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Tashi Duncan (Zendaya) and her tennis-playing, polyamorous twinks. | Challengers/Amazon MGM Studios The relationship style has been the topic of talky articles and books. Finally, it’s the sexiest element of the year’s sexiest movie. Much has recently been made out of polyamory in the media, to the point where the prospect of dating and ostensibly having sex with multiple people who are also attracted to you seems rather unsexy. Pieces in outlets like the Atlantic, New Yorker, and New York Times (at least twice) have taken stabs at painting portraits of polyams that have resulted in the following takeaways: poly relationships are messy, but they will be the first ones to admit to you that they are messy; poly people believe in a lot of annoying rules, except for annoying rules about monogamy; poly people feel misunderstood but they also have their own acronym-filled language (NRE! Metamour!); polyamory is either popular or not popular at all and said contested popularity, if true, may or may not be the result of a housing crisis. To be clear, I do not come to bury polyamory. I’m merely pointing out that all this seeming like an exhausting hassle is what happens when something humans do in their relationships becomes a media fixation. Secrets are suddenly made un-secret, and so much is lost in translation and public consumption. No one wants to write a news article that comes from a place of horniness, and with that mentality, the subject becomes a punchline. Just when you thought that the entire idea of being communally entangled felt too examined, too picked over to ever be sexy again, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers comes swooping in. Sun-drenched and sweat-soaked, the film demystifies polyamory into something blazingly simple: being in love — physically and emotionally — with two people and being loved back can make a person as happy as they’ve ever been or ever will be. Challengers/Amazon MGM Studios Imagine if it was you that Josh O’Connor (right) was gesturing this to! In tennis terms, “challengers” are a type of B-list tournament, made for players in ranking purgatory — not good enough to be in the main draws of grand slam tournaments and not bad enough to be out of the game entirely. The title also has a double meaning, referencing the very complicated, emotionally difficult, and extremely randy tennis prodigies-turned-pros Tashi Duncan (Zendaya), Art Donaldson (Mike Faist), and Patrick Zweig (Josh O’Connor). The three are part of an intricate, ball-bashing love triangle, and it’s no accident that every corner is so acutely hot. Zendaya in particular knows how to wear an old money sweater. Faist and O’Connor spend a lot of time arching their backs, whether they’re wearing tiny shorts or not. Perhaps most important, this is a triangle where, as screenwriter Justin Kuritzkes told NBC, “all sides needed to touch” — and they do. That’s crystal clear when they first meet, as teens at the junior US Open. Art and Patrick are attracted to Tashi for completely different, at times murky, reasons. Patrick thinks she’s physically beautiful, the hottest girl on earth. Art admires her commanding style of tennis, which makes her the hottest girl on earth to him. When they watch her rip backhands, something clicks for both of them — so much that when she finishes off the point and screams, Patrick grabs Art’s knee. Through her they see each other’s desires and each other in a new, clear way. The boys invite her to their room, and the great American tennis hope shows up. “I don’t want to be a homewrecker,” Tashi tells them. On the surface, it comes off as a joke. Their closeness and intimacy could be seen as something that’s a little funny for two men who aren’t explicitly gay. But the comment also functions as something truthful. Minutes later, during their three-way kiss, Tashi cocks her head back in a devious, ecstatic grin not because, as one might assume, Art and Patrick are paying her attention — but because Art and Patrick are kissing each other, lost in the moment. Perhaps Tashi Duncan is telling the truth. She wants to be a homemaker, not a homewrecker! What she really wants is to see them up their game. She tells the boys that whoever wins their face-off match the next day can have her number. A year later, when Art and Tashi are at Stanford, Art tries to throw a wrench in Tashi and Patrick’s ongoing relationship. He tells Tashi that the vibe he gets from Patrick is that it isn’t that serious. Art tells Tashi that Patrick doesn’t love her, a bit of information that only bothers her so far as she’d hate for someone to think that’s what she wants. Challengers/Amazon MGM Studios Frown if you’re not into monogamy! When Patrick arrives at Palo Alto, he pulls Art close — so close you can see the sugar glistening off of his churro (not a euphemism) — and warns him that he’s onto Art’s game. He sees the wedge, and Art trying to finagle a way in. Instead of being angry, Patrick is impressed, happy to see Art go for something that he wants — even if it is his girlfriend. Patrick also wants to see Art up his game. Their competition turns Tashi on too, as the two talk about Art while they make out and undress. She tells Patrick that Art can beat him — at tennis. She tells him that she watches and knows what he needs to do better in his matches. She tells him she thinks Art is good enough. At one point Patrick asks Tashi to stop talking about his friend and their shared sport, and it’s as though someone blew out the horniness like a candle. The fight that follows precedes Tashi’s career-ending injury, and in a roundabout way, her eventual marriage to Art, which catapults the pairing to a new level of fame and aspiration. Not unlike the way Tashi was miserable with Patrick when they weren’t talking about Art, Tashi is miserable being married to Art without Patrick. Though Guadagnino and Kuritzkes wrap the couple in plenty of material success — luxury endorsements, high-end clothes, lush hotels, and six grand slam wins — Art and Tashi are not happy as “the Donaldsons.” They have everything they ever wanted, winning tennis’s biggest tournaments and having the money to do anything, but it can’t spark excitement in their lives. You can tell how miserable Art and Tashi are because Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’s pulsating score takes a breath from its thumping pace whenever we’re near the Donaldsons and their dull monogamy. When Art tells Tashi he wants to retire after the Open, the score shifts into an elegiac, string-forward, pleading love song. It’s so soft that it’s almost a little pathetic, not unlike future tennis hall of famer Art. Yet, when Art and Patrick face off on the court and Tashi watches, Reznor and Ross’s music morphs into something honey-thick, sexier, and more dangerous. The score and their exchanged glances are comically electric; the sexy molly dance music captures the thrill of their three-way relationship. Those beats fill the last moments in the movie, the final points between Art and Patrick. In that closing set, Patrick changes up his service routine and places the ball in the neck of his racket. This is his secret code to Art that he slept with Tashi, a gesture the two created together as teens without Tashi’s knowledge. Art snaps. He goes into a catatonic, post-marriage state. He lets a couple points pass, and by losing them, plunges Patrick and himself into a tiebreak — a race to seven points, like soccer’s penalty shots or basketball’s overtime but more exciting. Valery Hache/AFP via Getty Images The Challengers press tour leaned into the polyam bit of the movie. Because, why not? But who’s winning isn’t Guadagnino’s concern. Nor is he particularly interested in articulating exactly what these men are thinking or feeling. There are no distinct labels or boundaries for how these men feel about each other. There’s no neat way to articulate what it means that the woman they’re both interested in is interested in both of them. There’s no ability to explain how much of their mutual want is fueling this erotic thrill. In this fantasy, there’s no need to talk things out for the sake of respectability or to make an audience feel comfortable or understand. All that exists in this moment is an indescribable frisson and beguiling respect that you may never get with just one person. The point that follows is an exhausting, grunting, sweat-stained rally that ends with both of them at the net, Art going up for a smash and Patrick bracing for impact. We don’t see who wins the point because all the camera’s focus is on Tashi, who growls — a carnal howl — in pleasure. The only other time we’ve seen her this happy was when all three of them were together, with all their desires for each other and with each other out in the open. And they’ve found that again, finally.

Israeli and Palestinian flags on display in protests at UCLA on April 28, 2024 in Westwood, California. | Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times/Getty Images It’s time to take back the Israel-Palestine debate from the radicals on both sides. You may have heard of Shai Davidai, the Israeli professor at Columbia University who has launched a crusade against the school’s pro-Palestinian protestors. He’s rocketed to fame by calling students terrorists, comparing himself to Jewish victims of Nazi Germany, and demanding the National Guard forcibly break up the student encampments. After the NYPD stormed Columbia’s campus on Tuesday night, arresting hundreds of students, he retweeted a message blaming the events on “a circus of narcissists, egged on by irresponsible faculty.” (Indeed.) Davidai, like many of the loud pro-Israel voices in the national debate, is casting blanket aspersions on students who are protesting for good reasons. Well over 30,000 Palestinians are dead, many of whom are children; the devastation is so complete that a fully accurate death toll is now impossible. There is no good moral or strategic justification for Israel’s scorched-earth approach, which currently risks strengthening the terrorist group Hamas’s strategic position in the long term. Given that billions of American dollars are underwriting this atrocity, it’s easy to see why college campuses are in uproar. But while the majority of students are genuinely motivated by justifiable outrage, a smaller faction have gone to a much darker place: going so far as endorsing Hamas’s murder of Israelis and calling for the violent destruction of Israel. All too often, they are tolerated by — or even members of — protest leadership. Students for Justice in Palestine, the biggest national force behind the college protests, has described Hamas’s mass slaughter on October 7 as “a historic win for the Palestinian resistance.” Khymani James, one of the leaders of the Columbia protests, publicly fantasized about murdering “Zionists.” University of Pennsylvania students chanted in support of Hamas’s military wing (“al-Qassam, make us proud, take another soldier down”). An organizer at UC-Berkeley distributed pamphlets explaining, in his words, how the Hamas attack “was an act of decolonization.” The reciprocal extremism on college campuses, egged on by irresponsible university administrators who have heightened tensions by calling in the cops, is a window into a reality everyone knows: The American conversation about Israel-Palestine is broken. Anyone who even touches the issue knows it’s toxic. The conversation is dominated by extremists who aggressively police the slightest misstep and punish internal dissent, a longstanding dynamic supercharged in recent years by social media. Recently, a prominent person in American politics privately told me that they see engagement on the topic as a no-win proposition. About half of all young American Jewish adults have stopped talking to someone they know over the conflict. There are deep reasons why America’s Israel-Palestine discourse is so dysfunctional. They range from the pro-Israel movement’s embrace of Israeli extremists to the pro-Palestinian movement’s radical-chic culture to the uninspiring alternative on offer in official Washington. Put together, they create an environment where the loudest and most influential voices on each side are all too often the most aggressive and uncompromising ones. In such an environment, the most reasonable people on each side — the ones that recognize that neither Israelis or Palestinians are going anywhere, and that peace can only be found through negotiated compromise — are sidelined. They are getting very little help from some alleged supporters of a two-state solution in Washington, where an insipid and out-of-touch approach does its own work to discredit the center. Understanding these dynamics can help us grasp the dueling narratives around the campus protests. But more importantly, it can help us comprehend why the space for creating pro-peace coalitions seems to have shrunk — and what can be done to rebuild it. Inside the pro-Israel movement’s radicalization In the United States, the Israel-Palestine debate has gone through a long process of polarization and radicalization that has only gotten worse in recent years. I know the dynamics on the pro-Israel side firsthand: When I was in college in the late 2000s, I was the president of my university’s pro-Israel campus group. I abandoned the post shortly after I got into a public argument with one of my own members after he endorsed West Bank settlement, an enterprise that I always thought was both morally wrong and politically suicidal. As Israel’s government moved more and more to the right, increasingly captured by the anti-Palestinian settler movement, the pro-Israel movement moved with them — leaving no place for people like me. Today, I spend much of my professional life criticizing Israel from the anti-occupation left. There are deep reasons why the pro-Israel movement is the way that it is. When I used to attend closed-door events for student activists held by AIPAC, the leading American pro-Israel lobby, they would tell us that they do not see second-guessing the Israeli government as part of the job description. Israel’s leaders determined what was in the country’s best interests; AIPAC and its activists worked merely to support that agenda on Capitol Hill. Michael Brochstein/SOPA Images/LightRocket/Getty Images Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks at AIPAC’s Policy Conference in DC in 2018. This “we don’t judge” policy, rooted in an uncompromising version of Zionism that grants little weight to Palestinian rights, has turned AIPAC and its allies into lobbyists for colonialism. In this, they have enthusiastically linked up with outright right-wing extremists like Pastor John Hagee, the leader of Christians United for Israel. The pro-Israel movement, once comfortable with a two-state solution when Israel’s leadership supported it, is now doing everything in its power to back a government bent on destroying it. What was once called “liberal Zionism” — the view, held by a majority of American Jews, that Israel has a right to exist but no right to occupy Palestinian land — no longer has a place in the organized pro-Israel movement. AIPAC and other mainstream pro-Israel groups treat the smaller liberal Zionist organizations, like J Street and Americans for Peace Now, as mortal enemies. The pro-Israel movement’s current job is mainstreaming Israeli extremism. And it has long been willing to threaten people’s careers and livelihoods — through tools like a public blacklist of pro-Palestinian scholars and students — in order to accomplish that end. When “pro-Palestine” becomes “anti-peace” The pro-Palestinian movement in the United States is far weaker than its pro-Israel twin. There is no Palestinian AIPAC capable of leading $100 million campaigns to unseat members of Congress. But as Americans’ sympathy with Palestinians continues to grow, the movement is poised to wield greater influence down the line — making its own radicalization process a subject of real concern. In his book The Movement and the Middle East, historian Michael Fischbach argues that the 1960s-era radical left in the United States fractured over Israel-Palestine, and the events of that period determined “where progressive Americans stand on these issues today.” During the Cold War, the most hardline factions took an uncompromising pro-Palestine stance, seeing armed Arab struggle against Israel as part of the global fight against Western imperialism. More moderate groups, by contrast, supported Israel in existential conflicts like the 1967 Six-Day War. With extreme left factions playing a disproportionate role in shaping pro-Palestine activism, a significant chunk of the movement took on a similarly radical cast. In this, they were aided by the censorious efforts of the pro-Israel extremists, who worked to turn “Palestine” into a dirty word in mainstream American political discourse. This meant that, for many years, young people passionate about the Palestinian cause were drawn toward far-left factions who called for Israel’s destruction, lionized Palestinian violence, and saw the two-state solution as a sellout compromise. Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images A University of Washington student and Revolutionary Communist International member holds a publication during an on-campus protest. “It became a far-left issue because it was so stigmatized,” says Hussein Ibish, a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute in Washington. “You had to be on the far left … in order to fit being a champion of the Palestinians into your professional career path.” In the 2000s, Ibish helped found the American Task Force on Palestine (ATFP), a DC-based group that aimed to promote the Palestinian cause from a pro-peace standpoint. He recalls unremitting hostility from both the AIPAC-style pro-Israel groups and the existing far-left pro-Palestinian infrastructure. ATFP was chronically short of money, maxing out at three full-time policy staffers. It ultimately shuttered its doors in 2016. “We failed,” Ibish says, “because no one supported us.” Today, the Palestinian cause is far more mainstream than it once was — especially among young people and liberals. This is primarily the result of Israel’s rightward political drift: As Israel continues West Bank colonization and pulverizing Gaza, the injustice of the status quo becomes increasingly hard to deny. Yet far-left maximalists still wield disproportionate influence in the pro-Palestine activist and intellectual communities. This is why prominent voices on the issue today — like the US Campaign for Palestinian Rights, “dirtbag left” podcasters, the president of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and academics like Judith Butler — have been able to praise or sanitize Hamas’s actions on October 7 without meaningful pushback on their own side. Breaking the radicalization doom loop The most radical voices on both sides are not representative of broader public opinion. Polling shows that Americans favor a two-state solution by a roughly 20-point margin. About 30 percent support Israeli annexation of the West Bank; only 5 percent believe that Hamas’s action on October 7 was acceptable. A sizable majority of American Jews are uncomfortable with actions of the Israeli state; only a small minority of American Muslims endorse terrorism against Israelis. The radicalism you see in the news or on social media reflects neither the mass public nor the views of Americans from the most affected groups. Instead, it reflects the views of the extremely engaged. Their every utterance or action is magnified by their extreme allies and enemies alike, making it seem as if the worst and most marginal voices stand in for everyone else. Extreme activists polarizing public debates is not an uncommon phenomenon: Look, for example, at the way anti-abortion activists or climate change radicals push well beyond what the average person in their coalition supports. Once people get locked into mutually hostile camps, the rank-and-file becomes more tolerant of any kind of extremism directed at their opponents — and less tolerant of any internal voices calling for compromise and mutual dialogue. The more radical one side appears, the more the other radicalizes in response. What’s happening on Israel-Palestine is an especially bitter version of this standard political polarization doom loop. So what can be done? The obvious answer is to make space for pro-peace voices. And that starts, counterintuitively, by creating room for more challenges to what appears like a moderate Washington consensus — but in reality is a debate heavily tilted toward Israel. Both major American political parties have long been staunchly pro-Israel. The Republican version of this is rabid, increasingly aligned with Netanyahu and his far-right government. The Democratic version is pallid, mouthing empty support for two states and bromides about shared liberal values even as Israel starves Palestinian children. The handful of dissenters, including Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) or Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD), have been relentlessly attacked as anti-Israel or even antisemitic (though there’s more room for them today than there has been in the past). Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during the 2019 National Conference hosted by J Street, a pro-peace lobby in Washington. When the establishment seems out of touch with reality, extremism tends to flourish. Republicans may be fine with that, but Democrats clearly are not. If they wish to defang campus radicals on their left flank, they need to create more space in the system for taking legitimate concerns with Israel’s behavior seriously. Cease unconditional support for the war in Gaza and start thinking more creatively about how to pressure Israel into taking up Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas’s recently reiterated offer to negotiate. As horribly polarized as the Israel-Palestine debate seems, there actually is space for productive coalition-building that can contribute toward the cause of peace. Let’s not let the extremist voices in the discourse distract us from that fact.

Selcuk Acar/Anadolu via Getty Images The Columbia protests and the debate over pro-Palestinian college students, explained. Protests over the war in Gaza erupted on Columbia University’s campus in mid-April, inspiring demonstrations at other universities across the country as well as in Canada and France. But as those protests — many of which center on encampments and demands that universities divest from Israel — have grown, so too have intense crackdowns involving local law enforcement. Wednesday at UCLA, masked counter-protesters attacked pro-Palestine protesters in their encampment with metal pipes, mace, and pepper spray and threw at least one firework, while police were slow to intervene, according to Al Jazeera. The encampment was later cleared by police. That outburst followed a police action at Columbia that saw officers arresting student protesters who had occupied a building, and the arrests of hundreds of other protesters across the country. President Joe Biden gave an address in the wake of these developments, affirming the right to protest in remarks at the White House Thursday, but “not the right to cause chaos.” “It’s against the law when violence occurs,” Biden said, adding that he would not seek to deploy the National Guard to stem the unrest. Biden, who has staunchly supported Israel’s war in Gaza after October 7, had previously denounced both “antisemitic protests” and “those who don’t understand what’s going on with the Palestinians.” His remarks are a reminder of how much political scrutiny colleges and universities are currently under, particularly when it comes to issues of Israel and Palestine, as Israel’s war on Hamas stretches into its eighth month. Previous rounds of congressional testimony made top universities the locus around which America litigates questions about the US’s support of Israel amid its deadly war in Gaza, free speech, antisemitism, and anti-Muslim discrimination — and a convenient target for political elites looking to make a point. And not just Biden: House Speaker Mike Johnson, visited Columbia’s campus, and now claims “antisemitism is a virus” spreading on college campuses. As politicians weigh in, some universities — including Columbia — have taken steps to shut down encampments, often without considering students’ central demand — that their schools divest any investments in Israel. Others, including Brown University, have entered into agreements with demonstrators, accepting some of their demands. Overall, the controversies at Columbia and other campuses illustrate how universities have struggled to uphold their dual commitments to free speech and protecting their students during a fraught political moment when more young people sympathize with the Palestinian cause than with the Israeli government. Concerns about antisemitism at the protests (often attributed to students, but largely perpetrated by outsiders according to anecdotal reporting) also piqued national attention, as has the very public role of police. “Calling the police on campus is such a breach of the culture of a college or university,” Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union, which is representing arrested Columbia students, told Vox. “To do so in response to nonviolent student protest is beyond the pale, and it really undermines the standing of the university in the eyes of a broad swath of the population as a place of free, open, and robust dialogue and debate.” What’s actually happening on college campuses Pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel protests have become a prominent feature on college campuses since Hamas’s October 7 attack on Israel. They reached a fever pitch in December when the presidents of Harvard, MIT, and the University of Pennsylvania gave controversial testimony before Congress about campus antisemitism, both real and hypothetical. The demonstrations were reanimated after Columbia president Nemat Shafik gave congressional testimony that, per the Associated Press, focused on “fighting antisemitism rather than protecting free speech.” Students erected tents on Columbia’s main lawn to show solidarity with Gaza. Then Shafik took the controversial step of calling in the police to arrest those involved. They have spread not just across the country — at campuses including at Yale University, New York University, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Miami University in Ohio, and Temple University in Philadelphia and others — but also internationally. Over the course of the protests, hundreds of people at Columbia, Yale, the University of Texas-Austin, Emerson College, the University of Southern California, and New York University have faced mass arrests as administrators seek to quell the unrest. Police involvement in the protests has intensified in recent days: Local law enforcement removed students at Cal Poly Humboldt from a university hall they had been occupying for a week. Dozens of NYPD officers entered Columbia University Tuesday night, arresting a group of protesters who occupied a university building. Protesters at Cal Poly Humboldt, Columbia, City College of New York, and the University of New Mexico were also arrested. At least 47 students were arrested at Yale days after its encampment sprung up, and more than 150 were arrested at New York University. Texas Gov. Greg Abbott directed Texas police to the UT-Austin campus, where they arrested 34 including a journalist. Boston police also arrested 108 people at a protest led by Emerson College students who linked arms tightly and raised umbrellas; four officers were injured while trying to break up the crowd. In an echo of previous protest movements — including those at universities in the mid-20th century, as well as more recent demonstrations for civil rights — protests at some schools, including the University of Texas, appear to be growing in response to police crackdowns on protesters. There have been anecdotal reports of police violence during Tuesday night’s police raid at Columbia; those are difficult to verify, as press — including student reporters — were not allowed in the occupied building at the time. The protests are calling on universities to divest from firms that they contend profit from Israel’s war and occupation in Palestine, more than six months after the start of the war and as the death toll in Gaza has exceeded 34,000. Some groups at universities that conduct military research, like New York University, are also requesting their schools end work contributing to weapons development as well. Following Shafik’s testimony, Columbia students pitched more than 50 tents on the lawn in what they called a “Liberated Zone” on April 17. But the tents stayed up only about a day and a half before Shafik intervened. “The current encampment violates all of the new policies, severely disrupts campus life, and creates a harassing and intimidating environment for many of our students,” she wrote in an April 18 letter to the Columbia community. The police arrived shortly thereafter to arrest students for trespassing and removed more than 100 protesters, tying their hands with zip ties. Some have also been suspended and removed from student housing. In the days since, negotiators from the group leading the protest at Columbia — Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD) — have been in discussion with university administrators about the demonstrators’ demands. Those negotiations were cut off the morning of April 29. A lot of the national attention has focused less on the protesters’ demands or the US-Israeli relationship — and the destruction of Gaza — and more on allegations that the protests are inherently antisemitic for criticizing Israel, or that specific antisemitic incidents have occurred. Shafik announced that classes would be hybrid through the end of the academic year to provide a “reset” on the conversation and in light of students’ safety concerns. Shafik requested on April 30 that the NYPD maintain a presence on the university campus until mid-May. Rabbi Elie Buechler, a rabbi associated with Columbia University’s Orthodox Union Jewish Learning Initiative on Campus, had urged hundreds of Orthodox Jewish students to go home and suggested they stay there for their safety. Brandeis University, a historically Jewish institution, has extended its transfer application period to accommodate students who feel unsafe on their campuses. The protests have been complicated by the way they’ve been characterized Student protests on Columbia’s campus were largely nonviolent until the night of April 30, when the NYPD entered Hamilton Hall — the building protesters occupied and renamed “Hind’s Hall” for Hind Rajab, the 6-year-old Palestinian girl allegedly killed by Israeli troops alongside her family in January. An Instagram video shared by CUAD appears to show an individual being pushed or kicked down the stairs in front of the building, and one student told Vox they saw some of the arrested protesters bloodied and with visible wounds. Representatives from the New York Police Department said during a press conference shortly after the Columbia encampment opened that there had been some incidents in which Israeli flags were snatched from students and unspecified hateful things said. But they said that there have not been any reports of Columbia students being physically harmed or any credible threats made against individuals or groups associated with the university community ahead of the start of the Jewish holiday of Passover. However, a video surfaced in late April of what appeared to be masked pro-Palestinian protesters outside of Columbia’s gates shouting, “The 7th of October is going to be every day for you,” at Jewish students. It’s not clear whether those shouting were affiliated with the university. Just after the video was circulated, President Joe Biden issued a statement: “This blatant Antisemitism is reprehensible and dangerous — and it has absolutely no place on college campuses, or anywhere in our country.” That statement served as a “blanket condemnation of the Columbia protests,” said Matt Berkman, an assistant professor of Jewish studies at Oberlin College. It failed to distinguish those featured in the video who may not have been affiliated with the university from the vast majority of student protesters, who based on many different accounts, have been peaceful. And it flattened the makeup of the protests, which include a number of Jewish students. Jewish students who have been suspended from Columbia and Barnard stated that they had celebrated a Passover Seder within the encampment at a press conference. In a video address, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also misleadingly characterized the protests, falsely claiming that “antisemitic mobs have taken over leading universities” in a video address and compared them to rallies held in Germany during the rise of the Nazi party. “Pro-Israel activists are clearly invested in painting everyone at Columbia, whether inside or outside the gates, with the same broad brush,” Berkman said. There are antisemitic incidents in the United States, which represent real danger to Jewish communities and individuals — and they have increased since the Hamas attacks on October 7. In December, the Anti-Defamation League reported that antisemitic incidents had increased by nearly 340 percent since then. Complicating its data, however, is the fact that the ADL’s annual audit of antisemitic assaults, vandalism, and harassment also includes in the latter categories some anti-Zionist activism. Removing all Israel-related incidents from their count, America has a smaller but still big problem: Non-Israel-related antisemitic incidents still rose by 65 percent compared to 2022, per their data. Columbia students aren’t alone in facing broad accusations of antisemitism. Students at Yale, the Ohio State University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and others have all been called out by the ADL for engaging in Palestine solidarity protests as well as for specific incidents of antisemitism. Nor are they alone in facing arrest; NYU students and faculty and students at Yale have also been arrested. Police involvement in the protests — particularly on New York City campuses — has been met with backlash, particularly from university faculty and activists. “NYPD presence in our neighborhood endangers our entire community,” the Columbia chapter of the American Association of University Professors wrote in an April 30 letter. “Armed police entering our campus places students and everyone else on campus at risk.” The letter claims that faculty efforts to defuse tension between the protesters and administration had been rebuffed, and that university administration had failed to consult faculty when deciding to bring the police on campus. Veronica Salama, who as a staff attorney at NYCLU is part of the team defending these students, told Vox that Shafik called the police as part of her emergency powers — but in doing so violated university policy. Vox has reached out to Columbia for comment and will update with its response. What’s behind the protests? In many ways, the demands of the protesters have been overshadowed by the controversy. At Columbia, the protesters belong to the coalition CUAD, which formed in 2016 to demand Columbia and Barnard College disclose investments in and divest — or remove from its investment portfolio — from Israeli and American companies and institutions that support Israel, citing its wars in Gaza and oppression of Palestinians in the West Bank and Jerusalem, and its illegal occupation of Palestinian territory. Shafik said in a statement that the school will not divest from Israeli companies or those that contribute to the ongoing occupation and destruction of Gaza; instead she offered a process to make Columbia’s investments more transparent to students and pledged to support early childhood development in Gaza and displaced scholars from the region. The coalition’s demands for divestment are of a piece with the BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) movement started by Palestinian civil society groups in 2005. BDS cites as its inspiration the anti-apartheid activists of the 1980s who targeted South Africa’s apartheid government with boycotts. While that movement wasn’t decisive in bringing down that government, it was successful in alienating the apartheid government from major global players like Barclays bank, the Olympics, and the International Cricket Conference, forcing countries and international institutions to confront their complicity in South Africa’s racist policies. In addition to divestment from “companies profiting from Israeli apartheid,” CUAD has a list of five other demands, including a call for an immediate ceasefire from government officials including President Joe Biden, and, importantly, an end to the dual degree program that Columbia has with Tel Aviv University. These demands echo those of student groups at other colleges and universities. NYU student activists are also demanding the university shut down its Tel Aviv campus and “divest from all corporations aiding in the genocide,” including weapons companies, and ban weapons tech research that benefits Israel. Two universities, Brown and Northwestern, have reached deals with student protesters and refused to take disciplinary or legal action against them. Northwestern has pledged to disclose its investments, and Brown has promised to hold a university board vote on whether to divest. However, the administration will not hold that vote until October. Critics allege that BDS and anti-Zionism are at their core antisemitic, arguing that BDS delegitimizes Israel and “effectively reject[s] or ignore[s] the Jewish people’s right of self-determination, or that, if implemented, would result in the eradication of the world’s only Jewish state, are antisemitic,” according to the Anti-Defamation League. The nature and tenor of the campus anti-war protests has been at the forefront of both media coverage and congressional hearings on antisemitism and campus free speech. But administrative response to them — particularly calling the police and issuing suspensions — has added a new dimension to the debate. It’s all part of a broader fight over free speech and antisemitism on college campuses Universities have struggled to balance their goals of protecting free speech and combatting antisemitism since the outbreak of war in Gaza, which has proved a political minefield. In December, a trio of university presidents who testified before Congress were accused (if not fairly) of being too permissive of free speech in the face of antisemitism or being too legalistic in their explanations of their situation. Now, some universities seem to be changing their tack. Shafik called in the police on protesters despite Columbia’s longstanding reputation as a bastion of free speech. The University of Southern California recently canceled the commencement speech of its pro-Palestinian valedictorian over campus safety concerns. And now NYU and other institutions have also instituted police crackdowns on protesters. Private universities, like many of those experiencing protests today, have long maintained policies that protect free speech similarly to the First Amendment: permitting anything up to genuine threats of violence and threatening behavior that would warrant punishment or even referrals to the criminal system. But the last six months have seemingly made many of them question not just when and where a threat begins, but also maybe even those commitments to students’ free speech more broadly. And complicating this all is a years-long history of pro-Palestinian activists saying they face targeted harassment. Alex Morey, director of campus rights advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, said that if Columbia wants to remain committed to free speech, it has an obligation to apply its speech policies in an equitable manner that is unbiased against any particular viewpoint and to ensure that students currently facing disciplinary action are offered due process. “Columbia providing due process, while fairly and consistently applying its viewpoint-neutral speech policies, will be absolutely mandatory here if Columbia wants to start back on the right path,” Morey said. Prohibiting students from camping out or blocking entrances or exits is “all above board” if applied uniformly, Morey added. But schools should see calling the police to enforce any such policies as a last resort, said Frederick Lawrence, the former president of Brandeis University and a lecturer at Georgetown Law. “I understand the very strong desire to protect the safety of all the students involved,” he said. “At the end of the day, the presumption should be in favor of free speech and free expression, and there are exceptions to that, but [starting] with that presumption often brings a lot of clarity to these vital decisions.” Correction, April 25, 4:30 pm ET: This story originally misstated the Anti-Defamation League’s methodology for tracking antisemitic incidents. It differentiates among the categories of assault, vandalism, and harassment. Among the latter categories, it includes some anti-Zionist expressions. Update, May 2, 1:16 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 24 and has been updated multiple times, most recently to include Biden’s most recent remarks on the protests.

Andrew Huberman, a neurobiology professor and host of the Huberman Lab podcast, attending INBOUND 2023 in Boston, Mass. | Photo by Chance Yeh/Getty Images for HubSpot The Huberman Lab has credentials and millions of fans, but it sometimes oversteps medical fact. Sometimes, misleading information is easy to spot, traveling in the same conspiracy-theory-slicked grooves it has for decades. The same ideas that undermined belief in the safety of Covid-19 vaccines have been around for more than a century, adapting the same message to suit new media formats, new epidemics, and new influential endorsements. In a way, George Bernard Shaw’s outspoken opposition to the smallpox vaccine in the first half of the 20th century is not unlike that of, say, Aaron Rodgers’s misleading statements about the Covid-19 vaccines. Such misleading information is relatively easy to see. But spotting other kinds of misleading information is more like identifying planets in other star systems. It’s difficult to find such a planet by just taking a direct image; the radiation from the star the planet orbits can obscure it. Instead, you might look for the shadow in front of the star or the “wobble” of a star caused by the gravitational pull of an orbiting planet. You find it by looking around it. Over time, with this kind of misleading information, you learn to spot the wobble, the tells that something might not be right. This is what happened for me when I began to listen to Huberman Lab last fall. Huberman Lab is one of the most popular podcasts in the country, led by Stanford neuroscientist Andrew Huberman. His most ardent fans — and there are millions — tend to be fitness enthusiasts, self-optimizers, and crossover listeners who heard about his podcast from other influencers in the Joe Rogan Extended Universe. Huberman looms large in the minds of his biggest fans. If you’re outside of that circle, perhaps you heard of his work after a New York magazine profile earlier this year detailed his personal conduct. The podcast’s premise is simple: presenting science-based overviews and conversations on a broad range of topics, from longevity to mental health to nutrition. A fawning profile in Time magazine last summer credited Huberman with getting America to care about science again. More than anything, though, the episodes I listened to conveyed a promise: If you want to optimize your body and mind, science has the answers, and all we need to do is listen. It’s a riveting promise, one that Huberman is not alone in making. Silicon Valley, in particular, is filled with wellness guides and well-funded laboratories seeking the secret to living the best and longest life. There are other well-credentialed promises of cures and solutions circulating, especially on podcasts, a format that seems to lend itself to this slippage between the reputable and the freewheeling. Huberman’s rise to popularity during the Covid-19 pandemic should have been a win for information: Huberman, an associate professor of neurobiology at Stanford with an active lab, it seemed, was a respected researcher in his field of visual neuroscience, and he filled his multi-hour podcast episodes with citations and caution. Popular science communication isn’t always the best science communication. The implicit pact that Huberman’s podcast makes with its audience — that it will, if you listen and follow, help you optimize your life — has turned the podcast into a powerful force that shapes how his audience of millions understands science. But listeners of Huberman Lab may be, at times, hearing what some call an illusion. When good communication goes bad In late March, New York magazine reported that Huberman’s Stanford laboratory “barely exists” and that, according to multiple women who dated him during his rise to fame, Huberman had manipulated and lied to his partners (Huberman’s spokesperson denied both of these allegations to the magazine, which shares a corporate owner with Vox). The profile was one tell — obscuring aspects of his personal and professional lives. But even before it came out, the same subject experts on the topics Huberman covered had been questioning some of the science of the podcast itself. This liminality, or in-betweenness, of Huberman Lab is key to its success. When speaking about vaccines, Huberman is no Alex Jones or Aaron Rodgers. He’s a real scientist who cites real studies. He approaches topics that might end up drawing scrutiny with a great deal of caution. For example, Huberman never tells his audience to avoid the flu vaccine. All he’s saying is that he doesn’t take it himself. And yet, the subtext is there. “Now, personally, I don’t typically get the flu shot. And the reason for that is that I don’t tend to go into environments where I am particularly susceptible to getting the flu,” Huberman said in an episode earlier this year on avoiding and treating the cold and flu. He went on: “When you take the flu shot, you’re really hedging a bet. You’re hedging a bet against the fact that you will be or not be exposed to that particular strain of flu virus that’s most abundant that season, or strains of flu virus that are most abundant that season, and that the flu shot that you’re taking is directed at those particular strains.” Make the choice that’s right for you, Huberman says. Talk to your doctor. “He’s a good communicator, right? That’s why he’s a star,” Tim Caulfield, a professor of health law and science policy at the University of Alberta, told me in late 2023. Huberman often does a “very good job” talking about the science behind a topic he’s exploring in an episode, Caulfield added, but “in the end, the overall takeaway, I think, is less supported by the science than the impression you’re given listening to the episode.” Instead of recommending a flu shot, Huberman introduces his listeners to a series of other ideas. Andrea Love, a microbiologist, immunologist, and science communicator herself, wrote a four-part newsletter series addressing Huberman’s claims in greater detail. She says he promoted possibly using a sauna to improve immune function, citing a study that had just 20 participants and did not directly measure immune function. She says he promoted the potential use of unproven supplements, including those sold by AG1, a company that partners with Huberman and sponsors his podcast. Huberman and his spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on Love’s characterization of this episode. For Love, it was easy to see Huberman Lab as sleight of hand even before the New York magazine story was published. The ingredients were there: Huberman is a magnetic personality capable of capturing attention with implied promises of the secrets to longevity, a perfect body, a perfect mind, even perfect sleep — much of which he says can be achieved with the help of the supplements that he himself advertises. Love was part of a cohort of scientists and public health communicators who raised concerns about Huberman’s wildly popular podcast over several months. When Huberman had Robert Lustig on as a guest, those concerns grew louder. Lustig is a pediatric endocrinologist at the University of California San Francisco (UCSF), but he’s perhaps best known for arguing that sugar, particularly fructose, is a “toxin.” Love, who said that Lustig’s claims about the uniquely causal relationship between fructose and childhood obesity remain unproven, listened to the conversation between the two scientists. (Disclosure: I recently accepted a contract for non-editorial freelance work at UCSF Health.) “I was floored with how many different types of misinformation he was able to shove into a single episode,” Love said earlier this year, after listening to the majority of Huberman’s 3-hour interview with Lustig. Like many of Huberman’s lengthy episodes, this one racked up millions of views on YouTube alone. In 2023, Huberman Lab was the eighth most listened to podcast on Apple Podcasts, and the third most popular on Spotify. As she listened, she took notes, marking moments where she felt the podcast omitted important facts, misinterpreted the progression of disease, or provided confusing information to listeners. At one point, Lustig cited a study that he said “showed” ultra-processed foods inhibit bone growth — one that, according to Huberman’s exchange with Lustig, used human subjects in Israel to test its claims. Love tracked down the 2021 paper easily. “This was in vivo – IN RODENTS,” she wrote in her notes. In her view, the podcast was “outright LYING to listeners.” A spokesperson for Andrew Huberman responded to a request for comment by noting that the podcast team “review studies mentioned on the podcast by guests, however the conclusions drawn by guests are their own and our guests are the foremost experts in their fields.” The show links to referenced studies in the show notes for each episode. Misleading information can be hard to see Nailing down Huberman’s beliefs is, likewise, tricky, straddling the line between endorsement and implication. In October, Huberman commented on an Instagram post by his friend Joe Rogan promoting an interview with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the presidential candidate who was once a respected environmental lawyer but is now perhaps best known for promoting conspiracy theories about vaccines, including those for Covid-19. “I’m eager to listen to this and to learn more about Robert’s stance on a number of issues. Whenever I run into him at the gym, he is extremely gracious and asks lots of questions about science and, by my observation, trains hard too!” Huberman’s verified Instagram account posted. When I told Caulfield about this post, he described it as “infuriating.” Huberman and his spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on his post about Kennedy. “Any kind of legitimization and normalization of that rhetoric, especially by someone who professes to be informed by science and has the credentials of a renowned institution behind him should be ashamed of doing that,” he said. Huberman’s relationship to the information in his podcast can be viewed through a series of glancing blows; through the subtext of deciding not to take the flu vaccine himself and telling that to his audience; through serious questions about how he handles himself in romantic relationships; and through the selection of his guests, the framing of his episodes, and his friends. Although Huberman has not directly responded to the New York magazine piece after its publication, his friends in the podcasting world, along with several more right-leaning media personalities, have called it a hit piece, and dismissed criticism of Huberman as either sloppy or mean-spirited. “Andrew should be celebrated. Period,” wrote Lex Fridman, a computer scientist and podcaster who has long been one of Huberman’s friends. And it appears his podcast viewers are still tuning in.

Canceling people’s debt from unpaid medical bills does not lead to improvements in their health or finances, according to a new study. | Getty Images A shocking new study suggests medical debt relief didn’t do much to improve patients’ finances or health. Four in 10 Americans carry some kind of medical debt, an affliction that is unique to the United States among wealthy nations. The country does not guarantee medical insurance to everyone, and the costs even to people who carry coverage are much higher on average than they are for patients in the rest of the developed world. It’s a fundamental flaw in the design of the US health care system. Those debts weigh on the people who carry them: Research has found that people who incur substantial medical bills (after a cancer diagnosis, for example) report cutting back on everyday spending, depleting their savings, and even downsizing their homes. Medical debt is associated with poorer general health, as well as higher rates of cancer, heart disease, and overall mortality. People end up sicker because they can’t afford their health care. In the absence of politically difficult health care reform, activists and some state and local governments have set up medical debt relief programs, purchasing the debts of people in difficult financial circumstances for much less than face value and wiping them out at no cost to the patient. But a new study of medical debt relief by a group of top economists has called its value into question. Participants who had their debt erased did not see their mental or physical health or their access to credit improve much after debt relief. There was even evidence that some people felt more depressed. “It would be great if we could improve people’s mental health, we could ease their finances, we could get them to go to the doctor more often by buying debt for less than a penny on a dollar,” Francis Wong, a University of Munich economist who co-authored the study, told me. “But it just didn’t work.” The findings stunned the researchers. While it might still be premature to discard medical debt relief based on one study, the research raises important questions about the limits of debt relief, and about how to use finite government and philanthropic resources to alleviate high health care costs. One lesson of the paper may be that relieving debt long after it’s accrued is ultimately a Band-Aid on the structural problems within US health care. Many people with medical debt are contending with other financial problems compounded by their health expenses, which are not easily undone by eliminating hospital bills. Preventing medical debt in the first place may be more effective. “The punchline for me is that you really need to tackle the root cause that created all of these issues in the first place, that created the financial distress and poor mental health,” Wong said. “That’s a matter of addressing the holes in the American health care system.” Medical debt relief didn’t do much to improve people’s finances The research team — including Wong, Harvard’s Raymond Kluender, Stanford’s Neale Mahoney, and UCLA’s Wesley Yin — was commissioned to study a group of 83,400 people who collectively had $169 million in medical debt relieved through the organization RIP Medical Debt (recently renamed Undue Medical Debt). The study analyzed two groups of patients: one had held their debts for seven years on average, the other for a little more than a year. Using surveys and financial data, the experiment tracked most patients for about a year after they received debt relief. Compared to patients who did not have their debt wiped out, the researchers found, the relief had negligible effects on participants’ access to credit and other measures of financial well-being. Credit scores increased by a marginal 3.6 points on average, though for people whose only debt had been medical debt, there was a more sizable 13.4-point increase. The average increase in credit limits was just $342. Participants whose debt was relieved actually became less likely to pay future medical bills, the study found. The results showed no improvements in objective and subjective measures of financial distress. One reason may be that although participants had an average of $2,167 in debt relieved, they had plenty of other, non-medical debt. The group averaged $28,000 in debts including things like credit card balances and car loans. An average of $4,000 in bills had already reached collections. “The most striking thing to me was just how much financial distress that folks with medical debt are experiencing broadly,” Kluender said. “The debt relief that we were able to execute through the experiment was insufficient to address their financial deprivation.” People in medical debt are often pestered by collectors and forced into even more debt to pay their bills and cut their spending on necessities such as food and rent. People did not report feeling happier or healthier after debt relief The study also found that measures of depression, stress, anxiety, subjective feelings of well-being, and general health barely budged after debt was wiped out. One finding is especially telling. Before the experiment began, the authors asked a panel of 45 experts what they expected the study to find. Panelists anticipated on average a 7 percentage point reduction in the number of patients reporting moderate or worse depression. Instead, the study showed a 3.2-percentage point increase in patients reporting that they were depressed. That’s on top of the 45 percent of participants who reported having at least moderate depression before the experiment began. The worst mental health effects were found among the 25 percent of participants with the most medical debt: They experienced a 12.4-percent increase in depression along with “worsening of anxiety, stress, general health, and subjective well-being” after debt relief. “That’s just staggeringly high rates of poor mental health,” Wong said. How can that be? One possibility is that the relief came too late to undo the severe mental health burden of carrying debt for months or years. Such patients have “already been scarred by the collection process,” Mahoney told me, and will continue to struggle with non-medical debts. “That’s the sort of person who on a weekly basis is getting hounded by debt collectors, not just sort of the medical debt collectors that we study, but debt collectors of all sorts,” Wong said. Medical debt relief “really doesn’t do anything to alleviate any of those other conditions, not to mention whatever health condition led them to incur medical debt in the first place.” The researchers identified another plausible theory through a sub-experiment included in the study, which tested the reactions of patients based on how they were informed of their debt relief, either by phone call or by letter. Among the people who received a direct phone call to let them know, the negative mental health effects were greater. Prior research has found that Americans tend to feel shame and stigma when receiving charitable or government aid to pay their bills. Participants had not requested debt relief, the study noted, but rather had it purchased and wiped out by RIP Medical Debt without their prior knowledge (this is often how medical debt relief programs work). It’s possible that the very act of filling out the study’s surveys may have affected how the respondents perceived their own situation. “We’re reminding people of this unpleasant experience that they had,” Kluender told me. “And maybe they were going through some unpleasant negotiations with their insurer or they feel a lot of guilt and shame about being unable to pay the bill.” What do we do with this information? The disappointing findings are especially surprising in light of research on relief programs for other types of debt, like credit card debt and student loan debt, that has found improvements in financial health and job prospects. Medical debt, like those other types of debt, has been associated with worse health and a weaker financial situation. But medical debt has some distinct characteristics. Repayment rates are much lower than they are for student loans or mortgages. Once a medical bill reaches collections, it’s often resolved with a negotiated settlement, which can result in much lower payments than what the patient originally owed. So the study participants, who had carried their debt for more than a year at a minimum, may have already been subconsciously writing off the medical debt by the time relief came, the authors said. That limits the impact they may feel when it’s wiped out. Some experts not involved in the study think the findings may understate the benefits of medical debt relief, especially on people’s finances, based on earlier studies of medical debt relief that had found larger benefits for people’s credit scores and credit access. The effect on credit scores is increasingly a moot point, however. Credit agencies have agreed to stop reporting most medical debt on people’s credit reports, after urging from the Biden administration, a step taken in the midst of the experiment. (The study relied on a subset of people whose debt was relieved prior to that announcement.) Amy Finkelstein, a leading researcher on health care costs at MIT whose nonprofit J-PAL North America helped fund the study, said she was shocked by the results but grateful to have them. Part of the difficult work of policymaking is to soberly assess the results of what you are doing. “Yes, it’s disappointing. But another way of saying it is: This was true whether or not we had done the study,” Finkelstein told me. “So it’s good to know so that we can try to learn from it and move on.” Everybody I spoke to agreed on one thing: Preventing people from accruing medical debt in the first place would likely be more effective in improving their finances and health than relieving debts after the fact. One-time debt relief may not make it any easier or less stressful to access health care in the future, but providing people with health coverage that eliminates the risk of debt does. That hypothesis is supported by existing evidence. The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment, a totemic work in health care research, found that low-income adults who received Medicaid saw a 9 percent reduction in depression. They were also less likely to end up in debt because of a medical bill and less likely to take out loans or skip payments on their other necessities to cover their health care balance. Experts I spoke to named more robust interventions that could lead to less medical debt and better health and financial outcomes, including more generous insurance benefits for people already covered. Covering the 26 million Americans who remain uninsured would be another step. Most states in the Deep South still haven’t expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act (ACA), leaving millions of low-income people without coverage. Other proposals, such as more public insurance options, have gained increasing support among Democrats. “As a consumer advocate, the best solution would be single-payer, Medicare for all,” Chi Chi Wu, an attorney with the National Consumer Law Center, said. But major overhauls are easier said than done. The history of US health care reform is one of a country inching toward universal health coverage: Medicare and Medicaid passed in the 1960s, and the ACA didn’t come along until 2010. Our byzantine insurance system with weak cost controls persists, with a massive health care industry invested in maintaining the status quo. In the meantime, experts said, policymakers could focus on making sure that hospital financial assistance programs are accessible to more people. Many patients are eligible for aid that would significantly reduce what they owe — but they often have no idea it’s available. The New York Times reported in 2022 that some hospitals were making it extremely difficult for eligible patients to find out about and use assistance programs, while aggressively seeking payment even from patients who should qualify for aid. The long-term project of universal health care continues. The debt relief study, disappointing as its results might be, may spur some fresh thinking about how to better help people.

Nude images shared without consent can be traumatic, whether they’re real or not. | Getty Images/iStockphoto How do you stop deepfake nudes? There’s a lot of debate about the role of technology in kids’ lives, but sometimes we come across something unequivocally bad. That’s the case with AI “nudification” apps, which teenagers are using to generate and share fake naked photos of their classmates. At Issaquah High School in Washington state, boys used an app to “strip” photos of girls who attended last fall’s homecoming dance, according to the New York Times. At Westfield High School in New Jersey, 10th grade boys created fabricated explicit images of some of their female classmates and shared them around school. Students from California to Illinois have had deepfake nudes shared without their consent, in what experts call a form of “image-based sexual abuse.” Now advocates — including some teens — are backing laws that impose penalties for creating and sharing deepfake nudes. Legislation has passed in Washington, South Dakota, and Louisiana, and is in the works in California and elsewhere. Meanwhile, Rep. Joseph Morelle (D-NY) has reintroduced a bill that would make sharing the images a federal crime. Francesca Mani, a 15-year-old Westfield student whose deepfaked image was shared, started pushing for legislative and policy change after she saw her male classmates making fun of girls over the images. “I got super angry, and, like, enough was enough,” she told Vox in an email sent via her mother. “I stopped crying and decided to stand up for myself.” Supporters say the laws are necessary to keep students safe. But some experts who study technology and sexual abuse argue that they’re likely to be insufficient, since the criminal justice system has been so inefficient at rooting out other sex crimes. “It just feels like it’s going to be a symbolic gesture,” said Amy Hasinoff, a communications professor at the University of Colorado Denver who has studied image-based sexual abuse. She and others recommend tighter regulation of the apps themselves so the tools people use to make deepfake nudes are less accessible in the first place. “I am struggling to imagine a reason why these apps should exist’’ without some form of consent verification, Hasinoff said. Deepfake nudes are a new kind of sexual abuse So-called revenge porn — nude photos or videos shared without consent — has been a problem for years. But with deepfake technology, “anybody can just put a face into this app and get an image of somebody — friends, classmates, coworkers, whomever — completely without clothes,” said Britt Paris, an assistant professor of library and information science at Rutgers who has studied deepfakes. There’s no hard data on how many American high school students have experienced deepfake nude abuse, but one 2021 study conducted in the UK, New Zealand, and Australia found that 14 percent of respondents ages 16 to 64 had been victimized with deepfake imagery. Nude images shared without consent can be traumatic, whether they’re real or not. When she first found out about the deepfakes at her school, “I was in the counselor’s office, emotional and crying,” Mani said. “I couldn’t believe I was one of the victims.” When sexual images of students are shared around school, they can experience “shaming and blaming and stigmatization,” thanks to stereotypes that denigrate girls and women, especially, for being or appearing to be sexually active, Hasinoff said. That’s the case even if the images are fake because other students may not be able to tell the difference. Moreover, fake images can follow people throughout their lives, causing real harm. “These images put these young women at risk of being barred from future employment opportunities and also make them vulnerable to physical violence if they are recognized,” Yeshi Milner, founder of the nonprofit Data for Black Lives, told Vox in an email. Stopping deepfake abuse may require reckoning with AI To combat the problem, at least nine states have passed or updated laws targeting deepfake nude images in some way, and many others are considering them. In Louisiana, for example, anyone who creates or distributes deepfakes of minors can be sentenced to five or more years in prison. Washington’s new law, which takes effect in June, treats a first offense as a misdemeanor. The federal bill, first introduced in 2023, would give victims or parents the ability to sue perpetrators for damages, in addition to imposing criminal penalties. It has not yet received a vote in Congress but has attracted bipartisan support. However, some experts worry that the laws, while potentially helpful as a statement of values, won’t do much to fix the problem. “We don’t have a legal system that can handle sexual abuse,” Hasinoff said, noting that only a small percentage of people who commit sexual violence are ever charged. “There’s no reason to think that this image-based abuse stuff is any different.” Some states have tried to address the problem by updating their existing laws on child sexual abuse images and videos to include deepfakes. While this might not eliminate the images, it would close some loopholes. (In one recent New Jersey lawsuit, lawyers for a male high school student argued he should not be barred from sharing deepfaked photos of a classmate because federal laws were not designed to apply “to computer-generated synthetic images.”) Meanwhile, some lawyers and legal scholars say that the way to really stop deepfake abuse is to target the apps that make it possible. Lawmakers could regulate app stores to bar them from carrying nudification apps without clear consent provisions, Hasinoff said. Apple and Google have already removed several apps that offered deepfake nudes from the App Store and Google Play. However, users don’t need a specific app to make nonconsensual nude images; many AI image generators could potentially be used in this way. Legislators could require developers to put guardrails in place to make it harder for users to generate nonconsensual nude images, Paris said. But that would require challenging the “unchecked ethos” of AI today, in which developers are allowed to release products to the public first and figure out the consequences later, she said. “Until companies can be held accountable for the types of harms they produce,” Paris said, “I don’t see a whole lot changing.” This story appeared originally in Today, Explained, Vox’s flagship daily newsletter. Sign up here for future editions.

Anne Hathaway as Solène and Nicholas Galitzine as Hayes in The Idea of You. | Courtesy of Prime From The Idea of You to viral essays, the discourse is rarely about the people inside the relationships. There’s something about age gaps right now. They’re all over the place. The Idea of You, out on Amazon Prime this week, features Anne Hathaway as a 39-year-old mom falling in love with a 24-year-old boy band star, only to be haunted by tabloid covers calling her a cougar. It’s based on a novel of the same title by Robinne Lee, dubbed by Vogue “the sleeper hit of the pandemic.” Meanwhile, over the past few months, the Cut has twice gone viral with articles about age gaps. In December, it published a reported article by Lila Shapiro interviewing multiple couples with significant age gaps. In March came a personal essay by Grazie Sophia Christie about her relationship with her husband, who’s 10 years older. On social media, Shapiro’s report was largely met with fascination and Christie’s with recriminations; both were widely distributed and discussed. In her new memoir Consent, writer Jill Ciment revisits her celebrated memoir of 20 years ago, Half a Life, about her marriage to the man she met when she was 17 and he was her 47-year-old art professor. “Should I refer to him in the language of today — sexual offender, transgressor, abuser of power?” Ciment asks, referring to her late husband, as she describes their first kiss. “Or do I refer to him in the language of 1970, at the apex of the sexual revolution, when the kiss took place — Casanova, silver fox?” The ways we talk about age-gap relationships have changed so completely so fast. They’ve come to be a stand-in for the way the Me Too movement changed our whole erotic vocabulary: Before, titillating; after, abusive. When Taylor Swift first releases “All Too Well” in 2012, it’s received as a tragic breakup song about Swift’s relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal, who she dated when she was 20 and he was 29. When she rereleases it in 2021, it’s received as an account of predatory behavior. Age-gap relationships in the abstract have become a place of talking through our newly heightened societal awareness of power dynamics and the potential therein for abuse — especially when the standard gender roles flip. Frequently, the discourse has almost nothing to do with the people actually in the relationships in question. Historically, men were expected to be older than their wives. The reasons why are as gross as you think. “Haven’t you ever heard that the girl is supposed to be half the man’s age, plus seven?” asks Patty O’Neill in the 1951 play turned 1953 film The Moon Is Blue. Patty, 22, is wooing a 30-year-old man at the time, and she is delighted to find that the math “just works out.” Today, the rule “half your age plus seven years” is popularly held to tell you the youngest possible person you can date without being creepy. A 30-year-old, the idea is, can just about get away with dating a 22-year-old of any gender, but get down to 21 and things start to feel weird. Historically, however, the equation was supposed to dictate the ideal age gap between a man and a woman. It seems to have been fairly common around the midcentury. In 2014, the New Republic found the idea turning up in sources as disparate as The Moon Is Blue (1951) and quotes from Elijah Muhammad in The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965). American newspapers of the 1930s ascribed the rule to Maurice Chevalier, or, more vaguely, to the French. The ideology that considers this age-gap ideal is profoundly misogynistic. Part of the reason the husband is supposed to be the older figure (twice his wife’s age minus 14 years) is to increase his status. Wiser than his wife, the husband could have his own established source of income and his own established adult life before he entered into marriage. The wife would rely on her husband for all of the above. In exchange, the wife would grant her husband her youthful beauty, and the common wisdom held that this exchange was equal. The tricky thing, though, was that the wife’s youth is by its nature fleeting, while the husband’s wealth would with any luck only increase with time. The wife had a ticking clock placed on her social value, and it was up to her to make a good marriage before the clock struck midnight and her social value disappeared. This is a worldview in which a woman’s access to adulthood depends upon her erotic value. Her beauty is all she has to trade to the world in order to be granted the status of full personhood — and even that personhood is contingent, because the wife can only ever access it through her husband. In Christie’s Cut essay, she positions her own marriage as being part of this very legacy. Christie consciously set out to choose an older husband, she writes, because she wanted to benefit from the financial security of an older and wealthier partner, and she thought her best bet was to use the currency of her youth and beauty before they became devalued by age. “I had, like all women, a calculator in my head,” she writes. “I thought it silly to ignore its answers when they pointed to an unfairness for which we [Christie and her fellow female classmates at Harvard] really ought to have been preparing.” The asymmetry in power between Christie and her husband, she writes, benefits her so much that she feels no real need to right it. “Who is in charge, the man who drives or the woman who put him there so she could enjoy herself?” she asks rhetorically. “I sit in the car, in the painting it would have taken me a corporate job and 20 years to paint alone, and my concern over who has the upper hand becomes as distant as the horizon, the one he and I made so wide for me.” It’s only fair to take Christie at her word that she’s happy in her marriage. Yet the exchange she describes sits oddly in the modern era, particularly in the post-Me Too era’s heightened awareness of sexual power dynamics. You run across the same dilemma in all the age-gap think pieces. “It’s perfectly possible for two consenting adults to have a healthy and equitable relationship despite a significant age gap,” mused a Guardian article from 2020 on Leonardo DiCaprio’s habit of dating only 25-year-olds. However, the article continued, “​It feels like a major flag if a man consistently dates women half his age. One suspects that person isn’t actually looking for a partner, but an admirer.” In her Cut article, Shapiro outlines the basic problem. The anti-age-gap discourse, she writes, emerged from the Me Too movement’s “concern with power differentials and with coercion and consent.” On the other hand: “It also sits at odds with Me Too’s core ethos — ‘Believe women’ — by raising an outcry on behalf of women who, by all available public accounts, have no complaints about their relationships. Even if they say they are happy, the age-gap critics don’t believe them.” In the wake of the new discourse, even the people involved in the relationships can’t always believe themselves or the things they say. Much of the tension of Consent comes from Ciment’s anguished and untrusting analysis of her old memoir, the one where she told the story of her marriage as a straight love story. In her first memoir, 1996’s Half a Life, Ciment consistently describes herself as the sexual aggressor in her early encounters with her future husband, Arnold. Yet looking back over the manuscript 25 years later in Consent, she feels her old account cannot be trusted. “Am I as delusional as Humbert Humbert when he narrates (Lolita is twelve at the time), ‘It was she who seduced me’?” Ciment writes. “When I wrote this, was I protecting Arnold? The statute of limitations had long ago passed. Was I protecting my marriage? We had just celebrated our twenty-seventh anniversary.” Ciment and Arnold were married until Arnold’s death in 2016, and according to Ciment, their marriage was a happy one. Still, she keeps interrogating herself. “Had Arnold experienced the sea change of the MeToo era, would he have come to believe that he crossed a line when he first kissed me?” she writes. “Does a story’s ending excuse its beginning? … Can a love that starts with such an asymmetrical balance of power ever right itself?” Things get even more complicated when we reverse the gender roles. Is there a gender swap exception? Discussions about age-gap relationships in which the woman is older than the man tend, on average, to be less about whether or not the woman is a predator and more about whether or not she should be humiliated for dating a younger man. Her detractors might dismiss her as a desperate cougar; her supporters might frame her dating decisions as a feminist triumph. That’s the tension at the heart of The Idea of You, both the Hathaway film and the novel it’s based on by Robinne Lee. The story centers around Solène, a 39-year-old whose ex-husband is dating a younger woman. Solène grits her teeth at his choices, but she’s not surprised by them: “Because that’s what divorced men in their forties did,” she narrates. “His stock was still rising. His power still intact. Daniel had become more desirable, and I somehow less so. As if time were paced differently for each of us.” Shortly thereafter, Solène finds herself entangled in a love affair with the much younger Hayes Campbell, lead singer of her daughter’s favorite boy band. In the book, Hayes is 20. In the movie, he’s 24. Either way, he’s a lot younger than Solène. When she suggests that the age gap might become a problem, however, Hayes scoffs. “If our ages were reversed, no one would bat an eyelash. Am I right?” says Hayes in Lee’s novel. “So now it’s just some sexist, patriarchal crap, and you don’t strike me as the kind of woman who’s going to let that dictate her happiness. All right? Next issue.” Part of the fantasy of The Idea of You is the idea of a woman whose social currency increases as she ages in the same way that her husband’s does. Solène’s beauty and sophistication are so potent that she does not need to be young to be a catch. Her social value is confirmed by her attractiveness to a man who is not only youthful and beautiful himself but also bears the traditional markers of male power: Young Hayes is richer than Solène’s middle-aged ex-husband will ever be, so that he can fulfill both sides of the old age-gap bargain at once. The fantasy here is not a world in which women’s social power doesn’t depend on their sexual currency. The fantasy here is that a woman’s sexual currency might not depreciate over the course of her 30s — particularly if the woman in question is played by Anne Hathaway, long celebrated for her eternal youthfulness. The result is a sort of mirrorverse version of Christie’s worldview: These are the rules, so let’s maximize our power within them. For some readers, this fantasy is intensely potent and affirming. “It teaches that women remain desirable, strong, and sexually viable as they age: there is no end date,” wrote one reader on Goodreads. “It calls out gender-based double standards. It empowers women to block out all the patriarchal noise and build the life they want. When we change our thoughts, we change our world. This. This is what I needed.” For other readers, the fact of Solène’s gender doesn’t change what they see as the fundamental problem with an age-gap romance: the age part. “idk who lied to this woman,” wrote another Goodreads reviewer, “but f*cking some kid 20 years younger than you is not the feminist slay you think it is.” What happens in the end? There is a question neither The Idea of You nor Christie engages with, which is: What happens as time and age come for all of us? The problem of aging rarely appears in the stories about age-gap relationships, but it is central to the people living in those relationships. “It’s only when the two people actually love each other and want to build a life together that the age gap, as an age gap, not as a gap that stands in for various inequities, actually matters,” says the writer B.D. McClay in an essay on Substack responding to Shapiro’s Cut piece. “If you want to get married and have kids, then you have to deal with what I think of as the sad math: how long the older partner is likely to see your mutual children get to become. Any parent can die, but what makes this different is that the absolute best case scenario might involve, for some, not seeing your kids ever graduate from college.” The problem of aging fills the final pages of Consent, which sees Ciment caring for Arnold toward the end of his life. These scenes are not, she feels, literary. “Who would believe a scene in which Lolita takes Humbert Humbert for cataract surgery?” she writes. “Or worries about his prostate? How would I compose the scene where Lolita arranges hospice care for the man who supposedly stole her childhood? Wouldn’t I have to include the day Lolita is at Humbert Humbert’s bedside when he dies? Isn’t that what happily ever after means? A love that lasts long enough that one lover is there to close the other lover’s eyelids?” Ciment is able to come to a resolution of sorts on her questions in her description of the day of Arnold’s death. She sees him lying in their bed, in “the same position he was in when I went to seduce him forty-five years before,” she writes. As she goes to kiss him, she knows that for all her fretful wondering about their first kiss and what it signifies, “there could be none about our last.” Their final kiss is for the pair of them alone, as individuals and as a couple, and what it signifies is them and their long marriage. It is separate from the asymmetry of power from which they began. The fantasy of The Idea of You, however, cannot quite stand up to such realism. It cringes away from the idea of a Solène who might be past middle age and into old age, who might require caregiving or who might even look significantly older than her boyfriend when they’re lounging by a European poolside together. In Lee’s novel, Hayes and Solène split up at the end of the book and don’t reunite, with Solène explaining that the public scrutiny of their relationship is too difficult for her 12-year-old daughter. The film mostly preserves this ending while tacking on a brief epilogue that suggests Hayes and Solène might reunite after her daughter is off at college. In either case, the relationship presented to the audience is preserved in amber, crystallized at the moment in which the age gap is sexy and not potentially tragic. That age-gap fiction and discourse tends to avoid those tragedies is one of the tells that that age-gap discourse is never about individual people, or even individual couples. It is about the whole history of misogynistic ideology from which our age-gap expectations emerge, and how drastically the way we think about sex and power changed in the space of a few years. The age-gap discourse is a metaphor for the way Me Too changed the world — even if the people in age-gap relationships would rather that it weren’t. Correction, May 2, 5 pm ET: A previous version of this story miscalculated the inverse version of the age gap rule. The inverse of “half your age plus seven years” is “twice your age minus 14 years.”

A nurse administers a dosage of the cholera vaccine during the launch of the campaign to immunize people in affected areas, at the Kuwadzana Polyclinic in Harare on January 29, 2024. | Jekesai Njikizana/AFP via Getty Images “A billion people at risk”: How worldwide cholera outbreaks are threatening lives. Amid a global resurgence of cholera, the world is fighting with one hand tied behind its back. The global stockpile of the oral cholera vaccine — a supply whose needs are difficult to predict and fill anyway — has dwindled to nearly nothing after the Indian drug manufacturer that produced about 15 percent of the world’s supply stopped making the vaccine last year. While other companies are setting up new production capacity, the stockpile is now effectively nonexistent. Demand is so great that as soon as doses are produced, they must immediately ship to one of the world’s current cholera hot spots. This crisis is symptomatic of a larger problem: the persistent lack of political will and financial investment to dramatically reduce cholera deaths. Cholera flourishes in areas where there is contaminated water, poor sanitation, and people living in crowded conditions — like the city of Rafah, currently home to more than 1 million Palestinians displaced by Israel’s war in Gaza. Cholera has not yet been detected there, since no one from outside Gaza can bring it in, but an outbreak would be catastrophic given the decimation of Gaza’s health care system and the lack of access to humanitarian goods like clean water and medication. The disease is typically spread when an infected person or people contaminate a water source by defecating in or near it. People get sick after drinking the contaminated water, suffering from acute diarrhea and vomiting — which can, without treatment, kill an infected person within a day. It’s a disease that rich countries with clean water and good sanitation infrastructure do not have to worry about anymore. But cholera cases are rising worldwide now after a period of decline from 2017 through 2021, according to the World Health Organization’s cholera team leader Philippe Barboza. There are currently active cholera outbreaks in Zambia, Mozambique, Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Syria, Ethiopia, Somalia, Zimbabwe, and Haiti. “Once it is there in these situations, because of the very poor water and sanitation and hygiene situation, it can spread like wildfire,” Paul Spiegel, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Humanitarian Health, told Vox. As many as 143,000 people die from this preventable disease each year — which could even be an underestimate, since some countries do not have the capacity to detect or compile data on cholera cases. According to some metrics, it is becoming more fatal because many infected people do not have adequate access to health care. Concurrent outbreaks throughout the world are straining the global health sector’s resources to respond. “It’s a really horrible way to die,” Mohammad Fadlalla, an Ohio-based physician who volunteers with Medecins Sans Frontieres and has responded to multiple cholera outbreaks, told Vox. With the increase in outbreaks and limited countermeasures, particularly vaccines, “We are talking about a billion people at risk” in the immediate term, Barboza said. “And this is an underestimate. This is a very conservative estimate.” Why aren’t there enough cholera vaccine doses? There are a few intersecting crises that have led to cholera’s comeback and the world’s limited capacity to combat it. One pivotal moment came in 2020, when Shantha (now Sanofi India), a fully owned subsidiary of French pharmaceutical company Sanofi based in India, announced that it would stop manufacturing its oral cholera vaccine at the end of 2022. “We took this decision in a context where we were already producing very small volumes versus the total demand for cholera vaccines and in the knowledge that other cholera vaccine manufacturers (current and new entrants) had already announced an increased supply capacity in the years to come,” Sanofi told the Guardian in 2022. The company said at the time that it had shared information about how its vaccine was manufactured with public health partners like the International Vaccine Institute (IVI), which has transferred the vaccine technology to new manufacturers. But those contingencies weren’t enough to offset a total shutdown by the company that was manufacturing about 15 percent of the global vaccine supply depending on the year, as Jerome Kim, director general of the IVI, told Vox. That left just one other manufacturer, South Korea’s EuBiologics, in the market as global cholera cases surged. “WHO has contacted [Sanofi] several times to ask first to increase [vaccine production], second to maintain, and third, to postpone their decision,” Barboza said. “So we have tried all the possible things and the rationale of [Sanofi is], ‘Oh, no, there will be other manufacturers that are coming.’” In an email to Vox, Sanofi said that the decision to exit the cholera vaccine market was not about profitability, but rather based on an understanding that EuBiologics would increase its output and other manufacturers would enter the market. EuBiologics will produce as many as 50 million doses of an oral cholera vaccine this year. The WHO announced in April that it approved a simplified, but still effective, version of the present formula for use, which will help mitigate the vaccine shortage. The world has already been forced to start rationing vaccine doses. In 2022, the WHO recommended halving the vaccine dose from two to one, which downgrades the vaccine’s efficacy but does offer protection for a year or more, and obviously increases the number of people who can receive some protection with limited supplies. Last year, all of the 36 million regimens were distributed to 72 million people to take one dose each. Today, with only EuBiologics now producing a cholera vaccine, doses are allocated as soon as they are made to one of the areas with an active outbreak, said Derrick Sim, managing director of vaccine markets and health security at Gavi, the international vaccine alliance. Because of the global shortfall, there are no vaccine doses available for preventive campaigns that would keep cholera out of communities in the first place. And absent an international commitment to improve the water supply and sanitation in poor countries at risk for cholera outbreaks — an approximately $114 billion yearly commitment — vaccination would be a powerful tool for preventing sickness and death from cholera in areas where outbreaks could occur. There are some important developments in vaccine technology in the pipeline, such as a temperature-stable pill form that would be much easier to transport and administer than the current liquid form, which must be kept between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius. At least three companies are currently working to develop new cholera vaccines, but they won’t be on the market until at least the end of 2025, and potentially years later. Gavi, which supports vaccine programs in developing countries and has contributed to the vaccination of nearly 1 billion children since its founding in 2000, is also working with smaller manufacturers in developing countries in Africa to bolster the global supply and produce the vaccine closer to where it will ultimately be used, Sim said. But developing cholera vaccines — from research to improve them to transferring the vaccine technology to new manufacturers, from clinical trials to purchasing and distributing them — also requires money. The WHO budgeted about $12 million for its cholera vaccination efforts last year, but that number will need to increase as cases do. That could potentially help address some of these supply issues — but it also highlights why they exist in the first place. “The big manufacturers are not interested in investing in a vaccine that only the poor countr[ies] can buy,” Barboza said, “and that will cost only $1.50 or $1 per dose.” Why are cholera cases rising in the first place, in the 21st century no less? At the time Sanofi decided to exit the cholera vaccine market in 2020, cholera was trending downward after a 20-year high in 2017. The Global Task Force for Cholera Control — a collaboration between the WHO, GAVI, and other stakeholders — had released a road map to reducing cholera deaths by 90 percent by 2030, and poor and developing countries where cholera is endemic or an active concern were implementing national cholera vaccination plans. In retrospect, experts believe the world missed an opportunity to work aggressively toward prevention, an effort that would have been aided by Sanofi’s continued production of its cholera vaccines. But Covid-19, which diverted resources and attention away from most other global diseases including cholera; an increase in displacement due to violence and conflict; and extreme weather events caused by climate change that both displace people and make environments more conducive to cholera have combined to allow the disease to spread more rapidly. Four of the five worst years for cholera in recent history have come since 2017. This is all the more concerning because cholera is fairly simple to prevent, with the supplies to provide clean drinking water and sanitation. It’s easy to treat, too: All it takes to cure cholera in most cases is clean water and oral rehydration salts, antibiotics in the worst-case scenarios. With proper medical intervention, no one should die from it. In situations of extreme instability like in Sudan, or where the medical sector has been decimated as in Gaza, those interventions become more challenging. And while some countries have long had routine cholera outbreaks, it’s not always easy to predict when or where they’ll hit, or how big they will grow, because contaminated water sources and infected people can cross borders, as likely occurred in Lebanon in 2022. Cholera is common in neighboring Syria, where the Assad regime has decimated local infrastructure and displaced hundreds of thousands of people. Though Lebanon had not experienced an outbreak since 1993, conditions were ripe for it. Years of government corruption and incompetence have led to a breakdown in public infrastructure including health care and sanitation — all of which helped trigger the outbreak in 2022. That outbreak saw at least 6,000 confirmed and suspectd cases. In August 2023, Fadlalla was responding to an outbreak in Al Qadarif, Sudan, which has been in a devastating civil conflict for a year now. “A lot of the governmental institutions were [at the time] eight months without their people getting paid their salaries, and the bureaucracy was not really functioning or operating,” he said. “And this is including the Ministries of Health. The whole medical sector was not getting paid, supplies were not getting restocked.” Climate change and the conflict and displacement related to it also significantly contribute to the uptick in cholera outbreaks, according to experts Vox spoke with. Higher temperatures and changing weather patterns make the environmental conditions ripe for outbreaks in new places unused to the disease. But climate change is not going to be reversed any time soon, nor is the global community going to commit to improving sanitation in developing countries or mitigating displacement. So in the meantime, vaccines remain one of the most important ways to prevent cholera deaths. “It’s not that nothing is happening,” Barboza said. “There are a lot of things that are happening, but are they acting fast enough, with enough money?”

Farmer protests in Nîmes, France, in March. According to reports, large tires were set on fire during the blockade. | Luc Auffret/Anadolu via Getty Images Road-clogging, manure-dumping farmers reveal the paradox at the heart of EU agriculture. In February 2021, in the midst of the deadly second year of the Covid-19 pandemic, Grégory Doucet, mayor of Lyon, France, temporarily took red meat off the menus of the city’s school cafeterias. While the change was environmentally friendly, the decision was driven by social distancing protocols: Preparing one hot meal that could be served to meat-eaters, vegetarians, and those with religious restrictions rather than serving multiple options was safer and more efficient. The response from the French agricultural establishment was hysterical. “We need to stop putting ideology on our children’s plates!,” then-Minister of Agriculture Julien Denormandie tweeted. Livestock farmers clogged Lyon’s downtown with tractors and paraded cows in front of city hall, brandishing banners declaring, “Stopping meat is a guarantee of weakness against future viruses.” An impromptu coalition of livestock producers, politicians, and parents unsuccessfully petitioned the city’s court to overturn the change. It may have seemed a tempest in a teacup — a quintessentially French squabble. But it was a microcosm of European agricultural politics, reflecting the great paradox of European Union (EU) farmers’ relationship to the state. On one hand, farmers are wards of the welfare state, dependent on national governments and the European Union for the generous subsidies and suite of protectionist trade policies that keep them in business. On the other, they are business people who balk at regulations, restrictions, and perceived government overreach. The tension between these positions regularly erupts into farmer revolts when governments attempt to regulate food or farming in the public interest as it might any other industry. EU politicians, meanwhile, often feel the need to kowtow to agribusiness because of its ability to mobilize protesters and voters alike. This year, it has become clear these protests have the power to transform Europe’s future. This past February, three years almost to the day after Doucet’s school lunch announcement, roads around Lyon were again blocked by farmers raging against the French government and the EU. It was one surge in the wave of protests that has swept through Europe in recent months, set off by a litany of demands, including continued subsidies and no new environmental regulations. In short, all the benefits of government with none of the governance. In Paris, farmers traded blows with police at the country’s Salon de l’Agriculture trade fair. In Germany, they tried storming a ferry carrying the country’s economy minister. In Brussels, they rammed through police barricades with tractors. In the Netherlands, they lit asbestos on fire alongside highways. In Poland, they massed along the Ukrainian border to prevent the import of cheap grain. In Czechia, they paved Prague’s streets with manure. The protests have come as the EU seeks to pass a slate of laws as part of its Green Deal, a sweeping climate plan that includes checking the worst harms of industrial agriculture, which takes up more than a third of the continent’s landmass and contributes disproportionately to its ecological footprint. That agenda is colliding with Europe’s longtime paradigm of few-strings-attached welfare for agribusiness. Agribusiness interests have been working to foil the Farm to Fork strategy, the crown jewel of the Green Deal meant to overhaul Europe’s food system, since its inception in 2020. This year, with the specter of right-wing populism looming over upcoming European Parliament elections (part of the EU’s legislative branch), farmers’ protests across the continent have succeeded at not only stalling new sustainability reforms, but also undermining existing environmental regulations. Now, plans to make Europe a global leader in sustainable agriculture appear to be dead on arrival. Dursun Aydemir/Anadolu via Getty Images Farmers dump manure on streets in the EU quarter of Brussels in March. How European agriculture got this way Despite its centrality to European politics and policy, agriculture is a very small industry within the bloc’s economy, making up about 1.4 percent of the EU’s GDP and no more than 5 percent of GDP in any of the Union’s 27 countries. The sector is also one of the biggest recipients of EU funds, with subsidies to farmers and investment in rural development consuming about a quarter of the EU’s budget, on top of often generous national subsidies. Meanwhile, European agriculture’s environmental footprint is vastly disproportionate to its economic contribution. It uses a third of all water on the increasingly arid continent. It’s responsible for 10 percent of the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions, including much of its methane and nitrous oxide, both highly potent greenhouse gases primarily released by animal agriculture. It accounts for about a quarter of global pesticide use, which has been linked to soil and water contamination, biodiversity loss, and a slew of impacts on human health. Of course, we need to eat, and food needs to be produced. But Europe’s monocrop- and livestock-intensive agriculture system is anything but sustainable. Yet the EU continues to pour massive amounts of money into subsidizing an economically negligible sector that is responsible for many of the continent’s environmental problems and that, off the back of those subsidies, organizes to prevent environmental regulations or even conditions on those very subsidies. Many countries around the world generously subsidize food production — including, famously, the United States, where agriculture makes up less than 1 percent of GDP and punches far above its weight politically. But much of the US ag sector’s billions in annual federal payouts comes in indirect forms like subsidized crop insurance, including more than a third of the $24 billion it received in 2021 — and these subsidies make up a much smaller share of the industry’s contribution to GDP relative to agriculture subsidies in the EU. In Europe, decades of government policy have integrated food production into an extensive state welfare framework where, on paper, the good of farmers is equated with the public good. That system emerged from the ruins of World War II, when shoring up farming and food security became an existential policy imperative on the devastated and often starved continent. Post-war policies were designed to secure the food supply, provide farming families with a stable income, and stimulate rural economies in the interest of the public good. European agriculture policy became its own welfare system defined by subsidies and protection from foreign competition. It worked. By 1950, agricultural production in Western Europe had recovered to pre-war levels. When the European Economic Community (EEC), the precursor to the EU, formed in 1957, agriculture was central to the discussions, as economic integration would require dealing with the problem of highly subsidized and protected farming in member states. The answer was the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), launched in 1962, a centerpiece of EEC and later EU policy. An extension of national-level agricultural welfare policies, the goal of the CAP was “to ensure a fair standard of living for the agricultural community, in particular by increasing the individual earnings of persons engaged in agriculture.” In other words, rather than using policy to build agriculture into a viable competitive business, the goal was to protect agriculture from the market and commit to a long-term policy of keeping farmers in business. CAP was “from the outset a public policy reflecting highly subjective political ‘preferences,’ not rational commercial interests,” economic historian Ann-Christina Knudsen argues in her book Farmers on Welfare: The Making of Europe’s Common Agricultural Policy. For decades, CAP has been the EU’s biggest budget line. As recently as the 1980s, it made up about two-thirds of the Union’s budget. While bouts of trade liberalization and the rise of other priorities have steadily reduced its relative size, about a third of the EU’s 2021-2027 budget was earmarked for CAP. Over 70 percent of this money is distributed as direct payments to farmers. Since payments are primarily based on farm size, the biggest farms get the lion’s share of that money. Over half of the EU’s 9 million farms produce less than 4,000 euros of products per year and make up a combined 2 percent of Europe’s farm production, while the top 1 percent of farms — those that bring in over 500,000 euros — control 19 percent of all farmland and are responsible for over 40 percent of output. The top 0.5 percent of farms receive over 16 percent of all CAP payments. Lavish subsidies have helped make Europe a net exporter of agricultural products, with early concerns about food security long since displaced by a global thirst for Irish whiskey and Dutch beer and hunger for Irish butter and French cheese. Coupled with decades of government policy incentivizing industrial production methods that favor big operations, such as factory farming and large-scale monocropping, CAP has served to push Europe’s farmers to get big or get out. Between 2005 and 2020, the EU lost over 5 million farms, virtually all of them small operations sold by retiring farmers or those simply unable to compete with their larger neighbors. Large farmers, in turn, have organized into powerful political interest groups that aim to dictate agricultural policy to their governments. Farmers and their political allies pack the EU’s agriculture committee. Lobby organizations like Copa-Cogeca, which represents large farmers’ unions across the EU, and CropLife Europe, a pesticide trade group, pressure governments to entrench the status quo, including maintaining CAP as an ever-open spigot gushing taxpayer money. And where governments are seen as truant in delivering on their promises, cities and nations can be brought to a standstill by blockades of tractors, helping galvanize public opinion and push politicians into acquiescence. Europe’s turn toward environmental protections is clashing with farming interests Today, the growing importance of environmental goals in EU politics has driven a wedge into the sometimes contentious but mostly cozy relationship between farming interests and governments. While EU subsidies do come with some environmental strings attached, such as requirements to protect wetlands or engage in soil-friendly crop rotation, these are often poorly enforced and noncompliance is common. In Europe, much like in the US, agriculture is governed with a lighter touch compared to other industries, a paradigm often known as agricultural exceptionalism. In the Netherlands, for instance, farms have for decades been granted a derogation on nitrogen emissions, allowed to emit more than any other industry. This meant that, over the years, dairy farms and heavily fertilized crop fields leached nitrogen into the soil and water, poisoning rivers and wetlands. In 2019, the Dutch government sought to close the loophole and buy out livestock farmers unable to comply with the restriction. Farmers launched a series of protests marked by the now-ubiquitous use of tractors to block roads and public spaces in a show of force against government bureaucrats. Many felt aggrieved that government, by pushing the resource-intensive industrial farming that had made the Netherlands into an agricultural powerhouse, had helped create the very environmental problems now being blamed on farmers. Peter Boer/Bloomberg via Getty Images A two-week old calf on a dairy farm in Hazerswoude, Netherlands. Livestock farmers have been protesting the Dutch government’s efforts to limit polluting nitrogen emissions from farms. Cities across the country ground to a halt, and the protesters formed a new political party, the far-right-aligned BoerBurgerBeweging (the Farmer-Citizen Movement, or BBB). Last year, it won the country’s provincial elections in a landslide on the back of rural votes as well as broader anti-government and anti-EU sentiment, controlling 20 percent of seats in the Dutch senate. It was a portent of things to come. 2019 was also the year the European Commission, the executive branch of the EU, proposed the Green Deal, which aims to achieve net zero emissions across the EU by 2050 through emissions reduction across all industries, renewable energy and electric vehicle adoption, and reforestation programs. Farm to Fork, the food system component of the plan, calls for dramatically reducing pesticide use and food waste, and promoting more sustainable dietary choices through product labeling and school lunches; independent modeling suggested it could cut agricultural emissions by up to 20 percent and halve biodiversity destruction. Environmental policies are broadly popular with the European electorate, and that plan was arrived at through the EU’s highly bureaucratic — but nonetheless democratically deliberative — process. But because it originated with the European Commission, whose members are unelected, it was seen by some as being mandated by unaccountable functionaries. Farmers bristled at the idea of being told to devote some of their land to biodiversity and nature restoration. Growers of monocrop products like grains and grapes for wine balked at drastic pesticide reductions. The pesticide industry and its lobby saw its profits threatened. But most impacted would be livestock, the sector least able to meet stringent environmental or animal welfare standards. Animal agriculture makes up 40 percent of European agricultural production, releases more than 80 percent of the continent’s emissions from agriculture, and receives more than 80 percent of CAP subsidies, according to a recent study using data from 2013. Immediately, the agricultural lobby began petitioning politicians to delay or do away with the proposed rules, starting with the proposed pesticide reduction measures. At first, EU politicians held in their support for reforms, voting in 2021 to implement Farm to Fork. But as Covid-19, with its disruption of food supply chains, dragged on and Russia invaded Ukraine, raising the specter of a food shortage, ag lobby groups gained new ammunition to fire at what they framed as the Green Deal’s attack on food security and the livelihood of farmers. Attacks on pro-Green Deal politicians escalated, including threats of violence against its staunchest supporters. Bit by bit, political support for Farm to Fork began to erode. By the end of 2023, before most of Farm to Fork had even been implemented, many of its core initiatives were already watered down or abandoned, including pesticide reduction mandates and farm animal welfare improvements. Also declawed was the nature restoration law, which would require EU member states to restore 20 percent of degraded habitats to preserve biodiversity, by calling on farmers to plant tree and flower strips along the edges of fields, for example. Industrial beef and dairy operations were also granted an exemption from industrial emissions targets despite being among the food system’s biggest emitters, responsible for most agricultural methane emissions. Throughout, political allies of agricultural lobbies like the right-wing European People’s Party have celebrated these wins over the specter of “NGO environmental dictatorship.” Farming interests are blocking the development of sustainable alternatives The same groups pushing against environmental regulation in the name of keeping the government out of business have few compunctions about turning to governments to thwart their competition. Meat producers in particular are threatened not only by environmental regulations that would affect them most, as the food system’s biggest emitters, but also by meat alternatives that have the potential to cut into their market share. Cell-cultivated meat, a novel technology that can harvest animal tissue from stem cells rather than slaughtered animals, has not yet received regulatory approval for sale in the EU and remains largely theoretical. That did not stop politicians in Italy, under pressure from agricultural lobby groups, from passing legislation last November banning not just the sale of cellular agriculture products, but also scientific research into the technology. Agriculture Minister Francesco Lollobrigida, a member of the country’s far-right ruling party Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy), declared cultivated meat a threat to Italian culture and civilization. Soon thereafter, members of the Italian delegation to the EU, joined by representatives from 11 other countries, called on the Council of Europe to “ensure that artificially lab-grown products must never be promoted as or confused for authentic foods,” ostensibly in the public interest. Farming lends itself to populism, which often acts as a cover for cold business calculations. The cultivated meat ban reveals that agricultural lobby group demands are generally about realpolitik rather than a principled position about state intervention — no different from any business that aims to protect its bottom line. Political scientist Leah Stokes, in her book Short Circuiting Policy, has described such policy fights as “organized combat” between interest groups, which tends to favor powerful incumbents over new constituencies aiming to build political support for social or economic change. In Italy, an entrenched and politically well-connected agricultural lobby had the power to write its preferences into policy while proponents of cellular agriculture did not, allowing them to nip potential competition in the bud. Something similar is at work in the unraveling of the EU’s green agenda. Proponents of environmental legislation, while technically having science and public support on their side, were either unprepared or lacked the heart for a fight with the battle-tested farming lobby. All that took place before Europe became engulfed by protests. Then came the tractors. Last December, a proposed cut to diesel subsidies (used to power tractors and other farm machinery) in Germany, which had more to do with the country’s budgetary crisis than with environmental regulations, sent aggrieved farmers into the streets. Dozens of other protests erupted around Europe stemming from particular national issues. But as they grew, they coalesced into a generalized grievance about the failure of government and the EU to sufficiently support farmers, with new environmental policies offering a particularly easy target for ire. Alan Matthews, an Irish economist and preeminent expert on the CAP, recently argued that part of the problem is the changing social capital of farmers: “Instead of being seen as heroic producers of a vital commodity, they are increasingly described as environmental villains and climate destroyers. … Instead of taking responsibility for these problems, farmers often adopt a defensive position of denial.” The protests have brought farmers of all stripes to the streets, big and small, organic and conventional. Despite their differences and the historic exclusion of small farmers from EU policymaking, most of Europe’s farmers share a common interest in maintaining subsidies and reducing regulation. They also raise some valid points about the contradictions in EU policy, such as in their calls for more protection from foreign competitors that produce with lower standards than in Europe, including livestock produced in jurisdictions with no animal welfare protections or raised using growth stimulants banned in Europe. But this argument is undermined by farmers’ calls to weaken those very standards. By late February, when a massive protest by farmers from across the continent ran amok through the EU quarter of Brussels, politicians across the continent were buckling to farmers’ demand. At the EU, even the watered-down version of the nature restoration law that had passed a vote in EU Parliament despite protests was stalled — perhaps indefinitely — as states including Belgium and Italy withdrew their support. But perhaps most worrying has been the willingness of EU politicians to weaken already existing environmental standards, including loosening environmental conditions and reporting requirements for all farms smaller than 10 hectares. These decisions may have also been motivated by upcoming EU elections. Many Europeans support the farmers’ cause, and as the Dutch case showed, the protests have the potential to galvanize voters to support parties seen as “pro-farmer.” With widespread concern about large gains for right and far-right parties in the EU Parliamentary elections next month, even ostensibly pro-Green Deal politicians, including European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, have been forced to act appropriately deferential to the protesters. Frederick Florin/AFP via Getty Images European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen speaks at the European Parliament on February 6, the same day that she recommended shelving a plan to cut pesticide use as a concession to protesting farmers. Sooner or later, climate change will force a reckoning with farming practices The latest progress report on the EU’s quest for carbon neutrality, released by the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change amid the protests in January, showed little improvement, especially in agriculture. It called for reductions in production of meat and dairy, higher consumer prices of highly emitting foods, more incentives for farmers to embrace green practices, and, as a political hint, more ambitious policy plans. In short: the opposite of the situation on the ground. Arriving at a viable agricultural policy that marries support for farmers, green goals, and liberal trade policies is a difficult balancing act with few clear-cut solutions. It is unlikely that these could be achieved without continued state and EU involvement in shaping how food is produced in Europe through some mix of protectionism, policy nudges, and regulation. CAP, in one form or another, isn’t going anywhere. But to the extent that it remains primarily a subsidy program, there is no reason why conditions on meeting strict climate and environmental targets should not be massively strengthened, rather than weakened, and enforcement ramped up. And there is no reason not to use policy to steer production away from highly polluting industries like meat and dairy toward less harmful ones. To be in favor of more sustainable farming is not to be against farmers; it is to be against unsustainable farming practices. To allow these two to be conflated is to lose the fight, as the EU is currently doing. After all, to the extent farmers see themselves as businessmen, a sign of business acumen is making a profit within regulatory and market constraints. One thing is certain: Bowing to the demands of special interests whose only interest is maintaining agricultural exceptionalism only precipitates a sooner reckoning with environmental crises, which will force farming to change whether farmers want to or not. The EU, however, seems to be taking marching orders from a parasite of its own creation, abandoning the very notions of public good that led to the creation of its agricultural policies in the first place.

A protester holds a sign reading “My body my choice” at a Women’s March rally where Arizona Secretary of State and then-Democratic gubernatorial candidate Katie Hobbs spoke outside the State Capitol on October 8, 2022, in Phoenix, Arizona. | Mario Tama/Getty Images How conspiring doctors, questionable tonics, and twisted patriotism led to the 1864 Arizona abortion ban that has finally been repealed. Arizona lawmakers voted Wednesday to repeal a Civil War-era state law that amounts to a near-total ban on abortion following an Arizona Supreme Court ruling last month that the law could be enforced. Democrats in the chamber — as well as both former President Donald Trump and Republican Senate candidate Kari Lake, in an election-year shift toward a more moderate stance on abortion — had pushed the Arizona legislature to overturn the law. If it had gone into effect, it would have threatened access to reproductive care for about 1.6 million people of reproductive age. It’s one of several abortion laws enacted before the Supreme Court’s 1973 decision in Roe v. Wade that had been revived since the justices overturned Roe in 2022. Resuscitating these laws has created legal headaches, in part because they were written in a very different time for reasons that have little in common with the concerns of anti-abortion advocates today. Arizona’s ban, first passed in 1864 and codified again in 1901 and 1913, says anyone who “provides, supplies or administers” an abortion or abortion drugs will face a state prison sentence of two to five years unless the abortion is necessary to save the life of the person who is pregnant. Taken out of the 19th-century context in which it was passed, that language would seem to amount to a near-total ban on abortion. But that’s not how the law was originally enforced. Few people were prosecuted under the Arizona law or similar ones in other states. At the time, first-trimester abortions were widespread and widely accepted in the public conscience. Abortion laws of the mid-1800s were the product of discussions among lawyers and doctors and were designed to professionalize abortion services and medicine writ large — a seemingly noble cause, but also one driven by physicians’ self-interests and the desire to both boost (white) women’s birth rates and weaken a nascent feminist movement. There was no national abortion debate to speak of. Religion wasn’t yet a major factor in Americans’ views on abortion in the way it is today, and scientists had not yet developed methods to detect pregnancy during the first months of gestation. All of that meant abortion was a common, if not always safe, part of American life, despite what the old laws might suggest. “I think people imagine nobody did it because it was illegal. But we know that’s not true,” said Lauren MacIvor Thompson, a history professor at Kennesaw State University focusing on women’s rights and public health. Abortion was common and widely accepted in the 19th century For much of the first half of the 19th century, there were few laws in the US that were specifically concerned with abortion. Rather, abortion was understood in the tradition of British common law: It was only a crime after “quickening,” when a fetus’s movement could be detected — around four or five months of gestation. Before quickening, people could be ignorant (or have plausible deniability) about being pregnant. Generally, the American public at this time had few moral qualms about abortion before quickening. In particular, it was a service that many believed should be offered to unmarried women, who risked reputational ruin if they proceeded with the pregnancy and often came from poor backgrounds, as historian James Mohr writes in his 1978 book, Abortion in America. But around the mid-1800s, things started to shift. More people appeared to be seeking abortions, not just those who were unmarried. One estimate by physicians at the time that Mohr cites suggests that as many as one in five pregnancies ended in abortion. Partially because of this, birth rates fell dramatically: from 7.04 children per woman in 1800 to 3.56 by 1900, according to Mohr. Starting around the 1830s, abortion became a lucrative industry. It was still mostly unregulated but perceived as largely safe, especially when weighed against the risks of pregnancy. There is little available data on maternal mortality rates in the US at the time, but even by 1915, after the development of antisepsis, it was about 600 in every 100,000 births — higher than in some European countries at the time. In 2021, the US maternal mortality rate was 32.9 deaths per 100,000 live births. As Mohr writes, home medical manuals and midwifery texts advised readers on abortifacient substances (such as black hellebore) and practices that could bring about an abortion (such as bloodletting and “raising great weights”). Abortifacient tonics of varying effectiveness were prolifically advertised. Physicians, midwives, and even untrained practitioners offered procedures to clear “obstructed menses.” One abortion provider to the elites, known as “Madame Restell,” amassed a fortune estimated at up to $1 million. Increased access to abortion seen throughout the 19th century led to increased scrutiny, however, and that led to many of the laws and attitudes still with us today. The beginnings of the anti-abortion movement The anti-abortion movement began to take off in the 1850s for a few reasons. For one, anti-abortionists resented the fact that wealthy, white Protestant women were starting to drive demand for abortions, usually to limit their family size or delay having their first child. These women were seen as shirking their duties to “republican motherhood” — a concept that involved raising the next generation of productive citizens instilled with the values espoused by the young American republic and that excluded nonwhite women. They were maligned for indulging priorities outside of the home at a time when the women’s suffrage movement was taking shape. Some men were seen as complicit in this phenomenon, urging their wives to get abortions and paying for them. Anti-abortionists argued that laws specifically restricting abortion were necessary because otherwise, “nice white ladies who don’t want to be pregnant just won’t fulfill their obligation,” as MacIvor Thompson put it. Around this time, there were also a few highly publicized trials involving botched abortions, typically cases where the pregnant person died. This raised the profile of abortion as a safety issue for legislators. A broader movement to professionalize the American medical system also contributed to the first laws restricting abortion in the US. The Civil War laid bare the need for more competent medical professionals, and credentialed physicians known as “regulars” lobbied for laws on abortion for the stated reason of protecting people from quacks. But they also had selfish motivations to essentially establish a monopoly over the market for abortions and sideline their competition. Physicians — who, at that point, were nearly all white and male — had lost income and stature as a result of this competition with other medical practitioners, and performing abortions was a way to attract loyal long-term patients, Mohr writes. “What they’re trying to do is consolidate their professional dominance because they don’t want to be competing with midwives or competing with what they call ‘the irregulars,’” MacIvor Thompson said. This was despite the fact, she added, that the “outcomes that doctors got in terms of treating patients were really not that much better than people who didn’t have medical training.” Arizona’s abortion ban came amid a wave of early anti-abortion legislation The first standalone law to specifically prohibit abortion in the US was passed in Massachusetts in 1845. It made performing an abortion a misdemeanor for which an offender could serve five to seven years in jail and face up to a $2,000 fine — about $74,000 in 2024 dollars — or a felony in cases where the person having the procedure died. But as would be the case with others that came after it, the law was rarely enforced: No one was convicted under it between 1849 and 1857, according to Mohr. Generally, such early abortion laws mostly did not create penalties for the pregnant person who sought an abortion but only for those who performed them — and messed up. “Historians have argued that a lot of these initial laws were meant to protect women. They’re either next to poisoning laws, or they’re framed in a way where it’s like, this is to protect women from quacks,” said Shannon Withycombe, a history professor at the University of New Mexico who studies early abortion laws. Few religious leaders wanted to get involved in abortion politics. Some Catholic bishops espoused the position, as the church does now, that abortion is wrong because life begins at conception. But at the time, Catholicism was associated with European immigrants who weren’t “welcomed into white middle-class American society,” MacIvor Thompson said. However, Horatio Storer, a Harvard physician who converted to Catholicism in his 40s, set out to consolidate support for anti-abortion laws in the 1850s. He ultimately led the charge to criminalize those who sought abortions and to make the punishment more severe if the person was married. He even pushed physicians and legislators to abandon the earlier understanding of abortion as acceptable before quickening and to suppress it at any stage of pregnancy. Storer’s writings came to inform anti-abortion legislation across the country, though the physician lobby didn’t agree with everything he wrote. Many believed he had gone too far in framing abortion as a religious and moral issue, insisting that it was really a medical issue, Withycombe said. But physicians latched on to one particular point Storer made in his 1860 book On Criminal Abortion in America: that “doctors need to be able to practice abortion because there are lots of reasons why an abortion is important for the health and life of a woman,” Withycombe said. This supported physicians as the definitive source of medical expertise about when and how an abortion should be safely administered over other abortion practitioners. And Withycombe notes that in her readings of medical articles and obstetrical teaching texts of the time, she has found a broad array of circumstances in which physicians believed it was their medical duty to perform an abortion — including circumstances in which failing to do so wouldn’t necessarily result in a pregnant person’s death, such as “pernicious anemia,” “obstinate vomiting,” and “advancing jaundice.” Withycombe said the 1864 Arizona law was part of a wave of legislation, all with similar provisions informed by Storer’s writings, that swept the West in the 1860s while the Civil War was raging. Colorado passed a ban in 1861, Nevada in 1861, Idaho in 1864, and Montana in 1864. At the time, these states were trying to prove that they were part of modern America, emulating medical licensing laws and protections that had already been enacted in more cosmopolitan parts of the country. In that sense, the passage of these laws was more about professionalizing medicine than the moralistic arguments that later motivated the 1873 Comstock Act, a federal anti-obscenity law that also prohibited the mailing of “every article or thing designed, adapted, or intended for producing abortion.” However, Storer’s moral philosophy on abortion did eventually gain traction, and it influenced the next wave of anti-abortion lawmaking in the decades thereafter. About 40 states banned abortion by 1880. Where the battle over the Arizona ban stands now Arizona isn’t alone in dealing with a pre-Roe anti-abortion law. Oklahoma is currently enforcing a 1910 abortion ban. Wisconsin’s Democratic attorney general has asked the state Supreme Court to strike down that state’s 1849 ban. Delaware, New Mexico, and Michigan have repealed their pre-Roe bans only in the last few years. West Virginia’s 19th-century ban was blocked in court in 2022, but the state legislature moved quickly to codify a new abortion ban that allows few exceptions. As part of the Arizona Supreme Court ruling, the state was supposed to ensure the 19th-century law was “harmonized” with a ban after 15 weeks of pregnancy passed in March 2022. It’s not clear what that meant in practice. But now that the Arizona legislature has repealed the law, it’s a moot issue. If lawmakers had not intervened, though, its enforcement would have looked very different from the way the law was interpreted in the years immediately after its passage. As mentioned, enforcement was spotty in the 19th century, and unlike now, abortion providers continued to operate despite facing potential legal repercussions. Producers of abortifacients often circumvented bans by using euphemistic language to describe their products. Early abortion laws, including the Arizona ban, also empowered physicians to make decisions about abortion. “A lot of these laws were at least supported if not written by physicians,” Withycombe said. “Physicians agreed that they have complete discretion over whether an abortion is medically necessary.” However, doctors have often been sidelined in the enforcement of abortion bans post-Roe, with many choosing to leave states with restrictive laws because they feel they cannot perform lifesaving care. The medical and popular understanding of pregnancy and abortion has also evolved since 1864. We can now detect pregnancy much earlier than “quickening” using urine and blood tests. In the 1860s, early abortions were generally seen as morally equivalent to contraception, Mohr writes — a concept that the American right largely rejects today. “These laws are being upheld as proof that everyone was completely against abortion in all cases, from the moment of conception,” Withycombe said. “Given the understanding of human development at the time, that is not true in the 1860s.” Update, May 1, 5:15 pm ET: This story was originally published on April 14 and has been updated multiple times, most recently with news that the Arizona legislature has repealed the 1864 ban.