” One way today’s protests resemble those of the 1960s, however, is that they’ve escalated when university administrators have sent in the police to break them up. Both now and then, students who did not participate in the initial or more radical elements of the protests resented being characterized as confrontational and disruptive. “If you treat everybody like they’re radical militants who are out to do violent misdeeds, you tend to get what you characterize,” said Farber. “It radicalized [protesters in the ’60s]. It made them angrier. It didn’t make them go away.” Politicians also sought to capitalize on the backlash to the protests of the ’60s, just as some are now. In the 1966 California governor’s race, former President Ronald Reagan accused the incumbent governor and the president of the University of California of not being tough enough on protesters at Berkeley, even though they conducted a mass arrest of students. “Reagan got elected governor by pledging to clean up the mess of Berkeley,” Cohen said. If that sounds familiar to today, you’re not wrong. Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, took a similar tack and visited Columbia’s campus Wednesday to demand that the university president resign for not being strict enough with the protesters, even though she had just called the police on protesters. His party, meanwhile, continues to wage war on elite universities that it accuses of promoting “woke” ideas. Today’s protests have a lot in common with anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s A better analogy for today’s protests might be the anti-apartheid protests of the 1980s. Students built up their power in university governance and assembled lobbying groups throughout the 1970s. They also became more of a political force when the voting age was lowered from 21 to 18 in 1972. That meant that, by the time protests against South African apartheid gained steam in the 1980s, they had accumulated more political influence and were better organized. Their demands of university administrations were practically identical to what protesters are asking for today. They wanted their universities to divest from firms that supported or profited from South African apartheid. And they were effective: 155 universities ultimately divested. And in 1986, the US government also bowed to pressure from protesters and enacted a divestment policy. Along with increasing protests within South Africa led by organizations including the African National Congress, the Pan Africanist Congress, and trade unions, that kind of international pressure helped force the white South African government to begin negotiations that ultimately ended apartheid, at least officially. But protesters also didn’t face much pushback in the ’80s because there was a “certain embarrassment among elites in the United States that there was complicity with South Africa’s white government,” Farber said. “It was kind of pushing against an open door,” he said. “It wasn’t really a polarizing issue.” That differs from today, when the Gaza war has revealed a major generational divide and there doesn’t exist the same kind of consensus among Americans. The divestment movement against the apartheid government — which started with universities and then was adopted by the US federal government — also arguably packed a bigger punch due to vulnerabilities in South Africa’s economy, including the fact that many of its goods could be substituted with products from elsewhere. Assuming that divesting from Israel would be possible (and some say it is not), the scholarship on such divestment movements’ effectiveness is mixed. It would be very difficult to effectively boycott or ban imports of all Israeli goods, many of which do not have substitutes or at least would be hard to replace. That includes computer technology, medical devices, drugs, and advanced machinery in heavy industry. That doesn’t necessarily mean that divestment from Israel would not have a significant impact on public perception of the war in Gaza and the Israeli occupation. But the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement — which predates the current protests — has so far had a negligible economic impact. “The data suggests that, economically, anything short of official sanctions by important economic partners such as the United States or European Union would be unlikely to produce anything near the kind of economic pressure BDS supporters envision,” researchers at the Brookings Institution concluded. University administrators are now also facing pressure from donors and politicians that didn’t exist during the 1980s. At least one billionaire donor has indicated that he intends to pull his support from Columbia amid the protests. And over 30 states have laws that preclude their governments from doing business with companies that embrace the BDS movement against Israel. “The call for the divestment of Israel has a lot of opposition because there’s a lot of political power structure to support Israel,” Cohen said. Why universities are breeding grounds for political activism There is something about a university campus that inspires political activism. Even in the age of social media, geographic proximity to a community with a high concentration of young people — many of whom are thinking critically about the world for the first time and may be undistracted by the pressures of adult life — seems to help incubate social movements. “The university is the center of teaching and learning where people are taught in classes, or out of classes, to question things,” Cohen said. This isn’t specific to America. All around the world, college campuses are hubs of political activity and young people are at the forefront of social movements. But the more conservative elements of American society have never really wanted students to play that role. There was a persistent sense throughout major social movements in American history that young people were disrespecting their elders and the value of their education, with contemporary polls showing widespread disapproval of the sit-in movement against racial discrimination, the freedom riders, the free speech movement, and the antiwar movement of the 1960s, Cohen said. Even after the Kent State massacre, polling showed that the American public sympathized more with the National Guard troops who shot and killed protesters than with the protesters themselves, Johnston noted. Blanket condemnations of today’s protests as inherently antisemitic and disruptive to the university environment — even though protesters have not occupied buildings or interrupted classes — would suggest little has changed. It’s true that some students feel unsafe, and university administrators should be taking steps to address those concerns. But they are no longer starting with the presumption of protecting free speech. “The pressure to suppress these demonstrations is quicker and more extreme than was the case in any prior student movement I’ve ever studied,” Cohen said. But if university administrators continue on this path, they might just see it backfire on them, just as before. “All they’re going to do is accelerate the anger and rage of more and more students, even those who are not directly involved,” Farber said. “That’s certainly what happened in the ’60s.”

Preview: Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images The Columbia protests and the debate over pro-Palestinian college students, explained. Protests over the war in Gaza erupted on Columbia University’s campus last week and have sparked demonstrations at other universities across the country. The demonstrations appear to be growing in the face of intense crackdowns involving local law enforcement, as well as growing political scrutiny. And they have once again, made top universities the locus around which America litigates questions about the US’s support of Israel amid its deadly war in Gaza, free speech, antisemitism, and anti-Muslim discrimination — and a convenient target for political elites looking to make a point. For example: Lawmakers, including House Speaker Mike Johnson, visiting Columbia’s campus this week. The demonstrations intensified in the wake of recent congressional hearings on antisemitism on campus and amid an uptick in both antisemitism and anti-Muslim sentiment in the US. And they have spread across the country, including at Yale University, New York University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Miami University in Ohio, and Temple University in Philadelphia, among other campuses. At Columbia, Yale, the University of Texas-Austin, Emerson College, the University of Southern California, and New York University, students have faced mass arrests as administrators seek to quell the unrest. As of Friday, more than 500 people, including faculty like Noëlle McAfee at Emory University and Sinan Antoon of NYU, have been arrested. In an echo of previous protest movements — including those on universities in the mid-20th century, as well as more recent demonstrations for civil rights — protests at some schools, including the University of Texas, appear to be growing in response to police crackdowns on protesters. The protests are calling on universities to divest from firms that they contend profit from Israel’s war and occupation in Palestine, more than six months after the start of the war and as the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 34,000. Some groups at universities that conduct military research, like New York University, are also requesting their schools end work contributing to weapons development as well. Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests have become a prominent feature on college campuses since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. They reached a fever pitch in December when the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania gave controversial testimony before Congress about campus antisemitism, both real and hypothetical. Tensions reignited last week after Columbia president Nemat Shafik gave congressional testimony that, per the Associated Press, focused on “fighting antisemitism rather than protecting free speech.” Students erected tents on Columbia’s main lawn to show solidarity with Gaza. Then Shafik took the controversial step of calling in the police to arrest those involved. That contentious decision wasn’t just jarring to Columbia students particularly because of the university’s history, but also sparked outrage among onlookers both at the site and on social media. The controversy at Columbia and other campuses has illustrated how universities have struggled to uphold their dual commitments to free speech and protecting their students during a fraught political moment when more young people sympathize with the Palestinian cause than with the Israeli government. Concerns about antisemitism at the protests (often attributed to students, but largely perpetrated by outsiders according to anecdotal reporting) also piqued national attention; amid this all, Columbia University switched to remote learning on April 22 — which also happened to be the first day of the Jewish holiday of Passover. “Calling the police on campus is such a breach of the culture of a college or university,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is representing arrested Columbia students, told Vox. “To do so in response to nonviolent student protest is beyond the pale, and it really undermines the standing of the university in the eyes of a broad swath of the population as a place of free, open, and robust dialogue and debate.” What’s actually happening on college campuses It all started at Columbia, where students pitched more than 50 tents on the lawn in what they called a “Liberated Zone” on April 17. But the tents stayed up only about a day and a half before Shafik intervened. “The current encampment violates all of the new policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students,” she wrote in an April 18 letter to the Columbia community. The police arrived shortly thereafter to arrest students for trespassing and removed more than 100 protesters, tying their hands with zip ties. Some have also been suspended and removed from student housing. In the days since, pro-Palestinian student groups on other university campuses have staged similar protests in solidarity with their counterparts at Columbia. Students have also erected encampments at Yale, Harvard University, the University of Michigan, New York University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt. A total of 47 students were arrested at Yale on Monday, and more than 150 were arrested at New York University overnight Tuesday. On Wednesday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed Texas police to the UT-Austin campus, where they arrested 34 including a journalist. Boston police also arrested 108 people at a protest led by Emerson College students who linked arms tightly and raised umbrellas. Four officers were injured while trying to break up the crowd. A lot of the national attention has focused less on the protesters’ demands or the US-Israeli relationship — and the destruction of Gaza — and more on allegations that the protests are inherently antisemitic for criticizing Israel, or that specific antisemitic incidents have occurred. Shafik announced that all Columbia classes would be virtual on Monday (and now hybrid through the end of the academic year) to provide a “reset” on the conversation and in light of students’ safety concerns — Rabbi Elie Buechler, a rabbi associated with Columbia University’s Orthodox Union Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, had urged hundreds of Orthodox Jewish students to go home and urged them to stay there for their safety. “I cannot but agree that this is motivated by trying to pacify congressional members who are trying to interfere in the running of this university and, at this point, all universities,” Marianne Hirsch, professor emerita of English and comparative literature and the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender at Columbia University, said at a press conference in front of Shafik’s house Tuesday. Student protests on Columbia’s campus have been nonviolent so far. Representatives from the New York Police Department said during a press conference Monday that there had been some incidents in which Israeli flags were snatched from students and unspecified hateful things said. But they said that there have not been any reports of Columbia students being physically harmed or any credible threats made against individuals or groups associated with the university community ahead of the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover. The police only enter Columbia’s campus when asked, given that it is a private university. They have established off-campus “safe corridors” where officers are stationed and will intervene in incidents involving harassment, threats, or menacing behavior — which does not constitute protected speech under the First Amendment. However, a video surfaced over the weekend of what appeared to be masked pro-Palestinian protesters outside of Columbia’s gates shouting, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” at Jewish students. It’s not clear whether those shouting were affiliated with the university. Just after the video was circulated, President Joe Biden issued a statement: “This blatant Antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous — and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.” That statement served as a “blanket condemnation of the Columbia protests,” said Matt Berkman, an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. It failed to distinguish those featured in the video who may not have been affiliated with the university from the vast majority of student protesters, who based on many different accounts, have been peaceful. In a video address Wednesday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also misleadingly characterized the protests, falsely claiming that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities” in a video address and compared them to rallies held in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. “Pro-Israel activists are clearly invested in painting everyone at Columbia, whether inside or outside the gates, with the same broad brush,” Berkman said. On Tuesday, a student draped in an Israeli flag spoke to reporters from within the fenced-in area of the encampment. Jewish students who have been suspended from Columbia and Barnard stated that they had celebrated a Passover Seder within the encampment at a press conference. There are antisemitic incidents in the United States, which represent real danger to Jewish communities and individuals — and they have increased since the Hamas attacks on October 7. In December, the Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents had increased by nearly 340 percent since then. Complicating its data, however, is the fact that the ADL’s annual audit of antisemitic assaults, vandalism, and harassment also includes in the latter categories some anti-Zionist activism. Removing all Israel-related incidents from their count, America has a smaller but still big problem: Non-Israel-related antisemitic incidents still rose by 65 percent compared to 2022, per their data. Columbia students aren’t alone in facing broad accusations of antisemitism. Students at Yale, the Ohio State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others have all been called out by the ADL for engaging in Palestine solidarity protests as well as for specific incidents of antisemitism. Nor are they alone in facing arrest; NYU students and faculty and students at Yale have also been arrested. Police involvement in the protests — particularly on New York City campuses — has been met with backlash, particularly from university faculty and activists. Veronica Salama, who as a staff attorney at NYCLU is part of the team defending these students, told Vox that Shafik called the police as part of her emergency powers — but in doing so violated university policy. Vox has reached out to Columbia for comment and will update with its response. According to an email obtained by Vox, university administration originally set a deadline of midnight Tuesday night to reach an agreement to dismantle the encampment; if none is reached, the email said, the administration “will have to consider alternative options for clearing the West Lawn and restoring calm to campus.” That deadline has been repeatedly extended, however. What’s behind the protests? In many ways, the demands of the protesters have been overshadowed by the controversy. At Columbia, the protesters belong to a coalition, Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), which formed in 2016 to demand Columbia and Barnard College disclose investments in and divest — or remove from its investment portfolio — from Israeli and American companies and institutions that support Israel, citing its wars in Gaza and oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. The coalition’s demands are of a piece with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement started by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. BDS cites as its inspiration the anti-apartheid activists of the 1980s who targeted South Africa’s apartheid government with boycotts. While that movement wasn’t decisive in bringing down that government, it was successful in alienating the apartheid government from major global players like Barclays bank, the Olympics, and the International Cricket Conference, forcing countries and international institutions to confront their complicity in South Africa’s racist policies. In addition to divestment from “companies profiting from Israeli apartheid,” CUAD has a list of five other demands, including a call for an immediate ceasefire from government officials including President Joe Biden, and, importantly, an end to the dual degree program that Columbia has with Tel Aviv University. These demands echo those of student groups at other colleges and universities. NYU student activists are also demanding the university shut down its Tel Aviv campus and “divest from all corporations aiding in the genocide,” including weapons companies, and ban weapons tech research that benefits Israel. Critics allege that BDS and anti-Zionism are at their core antisemitic, arguing that BDS delegitimizes Israel and “effectively reject[s] or ignore[s] the Jewish people’s right of self-determination, or that, if implemented, would result in the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state, are antisemitic,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. The nature and tenor of the campus anti-war protests has been at the forefront of both media coverage and congressional hearings on antisemitism and campus free speech. But administrative response to them — particularly calling the police and issuing suspensions — has added a new dimension to the debate. It’s all part of a broader fight over free speech and antisemitism on college campuses Universities have struggled to balance their goals of protecting free speech and combatting antisemitism since the outbreak of war in Gaza, which has proved a political minefield. In December, a trio of university presidents who testified before Congress were accused (if not fairly) of being too permissive of free speech in the face of antisemitism or being too legalistic in their explanations of their situation. Now, some universities seem to be changing their tack. Shafik called in the police on protesters despite Columbia’s longstanding reputation as a bastion of free speech. The University of Southern California recently canceled the commencement speech of its pro-Palestinian valedictorian over campus safety concerns. And now NYU has also instituted a police crackdown on protesters. Private universities, like many of those experiencing protests today, have long maintained policies that protect free speech similarly to the First Amendment: permitting anything up to genuine threats of violence and threatening behavior that would warrant punishment or even referrals to the criminal system. But the last six months have seemingly made many of them question not just when and where a threat begins, but also maybe even those commitments to students’ free speech more broadly. And complicating this all is a years-long history of pro-Palestinian activists saying they face targeted harassment. Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that if Columbia wants to remain committed to free speech, it has an obligation to apply its speech policies in an equitable manner that is unbiased against any particular viewpoint and to ensure that students currently facing disciplinary action are offered due process. “Columbia providing due process, while fairly and consistently applying its viewpoint-neutral speech policies, will be absolutely mandatory here if Columbia wants to start back on the right path,” Morey said. Prohibiting students from camping out or blocking entrances or exits is “all above board” if applied uniformly, Morey added. But schools should see calling the police to enforce any such policies as a last resort, said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law. “I understand the very strong desire to protect the safety of all the students involved,” he said. “At the end of the day, the presumption should be in favor of free speech and free expression, and there are exceptions to that, but [starting] with that presumption often brings a lot of clarity to these vital decisions.” Correction, April 25, 4:30 pm ET: This story originally misstated the Anti-Defamation League’s methodology for tracking antisemitic incidents. It differentiates among the categories of assault, vandalism, and harassment. Among the latter categories, it includes some anti-Zionist expressions. Update, April 26, 3:18 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 24 and has been updated multiple times, most recently to include news of the extended deadline for protestors at Columbia University.

Preview: The (bad) options for Americans facing an emergency expense. A 2023 Federal Reserve survey found that a third of Americans say they don’t have the cash to cover a $500 emergency expense. So what happens if they need it? In this video, we compare six of the ways Americans say they get money when they don’t have it: credit cards, bank loans, borrowing from a friend or family member, payday loans, selling something, and going into overdraft. How difficult is each one to access? How does paying off each kind of debt work? And how much does each one cost down the line? None of these options are great for someone who can’t pay an emergency expense. But some of them are a lot worse than others. This video is presented by DCU. DCU has no editorial influence on our videos, but their support makes videos like these possible.

Preview: Food delivery apps have recently added new fees in response to minimum pay rules in New York City and Seattle. | Getty Images/iStockphoto Amid delivery discourse, a new report claims to shed some light on DoorDash’s delivery fees. No one is happy about the delivery apps. Not the customers, who feel gouged by an avalanche of fees. Not restaurants, who feel gut-punched by the commission apps take from them. Certainly not delivery workers, who have long been rewarded with a pittance for doing a job that, in a city like New York, has a higher injury rate than that of construction workers. Amid this dogpile of disgruntlement, the merry-go-round of debating the value of food delivery keeps spinning. After all, some people, especially those with disabilities, rely on such services — but then, it is difficult work, and everyone ought to tip well. Another faction argues that this isn’t fair, because it’s already so unaffordable. The delivery apps themselves recede somewhat into the background, as if their existence is a given. They’re merely fulfilling a demand in the market, naturally taking a cut for themselves — two plus two equals four. Our desire to consume is seen as the problem, the having-cake-and-eating-it-too mentality of expecting affordable convenience. But we should give credit where it’s due. Delivery apps have expended a lot of effort (and money) making the case that we — restaurants, workers, and consumers — desperately need them. Unhappy about the state of things now? You’ll really be pulling your hair out if you try to force the apps to change. In New York City and Seattle, new minimum pay laws for delivery workers recently went into effect. Immediately, additional “regulatory” fees were charged to customers, and restaurants and delivery workers complained that orders dropped, with Uber claiming in a blog post that they had dipped by 30 percent. Neither city’s minimum wage laws have forced delivery apps to tack on new fees, but both DoorDash and Uber Eats have introduced them nonetheless. (Grubhub did not.) The message is clear: If you try to mediate how the apps operate, things will just get worse. Now, Sens. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Bob Casey (D-PA), and Ben Ray Luján (D-NM) have sent letters to DoorDash and Uber calling on the companies to stop charging junk fees. “When additional hidden fees nearly triple the price of an order, that is price gouging — plain and simple,” reads a copy of the letter sent to Vox. The letter also requests answers to exactly what the fees cover, including how much of the fees have gone to delivery workers versus to executive pay, among other questions, by no later than May 15. An Uber spokesperson told Vox that there were “consequences to bad regulations and we made these consequences clear in repeated testimony that both cities chose to disregard.” A DoorDash spokesperson wrote that its platform “has to work for everyone who uses it — Dashers, merchants, and customers alike — which is why we’ve opposed these extreme new rules.” They continued that the new laws “require platforms like DoorDash to pay well above the local minimum wages, not including additional pay for mileage and tips. Just as we warned, the increased costs created by these regulations have led to an alarming drop in work for Dashers and lost revenue for small businesses.” “Grubhub is complying with the new pay standards in New York City and Seattle, and we have made adjustments to our platform to run a sustainable business given the added costs to operate in these markets,” a Grubhub spokesperson told Vox. “We warned that these ill-conceived policies would have immediate negative impacts on the people they were intending to help, and the data is showing that to be the case.” Grubhub supports increased earnings for workers, but has previously cautioned how pay laws could impact workers’ ability to choose when and how much they work. Some headlines have already declared app-delivery regulations a failure; Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson has already proposed a new ordinance that lowers the pay rate. At the crisis point of consumers fed up with the cost of food delivery, companies like DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub — the three biggest in the US — are insisting on their irreplaceable value to the restaurants, consumers, and workers who have long complained about them. “These guys are doing what I call a corporate tantrum” Kimberly Wolfe, a delivery app driver in Seattle who fought for the wage law with an advocacy group called Working Washington, isn’t buying it. “These guys are doing what I call a corporate tantrum,” she tells Vox. “They’re just cutting off their nose to spite their face.” What apps take from restaurants and customers To be sure, delivery apps are convenient. For this ease of use, customers are painfully up-charged. Menu prices are almost always more expensive than ordering directly from restaurants. Then there are the line-item fees that appear on the receipt. There’s the delivery fee, but also the frustratingly generic “service fee” that could cover anything from keeping the apps’ servers up to paying their drivers. The letter sent by Sens. Warren, Casey and Luján notes that US lawmakers demanded more transparency on these fees last February too — but the responses from DoorDash and Uber provided little clarity, according to the new April 16 letter. The letter also points out how fees have ballooned alongside executive compensation: in 2020, DoorDash CEO Tony Xu was the highest paid CEO in Silicon Valley with a pay package worth $413 million. DoorDash charges a 15 percent service fee that starts at a $3 minimum. Uber Eats charges an unspecified service fee that depends on basket size. Browsing Grubhub in Seattle, I loaded a sample $62 food order and was levied a $14 service fee. Then add the taxes and tip. For the privilege of having a meal delivered to your home — something pizza and Chinese restaurants have done for at least half a century — you might find yourself paying nearly double the cost of just the food. For restaurants, there’s a price as well. For the privilege of being found in the apps’ centralized hubs, apps can swipe as much as 30 percent of an order’s subtotal from restaurants, even collecting a commission on pickup orders. That’s if diners choose them over the influx of ghost kitchens and promoted partners. Much attention has been paid to the fact that delivery apps aren’t profitable, or were on a long road to becoming profitable — but that’s in large part because they chose to invest aggressively in growth over being in the black at the end of the year. Last year, DoorDash’s profit margin was nearly 49 percent. Even after deducting a bunch of its biggest expenses, including driver pay, Uber’s delivery segment pocketed $1.5 billion, an increase of 173 percent from 2022. Out of $8.6 billion in revenue in 2023, DoorDash spent almost $2 billion on sales and marketing, and another billion on R&D. It also spent $750 million last year buying back its own stock, a move often used by corporations to boost stock value. Uber has also long poured money into sales and marketing, which includes things like promotions and discounts, as well as R&D, in order to grow. This year, the company is preparing to shell out a cool $7 billion on stock buybacks. What (little) apps provide to delivery workers While customers find themselves paying $9-plus service fees on a delivery order, the worker handing you the food might only get a few dollars, all while paying for their own vehicle and fuel. Wolfe recalls how paltry some of the payouts were before the Seattle wage law, when she would see $2 to $3 for an order before tips. In May 2022, Working Washington aggregated data from over 400 delivery jobs in the Seattle area and found that restaurant delivery workers were making on average $8.71 per hour after deducting basic expenses such as gas, which was far below the city’s 2022 minimum hourly wage of $17.27. During a Working Washington protest at City Hall in 2022, paper bags with receipts showing how much a worker had made on a delivery order were put on display. “There were quite a few that were negative,” says Wolfe. “Once you figured expenses and all that, you were basically paying them to deliver.” A 2022 study from NYC’s Department of Consumer and Worker Protection (DCWP) found that, after expenses, food delivery workers in the city were making an average of $11.12 per hour — again, sub-minimum wages. Crucially, customer tips made up about half of a delivery driver’s total earnings before expenses. (Data from Solo, which makes software for app-based gig workers, shows that tips make up a similar proportion of pay in Seattle.) A more recent report on the adopted minimum pay projected that drivers’ annual earnings after expenses (and accounting for the common practice of working for multiple apps) would rise from $11,970 in 2021 to $32,500 by 2025. Yet this calculation relies on a key assumption: that customers would keep tipping about the same amount as before the wage law. It’s hard to imagine that tipping rates in Seattle and NYC would stay the same given that the apps have added friction to the process. On both DoorDash and Uber Eats in these two cities, the tipping prompt now comes up after delivery, not at checkout, when diners are less likely to engage with the app. On GrubHub, the option to tip at checkout is still available, but many NYC-area restaurants on the platform now show lower default tipping options that max out at 12 percent. (Of course, a customer can still input a custom amount.) “After the minimum wage started, I would be on the apps and after two hours it would lock me out” It has also likely gone down because deliveries have gone down. While a spokesperson for the DCWP told StreetsBlog that “mass lockouts” were not occurring, some workers in NYC report that the apps are now locking them out, restricting the number of hours they work. Justice for App Workers, a coalition of rideshare and delivery workers, held a rally in front of New York’s city hall on March 27 to demand that the city address the lockouts. Food delivery workers are saying that they’re “unable to work for hours and days on end,” according to a statement released by the group. Bimal Ghale, a delivery worker in New York who is part of the Justice for App Workers group, told Vox through an interpreter that he used to work five to six hours at a time. “After the minimum wage started, I would be on the apps and after two hours it would lock me out,” he says. “The apps claim the area isn’t busy.” But Ghale is still delivering in the same neighborhoods he did before the new pay law, and the DCWP has also stated that orders have “remained steady.” An Uber spokesperson said that the city had known workers’ access to apps would become limited due to the new hourly pay rule. “Since the rule went into effect, nearly 6,000 couriers have lost access to the platform, nearly 20,000 people are on the waitlist to work on the app,” the spokesperson said. Since last December, when the pay rule went into effect in NYC, at least 500 complaints have been lodged with the DCWP alleging that apps aren’t following it. A DCWP spokesperson told Vox that the department was monitoring compliance. In Seattle, DoorDash has slapped a $4.99 regulatory fee on all orders, and in NYC it charges an extra $1.99. It’s unclear how these meaningfully differ from the catchall service fee, a portion of which can also cover worker pay — except that the labeling points the finger at the law for higher prices. DoorDash’s regulatory response fees are meant to cover the costs of new regulations. The DCWP estimates that if apps passed on only half of their labor costs to consumers, instead of all of it, they would still pocket $232 million a year in revenue. It’s not a given that the apps have to charge us more to pay their workers better. A new report released by advocacy group Working Washington claims to shed some light on how these fees might be divvied up. By comparing customer receipts and driver pay for 31 delivery orders placed since Seattle’s new minimum pay law was implemented, the group estimated that only about half of the fees DoorDash charges customers and restaurants went to workers. The report alleges that the company could ax the $4.99 regulatory fee and still retain a 30 percent margin on each order. DoorDash says that these calculations are inaccurate. “This is misinformation being sold as a ‘report’ — full of outrageous claims, exaggerations, and in many cases outright fabrications meant to deceive the public and policymakers,” a spokesperson told Vox, noting that the flat regulatory fee helps “offset only some of the costs associated with this burdensome law.” “As we have long said, if costs can be reduced through compromise legislation, we will look at all ways to reduce costs for consumers,” the spokesperson continued. Apps cry that their hands are tied Not long after the pay law went into effect, DoorDash published a blog claiming that Seattle businesses had already lost over $1 million in revenue and that workers were making less because orders on the platform had dropped. Grubhub’s write-up on the law’s adverse effects claims that tips are down 26 percent, with no mention of the fact that many of its Seattle-area merchants now show a lower range of tipping options — a tactic the company has used before. None of these tactics are new. Just look at what happened in California after the passage of a ballot initiative called Proposition 22 a few years ago, which allowed app-based gig work companies like Uber and DoorDash to classify their workers as independent contractors, saving them a lot of money. In exchange, they agreed to pay 120 percent of the minimum wage for every hour of trip time — as in, time spent logged on the app, waiting for a ride or for an order to appear, would not count. App companies spent hundreds of millions of dollars backing Prop 22, even threatening to pull out of California if it failed to pass. They also warned that, without Prop 22, prices would go up for customers. A month after the successful vote, delivery apps announced fee increases anyway. The math doesn’t add up. On the one hand, delivery apps play up the fact that they’re just intermediaries helping facilitate the sale or delivery of a product — they’re not employers, who would be on the hook for far greater payroll taxes and other employment costs than what apps currently pay. On the other hand, they command a steep price from restaurants and customers for matchmaking, of which the workers only see a narrow slice. The apps don’t make the food taste better, or deliver faster, and it’s obviously not cheaper. So who, exactly, benefits from their existence? What do they really add to the tangle of relationships we call the economy? If app companies leave cities like Seattle and New York to avoid having to pay higher labor costs, who would lose? Wolfe doesn’t seem worried. Her thinking is that if they can’t run a competent business, perhaps they shouldn’t be in business. “Don’t let the door hit you,” she says. “Because you want capitalism — baby, that’s capitalism.” Update, April 26, 10:35 am ET: This story was originally published on April 2 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with a new report that claims to reveal how much of DoorDash’s fees goes to paying workers.

Preview: Carolyn Fong/The Washington Post via Getty Images Harvard dishonesty researcher Francesca Gino faked her research. But she still has a lot to teach us. When it is alleged that a scientist has manipulated data behind their published papers, there’s an important but miserable project ahead: looking through the rest of their published work to see if any of that is fabricated as well. After dishonesty researcher Francesca Gino was placed on leave at Harvard Business School last fall following allegations that four of her papers contained manipulated data, the people who’d co-authored other papers with her scrambled to start double-checking their published works. Gino was a prolific researcher, and with 138 papers now called into question and more than 143 people who had co-authored with her, it proved a challenge to find who handled what data — so six co-authors began to work through each paper to systematically make public how the data was collected and who had custody of it. Their work was organized as the Many Co-Authors Project. The group was undeterred by Gino suing all of her accusers last summer, as well as by her condemnation of the project as unfair (“it inadvertently creates an opportunity for others to pin their own flawed studies or data anomalies on me,” she wrote). But their work provides a window into what kinds of manipulations and errors might make it past peer review until they come under heightened scrutiny — and raises in its own way a broader problem with our current research system. Based on the group’s work, it looks plausible that the data manipulation for which Gino is under fire is not contained to the four papers that have already been retracted. For example, in this 2019 paper, many participants were disqualified for not paying attention to the instructions — but the participants who were disqualified were overwhelmingly ones whose results were contrary to the hypothesis. (Likely because of the litigation surrounding the charges against Gino, the authors are careful not to say outright that what they’ve seen is a surefire sign of fraud.) But papers like the 2019 one — where the data is available — are the exception, not the rule. For most of the papers, no one has access to the data, which leaves no way to determine whether manipulation occurred. In some cases, co-authors are wary of participating in the effort to find other sketchy studies, worried that their name will be tarnished by association if they find a fraudulent paper. With systematic fraud, transparency is the only way through. Without a serious reckoning, the discovery of data manipulation doesn’t undo the harm it caused to our understanding of the world. Even after a paper is retracted, it doesn’t mean that other research that relied on those findings becomes amended. Instead, new studies are built atop flawed research. That’s a problem for scientific inquiry. We need to do something more systematic about fraud There’s something simultaneously heartwarming and exasperating about stories of researchers across the globe coming together to check whether their published research was actually faked. Why is basic information such as “which co-author collected the data?” and “who has access to the raw data?” not included as part of the process of publishing papers? Why is the data itself not available by default, which allows for finding mistakes as well as fraud? And after many researchers have been accused of systematic fraud, why is there still no process for systematically looking for problems in research? This is one of Gino’s complaints about the Many Co-Authors Project. “Like all scholars, I am interested in the truth. But auditing only my papers actively ignores a deeper reflection for the field,” she wrote. “Why is it that the focus of these efforts is solely on me?” The focus is on her for a good reason, but I do think that the Many Co-Authors Project is a symptom of a broken system. Even once a researcher is suspected of fraud, no institution is responsible for reviewing the work they’ve published and how it might affect the literature. Richard Van Noorden reported in Nature last year about what happens when a researcher is well-known to have fabricated data: “A more recent example is that of Yoshihiro Sato, a Japanese bone-health researcher. Sato, who died in 2016, fabricated data in dozens of trials of drugs or supplements that might prevent bone fracture. He has 113 retracted papers, according to a list compiled by the website Retraction Watch.” So what happened to other work that relied on Sato’s? For the most part, the retractions haven’t propagated; work that relied on Sato’s is still up: “His work has had a wide impact: researchers found that 27 of Sato’s retracted RCTs had been cited by 88 systematic reviews and clinical guidelines, some of which had informed Japan’s recommended treatments for osteoporosis. Some of the findings in about half of these reviews would have changed had Sato’s trials been excluded.” Journals do not consider themselves responsible for following up when they retract papers to see if other papers that cite those papers should be affected, or to check if other papers published by the same author have similar problems. Harvard doesn’t consider itself to have this responsibility. Co-authors may or may not consider themselves to have this responsibility. It’s as if we treat every case of fraud in isolation, instead of acknowledging that science builds on other science and that fraud rots those foundations. Some easy principles for reform I’ve written before that we should do a lot more about scientific fraud in general. But it seems like a particularly low bar to say that we should do more to, when a person is demonstrated to have manipulated data, check the rest of their work and get it retracted if needed. Even this low bar, though, is only being met due to the unpaid and unrewarded work of people who happened to notice the problem — and some of them have been sued for it. Here’s what could happen instead: Data about which co-author conducted the research and who has access to the raw data should be included as a matter of course as part of the paper submission process. This information is crucial to evaluating any problems with a paper, and it would be easy for journals to simply ask for it for every paper. Then you wouldn’t need a project like the Many Co-Authors Project — the data they’re attempting to collect would be available to everyone. Nonprofits, the government, or concerned citizens could fund an institution that followed up on evidence of data manipulation to make sure that manipulated results no longer poison the literature they’re a part of, especially in cases like medical research where peoples’ lives are at stake. And the law could protect people who do this essential research by making it faster to dismiss lawsuits over legitimate scientific criticism. Gino sued her critics, which is likely contributing to the slowness of reevaluations of her other work. But she was only able to do that because she lived in Massachusetts — in some states, so-called anti-SLAPP provisions help get quick dismissal of a lawsuit that suppresses protected speech. Part of the saga of Francesca Gino is that Massachusetts has a very weak anti-SLAPP law, and so all of the work to correct the scientific record takes place under the looming threat of such a lawsuit. In a state with better anti-SLAPP protections, she’d have to make the case for her research to her colleagues instead of silencing her critics. It is very much possible to do better when it comes to scientific fraud. The irony is that Gino’s research and the controversy surrounding it may well still end up having a long-lasting legacy in teaching us about dishonesty and how to combat it. A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!

Preview: JoJo Siwa performs at Miami Beach Pride Festival on April 14, 2024. | Sean Drakes/Getty Images Is the massive backlash against the former child star justified? It’s a Hollywood cliche, but unfortunately true, that talented children rarely have it easy transitioning their careers into adulthood, much less transitioning to adulthood themselves. The recent string of controversies around Dance Moms-kid-turned-pop-star JoJo Siwa, however, reminds us that rebranding from a child star to a mature one isn’t easy — especially if your “brand” was perhaps never fully understood to begin with. Since Siwa started promoting her new single “Karma” over a month ago, the backlash from fans and haters alike has been virtually nonstop. Audiences have trashed her for everything from allegedly “stealing” the song itself (she didn’t) to getting too sexual in the music video, which went viral in part due to the outrage over a scene in which she dry-humps another woman. (She did warn us it wouldn’t be kid-friendly.) All of this outrage is simultaneously more and less complicated than it looks on the surface. On the one hand, Siwa is yet another young star who’s had trouble putting an end to the aura of their childhood cuteness, and who’s being perceived as “trying too hard to shock us” with a rebrand many seem to view as crass and over-sexualized. On the other hand, the controversy seems to suggest that there’s a limit to what kind of public queerness we’re comfortable with — especially regarding queer women. On top of all this, there’s an arguably separate conversation about the actually offensive things Siwa has allegedly done and said — a series of missteps, bad business decisions, and profound failures to read the proverbial room that can’t be ignored. Siwa’s promotion of “Karma” has already dealt her plenty of backlash JoJo Siwa has long been a fixture of competitive reality TV thanks to her striking personality, nimble dancing, and perhaps most famously, her collection of big bright hair bows, made by her mom. Siwa joined the Dance Moms universe in 2013, when Dance Moms instructor Abby Lee Miller, who ran the show’s focal dance studio, highlighted her as a guest dancer on the spinoff series Abby’s Ultimate Dance Competition. She joined the main show in its fourth season the following year, then rode the reality dance show wave through the rest of her adolescence and early adulthood. Siwa grew her fanbase through YouTube via her XOMG POP! channel. Her hit 2016 single “Boomerang,” released when Siwa was almost 13, currently sits just shy of 1 billion views. The video sees her sporting her trademark bows and fully embracing her ice-cream-colored teen girl bubble-pop era. On the strength of its success, Siwa signed a lucrative deal with Nickelodeon in 2017 to do similar work aimed at Nickelodeon’s target audience of preteens — leading Siwa to helm an “empire” of children’s programming that netted her an estimated $20 million over the years. In 2020, Time named Siwa, at 17, one of its 100 most influential people. Siwa’s Nickelodeon era plays like an extended Hannah Montana remix of fully kid-themed, ditzy pop. Simultaneously, however, and a little incongruously, she continued her dance show career, using it to help her transition toward more adult mediums: She featured as a singing, dancing T-Rex on the third season of The Masked Singer in 2020. After casually coming out in a tweet in 2021, she competed on Dancing With the Stars in its 30th season, dancing to upbeat queer anthems like “Born This Way” as part of a historic same-sex dance team. The last two seasons of So You Think You Can Dance have seen Siwa joining the show as a somewhat controversial judge. You might expect that with that much influence and popularity and the ability to leverage her dancing skills into an ongoing career, Siwa would have relatively little problem transitioning out of her Nickelodeon phase. But therein lies the problem: The image she’s trying out now is, depending on who you talk to, either a step too far removed from that earlier spunky kid for many fans to take, or not far enough — just “Disney with cuss words,” as one X user put it. “Child stars and celebrities embody not only our culture’s ideals of childhood, but also demonstrate how contradictory those ideals actually are,” Djoymi Baker, who researches child stars as a media and cinema studies lecturer for RMIT University in Melbourne, told Vox in an email. “Child celebrities are expected to act as if they are not getting older, and maintain a child-like innocence or face public outrage.” With “Karma,” the outrage at Siwa seemed to peak. Siwa’s “Karma” music video released on April 5, yet due to the incendiary previews of a fully sexualized Siwa, it was drawing backlash well before its release. The general consensus was that Siwa was trying too hard to perform a hyper-sexualized, raunchy caricature of her own queerness — and the actual video only seemed to confirm that view. Highlights include Siwa’s much-mocked choreography and a sequence in which Siwa makes out with a series of different women, set to lyrics about infidelity and reaping what you sow. The public’s general distaste for Siwa’s “Karma” persona involved debates about authenticity and whether her style is really “her” — a conversation that soon extended to controversy over the song itself and whether it’s also really “hers.” Things kicked off when Siwa claimed to invent a subgenre of music that already existed. “I want to start a new genre of music,” she told Billboard on April 5, “called ‘gay pop.’” She then went on to list example songs like Lady Gaga’s “Applause” and her own version of “Karma,” prompting many people to respond by noting both the long history of queer pop artists and the long existence of the music she claimed to want to “start.” She quickly corrected the statement, telling TMZ less than a week later that she “definitely [was] not the inventor” of the style, but rather wanted to “be a piece in making it bigger than it already is.” By the time Siwa walked back that unfortunate statement, however, the hostility toward her had already calcified. On April 12, artist Lil Tay slammed Siwa on Twitter, noting that she “didn’t buy the song [her 2023 single “SUCKER 4 GREEN”] or hire a ghostwriter,” implying that Siwa had. It’s true that Siwa didn’t write “Karma,” but rather picked up a new production of an old track. According to Siwa, she was pitched an old song that had been recorded by previous artists, including Miley Cyrus, who never released it. Although it’s a completely pedestrian thing for artists to release previously unreleased or little-known tracks, most of those artists hadn’t recently claimed to be inventing something new, and the backlash that settled on Siwa was ferocious. As part of the virality of the outrage, fans discovered singer Brit Smith’s 2012 version of “Karma” and boosted its sales, pushing the artist to a surprise No. 1 spot on Billboard’s electronic digital chart, all while Siwa’s version failed to even reach the Hot 100. Lil Tay’s “SUCKER” also got a boost, passing a milestone of 5 million Spotify streams amid all the noise over Siwa. That doesn’t mean the reception to “Karma” has been fully negative, however: Siwa’s version did open across multiple ranking charts, and she played to a crowd of over 50,000 at the Miami Beach Pride Festival on April 14, performing “Karma” for enthusiastic fans and reportedly breaking audience records. Still, the sheer level of the public’s anger toward Siwa suggests that something deeper is happening. It might stem from the career growing pains of a young adult making young adult mistakes, but part of it seems to boil down to a fundamental misunderstanding of Siwa herself. Siwa’s “rebrand” arguably isn’t that much different from her original brand During her time on Dance Moms, Siwa was portrayed as colorful, loud, opinionated, “obnoxious, [and] sometimes rude.” Siwa channeled that energy into her performances, which usually reflected an edgy personality and powerful, athletic dancing. The bows she always wore, followed by her Nickelodeon era, may have given audiences the false impression of Siwa as forever innocent, stuck in arrested development as a preteen. Writing for Vogue in 2021, Emma Specter argued Siwa had “built a brand off of the kind of glittery, bow-festooned femininity that is typically reserved for straight women” — a brand that her coming-out, especially at the young age of just 17, worked to subvert. But in fact, there’s really not much difference between one of Siwa’s early dance routines and her current much-touted “rebrand.” It’s not a stretch, for example, to see the girl who performed a tongue-wagging “Electricity” trotting out a KISS homage for an awards show. Abby Lee Miller herself recognized Siwa’s underlying consistency when she reacted to “Karma” on TikTok. “Everyone’s making such a big deal about the rebrand,” she noted. “I think it’s JoJo with paint on her face and a fabulous costume. It’s always been JoJo.” On the other hand, the backlash to this aesthetic has resurfaced some not-so-good things Siwa has actually done. Though Siwa is only 20, the list of her controversies and allegedly offensive behavior would be notable for a star at any age — everything from marketing a makeup line that was recalled for containing asbestos, to allegedly helping create an abusive work environment for members of her failed pop group XOMG POP!, to defending and continuing to be friends with disgraced YouTuber Colleen Ballinger after Ballinger allegedly engaged her underaged fans in inappropriate sexual exchanges. Though some of these claims and allegations aren’t necessarily Siwa’s fault, many seem completely avoidable — like the time a white child dancer was asked to don brown monkey makeup for her 2020 music video “Nonstop.” Responding to backlash over the alleged blackface, Siwa doubled down rather than apologizing. That’s more or less her MO for these situations — forging ahead rather than wasting time asking for forgiveness. And while there’s a huge difference between an adult putting a kid in blackface and a 17-year-old Siwa doing it, she’s old enough to know better, and this sort of behavior has caused Siwa’s notoriety to surpass her fame. Still, none of these controversies were what caused such deep public outrage in the days since “Karma” was released, and it’s hard not to think that this negative response ultimately boils down to a mismatch of expectations between Siwa’s extended public audience and the core queer audience to whom she’s performing. It’s hard not to compare Siwa’s fairly tame performance of queer sexuality in “Karma” to Lil Nas X’s wildly successful “Montero” music video. Both were the entries of established pop stars into a queer space, claiming their recently announced sexualities through raunchy, glittery, erotic performances. “Montero” saw Lil Nas X riding a stripper pole and giving the literal devil a lap dance before crowning himself the king of hell. By comparison, “Karma” is milder and murkier: Siwa uses the muddled metaphor of a sea monster emerging from the ocean to illustrate the anxieties of a girl who can’t choose between any of the beautiful women in her orbit. Admittedly, “Montero” is a lot more fun, full of far more creative and inventive artistry; yet it’s hard not to wonder if the vast difference between the public’s glee and delight in “Montero” and its disdain and derision for Siwa’s “Karma” is ultimately about a misogynistic refusal to let female pop stars grow up — at least without forcing them into rigid parameters of what that adulthood looks like. “The child star brand of innocence has historically been quite specific,” Baker said. “It is predominantly white, able-bodied, cis-gendered, and ostensibly asexual, with an expectation that growing up will be both heteronormative and yet as non-sexual as possible, particularly for women. This pattern has been seen again and again, with female child stars such as Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.” Baker pointed out that the Siwa backlash closely mirrors the backlash her teen pop predecessor Miley Cyrus received a decade ago, at the same age of 20, after twerking with Robin Thicke in 2013 — a move for which Cyrus recently confessed she “carried some guilt and shame.” “I was creating attention for myself because I was dividing myself from a character I had played,” Cyrus told British Vogue last year. “Anyone, when you’re 20 or 21, you have more to prove. ‘I’m not my parents.’ ‘I am who I am.’” Baker noted that Siwa has called Cyrus her “number one idol” for making the transition to an adult brand. A good deal of the criticism Cyrus faced in 2013 focused on the racially insensitive cultural appropriation of her twerking. Yet Baker also observed that both women’s queerness, and their performance of that queerness against their earlier sanitized child-star images, may have amplified the backlash they received. “That Cyrus is pansexual and Siwa is lesbian means they do not fit into the restrictive ideals of childhood, the child star, or growing up that still dominate,” she said. After all, apart from Siwa claiming her sexuality, just about everything else about her aesthetic is the same — she’s still colorful, opinionated, and backed by innumerable sparkly outfits. It’s somewhat ironic, then, that “Karma” has provoked such conversations about authenticity. Love her or hate her, the JoJo we have now was arguably the JoJo we had all along.

Preview: A month after a higher state minimum wage for fast-food workers went into effect, consumers picking up burgers and burritos at chains in the Golden State grapple with prices rising at a faster clip than in other states.

Preview: Despite overcapacity, government officials keep supporting automakers, unleashing “new productive forces” and adding to trade tensions.

Preview: The missile supplier built a factory in Utah to produce a key chemical. So far it has struggled to take off.

Preview: How the company will make lower-price EVs remains murky, but investors seem OK—for now.

Preview: The new CEO  explains his lifestyle and his company’s approach to ketchup and Lunchables

Preview: The doom loop is over. Now it’s a boom loop. But after the city revived itself, can Detroit rebrand itself?

Preview: The oil companies are still printing big profits, but their postpandemic run of record earnings is slowing down.

Preview: The movie-theater chain said the Hollywood writers and actors strikes from last year had dragged on box office returns.

Preview: The White House is reversing course after weighing the health benefits of the ban against the political risk of angering Black voters.

Preview: The board is considering installing a committee of top executives to run the company on an interim basis as turmoil over sale talks deepens.

Preview: The New York Jets traded down and got a protector.

Preview: Jesse Winker hit a grand slam in the fifth inning, one of three Washington home runs, and the Nationals beat the Miami Marlins 11-4 on Saturday.

Preview: Every year leading up to the the NFL draft, Bills general manager Brandon Beane reminds everyone there's no guarantee of filling the team's biggest needs in the early rounds because he's fixed on following Buffalo's draft board.

Preview: State Rep. Phil Lyman was selected as the Utah Republican gubernatorial nominee at the party's convention Saturday, though political observers say incumbent Gov. Spencer Cox remains the likely favorite in the upcoming primary.

Preview: Several hundred pro-Palestinian protesters, descended on a Washington hotel Saturday where President Biden was speaking to the annual White House Correspondents Dinner.

Preview: Columbia University has been accused of being soft on anti-Israel student demonstrators, but school officials did boot a student who declared that "Zionists don't deserve to live."

Preview: Nine players have already scored for the New York Rangers and Edmonton Oilers, 10 for the Colorado Avalanche.

Preview: The Kansas City Chiefs plan to explore options that include leaving Arrowhead Stadium after voters in Jackson County, Missouri, soundly rejected a sales tax initiative that would have helped to pay for renovations to the 52-year-old building.

Preview: Harvey Weinstein's lawyer said Saturday that the onetime movie mogul has been hospitalized for a battery of tests after his return to New York City following an appeals court ruling nullifying his 2020 rape conviction.

Preview: Vice President Kamala Harris likes to laugh, and knows that people make fun of it.

Preview: PIERRE, SD — After Governor Kristi Noem caught her puppy playfully barking at the mailman today, she broke out her 12-gauge shotgun and apologized for what was about to happen.

Preview: WASHINGTON, D.C. — Dr. Anthony Fauci has come out as a major supporter of Governor Kristi Noem after learning that she, too, is a puppy murderer.

Preview: NEW YORK, NY — In a dramatic entrance that left onlookers both baffled and concerned for their immediate safety, Congresswoman Ilhan Omar descended from the skies above the Columbia University campus via paraglider, ready to lead the charge in the latest round of protests.

Preview: ELAH VALLEY — A young boy named David has found himself under intense scrutiny and condemnation for his alleged violence against a kindly Palestinian giant named Goliath. Those critical of the young boy's action call this yet another tragic case of disproportionate force and cultural insensitivity.

Preview: GAZA — Israel announced its complete withdrawal from the Gaza Strip after learning this morning of a protest from a 19-year-old Fine Arts major at Northwestern University named Roxy Barnett.

Preview: Upon hearing the news that the Onion had been sold off yet again this past week, the Babylon Bee has decided to step in and help the floundering satire site by lending them one of its two jokes.

Preview: The Transportation Department issued a new rule requiring airlines provide customers with automatic cash refunds in the event of flight cancellations or significant delays, saving passengers a projected $500 million in the next year. What do you think? Read more...

Preview: NEW GLARUS, WI—Tsking her tongue with envy as she put the finishing touches on her teen’s at-home hairstyling, local mom Sandra Bennett told reporters Friday that she was pretty jealous of all the dick her daughter was going to pull with those highlights. “Honestly, I’m happy knowing what these dirty blond… Read more...

Preview: President Biden signed a bill into law banning TikTok nationwide unless the Chinese company that owns it, ByteDance, sells its stake in the app within a year. What do you think? Read more...

Preview: CHICAGO—Standing with the bride amid joyful tears from all present, heart transplant recipient Ronald Huger recently honored a dying wish from his donor when he walked the late pig’s daughter down the aisle at her wedding, sources confirmed Friday. “Your father wrote a letter before he passed away asking that whoever… Read more...

Preview: Recent reports have indicated that a number of female fans are thirsting over the Ghoul. The Onion asked women to explain why they are attracted to Walton Goggins’ mutant character in the new TV series Fallout, and this is what they said. Read more...

Preview: This uniquely shaped home made of bio-based materials hangs from the eaves of someone else’s garage so you won’t have to pay any property taxes. Must share with thousands of current residents. Read more...

Preview: WICHITA, KS—Complaining that the holidays had ended four months ago, annoyed local shoppers told reporters Friday that Towne West Square still hadn’t removed its now-rotting Santa Claus from a seasonal display in the mall. “He looked nice when they first put him there, right after Thanksgiving, but now that he’s all… Read more...

Preview: Today, billions of readers like yourself navigated to The Onion seeking dispatches from America’s Finest News Source. Like so many have done through the decades, you doubtless entered the hyperlink in a glazed stupor, hoping to see reporting of grave importance. However, today, this was not to be. You see, The Onion is… Read more...

Preview: Rather than specify that a government, army, or police officer killed civilians, many news outlets prefer merely to say that those civilians “were killed.” The Onion investigates the pros and cons of using the passive voice in journalism. Read more...

Preview: PHILADELPHIA—Triumphantly punching through the air as they dodged an imaginary foe, the shadowboxing nation confirmed this week that they had just rewatched 1979’s Rocky II. “God, the part where Rocky’s training right-handed instead of southpaw—oh, and then the chicken-chasing scene! Man, young Sly always hits… Read more...