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: Biden pardons Fauci and Milley in an effort to guard against potential ‘revenge’ by Trump  The Associated Press Biden Issues Pre-Emptive Pardons to Guard Against Trump’s Reprisals  The New York Times Biden issues preemptive pardons for Milley, Fauci and Jan. 6 committee members  CNN Biden pardons Fauci, Cheney and Jan. 6 panel ahead of Trump inauguration  Axios Live updates: Donald Trump’s 2025 Inauguration Day  PBS NewsHour

Preview: Trump Inauguration Live: Executive orders in focus, Biden pardons Fauci and others  Reuters Trump Inauguration Live Updates: Donald and Melania Prepare to Kick Off Long Day of Inaugural Events  PEOPLE Trump to Be Sworn In as 47th President: Inauguration Live Updates  The New York Times How to watch Donald Trump's presidential inauguration  CBS News What to know for Trump's inauguration. And, a Civil Rights icon remembers MLK Jr.  NPR

Preview: In photos: First Israeli hostages, Palestinian prisoners released in ceasefire  Axios As Cease-Fire Takes Hold, Gazans Return to Destroyed Homes: Israel-Hamas War Live Updates  The New York Times Gaza ceasefire brings hope but aid workers warn of major hurdles ahead  CNN 'Sunshine': 3 Israeli hostages are free after 471 days in captivity. Here's who they are  USA TODAY Gaza ceasefire and first hostage and prisoner releases bring Palestinians and Israelis some joy and hope  CBS News

Preview: Trump promised dozens of actions on immigration on Day 1. Here's what we know  NPR Trump’s team outlines suite of executive orders to top lawmakers ahead of his first day as president  CNN Trump to deploy military to border, end Biden parole policies in flurry of Day One executive orders  Fox News How do Donald Trump’s executive orders compare to all other US presidents?  Al Jazeera English Biden-era policies on the Trump 2.0 chopping block  Axios

Preview: Trump takes victory lap, thrills MAGA crowd at pre-inauguration rally  POLITICO Trump Celebrates in Washington at Rally Laced With Exaggerations and Falsehoods  The New York Times Key lines from Trump’s inauguration eve rally in Washington  Yahoo! Voices Village People founder says everybody can enjoy their music, Republican or Democrat  NPR Fact check: Trump makes false claims about his 2024 victory, the 2020 election, immigration and more at DC rally  CNN

Preview: Southern California faces most urgent warning for strong winds, extreme fire danger  Los Angeles Times Los Angeles will face another round of fire-fueling Santa Ana winds this week  CNN Southern California Is Poised for More Damaging and Dangerous Winds  The New York Times Increased fire risk to accompany Santa Ana winds' return  NBC Los Angeles In the calm before new fire warnings, SoCal emergency responders dig in for a ground war  Los Angeles Times

Preview: Over 75% of the US expected to face freezing temperatures this week as rare winter storm barrels toward the South  CNN Northeast: Winter Storm Demi To Dump Snow  The Weather Channel Video Snow storm and low temperatures slams Northeast  ABC News Massachusetts snow brings treacherous road conditions. But there is some good news.  CBS Boston Millions across the US brace for plummeting temperatures and winter storms  Turn to 10

Preview: Is the Stock Market Open Today? Here Are the Trading Hours for Martin Luther King Jr. Day. and Inauguration Day.  Barron's What’s open, closed on MLK Day and Inauguration Day  CNN Is there mail on MLK Day? What to know about 2025 USPS holiday schedule  NBC New York Is the stock market open or closed on MLK Day 2025? See holiday schedule  USA TODAY Are banks, post offices open on Martin Luther King Jr. Day? See what's closed on Monday  Austin American-Statesman

Preview: January 20 Weather Cold Weather Advisory And Gulf Coast Snowstorm  Just In Weather As Brutal Cold Settles Across U.S., Gulf Coast Braces for Rare Winter Storm  The New York Times Could Florida get snow? Winter Storm Watch issued for part of the state  FOX 13 Tampa Bitter cold grips much of the US as South braces for a rare winter storm  USA TODAY Potentially historic winter storm could cripple parts of Deep South  The Washington Post

Preview: Living Through the Fires, and Covering Them  The New York Times “It Was Kind of Apocalyptic”: BC Students Lose Homes and Communities in California Wildfires  The Heights ‘This is a nightmare’: STU student from L.A. watches as fatal wildfires burn on  The Aquinian Elon in Los Angeles grapples with effects of California fires  Elon News Network ‘It Was All Very Sudden’: Harvard Affiliates Displaced by L.A. Fires  Harvard Crimson

Preview: Donald Trump's campaign team attempted to troll the outgoing president on social media.

Preview: Donald Trump's niece said she takes "comfort in the knowledge" of one thing.

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Preview: The New York Times journalist also predicted what's to come from the anti-immigration hard-liner during Donald Trump's second term.

Preview: Rep. Byron Donalds had an odd way of describing the president-elect.

Preview: "My goodness gracious," Harry Enten said of one particular polling detail on the outgoing president.

Preview: The musician said he was also surprised to be asked one thing by the president-elect.

Preview: Pope Francis put the incoming administration on blast over an expected mass deportation program.

Preview: Trump’s slate of orders will touch on many of his broad campaign promises, including vast changes to the border and environmental policy.

Preview: Southern Californians are bracing for gusty winds and a heightened risk of wildfires less than two weeks after deadly blazes that have killed at least 27 people and ravaged thousands of homes.

Preview: Donald Trump’s first inaugural address is often referred to as the “American Carnage” speech. His second speech, in the Capitol, shouldn't be graded on a curve.

Preview: Voters rejected the failed progressive Biden-Harris agenda. But GOP populists are pushing Trump to abandon many conservative principles.

Preview: I was a national security adviser to Vice President Mike Pence. I saw the chaos Trump caused for his own administration.

Preview: With just hours remaining, Joe Biden issued pardons for Mark Milley, Anthony Fauci, and several people related to the Jan. 6 investigation.

Preview: Joe Biden is considering pre-emptive pardons for some people who might be targeted by the Trump administration. Are those constitutional?

Preview: From prominent attendees (and absences) to performers, here’s what to expect from the inaugural events at the Capitol as Trump retakes office.

Preview: Donald Trump is hosting the TikTok CEO, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg at his inauguration today. This is a White House built around billionaires.

Preview: Today is inauguration day. It's also MLK Day, a federal holiday. And as Donald Trump takes the presidential oath, we must never stop resisting.

Preview: King’s commemoration and Donald Trump’s inauguration coinciding feels both off-brand and on-point in a country where progress and its backlash have always moved on parallel tracks.

Preview: Video shows the moment three Israeli hostages are exchanged in Gaza. A ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas went into effect in the Gaza Strip on Sunday morning, with the release of the first hostages and a halt to Israeli military operations.

Preview: Acting on the day he leaves office, President Biden used his executive clemency power to protect people targeted by his incoming successor, Donald J. Trump, who has vowed “retribution.”

Preview: Donald J. Trump is returning to the White House in a far stronger position. He’s facing a depleted opposition and a more compliant Congress. Jonathan Swan, a politics reporter for The New York Times, breaks down how President Trump overcame significant challenges to consolidate his power over the Republican Party and voters in the four years since he lost the 2020 presidential election.

Preview: Plus, women’s history on the National Mall.

Preview: Sunday’s delayed start to the truce was a minor problem compared with the difficult choices and American leverage needed to get both parties to the second phase, which could end the war.

Preview: The first phase of the cease-fire deal calls for the release of 33 hostages, including women, children, men over 50 and sick and wounded people. Three hostages were released on the first day of the deal.

Preview: China’s internet companies and their hard-working, resourceful professionals make world-class products, in spite of censorship and malign neglect by Beijing.

Preview: The app has repeatedly name checked the president-elect in pop-up messages and statements, as it navigates a ban in the United States unless it is sold to a non-Chinese owner.

Preview: The Chinese social media app, popular in the United States a week after being flooded by TikTok users, has added language translation features.

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Preview: Test your wits on the Slate Quiz for Jan. 20, 2025.

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Preview: President Joe Biden meets with President-elect Donald Trump in the Oval Office of the White House on November 13, 2024, in Washington, DC. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Support independent journalism that matters — become a Vox Member today. On Monday, just hours before leaving office, President Joe Biden announced that he pardoned several individuals who may be the targets of political prosecutions in the incoming Trump administration. Incoming President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened “retribution” against perceived enemies.  According to a statement from the White House, Biden’s pardons went to former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Mark Milley, former federal public health official Dr. Anthony Fauci, and “the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee” investigating the January 6, 2020 attack on the US Capitol, and “the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee.“ For more than 150 years, the Supreme Court has understood the president’s power to issue pardons as entirely within his discretion; typically, neither Congress nor the courts may intervene. Yet, while the Constitution permits Biden to pardon whoever he wants, such a pardon won’t necessarily protect its recipient from everything Trump or his allies in government might do to make life difficult for Trump’s perceived enemies. Current law provides that people who are pardoned receive broad legal protections against federal criminal charges. Any pardons Biden issued should be virtually invulnerable to a court challenge. In Ex parte Garland (1866), the Supreme Court held that the president’s pardon power is “unlimited,” except that the president cannot pardon impeachments. Under Garland, the pardon power “extends to every offence known to [federal] law, and may be exercised at any time after its commission, either before legal proceedings are taken or during their pendency, or after conviction and judgment.” It also is “not subject to legislative control.” There is always some risk that the current Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 Republican supermajority, will ignore precedent. But the idea that presidents get to decide who is pardoned and that courts do not get to second-guess those decisions is well-established and stretches back to at least the post-Civil War period. Three limits on Biden’s pardon power There actually are three very significant limits on the pardon power, however. A person pardoned by Biden might still be successfully targeted by Trump administration officials or Trump’s allies in state government. One is that, as the head of the federal government, Biden can only pardon federal crimes. So someone who receives a pardon from Biden (or any other sitting president) might still be prosecuted by state officials for offenses under state law. The Trump administration, in other words, could potentially lean on MAGA-friendly state prosecutors to target individuals who receive a federal pardon from Biden. It should be noted that state prosecutors should not be allowed to target a former federal official for something that official did pursuant to their duties as a federal employee.  The seminal Supreme Court case on this point, In re Neagle (1890), arose from a truly wild set of facts. Stephen Field, a justice of the US Supreme Court, had a longstanding feud with David Terry, a former chief justice of California. In 1889, while Field was eating breakfast at a train station in California, Terry approached and assaulted Field. Field’s bodyguard, a deputy US marshal named David Neagle, then shot and killed Terry. After California charged Neagle with murder, the US Supreme Court ruled that this prosecution must be dismissed. Neagle, the Court explained, was “acting under the authority of the law of the United States” when he killed Terry, and thus was “not liable to answer in the courts of California” for carrying out his official federal duties. Assuming the current Supreme Court honors its precedent in Neagle, in other words, former federal officials should be safe from prosecution for state crimes they allegedly committed while “acting under the authority of the United States.” So if a state were to target, say, former federal public health official Anthony Fauci over federal policies he pushed during the Covid-19 pandemic, he should be immune from that prosecution. The second limit on the pardon power is that, while Garland states that presidents may issue a pardon “at any time after” the pardon recipient allegedly committed a criminal act, the president may not prospectively pardon future acts. This means that anyone Biden pardoned could still be targeted in the Trump administration for anything they do after Biden leaves office. The third limit is that the pardon power has traditionally been understood to extend only to criminal offenses and not to civil lawsuits or other non-criminal investigations (although at least one scholar has argued that it should be extended to civil offenses).  Thus, while Biden could potentially shield Trump’s perceived enemies from federal criminal prosecutions, the Trump administration might still sue a pardoned individual for allegedly violating a civil statute. It could also potentially use non-criminal investigations, such as an IRS income tax audit, to target people Trump views as foes. Even if Trump’s enemies are ultimately exonerated, the federal government could still cause them an extraordinary amount of misery As a final point, it’s worth noting that lawyers are expensive. Anyone Biden might preemptively pardon, who is targeted by the federal government, could run up hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees even if the courts ultimately determine that this individual is both immune from prosecution and not liable for any civil offense. This is doubly true if the Trump administration manages to shunt any criminal proceeding or civil dispute against a pardoned individual into a MAGA-aligned judge’s courtroom, who might defy precedents like Garland or Neagle. While the Supreme Court may eventually intervene and declare the individual immune from prosecution or suit, that may not happen until after years of investigations and months of lower court proceedings. And, even if a federal investigation uncovers no illegal activity — or even no activity that the Trump administration can characterize as illegal in order to bring meritless charges — such an investigation might still uncover embarrassing or damaging information that could then be made public. Perhaps one of Trump’s perceived enemies is engaged in an extramarital affair. Or maybe they simply said something hurtful about a family member or business partner in an email they thought would remain private. The bottom line is that, if the federal government is determined to make your life miserable, it can probably achieve that goal very easily, even if you never spend a day behind bars.

Preview: A child looks at a tablet while sitting on the couch on May 28, 2022, in Berlin. | Annette Riedl/picture alliance via Getty Images How many times a day do you interact with devices?  If you’re anything like me, it’s impossible to count. You’re reading this article on a phone or a tablet or a laptop. Maybe you used the alarm on your Apple Watch to wake up. Maybe you listened to a podcast while you brushed your teeth. Maybe you used an app to check the bus schedule or find a parking spot. Maybe you scrolled Instagram in the back of the Uber ride to work. You get the point: Our lives have become increasingly — and perhaps irreversibly — mediated through our devices. Everywhere you look, there are screens between us and the world. This is a monumental change in the human condition, and it’s hard to appreciate just how significant it is when we’re all living through it. There are clearly trade-offs with every technology. The only sensible question we can ever ask is: Are the trade-offs in each case truly worth it? What are they adding to our lives and, more importantly, what are they taking away?  Christine Rosen is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and the author of a new book called The Extinction of Experience: Being Human in a Disembodied World. Rosen’s book is a meditation on what it means to be a fulfilled human being in a world defined by technology. She does a very good job of drawing our attention to the experiences we’re losing and making the case that we should resist these losses. I invited Rosen on The Gray Area to talk about what’s really changed in human life and if all the concern about the scope of these changes is justified. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. Sean Illing The book is about the disappearance of certain kinds of fundamental human experiences. So what do you think we’re losing?   Christine Rosen The one that I think is the most important is face-to-face interaction. We’re living in a world where we can actively choose not to look each other in the eye on a regular basis, not communicate with each other physically in person, in the same physical space. When we are forced into physical space, say waiting for the bus or walking around your neighborhood or town, you can tune everyone out by having earbuds in and paying attention to the screen that’s in your hand. You can actively dissociate from social physical spaces. And we all do it all the time. We do it in interstitial moments of time when we should maybe just let our minds wander. We do it when we interact in a consumer setting.  If you think about someone who works behind a cash register, and I interviewed and talked to a lot of people who do, they will say people aren’t very nice to each other anymore. The pleasantries that we think are expendable, inefficient, meaningless, they actually grease the wheels of our social interaction in a way that makes us able to all get along even with strangers in public space. And many of us are starting to develop habits of mind and behaviors that cultivate a preference for not being face-to-face, in each other’s presence. And that has serious long-term consequences for how we interact. Sean Illing What sort of consequences? Christine Rosen We’re hardwired evolutionarily to understand each other by reading each other’s physical cues: facial expressions first and foremost, but also hand gestures and tone of voice. Even just the way you position your body in space in relation to other people sends signals: I am not a threat. I am a threat. I want to belong. I want to connect or I want to be left alone or I’m perplexed, versus I’m angry. From a very young age children learn this by staring at human faces. So what happens when, for example, in the case of kids, instead of spending eight waking hours looking at their family members’ faces and learning from expression and tone of voice and just trying to figure all this out when they’re pre-verbal, they’re looking at an iPad with lots of very stimulating cartoons and images and bright colors. Well, they learn something from the iPad. We’re not always exactly sure what yet; that’s being studied. But they don’t learn how to read people’s facial expressions. If you go into kindergartens and classrooms now, you’ll see these charts with the smiley faces, frowny faces, perplexed faces, and it’s trying to teach kids to identify emotional expressions on other people’s faces. That exists in part because we’re not teaching that organically because we’re putting these mediating devices between kids and their natural curiosity and eagerness to watch other people. Even a FaceTime conversation is going to be qualitatively different than an in-person conversation. Does that mean if your grandparents live on the other side of the world, you shouldn’t FaceTime? Of course not. But it does mean we have to be very careful about replacing too much in-person interaction. Sociologists have long studied what it means when you refuse to respect the existence of another person in a public space. When you deliberately ignore them, when you look through them, for example, and there have been studies of looking through people versus acknowledging them. These tiny social rules seem inefficient, they seem unnecessary in such a fast-paced, high-tech world, but they are crucial for social capital building.  Sean Illing You write, “Behind the power we wield with our technologies is a timidity and aversion to risk.” What is that timidity? What are the risks you think we’re avoiding?  Christine Rosen Look, it’s really difficult to connect with another person whom you don’t know. It can even be difficult to connect with people you do know at certain levels. We have work friends, we have our family, we have our closest friendships and relationships, and our most intimate relationships with our partners. Going out into the world is a constant adventure. But before we didn’t really have a choice. Now, I think there’s a sort of threat assessment risk people make when they go out into the world of like, I don’t want to deal with people. People are difficult. And this is a true statement. People can be very challenging to deal with. But when we start to train ourselves in habits of mind where our expectations, because most of our time is spent avoiding things — making things seamless, efficient, convenient, which is what our technologies give us and promise us — then when we deal with other human beings who are inefficient, inconvenient, sometimes difficult, we have fewer skills for meeting them where they are. In that sense, the timidity is both fear and a general sense that it’s too much work to do all that. But the reason it’s hard is because it also makes us better people. It allows us to flourish in new ways. It allows us to develop, because by meeting people where they are and actually dealing with their sometimes difficult behavior and understanding our own behavior, we are better at being humans. And again, it might sound simplistic to say this, but we have to make the argument for why that’s important now, because the easier path is not to do it at all. Sean Illing There’s a good passage in there about Walter Benjamin, the famous Frankfurt scholar, and what he called a “poverty of experience” in the modern world. One of his critiques was that people increasingly preferred a kind of life where everything is solved in the simplest and most comfortable way. Did he have much of a theory about why that is?  Christine Rosen I think what he was saying is that because we are adaptable creatures, we think the adaptability will only go one way, which is that we’ll adapt to the new thing and then we’ll all be better. But remember, we adapt to the machine itself, and we risk becoming more machine-like in the way we behave. That is not an improvement if you’re a human being. We don’t want our relationships to be more machine-like, but everything about how we’re living our daily lives does reward more machine-like behavior. Sean Illing At what point do we cease to be machine-like and just become machines? Christine Rosen Well, I do think we’ve become more machine-like, and I think Exhibit A for that is the way that people’s sex lives have been transformed by pornography. Now, pornography has always existed. Humans have always created it, sought it out, enjoyed it. I’m not judging pornography, per se. But if you think about how young people, for example, talk about their sex lives these days, sex lives where far, far fewer of them are having sex than older generations and where they talk about it in machine-like terms, performative terms, in ways that actually have shaped their understanding of what an intimate sexual relationship even should be, what it should look like, what it should feel like. So that concerns me. The way we date people now, everybody finds everybody else online. And I know lots of very happy couples who met online. But when you’re generally assuming that you’ll know someone by a menu of options, think about how that makes us understand another human being who can be complicated, contradictory, self-delusional, as we ourselves all are. So it tries to make very smooth what we should understand as being quite rough and interesting. I think that the technological relationship that’s ideal for a lot of people these days is one where they don’t have to see each other much in person. If you talk to young people, they will tell you this. Because again, that’s the timidity, that’s the lack of risk-taking. It is really risky to try to connect to another human being. It is one of life’s great risks, but it also brings one of life’s greatest rewards when you do. Sean Illing There’s a long tradition of people fretting about new technologies and how they’re going to ruin everything. Hell, Socrates hated the technology of writing because he thought it would destroy our memories and oral culture. How do we know this is any different? How do we know this isn’t a good old-fashioned panic? Christine Rosen Sometimes we do have moral panics. That’s true. But to counter that, I would say, particularly in the United States, we’ve lacked an ability to distinguish between the new and the improved. You hear new and improved. That’s how every new thing is marketed, right? But quite frankly, if you study history, what you understand is that not every new thing is an improvement. Sometimes important things are destroyed by the “new thing.”  So in the context of our technology use, we’re having this debate right now with AI. Is AI a powerful tool that will bring a lot of good? For example, it can, working with a radiologist, read a radiological scan quicker and find things that the human eye can’t. That’s all for the good, right? But if that same AI is being deployed by an insurance company that thinks it shouldn’t have to provide human therapists for patients who actually need one-on-one therapy for their mental health challenges, but instead can just give them an AI chatbot, I don’t think that is an improvement. That is a degradation. So we have this tool and it’s being deployed in a way that actually doesn’t help a person. It makes their life more challenging while they’re still being told it’s an improvement because it’s the new thing. So that’s where we need to start making these moral choices. These are ethical choices in many ways that we often are hesitant to speak of in those terms, because we don’t want to be seen as Luddites, as oldsters. I joke that I’m a neo-Victorian at this point. But a lot of this is about values and virtues and ethics, words that we’re kind of uncomfortable even using in modern parlance, but in some ways speak to these intuitions, that speak to the unease that a lot of people feel right now about how we live our lives. Sean Illing Do you think a meaningful and fulfilling life is possible if a lot of it — or most of it — is lived virtually?  Christine Rosen That’s a big nope for me. And it’s important to understand that that vision of a life is precisely the one that a lot of people in Silicon Valley are promoting, selling, trying to enact. And their understanding of what a flourishing human life looks like is interesting in this respect. What they promote for most people is not the way they choose themselves to live. They don’t let their kids use the technology and the social media platforms that they sell to the rest of us. That we know. We’ve known that for a while. They do not get high on their own supply, nor do their children. Human interaction is rapidly becoming a luxury good for the wealthy, where they get concierge medicine with lots of human beings attending to their needs. They get a lot of one-on-one therapy. They get tutors for their kids who sit down with them for hours at a time. That is not what the people who can’t afford that get. They are getting the therapy chatbot. They are getting the online YouTube video to help the kid get through a struggling class because the public school can’t afford human tutors for them. Some of that’s about wealth, but it’s also about worldview. Who gets to set the standards for what a flourishing human life looks like? And at what point do people who want to live in the real world and have the sort of flourishing human relationships that we know to be important for a good life, when do they start to feel like their ability to choose that for themselves is disappearing? Sean Illing You quote the techno-utopian Marc Andreessen in the book and he has this phrase “reality privilege.” His rejoinder to this complaint that we’re blurring the line between reality and unreality is to say that reality actually sucks for most people and their online world is much better. What’s your response to that? Christine Rosen There’s a lot that Marc Andreessen says and does that I admire. I think he’s a really interesting man of our time, as they say. But this enraged me to the point that I still get mad when I think about this argument, because reality is not a privilege. Reality is what each of us should be able to have the freedom and the opportunity to shape for ourselves. And when [it comes to] someone who will profit enormously from creating virtual realities, and when we have no control over how they’re structured or the kind of information we’ll give to the people who’ve created these worlds for us, I become very upset. Because I don’t think that’s something that the people who create and who want to create these spaces would ever want to live in themselves. The ultimate privilege is telling everyone else to check theirs, while they get to live in a reality they can afford to live in and telling everyone else they should just suck it up in the virtual world. Because isn’t the virtual world great? There’s also the stubborn reality that we still live in physical bodies. And despite the efforts of the Ray Kurzweils of the world to assume we’ll be able to upload or download our consciousness at some point, your physical body has a time limit. And for each of us, it’s different. We don’t always know what it is, but we are fallible, frail creatures. Reckoning with that is part of what makes us human beings. Saying you can live a full life online completely overlooks the physical embodied existence that we all, for now, share. And it’s a dystopian vision of a future for humanity — a very, very class-based vision, I would add — that really limits human freedom. Because if your reality is limited to what you can find in the virtual world, and your choices in the physical world narrow with each passing year, that’s not freedom. That’s not human flourishing. It is a very narrow-minded and elitist technocratic view of a human future — and I soundly reject it. Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump speaks to members of the media during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on January 7, 2025, in Palm Beach, Florida. | Scott Olson/Getty Images President-elect Donald Trump is set to become President Donald Trump — again. And he’s made a lot of promises about what he’s going to do with his executive power. On immigration, he’s said he’d like to enact mass deportations and end birthright citizenship (which is constitutionally protected), among other things. He’s made grand pledges on foreign policy, telling Americans he can solve the war in Ukraine as easily as you might open a bag of chips. He’s said he’ll reshape our (and the world) economy with sweeping tariffs. And his allies have hinted at even more unorthodox actions as well, including moves that could gut the federal workforce and classify Mexican cartels as terrorist groups. The bottom line is, if Trump does even a fraction of the things he and his team have floated, he’s going to radically reshape the United States. However, his vision of the future may not come to pass. A president only has so much power, and Trump is infamously mercurial — perhaps he’ll change his mind. And it may be that matters outside his control (for example, a global pandemic) completely warp his policy plans. All that to say, it’s impossible to predict just what Trump will do. What is possible, however, is creating a framework for thinking about what might happen during his second term.  To help with that, I asked each member of Vox’s politics team to answer a question: What’s the one thing you think is most important for people to keep in mind as Trump returns to power? Here’s what they had to say: Andrew Prokop The first time Trump was president, no one’s theory of how he’d govern was exactly right.   Trump’s most outspoken critics underestimated how, well, normal his administration would be on many policy matters. Good or bad, much of it was normal Republican stuff. Plus, though Trump often sounded unhinged, there was often at least some method in his madness, as he remained constrained by institutions and checks on his power, and could often be convinced to back down from his bluster. And yet, there was Trump’s attempt to steal the 2020 election — just one of many instances where he shockingly challenged long-standing democratic norms to try and get what he wanted, going far further than the political cognoscenti expected, and defying his apologists’ claims that he wasn’t as dangerous as he seemed.  So, when will second-term Trump be surprisingly normal? And when will he push the envelope in ways that risk destabilizing the country and the world? Think policy Nicole Narea The first Trump administration reshaped the conversation around immigration for the long haul, successfully framing it around the border and enforcement, while ignoring the contributions of immigrants living in the US.  This time around, he’s said he’d like to go further. However, the policy changes Trump is reportedly considering — mass detention and deportations, ending birthright citizenship, and shutting down the border — are not a real fix to an immigration system badly overburdened and in need of modernization or the factors that cause people to migrate in the first place.  That is, even if Trump is successful in radically altering immigration policy, he’s unlikely to succeed in “fixing” immigration. An actual solution would, for starters, update legal pathways to the US to fit its economic and humanitarian needs, increase staffing levels across the system (not just among immigration enforcement), and quickly and fairly process people at the border. Eric Levitz The incoming Trump administration is riven by competing factions. And its internal power struggles could have profound consequences for the next four years of public policy. Some in Trump’s orbit want to scale back his tariff proposals, while others (including the president) wish to stick to a more radically protectionist agenda.  Incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio seeks to confront Beijing and protect Taiwan, while Trump advisor Elon Musk maintains close business ties to the Chinese Communist Party and has expressed opposition to anti-China trade policies. Musk and other pro-Trump tech moguls support guest worker visas for highly skilled foreigners, while deputy chief of staff/homeland security adviser Stephen Miller aims to restrict such visas. One version of MAGA could lead us toward a global trade war, mass deportation, and confrontation with China — another, toward incremental changes in economic and foreign policies. Much therefore depends on who wins the Trump administration’s civil wars. Remember that tomorrow isn’t today Christian Paz I think it will be important to hold two ideas in our minds at the same time with this new administration: that Trump and his allies will overstep their popularity, and that Democrats will have to pick their fights in order to be an effective opposition. Trump and congressional Republicans are probably going to operate as if they have a huge popular mandate behind them. Yes, it might seem like all signs are pointing to them having one, but remember this: Trump’s popularity is still historically low and it will probably drop once he begins to govern. Republicans control Congress by single-digit margins.  Still, Democrats are on the back foot. You can probably expect they won’t operate with the same kind of resistance they did eight years ago. They’ll have to evolve, bide their time, and not reflexively condemn Trump every time he does something. The bet is Trump will fumble things, giving Democrats the opportunity — if they are strategic — to capitalize on his mistakes.  Zack Beauchamp It has become unfashionable to talk about Trump as a threat to American democracy. As if the fact that he won fair and square, and is being treated normally by much of the American elite, has somehow neutralized his inclination to break rules and shatter guardrails. That tendency, of course, has not been neutralized. The question for the new administration is not whether Trump will take actions that damage American democracy, but how severe that damage will be. The most important thing in the next four years will be tracking specific policy initiatives — such as Schedule F reclassification of federal employees — that contribute to democratic decline, and developing strategies to avert the worst outcomes. Keep a level head Patrick Reis Tracking Trump is overwhelming for anyone.  He’ll make big proclamations on social media that go nowhere. His team will make major new policies while insisting that nothing has changed. And in the media, all of that will be surrounded by a swirl of accusations and defenses.  So how is anyone to separate fact from fiction?  It starts with patience. When Trump speaks, wait to see if he backs it up. When you hear about major changes, read past the headlines, and seek out outlets that aim to clarify, rather than amplify, the news. A clear-eyed understanding of the Trump administration is possible — it’s just not always possible in real-time. The politics team, and all of Vox, will have a lot more for you on Trump and his administration in the days, months, and years to come. As the incoming president likes to say, stay tuned!

Preview: There’s a dominant narrative in the media about why tech billionaires are sucking up to Donald Trump: Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and Jeff Bezos, all of whom have descended on the nation’s capital for the presidential inauguration, either happily support or have largely acquiesced to Trump because they think he’ll offer lower taxes and friendlier regulations. In other words, it’s just about protecting their own selfish business interests. That narrative is not exactly wrong — Trump has in fact promised massive tax cuts for billionaires — but it leaves out the deeper, darker forces at work here. For the tech bros — or as some say, the broligarchs — this is about much more than just maintaining and growing their riches. It’s about ideology. An ideology inspired by science fiction and fantasy. An ideology that says they are supermen, and supermen should not be subject to rules, because they’re doing something incredibly important: remaking the world in their image.   It’s this ideology that makes MAGA a godsend for the broligarchs, who include Musk, Zuck, and Bezos as well as the venture capitalists Peter Thiel and Marc Andreessen. That’s because MAGA is all about granting unchecked power to the powerful.  “It’s a sense of complete impunity — including impunity to the laws of nature,” Brooke Harrington, a professor of economic sociology at Dartmouth who studies the behavior of the ultra-rich, told me. “They reject constraint in all of its forms.” As Harrington has noted, Trump is the perfect avatar for that worldview. He’s a man who incited an attempted coup, who got convicted on 34 felony counts and still won re-election, who notoriously said in reference to sexual assault, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything.” So, what is the “anything” that the broligarchs want to do? To understand their vision, we need to realize that their philosophy goes well beyond simple libertarianism. It’s not just that they want a government that won’t tread on them. They want absolutely zero limits on their power. Not those dictated by democratic governments, by financial systems, or by facts. Not even those dictated by death.  The broligarchs’ vision: science fiction, transhumanism, and immortality  The broligarchs are not a monolith — their politics differ somewhat, and they’ve sometimes been at odds with each other. Remember when Zuck and Musk said they were going to fight each other in a cage match? But here’s something the broligarchs have in common: a passionate love for science fiction and fantasy that has shaped their vision for the future of humanity — and their own roles as its would-be saviors.  Zuckerberg’s quest to build the Metaverse, a virtual reality so immersive and compelling that people would want to strap on bulky goggles to interact with each other, is seemingly inspired by the sci-fi author Neal Stephenson. It was actually Stephenson who coined the term “metaverse” in his novel Snow Crash, where characters spend a lot of time interacting in a virtual world of that name. Zuckerberg seems not to have noticed that the book is depicting a dystopia; instead of viewing it as a warning, he’s viewing it as an instruction manual. Jeff Bezos is inspired by Star Trek, which led him to found a commercial spaceflight venture called Blue Origin, and The High Frontier by physics professor Gerard K. O’Neill, which informs his plan for space colonization (it involves millions of people living in cylindrical tubes). Bezos attended O’Neill’s seminars as an undergraduate at Princeton. Musk, who wants to colonize Mars to “save” humanity from a dying planet, is inspired by one of the masters of American sci-fi, Isaac Asimov. In his Foundation series, Asimov wrote about a hero who must prevent humanity from being thrown into a long dark age after a massive galactic empire collapses. “The lesson I drew from that is you should try to take the set of actions that are likely to prolong civilization, minimize the probability of a dark age and reduce the length of a dark age if there is one,” Musk said.  And Andreessen, an early web browser developer who now pushes for aggressive progress in AI with very little regulation, is inspired by superhero stories, writing in his 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” that we should become “technological supermen” whose “Hero’s Journey” involves “conquering dragons and bringing home the spoils for our community.”  All of these men see themselves as the heroes or protagonists in their own sci-fi saga. And a key part of being a “technological superman” — or ubermensch, as the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche would say — is that you’re above the law. Commonsense morality doesn’t apply to you because you’re a superior being on a superior mission. Thiel, it should be noted, is a big Nietzsche fan, though his is an extremely selective reading of the philosopher’s work. The ubermensch ideology helps explain the broligarchs’ disturbing gender politics. “The ‘bro’ part of broligarch is not incidental to this — it’s built on this idea that not only are these guys superior, they are superior because they’re guys,” Harrington said. For one thing, they valorize aggression, which is coded as male. Zuckerberg, who credits mixed martial arts and hunting wild boars with helping him rediscover his masculinity (and is sporting the makeover to prove it), recently told Joe Rogan that the corporate world is too “culturally neutered” — it should be become a culture that has more “masculine energy” and that “celebrates the aggression.”  Likewise, Andreessen wrote in his manifesto, “We believe in ambition, aggression, persistence, relentlessness — strength.” Musk, meanwhile, has jumped on the testosterone bandwagon, amplifying the idea that only “high T alpha males” are capable of thinking for themselves; he shared a post on X that said, “This is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.” This idea that most people can’t think for themselves is key to Nietzsche’s idea of the ubermensch. What differentiates the ubermensch, or superman, is that he is not bogged down by commonsense morality (baseless) or by God (dead) — he can determine his own values.  The broligarchs — because they are in 21st century Silicon Valley and not 19th century Germany — have updated and melded this idea with transhumanism, the idea that we can and should use technology to alter human biology and proactively evolve our species.  Transhumanism spread in the mid-1900s thanks to its main popularizer, Julian Huxley, an evolutionary biologist and president of the British Eugenics Society. Huxley influenced the contemporary futurist Ray Kurzweil, who predicted that we’re approaching a time when human intelligence can merge with machine intelligence, becoming unbelievably powerful.  “The human species, along with the computational technology it created, will be able to solve age-old problems…and will be in a position to change the nature of mortality in a postbiological future,” Kurzweil wrote in 1999. Kurzweil, in turn, has influenced Silicon Valley heavyweights like Musk, whose company Neuralink explicitly aims at merging human and machine intelligence.  For many transhumanists, part of what it means to transcend our human condition is transcending death. And so you find that the broligarchs are very interested in longevity research. Zuckerberg, Bezos, and Thiel have all reportedly invested in startups that are trying to make it possible to live forever. That makes perfect sense when you consider that death currently imposes a limit on us all, and the goal of the broligarchs is to have zero limits.  How the broligarchs and Trump use each other: startup cities, crypto, and the demise of the fact If you don’t like limits and rules, it stands to reason that you’re not going to like democracy. As Thiel wrote in 2009, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” And so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the broligarchs are trying to undermine the rule of democratic nation-states. To escape the control of democratic governments, they are seeking to create their own sovereign colonies. That can come in the form of space colonies, a la Musk and Bezos. But it can also come in the form of “startup cities” or “network states” built by corporations here on Earth — independent mini-nations, carved out of the surrounding territory, where tech billionaires and their acolytes would live according to their own rules rather than the government’s. This is currently Thiel and Andreessen’s favored approach.  With the help of their investments, a startup city called Prospera is already being built off the coast of Honduras (much to the displeasure of Honduras). There are others in the offing, from Praxis (which will supposedly build “the next America” somewhere in the Mediterranean), to California Forever in, you guessed it, California. The so-called network state is “a fancy name for tech authoritarianism,” journalist Gil Duran, who has spent the past year reporting on these building projects, told me. “The idea is to build power over the long term by controlling money, politics, technology, and land.” Crypto, of course, is the broligarchs’ monetary instrument of choice. It’s inherently anti-institutionalist; its appeal lies in its promise to let people control their own money and transact without relying on any authority, whether a government or a bank. It’s how they plan to build these startup cities and network states, and how they plan to supplant the traditional financial system. The original idea of crypto was to replace the US dollar, but since the US dollar is intimately bound up with global finance, undercutting it could reshape the whole world economy. Trump seems to be going along with this very cheerfully. He’s now pro-crypto, and he’s even proposed creating “Freedom Cities” in America that are reminiscent of startup cities. His alliance with the broligarchs benefits him not only because they’ve heaped millions of dollars on him, but also because of how they’ve undermined the very notion of the truth by shaping a “post-truth” online reality in which people don’t know what to believe anymore. Musk, under the guise of promoting free speech, has made X into a den of disinformation. Zuck is close on his heels, eliminating fact-checking at Meta even though the company said it would be scrupulous about inflammatory and false posts after it played a serious role in a textbook example of ethnic cleansing. “Even more pernicious is the fact that these guys can control the algorithms, so they can decide what people actually see,” Duran said. “The problem is not so much that people can lie — it’s that the system is designed to favor those lies over truth and reality.” It’s a perfect set-up for a president famous for his “alternative facts.”     But the underlying ideology that unites MAGA and the broligarchs is contrary to the aims of most ordinary Americans, including most Trump voters. If the US dollar is weakened and the very idea of the democratic nation-state is overthrown, that won’t exactly “make America great again.” It’ll make America weaker than ever.

Preview: St. Paul, Minnesota, grocery store with sign in window accepting electronic benefit transfer cards and food stamps. | Michael Siluk/UCG/Universal Images Group via Getty Images How many people are living in poverty in America? It depends on whom you ask. If it’s the US Census, the answer would be somewhere around 37 million people. But that number doesn’t necessarily capture everyone who might be considered poor, because measuring poverty largely depends on how we define it. And some definitions, including the one used to determine the federal poverty line, can be surprisingly arbitrary. That’s a problem, because understanding how we measure poverty is critically important — not just because it gives us a sense of how deep the problem is in American society, but also because it allows us to better evaluate anti-poverty programs.  If we look at the federal poverty line, for example, it looks like poverty has mostly been stagnant, slowly ebbing and flowing without much meaningful change. In 1970, for example, 12.6 percent of Americans lived below the poverty line and in 2023, 11.1 percent of Americans did. But by other measures, poverty has dramatically dropped over the past six decades. So how do we measure poverty, and should we look for another way?  The poverty line, explained The official poverty rate, as measured by the US Census, is seriously outdated. It was developed in 1963 by an economist at the Social Security Administration, and it determined that the threshold should be three times the minimum food budget of a given family. That calculation was based on data from the 1950s, which found that the average American family spent about a third of their income after taxes on food.  To put a finer point on this, here’s how my colleague Dylan Matthews described this methodology in 2015: “The way we measure poverty is based on a 51-year-old analysis of 59-year-old data on food consumption, with no changes other than inflation adjustment. That’s bananas.” It’s only gotten older since then, and its flaws don’t stop there.  The official poverty measure also leaves out critical components of a person’s income, including some major anti-poverty programs. While it does count certain social benefits outside someone’s regular wages that contribute to their income — things like unemployment or Social Security benefits — major assistance programs like food stamps, Medicaid, or housing vouchers are excluded. Additionally, because it calculates incomes pre-tax, it leaves out tax credits like the Earned Income Tax Credit. As a result, the official poverty rate misses how major social programs are helping lift people out of poverty. Since 2011, however, the Census has taken steps to address these issues by applying another measure of poverty — the Supplemental Poverty Measure. This calculation ditches the decades-old practice of only using food spending to determine the costs of a family’s basic needs, adding other expenses like shelter, clothing, and utilities to the equation. It also counts noncash benefits like food stamps or housing vouchers toward someone’s income, and unlike the official poverty measure, which largely ignores geography, it accounts for regional cost-of-living differences.  According to researchers at Columbia University, who calculated what the Supplemental Poverty Measure would have been in the years before the Census started using it, poverty declined by 40 percent between 1967 and 2012. But when they removed some aspects of a person’s income, including certain tax credits and social programs, then it looks like poverty has stayed pretty much the same over the same time period. What else is missing? All of this sounds very technical. But where the government chooses to place the poverty line can make a material difference in someone’s life: If someone technically falls above the poverty line, that doesn’t mean that they suddenly no longer struggle to make ends meet. And though a person’s income might not change, if the poverty threshold changes, someone may then have a more difficult time covering basic costs because they might lose access to some welfare benefits like food stamps. So while various poverty measures can help give us a sense of how big of a problem it is, it’s also important to look at other factors that set people back and design programs to address those issues.  Sky-high housing costs, for example, eat up many families’ incomes. According to Harvard’s Joint Center for Housing Studies, for example, 22.4 million renter households, representing about half of renter households, are rent-burdened — meaning they spend more than 30 percent of their incomes on rent. And some 12.1 million households were “severely” rent burdened, meaning they spent more than half of their incomes on rent.  Rent burdens don’t show up in some poverty measures, including the official Census metric; but addressing these exorbitant housing costs would significantly help families across the board, especially those with lower incomes, and likely help alleviate poverty overall.  Ultimately, the problem of poverty doesn’t come down to how we measure it, but to how much government is willing to do to ensure that everyone can have a decent and dignified life. And no matter how we choose to measure poverty, one thing is for certain: We are nowhere close to guaranteeing that standard of living in America. This story was featured in the Within Our Means newsletter. Sign up here.

Preview: Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a new framework for thinking through your ethical dilemmas and philosophical questions. This unconventional column is based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Here is a Vox reader’s question, condensed and edited for clarity. I live in an isolated part of a developed country, relatively far from anything else, and am struggling with my relationship to flying in the face of climate change. Most advice on minimizing flying seems tailored to more connected areas in the US or Europe — we have no trains or buses, and it’s a 12+ hour drive to the nearest city. I’ve considered moving to a more connected area where these would be options, but then I’d experience the same angst any time I wanted to visit my family where I currently live.  I’ve tried to take the approach of flying less frequently and staying for longer periods of time, but I feel resentful toward the carefree way I see friends around me approaching this issue, like flying out every month to watch a game. I feel like I’m torturing myself with guilt over something that no one cares about, and that the good I do by avoiding the one roundtrip I would take on a vacation per year is erased by the behaviour of my peers.  On the other hand, the contribution my annual flight would make, in terms of global emissions and demand in the airline industry, is minuscule. I feel generally opposed to making climate change about individual actions, but flying is also something that is such a privileged action that it feels like a special case. I also feel conflicted because I don’t think I deserve to travel if I can’t do it ethically, but the strategies often proposed as alternatives are not available to me.  Dear Resentfully Landbound,  Your question has me thinking about Greta Thunberg. In 2019, the Swedish activist wanted to attend a climate conference in the US, but she refused to fly because of the high carbon emissions associated with air travel. So instead, she traveled across the Atlantic by boat. On rough seas. For two weeks. Should we all be doing what Thunberg did? I think Thunberg is a heroic young activist, and there’s value in activists who take a purist approach, like refusing to ever fly. But the value lies less in their individual action and more in their ability to serve as a powerful jolt to our collective moral imagination — to shift the Overton window, the range of behaviors that seem possible. Thunberg’s well-publicized sailing voyage, for example, helped convince others to fly less. But to say her approach has been a potent rhetorical tool is different from saying it’s a model that every individual should follow to a tee.    For one thing, not everyone can sail the seas for two weeks — whether because of the time required, a physical health condition, or some other factor. And it’s not clear that all people should forgo all flying.  That’s because we each have multiple values. Yes, protecting our planet is a crucial value. So is, say, nurturing relationships with beloved family members and friends who live abroad. Or developing a career. Or learning about other cultures. Or making art. So, even though minimizing how much we fly is a virtuous thing to do, some thinkers would caution you against treating that as the only relevant value.  Take contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf, who wrote an influential essay called “Moral Saints.” She argues that you shouldn’t actually strive to be “a person whose every action is as morally good as possible … who is as morally worthy as can be.” If you try to optimize your morality through extreme altruistic self-sacrifice, she says, you end up living a life bereft of the personal projects, relationships, and experiences that make up a life well lived. You can also end up being a crappy friend or family member. We often think of “virtues” as being connected to morality, but Wolf’s point is that there are non-moral virtues, too — like artistic, musical, or athletic talent — and we want to cultivate those, too. “If the moral saint is devoting all his time to feeding the hungry or healing the sick or raising money for Oxfam, then necessarily he is not reading Victorian novels, playing the oboe, or improving his backhand,” she writes. “A life in which none of these possible aspects of character are developed may seem to be a life strangely barren.”  In other words, it’s okay — even desirable — to devote yourself to a variety of personal priorities, rather than sacrificing everything in pursuit of moral perfection. The tricky bit is figuring out how to balance between all the priorities, which sometimes conflict with each other. In fact, I think part of the appeal of the purist approach is that it actually makes life easier on this score. Even though it demands extreme self-sacrifice, the extreme altruist never has to ask herself how much of the luxury (in this case, flying) to allow herself. The right answer is clear: none.  By contrast, if you’re trying to balance between different values, it’s nigh on impossible to arrive at an objectively “right” answer. That’s very uncomfortable — we like clear formulas! But I tend to agree with philosophers like Bernard Williams, who argue that it’s a fantasy to think we can import scientific objectivity into the realm of ethics. Our ethical life is just too messy and multifaceted to be captured by any single set of universally binding moral principles — any systematic moral theory.  And if that’s so, we have to look at how compelling we find the case for each competing value. It’s often obvious to us that we shouldn’t give equal weight to all of them. For example, I’m obsessed with snorkeling, and I’d love to be able to travel to all the top snorkeling destinations this year, from Hawaii to the Maldives to Indonesia. But I know I can’t justify taking infinite flights for infinite snorkeling trips during a climate emergency!  At the same time, that doesn’t mean I won’t ever go on any trip whatsoever. I do sometimes let myself travel by air, especially if it’s for a purpose that is not only pleasurable but also essential to a life well lived, like nurturing relationships with friends and family members who live far away. And when I fly, I try to make those miles really count by staying for a longer time.  This is basically what you’re already doing: “I’ve tried to take the approach of flying less frequently and staying for longer periods of time,” you write, describing “the one roundtrip I would take on a vacation per year.” I think that’s a reasonable approach, especially given the lack of trains and buses in your area. So, even though you framed your dilemma as a question about whether or how much to fly, I don’t actually think the flying bit is your real problem. The real problem is this bit: “I feel resentful with the carefree way I see friends approaching this issue, like flying out every month to watch a game. I feel like I’m torturing myself with guilt over something that no one cares about.” To be clear, it’s totally understandable to feel resentful; what your friends are doing does sound excessive. But the issue is that your resentment is making you miserable. And a virtuous but miserable life is not likely to be sustainable. Some do-gooders can go to altruistic extremes without feeling resentful or judgmental. They may be able to forgo flying entirely and use that choice to create new forms of meaning and connection and to enrich other aspects of their lives, so that they don’t become joyless, judgy, or one-dimensional moral optimizers of the sort Wolf described. But most of us are not in that category. And unless you are, I wouldn’t counsel you to go down the purist path, because resentment and judgmentalness can cause their own harm. They harm you, they harm the relationship between you and the targets of your judgment, and they can ultimately harm the cause itself because they’re off-putting to others and they make being climate-friendly seem impossibly hard.  If you’re like most of us, a path of moderation will probably work better. You can decide on a balance that you think is reasonable — for example, one roundtrip flight per year — and stick with that. Once you’ve done that, ditch the guilt that’s torturing you. That’ll help diffuse the resentment, some of which I suspect is actually resentment toward yourself, because of how you’ve been torturing yourself.  But that on its own might not be enough to get rid of all the resentment, because flying once annually still might feel like a big sacrifice relative to what your peers are doing. So one key intervention here is to expand your aperture, to look at what a broader group of people are doing, so that you don’t feel you’re sacrificing for the sake of “something that no one cares about.” More people care than you might think!  A study published in Nature Communications found that 80 percent to 90 percent of Americans are living in a “false social reality”: They dramatically underestimate how much public support there is for climate policies. They think only 37 percent to 43 percent support these policies, when the real proportion of supporters is roughly double that. (And support is high across the world.) The study authors note that this misperception “poses a challenge to collective action on problems like climate change,” because it’s hard to stay motivated when you think you’re alone in caring.   Concretely connecting with others who are choosing to fly less will help bring this home for you, and make you feel that you’re part of a community that shares your values. Networks you can reach out to include Stay Grounded, We Stay on the Ground, and Flying Less. The sense of belonging and camaraderie you get from being part of such a group can help you form positive emotional associations with your reduced-flying lifestyle — you’ll feel like you’re gaining something, not just losing.  I think that’s especially important given that resentment can actually feel good in the short term (even if it damages our well-being in the long term). Righteous indignation is a rush; it gives us an energy boost. So we can’t expect the brain to give it up just like that — we need to replace it with something else that feels good. The best candidate may be the pleasant emotion that philosophers and psychologists have identified as resentment’s exact opposite: gratitude.  Next time you feel resentment bubbling up, go out in nature and do something you enjoy — birding, hiking, swimming — and really savor it. Pay close attention to each sound, each smell. Remind yourself that your reduced-flying lifestyle is helping to preserve this source of pleasure. In other words, it’s enabling you to get more of what you love. As you do that, I hope you’ll feel not only proud that you’re living in line with your values, but also very grateful to yourself.  Bonus: What I’m reading This dilemma reminded me not just of Greta Thunberg, but also of Simone Weil, a WWII-era philosopher who died early because she starved herself, refusing to eat more than people in occupied France. She was a “moral saint” if ever there was one. And as this excellent essay in the Point Magazine notes, “Weil is a saint, but many couldn’t stand her.” She’s admirable for how much she cared about others’ suffering, but is her extreme self-sacrifice actually exemplary, in the sense that we should all follow her example? I don’t think so.     I also finally picked up a book that’s been on my to-read list for ages: Strangers Drowning by Larissa MacFarquhar. It does a beautiful job telling stories about extreme altruists and getting you thinking about the pros and cons of the purist path.  I’m enjoying Isaiah Berlin’s essay “The Pursuit of the Ideal,” in which the moral pluralist philosopher argues that there’s no one right way to live, whether on the individual or state level. “Utopias have their value,” Berlin writes, since “nothing so wonderfully expands the imaginative horizons of human potentialities — but as guides to conduct they can prove literally fatal.”

Preview: Burned trees from the Palisades Fire and dust blown by winds are seen from Will Rogers State Park in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood on January 15, 2025. | Apu Gomes/Getty Images The Palisades and Eaton fires in Los Angeles have destroyed over 10,000 structures — homes, businesses, and everything inside from bathroom cleaner to electrical wiring.  Naturally, people in the Los Angeles area are reaching for their phones to see what the Air Quality Index (AQI) says about the air around them. But to the surprise of most people, the AQI has been good or moderate across Los Angeles, even in neighborhoods that have been most impacted by the fires. In Pasadena, the AQI went from a high 293 (a rating of “very unhealthy”) on January 11 to a low of 30 (a “good” rating) the next day. How can that be? Throughout the week, concerned residents attended calls run by leading organizations like the Coalition for Clean Air and local NPR station KCRW asking more questions, like: When entire neighborhoods full of buildings and cars burn, what’s released into the air? How far do they have to be from the fires to be safe from these pollutants? And how do they protect themselves from bad air? Air pollution is a silent killer that no one is immune to. Every year, 7 million people all across the globe die prematurely from the effects of air pollution. In the United States, exposure to air pollution is associated with 100,000 to 200,000 deaths annually. Long-term exposure can lead to a range of health effects in almost every organ system of the body, says Ed Avol, professor of clinical medicine at the University of Southern California’s (USC) Keck School of Medicine. Wildfires play natural, important roles in their ecosystems, particularly in western states like California. But human-caused climate change is causing these blazes to become more severe and more frequent. This means that more humans will be exposed to bad air. But just how bad is that air? Unfortunately the answer isn’t as straightforward as you might think. But here’s what we do and don’t know about air quality, and how to think about lowering the risk to air pollution. What the AQI does (and doesn’t) tell us about the air The Environmental Protection Agency developed the AQI to give the public a tool to understand how good or bad the air is throughout the day. Using data collected by 5,000 air monitors placed all across the country, it tracks the levels of specific pollutants in the air, assigns it a number, and that number corresponds with a color-coded category to help people understand the quality of the air and what activities are safe to do in the outdoors.  You can find the latest AQI on the EPA’s AirNow website or through its AirNow app. They also offer a fire and smoke map, which shows the AQI and what neighborhoods are under smoke outlooks. As former Vox reporter Rebecca Leber explained: That haze you can see and smell on a particularly polluted day is made of ozone and fine particulate matter. Fine particulate matter, known as PM2.5 (the 2.5 microns describes its size, 30 times smaller than the width of a human hair) can embed in the cells of the lung and the bloodstream, aggravating inflammation, asthma, heart disease, and mental health. And ozone causes similar damage. In the stratosphere, ozone blocks ultraviolet radiation from the sun, but at ground level it can cause shortness of breath and damage to respiratory tissue. Both pollutants can affect the entire body in all stages of life.  But there are some important drawbacks to the AQI. It tries to distill a lot of information into one datapoint, and it depends on air monitors often placed near cities and not close to industrial polluters. Since air pollution can vary widely even over short distances — think a busy highway versus a quiet, tree-lined road — the air could be worse if you’re near a pollution source. The AQI is calculated based upon five criteria pollutants regulated by the Clean Air Act: fine particulate matter known as PM2.5, ozone, carbon monoxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen dioxide. When you look at the AQI on your phone or on a website, the number it shows you represents the primary pollutant. The pollutants that drive  the AQI number tend to be PM2.5 and ozone. In the case of the California wildfires, the pollution source is exposing millions of people in the greater Los Angeles area to smoke. And that smoke contains some pollutants that are outside of the scope of the AQI. “It’s correct that when all these things are burning, there’s a lot more toxic compounds in the air,” says Rima Habre, a professor of population and public health sciences at USC’s Keck School of Medicine.  As fires burn down houses and buildings, the blazes can release certain volatile organic compounds, toxic metals, and toxic gases into our air — all of which the AQI does not account for. That’s causing people to worry about the air, and whether their health will be impacted in the long-term as it was for first responders in the 9/11 attacks.  Ash from the wildfires, which can irritate your skin or lungs, falls out of the air and settles onto the ground and therefore is not accounted for in the AQI, Habre says. So the AQI could say that the air is good, even if there’s visible ash on your house or street. There are ways to measure the potential harmful pollutants and chemicals in the air that are outside of the AQI — that’s how we know they exist in the first place, Avol says. “But we don’t routinely measure all of these things, all the time, everywhere because that would be unfathomably expensive,” he added. Is the AQI still useful in the context of wildfires? Yes and no. It’s still an important resource, but it simply wasn’t designed for situations like these unprecedented mega wildfires burning down thousands of buildings and structures. But there are ways to help make choices around safety and risk, even when the AQI can’t tell us the full picture. How to think about risk and best protect yourself When I attended air quality information webinars this week, I heard Los Angeles residents ask a lot of the same questions: How far do they have to be from the wildfires to be safe from bad air? How can they keep their families safe? The uncomfortable truth is that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all answer to these questions. You could live several miles away from the fires, but if the wind is moving in the direction of your home, you could be at risk for exposure to bad air. But both Avol and Habre say you can analyze your risk, and make decisions on how to lower your risk from exposure to bad air. First, take into account your own personal health and the health of your family. Does anyone have respiratory conditions, like asthma? Is anyone immunocompromised? If so, these are extra reasons to stay cautious of the air, Habre says. You can then check the AQI and observe your environment. If the AQI says the air is good, but it smells like smoke or there’s a lot of ash present, or if the wind is blowing in your direction while fire is present, take precautions: Limit your time outside, wear a well-fitting N95 mask, which can help filter out PM2.5. And, when you do have to go outside, make sure your shoes and clothes aren’t tracking in ash when entering your home. It’s also a good idea to run air purifiers indoors while keeping windows and doors shut. Understandably, it’s a difficult and scary time for Los Angeles residents. On top of losing entire homes and neighborhoods, the wildfires have forced us to face an uncomfortable truth, which is that life is not risk-free and that there is no way to completely protect ourselves from the consequences of disasters like these. But it doesn’t mean we’re totally powerless in lowering our risk to short and long-term health consequences. “There’s a lot of agency here,” Habre says. Making informed choices, even imperfect ones, may be the best way to move through this uncertain period.

Preview: President-elect Donald Trump speaks to members of the media following a meeting with Republican senators on January 8, 2025, at the US Capitol in Washington DC. | Valerie Plesch/Bloomberg via Getty Images President-elect Donald Trump’s second term is expected to start with a flurry of executive orders, starting shortly after he’s sworn in. Exactly what those orders will contain is hard to know for sure right now. But executive orders — policy proclamations issued by the president under their executive authority — will likely be a powerful tool through which Trump can quickly and unilaterally enact key parts of his agenda. That’s because executive orders can help him circumvent Congress, where Republicans currently have the narrowest majority in the House in 100 years and they still need at least seven Democrats to pass most legislation in the Senate. There are limits to what he can accomplish via executive order, and some of his agenda requires legislation to implement, especially if it demands new appropriations (which Congress controls). But just as in his first term, Trump can quickly undo major pillars of his predecessor’s legacy via executive order as he has promised. Executive orders played a key role in the chaotic start to Trump’s first term eight years ago, which began with several high-profile executive orders, including a travel ban on citizens of seven Muslim-majority countries and the withdrawal from a major multilateral trade agreement known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP).  Many of these efforts were challenged in court by Democratic states and left-wing advocates, often successfully. Trump did win several of these battles, however, sometimes expanding the bounds of presidential power. It’s not yet clear what Trump will try to do this time — or if courts will react the same way. But looking back could help understand what’s ahead. The beginning of Trump’s first term was marked by an onslaught of executive orders Trump’s first week in office in 2017 featured five splashy executive orders, including several that sparked years-long litigation: The travel ban, which caused chaos at US airports in the days right after implementation, was initially blocked in court as discriminatory and then revised several times. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld a version of the ban that blocked citizens from five Muslim-majority countries, as well as Venezuela and North Korea on national security grounds. A declaration of a national emergency on the border, under which he claimed the authority to redirect $6 billion in military funds to begin construction on the southern border wall, a centerpiece of his 2016 campaign. Several federal courts ruled that he had no such authority to use funds appropriated by Congress for other purposes, but the Supreme Court allowed him to move forward with it.  A decision to green light the controversial Dakota Access and Keystone XL pipelines during his first week in office, which also faced legal challenges. Courts found that the projects did not undergo sufficient environmental review, and President Joe Biden later rescinded their approvals. An executive order cracking down on so-called sanctuary cities, which refused to allow local law enforcement to share information with federal immigration agents or hand over immigrants in their custody from receiving federal law enforcement grants. The order was challenged in court, but the Supreme Court never reached a final decision on it. A number of Democratic state attorneys general sued, but after Trump lost the 2020 election, the Supreme Court dismissed the case. Without any settlement on the legality of the order, Trump could again try to withhold funding from sanctuary cities and re-litigate the issue.  Only one of Trump’s initial executive orders was never challenged in court. His decision to exit TPP, former President Barack Obama’s signature trade deal between 12 nations, was clearly within his rights as president and never faced litigation.  What we know about Trump’s executive order strategy going forward On Day One of his second term, Trump is expected to issue executive orders rolling out his plans for mass deportations, ending birthright citizenship, implementing tariffs on Mexico and Canada, shutting down the border, and more. He reportedly claims to have more than 100 ready to go with the aim of erasing Biden’s legacy overnight. “Look, I can undo almost everything Biden did, through executive order,” Trump told Time in November. “And on Day One, much of that will be undone.” His advisers — many of whom have spent the last few years contemplating what he could achieve via executive order at conservative think tanks like America First Legal and the Heritage Foundation — are more prepared than they were during his first term. Heritage’s Project 2025 lays out a blueprint for a potential policy agenda, and some of its authors and editors have since joined the administration.  At least some of Trump’s Day One executive orders are bound to be tied up in the courts, just as they were last time. One potential thorn in his side may be a revival of a liberal resistance.  This time around, the Democratic response to Trump’s plans has been more muted. But a group of former Biden-Harris officials in collaboration with the legal organization Democracy Forward are gearing up to challenge Trump’s initial executive orders in court and turn public opinion against him. In addition to Democracy Forward’s efforts, the ACLU and other legal organizations are preparing to inundate the new Trump administration with litigation. Still, some of his executive orders are also bound to pass legal scrutiny, especially after Trump stacked the federal courts with friendly judges. Though legal scholars may argue that some of his proposals (such as ending birthright citizenship unilaterally) are patently illegal, what the courts may be willing to permit is anyone’s guess.  Just as in his first term, Trump is planning to test the limits of his executive authority.

Preview: Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack holds up a SNAP EBT card during a White House press briefing on May 5, 2021. | Alex Wong/Getty Images Joe Biden has had a rough go of things. He leaves the presidency with the worst end-of-first-term approval rating of any president since Jimmy Carter; 55.8 percent of Americans disapprove of his job performance and only 37.1 percent approve, as of Friday. Biden’s legacy will take years to sort out, and I certainly think he made serious mistakes. But one of the greatest triumphs of his presidency has gotten far too little attention, including from journalists like myself. That triumph is the reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan (TFP). The phrase “reevaluation of the Thrifty Food Plan” feels like it was concocted by an AI instructed to design the most boring string of words in the English language, but bear with me. This action, taken by Biden’s Department of Agriculture in 2021, resulted in a 21 percent increase in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP, or “food stamps” colloquially) benefits. The safety net program that is most precisely targeted at America’s poorest and most vulnerable people got a substantial, ongoing increase. That last part is notable, because so much of Biden’s presidency was spent on temporary measures, with a spree of short-lived programs unleashed in 2021 to tackle the Covid pandemic and help the economy recover from its aftereffects. The TFP hike stands out because it’s still going — indeed, it’s meant to be permanent — and it’s something that the Biden administration did on its own, in accordance with a law that Congress passed in 2018. As a fan of the food stamps program, I think this was an outstanding measure by Biden, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, and USDA nutrition leaders Stacy Dean and Cindy Long. Critics of food stamps, in particular among House Republicans, have long sought to roll back the measure, and it is a possible target for cuts in the Trump years. But whatever you think of the food stamp expansion, it’s an important part of Biden’s legacy, one that will reverberate longer than a burst of inflation or a temporary stimulus bill. Food stamps benefits, explained A shocking amount of US government policy is based on the eating habits of people in the 1950s. The best known case of this is the construction of the official poverty measure, the most frequently invoked statistic for measuring the extent of poverty in the US. It was devised in 1963 by Mollie Orshansky, an economist at the Social Security Administration, and based on the US Department of Agriculture’s 1962 “Economy Food Plan.” That plan was itself based on 1955 data, and meant to determine how much money a family of four would need for food, if they were really pinching pennies. The USDA had been putting together plans like this for decades; the 1962 report gives a short history, which goes back to “pioneer nutrition investigator” Wilbur Olin Atwater, who worked at the department in the 1890s. The point of the plans was instructional, similar to the food pyramid of more recent decades: to demonstrate for average families how they could purchase food that met their caloric and nutritional needs at a reasonable cost.  The Economy Food Plan was the result of an attempt to find the cheapest possible diet that could still provide basic nutrition. The report clarifies that this means it assumes households will buy less fruit, vegetables, or meat, and focus on cheap and lasting items like dry beans and potatoes. “It is essentially for emergency use,” the report concludes.  Orshansky tripled the cost of this emergency diet to arrive at a level of income below which a family would be in poverty, since families of three more typically spent a third of their income on food at the time. (For all the complaints about grocery inflation, Americans now spend only about 10 percent of their income on food.) That was the poverty line, and it has not changed since, with the exception of annual adjustments for inflation, according to the consumer price index. It serves to determine eligibility for programs like Medicaid, health insurance credits, and food stamps, and it’s all based on 1950s eating habits. For food stamps, though, “food plans” take on additional significance. Eligibility is based on the poverty line (which is in turn based on the 1962 Economy Food Plan), but the benefit amount received under SNAP is determined by something called the Thrifty Food Plan, which succeeded the Economy Food Plan starting in 1975.  The maximum SNAP benefit for a given family is set as equal to the cost of a diet for a family of that size under the Thrifty Food Plan; benefits are then steadily reduced as the family’s income increases. For instance, a four-person household this year has a maximum monthly benefit of $975, because that is the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan for a family of four. Food stamps assumes that a family can afford to pay 30 percent of their income on food, so a four-person household with $1,000 in monthly earnings would receive $975 minus (30 percent times $1,000) = $675 a month. When the Thrifty Food Plan was first established in 1975, it was set at the same level as the 1962 plan, only adjusted for inflation. It was the same approach used when setting the poverty line. The plan was then updated repeatedly, in 1983, 1999, and 2006, but each time the cost of the Thrifty Food Plan only grew according to inflation.  This was required: The updates were, as a matter of policy, meant to be cost-neutral. The plans’ allocation of the budget between different types of foods changed quite a bit over this period, but the overall cost could not. This was inadequate on a number of grounds. For one thing, food price inflation and overall inflation are not the same, and there have been key moments, like the mid-1970s and the aftermath of the pandemic, when food inflation was notably higher than overall inflation. But more importantly, the requirement to not increase prices meant that the Thrifty Food Plan came to involve a diet that assumed families had far more time to cook and meal prep than they actually did, and that they would subsist on bizarre diets that no one actually eats anymore. My favorite example is that the 2006 Thrifty Food Plan, to produce a cheap diet that provides adequate protein, suggested that a family of four should eat 40 pounds of low-fat milk and yogurt a week. That’s 18.1 kilograms, and since a Chobani cup of yogurt is 150 grams, that implies that the household is eating the equivalent of 120 yogurt cups a week. No one actually eats like this.  The TFP also assumed that households had 2 hours and 18 minutes free, every day, to prepare food; the actual amount for households on SNAP was more like 50 minutes. As such, the plan prescribed bulk purchases of goods that took time to chop, process, soak, etc., that many households just did not have. It also did not budget for people to buy convenient items that might be slightly more expensive, like canned beans instead of dry ones. How the Biden administration revamped food stamps Stacy Dean, who served as deputy undersecretary for USDA’s Food, Nutrition, and Consumer Services from 2021 to 2024, explained to me that her team’s efforts to reform the Thrifty Food Plan were authorized by the 2018 Farm Bill, passed by a Republican Congress and signed by Donald Trump. Section 4002 of the law stated that the Department of Agriculture should “by 2022 and at 5-year intervals thereafter … reevaluate and publish the market baskets of the thrifty food plan based on current food prices, food composition data, consumption patterns, and dietary guidance.” The team was thus instructed that the Thrifty Food Plan had to reflect how people actually ate (“consumption patterns”) and the foods they actually chose (“food composition data”), rather than assuming that poor Americans subsist largely on giant tubs of yogurt, or oatmeal and beans.  The administration concluded that complying with that instruction meant the total cost of the Thrifty Food Plan could not stay the same. It was not possible to accurately reflect the actual cost of food and not increase the cost of the plan. You can see this in the long report the USDA put out in 2021 outlining the changes. (They beat the 2022 deadline by a year.) “For the first time in more than 45 years, maintaining cost neutrality did not drive the process,” the report states. “Instead, the Thrifty Food Plan reevaluation process started first with assessing the foods and beverages that make up a healthy, practical diet, then determining a cost at which they could be purchased by resource-constrained households.” Dean said that by far the most important factor driving the 21 percent increase in the cost of the plan was that the department had better data on food prices with which to work. “In the past, they were using people’s recollection of what they paid for food. Do you remember what you spent on food last week?” she asked me. “You might remember in aggregate, but not for individual items.” Instead of that survey data, Dean and her team used data directly from retailers that the USDA was already collecting for other purposes. This provided a much more accurate and up-to-date sense of what people were paying for food — which led to a conclusion that food costs were greater than the old Thrifty Food Plan reflected. Dean emphasized to me that the goal was to get an accurate sense of what a thrifty household was actually paying for food, rather than an attempt to change SNAP per se. To that point, USDA has actually been revising downward the Thrifty Food Plan for Hawaii (which, along with Alaska, gets its own estimate separate from the mainland) because it believed the earlier estimate of the plan’s cost was too high. But the overall effect of the TFP reevaluation was to substantially increase food stamp benefits for the more than 41 million people who use it. While the resulting SNAP program is still quite modest (it went from offering $4.80 per person per day to $6.20 per person per day), that had significant budgetary implications. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the TFP change would cost $250 billion to $300 billion over 10 years.  Where SNAP goes under Trump While the Biden team saw the Thrifty Food Plan update as merely following the law Congress wrote, Republicans unsurprisingly saw the matter differently. Conservative think tanks like the Foundation for Government Accountability made attacking the change a major priority, and Republican members of Congress railed against it in hearings.  “Some will cynically point to provisions to update the Thrifty Food Plan in the 2018 Farm Bill as the basis for USDA’s action, but Congress never agreed to permit a quarter of a trillion-dollar spending increase,” Sen. John Boozman (R-AZ), the incoming chair of the Senate Agriculture Committee, argued in 2023. The 2018 Farm Bill itself expired on September 30, 2023, and has been continually extended as-is since then by Congress. But that means we’re overdue for a new farm bill, and Republicans like House agriculture chair GT Thompson (R-PA) have signaled they want to use the bill to roll back the TFP boost. Donald Trump proposed sweeping cuts to food stamps in each of his budgets as president, and lists of “spending options” being circulated by congressional Republicans give reversing the Thrifty Food Plan changes a prominent place, alongside cuts to Medicaid. All that suggests that Republicans will probably try to cut food stamps this year. But there’s reason to be optimistic they’ll fail. Food stamps have always survived based on an unusual coalition between farm-state members of Congress and urban members, where the latter support farm subsidies that don’t help their constituents in exchange for food stamps that do, and vice versa.  Farm bills pass through regular order, meaning they need 60 Senate votes, and no Senate Democrat is going to vote for a bill that substantially cuts food stamps. Even if Republicans try to use budget reconciliation to avoid needing 60 Senate votes, their thin House majority means only a few defections would be needed to kill food stamp cuts. There’s a reason Trump merely proposed cuts last time, while signing a farm bill that didn’t cut the program at all. If the Thrifty Food Plan changes endure, they stand as an unambiguously positive part of the legacy of Dean, Vilsack, and Biden himself. It’s tempting to view the 2021–2025 period as an interregnum in an era mostly defined by Donald Trump and the ways in which he’s reshaped American politics. But interregna can leave lasting marks too. And this could be an immensely positive one.

Preview: Studies show that wildfires and other climate disasters can speed up the gentrification process. | Jill Connelly/Bloomberg via Getty Images It is often said that climate disasters are great equalizers. They rip through neighborhoods, rich and poor, devastating communities and upending lives without discriminating between them. But it is, of course, not that simple.  As the wildfires blaze through Southern California, class divides are as evident as ever. It is true that even the rich and famous could not spare their homes from burning to the ground. But it is also true that while most residents have to wait for public assistance, the wealthy have more resources to come to their rescue. Private firefighters, for example, have been in high demand​​ — in some cases, even protecting individual mansions to prevent the fires from touching them.  One real estate investor pleaded for help on social media, asking if anyone has access to private firefighters that could save his home. “Will pay any amount,” he wrote on X. No matter how much money you have, natural disasters can still be unforgiving, and losing a home is always a tragedy. But once the fires finally go out, inequality will almost certainly rise because of the class divides that are already entrenched in Los Angeles. Rich people will be able to rebuild their homes and neighborhoods, while middle- and low-income families might be permanently displaced.  Studies of past California wildfires have shown that they drove gentrification — something that Hawaii residents have been dealing with since deadly wildfires ravaged through residential areas on Maui. Already, there have been reports of landlords hiking rents in and around Los Angeles, despite the fact that dramatically increasing rents during a state of emergency is illegal in California.  The ongoing wildfires have already destroyed more than 12,000 structures, including homes, schools, and houses of worship. The question for some of these communities — especially those in middle- and low-income areas — is whether they’ll ever come back, or whether the post-disaster gentrification will render them unrecognizable. How wildfires fuel gentrification When a natural disaster strikes a community, housing prices almost always rise. In the short term, the reason is obvious: Apartments and houses have been damaged or destroyed, so there are fewer of them, and that decline in supply causes rents to spike.  But as rebuilding efforts drag on, many middle- and low-income people never return to their neighborhoods because they can’t afford to.  “One of the reasons gentrification happens is that everything just becomes more expensive,” said Jennifer Gray Thompson, founder and CEO of After the Fire, a nonprofit that helps communities prepare for and recover from wildfires. One reason is the high cost of building, but there are others, including landlords taking advantage of high demand to raise rents and real estate investors buying up properties to try to profit off of them later. Rebuilding can be a slow and arduous process. In late 2018, a wildfire effectively leveled the town of Paradise, California, burning through 95 percent of its buildings. Five years after the fire, only about a third of the town’s pre-fire population of 27,000 had returned, and the median home price skyrocketed from $236,000 to $440,000. As a result, many victims of the fire have been permanently priced out, and the town has started to draw people in from wealthier regions like the Bay Area.  “In Paradise … they are a little over six years post-disaster — they are about 30 percent rebuilt — and their population has changed dramatically because a lot of their population was elderly and not well resourced at all,” Thompson said. “When you get those two combinations, you’re almost always going to have a massive change of demographics.” Nicole Lambrou, a professor of urban and regional planning at California State Polytechnic University Pomona, has found similar patterns. Lambrou has studied wildfires and the displacement that happens in their wake, and while she notes that there’s no single, concrete measure of gentrification, she and her colleagues found many signs of deepening inequality after the disasters.  “We looked at American Community Survey data [in communities affected by wildfires], and we have found that disabilities decreased, education rates increased, renter occupied housing decreased, and median age also decreased because there is a vulnerability in wildfires that’s associated with age,” Lambrou said — all markers of gentrification, with more vulnerable populations leaving impacted areas for good. “Disaster” or “climate gentrification” — that is, a neighborhood drawing in wealthier newcomers while pricing out longtime residents after a natural disaster like a wildfire or hurricane — is not exactly new. Many communities destroyed by various storms have struggled to bring back their lower-income residents. And while it generally has the same contours as non-disaster-related gentrification, it tends to accelerate the process because natural disasters immediately displace a sizable population and open up a lot of land for speculators to cash in on. That’s why in Lahaina, Hawaii, where wildfires killed over 100 people and destroyed more than 2,000 buildings in 2023, residents have been trying to raise money for a community land trust — buying up plots of land before speculators do, and renting or selling homes at more affordable rates.  One striking trend that contributes to making post-disaster communities less affordable is that people looking to buy a second home swoop in. When Lambrou and her colleagues were doing their fieldwork in Paradise to study the impacts of the fire, housing agents told them that they noticed a trend of Bay Area residents, who only live a couple of hours away, buying second homes.  “We did in fact find that that’s the case if you look at the data,” Lambrou said. “Secondary home ownership goes up substantially in these areas.” What can California do to prevent more gentrification While wildfires undoubtedly displace many people, it doesn’t mean that all communities follow the same pattern of gentrification in the ashes. For starters, Paradise was almost entirely burned down, while current fires are devastating a much smaller portion of the greater Los Angeles area by comparison. The LA metropolitan area might also fare better than places like Paradise in part because the city’s strong, diverse economy means that people who lose their jobs to the fire can more easily find employment and are more likely to stick around.  “If you have a place like Santa Rosa, which is part of a larger metropolitan region or even a place like Ventura, which is so close to the greater LA area, you can find alternative employment, you can find alternatives for your children,” Lambrou said, adding that those areas tended to have quicker recoveries after previous wildfires and keep a larger portion of the pre-fire population. “Conversely, in Paradise, they lost a lot of their schools, their major employer was the Adventist hospital, which burned down and they decided to not rebuild, and so they lost a lot.” Still, recovery efforts can be designed to minimize the potential for disaster-related gentrification, and the state has already taken some steps to do just that.  California Gov. Gavin Newsom, for example, issued an executive order that cuts red tape by suspending environmental reviews, which will help communities affected by the fires to rebuild at a faster pace. The executive order also ensures that homeowners won’t see their property taxes soar after they rebuild their homes by maintaining their pre-fire tax assessments. The state also needs to make sure that it administers funds in an equitable manner. In the past, research has shown that wealthier and whiter communities are more likely to receive government support after a fire. But ultimately, California was already home to some of the most expensive real estate in the world. The state has not been able to keep up with its housing production goals, and the ongoing housing shortage — which is only exacerbated by the fires — has been the main driver of gentrification. Doubling down on building more housing and increasing population density is key to bringing home prices down in the long run.  Victims of the wildfires, however, aren’t going to be able to wait that long to see housing prices come down. So what the state does next, and how it directs its resources, will be critical in allowing communities to rebuild. After all, the reason natural disasters aren’t great equalizers comes down to how a government responds. Update, January 17 at 6 pm ET: This piece was originally published on January 17 and was updated to include more context from Jennifer Gray Thompson.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Hampering the chief justice’s efforts to swear him in for a second term, President-elect Donald Trump autographed the inaugural Bible before handing it back to John Roberts, sources confirmed Monday. “There you go—all yours,”  said Trump, who took the Bible from Roberts, pulled a Sharpie out of his suit pocket, opened the book, and scribbled […] The post Confused Trump Autographs Swearing-In Bible Before Handing It Back To Justice Roberts appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Placing his right hand on the collection of posts taken from the controversial message board, JD Vance was reportedly sworn in as vice president Monday on a stack of printed-out 4chan greentexts. “I, James David Vance, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign […] The post JD Vance Sworn In On Stack Of Printed 4chan Greentexts appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Cackling wildly as he pulled himself from the smoldering wreckage while those around him watched in horror, Defense Secretary nominee Pete Hegseth reportedly crashed a golf cart into the stage at the presidential inauguration Monday. “Ooooh shiiiiit, what the fuck was that?” said the bewildered former Fox News host, who, after stumbling out of the vehicle […] The post Pete Hegseth Crashes Golf Cart Into Inauguration Stage appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Not bothering to conceal her phone screen, Melania Trump was reportedly swiping through Raya matches Monday in full view of television cameras. The former and incoming first lady of the United States was captured in close-up by various news networks perusing profiles on the celebrity dating app during her husband’s inauguration ceremony, occasionally pausing to zoom […] The post Melania Trump Swiping Through Raya Matches In Full View Of Cameras appeared first on The Onion.

Preview: WASHINGTON—Wanting to ensure his closest companion in the world got a good view of the inauguration proceedings, Elon Musk held up his AI girlfriend app so she could see, sources confirmed Monday. “Take it all in, Jasmine, my sweet—this is a day we’ll tell our children about,” Musk said as he slowly panned his phone’s […] The post Elon Musk Holds Up AI Girlfriend App So She Can See appeared first on The Onion.

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Preview: The EPA warned that forever chemicals found in sewage sludge that some farmers use to fertilize fields and pastures can pose a threat to human and animal health. What do you think? The post Sewage Sludge Used As Fertilizer Poses Health Risks appeared first on The Onion.