2026-03-14 03:54:09
Pavel Talankin is a teacher from a small mining town in Central Russia. He spent two and a half years documenting how his school was conscripted into Putin’s war propaganda machine for the Oscar-nominated documentary, Mr. Nobody Against Putin.
After Russia invaded Ukraine, his school changed almost overnight– teachers ordered to deliver government scripts and students marched through military drills. Talankin was required to film it all as the school videographer, and what he witnessed made him want to walk away from his job entirely. Instead, he connected with documentary director David Borenstein, and together they turned his footage into a feature film.
Borenstein said Talankin “wanted to show how quickly totalitarianism can take over a school, a workplace, a government, and how our complicity becomes fuel in that fire.”
It’s a message Talankin originally hoped to share with fellow Russians. But he now believes the film speaks to a far wider audience than he could ever have anticipated when he began filming.
He points to a joke circulating in Eastern Europe: the Belarusians say they and the Russians are watching the same TV series- only Russia is a few episodes behind.
“I am sorry to tell you,” he says, “that America has begun watching this series, too.”
2026-03-14 01:47:40
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
Up until the end of February, a steady flow of ships bound for destinations across the world would pass daily through the Strait of Hormuz. A narrow channel running between Oman and Iran, the waterway serves as the only natural maritime link between the Persian Gulf and the global economy. That all changed on March 2, when, after days of military strikes led by the S and Israel, Iran effectively closed the strait for the first time in history and warned that any ships passing through would be fired upon. Ever since, vessels moving through the channel have been attacked and set ablaze, and hundreds of tankers remain stranded. At least 1,800 people have been killed in the war, including Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and other top government officials.
The Persian Gulf is a linchpin of the planet’s oil and gas production; normally, roughly one-fifth of global oil and gas flows through the strait. Now, as it remains embattled, oil and gas prices have surged, and many experts warn an energy crisis is imminent. Restaurants across India are scaling back operations and warning of closures amid fuel shortages from the maritime blockade, while cooking gas prices are spiking in Sri Lanka.
“The fact that obviously nothing is leaving means that there’s going to be a large hole in the market for fertilizer.”
Another world crisis sparked by the war in Iran may also be in the offing. That’s because the region’s oil and gas production has made it one of the world’s leading exporters of nitrogen fertilizers, which are indispensable to the global food system. To produce the chemicals used to grow much of the planet’s crops, natural gas is broken down to extract hydrogen, which is combined with nitrogen to make ammonia, and then mixed with carbon dioxide to make urea. All told, nearly a third of the global trade for nitrogen fertilizer passes through the Strait of Hormuz, while almost half of the world’s sulfur, essential in producing phosphate fertilizers, also travels through the corridor.
The waterway is a lifeline for food, too. Palm oil exports coming from Southeast Asia face potential major disruptions. Grain shipments headed to Gulf countries reliant on rice and wheat imports have been stalled.
“A worrying amount of food, or inputs into modern agriculture, are going through this very small channel,” said Ginni Braich, a data scientist who studies food insecurity at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Better Planet Laboratory. She estimates that the strait is in the top 20th percentile of all the worlds’ transportation corridors just based on the sheer volume of food that passes through it.
The sudden and cascading effects of trade halting through the waterway, according to Braich, “really underscores how interconnected everything is, and how fragile…just any small amount of disruption can have huge aftershocks that reverberate all around the world.”
The timing, Braich said, could not be worse, as spring planting in the northern hemisphere—crop farmers’ biggest season—is approaching. “So, basically, vessels that were leaving the Middle East today would be arriving in mid-April,” she said. “Now, the fact that obviously nothing is leaving means that there’s going to be a large hole in the market for fertilizer.”
“There are many stops along the way from closing the Strait of Hormuz to a child in Malawi being fed.”
If the war persists, experts warn that the drop in supply and the increase of cargo insurance premiums and freight rates could raise prices for everyone along the supply chain. Unlike with oil, there is no meaningful strategic reserve for nitrogen-based fertilizer, so there’s no equivalent stockpile to help buffer the shocks.
While the US does produce some of its own fertilizer, domestic producers cannot rapidly replace millions of tons of fertilizer supplies. Other countries more reliant on fertilizer imports from the Middle East, such as India, will be hit hard by the cessation of traffic on the strait. China, Indonesia, Morocco, and several sub-Saharan African nations are also expected to be affected by the global gridlock of sulfur exports flowing from the Gulf.
Moreover, Braich warned, any prolonged increase in shipping and inventory costs “is going to be felt by the consumer.”
For some, the impact is already here. Prices for key fertilizer products are up because of the war and are expected to squeeze growers’ profit margins—which could lead farmers to ration fertilizer use, reducing yields, or even to shift from planting input-intensive crops. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins told reporters in Atlanta, Georgia, on Tuesday that the Trump administration was “looking at every possible option” to address “skyrocketing” fertilizer costs for US farmers “based on actions on the other side of the world.”
About 4 billion people on the planet eat food grown with synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Roughly half of the global population, in other words, is alive because of these chemicals converted into nutrients for plants, said Lorenzo Rosa, who researches sustainable energy, water, and food systems at the Carnegie Institution for Science at Stanford University.
Of course, the fact that natural gas is the key to mass-producing synthetic fertilizers carries its own terrible climate implications. Together, manufacturing and applying synthetic fertilizers to fields and farms accounts for over 2 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions—just about equal to the CO2 emissions from global aviation. There are low-emissions alternatives to this process, Rosa argued: Nitrogen could be recycled from waste, and natural gas plants could be powered by local or renewable energy sources and built closer to the farms that require fertilizer.
The US “will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,” Trump wrote on social media. He made no mention of fertilizer, or food.
Normally, the fossil fuel-based, centralized—and, thus, fragile—supply chain for fertilizer and food is far cheaper than its alternative. But major shocks like the U.S.-Israel war against Iran expose the dangerous vulnerability of that system, as efficient and financially sound as it may be. “At some point, a country will have to decide: ‘Do I want the cheap fertilizer, importing it from the Strait of Hormuz or another country? Or do I prefer to pay a green premium and have my own domestic production and energy and food security?’” said Rosa.
USDA Secretary Rollins acknowledged this vulnerability in Tuesday’s press conference. “We are getting almost all of our urea, almost all of our phosphate, almost all of our nitrogen from other countries around the world, and that has to stop,” she said.
The catch, however, is that decentralizing this supply chain could inadvertently create a green divide—splitting the world between the nations and farmers who can afford domestically produced fertilizer and those who can’t. Many countries confronting widespread famine in Africa, for instance, already pay the highest fertilizer prices in the world and are unable to withstand further inflation.
“There are many stops along the way from closing the Strait of Hormuz to a child in Malawi being fed,” said Cary Fowler, president of the nonprofit Food Security Leadership Council and former US Special Envoy for Global Food Security in the Biden administration. “The clear thing is that those two things are connected.”
The same countries that stand to face the most harmful food security effects because of the conflict in Iran are also the ones struggling to feed their citizens following the collapse of global food aid after President Donald Trump dissolved the US Agency for International Development, or USAID, last year. Emergencies like these are where the international community’s response becomes increasingly important, Fowler said.
In addition to the dissolution of USAID, which halted international research efforts and initiatives to improve farming practices in lower-income nations, the World Food Programme has in recent months sounded the alarm over historically low donations from the US and other major Western donors.
“If we don’t invest in that sustainable productivity growth, then we put ourselves in a situation where we’re going to need a lot more humanitarian aid, particularly when there’s flare-ups like we’re experiencing now,” said Fowler. “And that gives us another choice—whether to provide that humanitarian aid or not. And that’s a choice of whether we want to, at least in the short-term, solve the problem. Or do we want to watch children starve to death on TV?”
It’s not clear how long the strait will remain closed, although Trump has swung between stating the war with Iran could stretch on through April, if not longer, and declaring it nearly done. Last week, the president announced that the US might begin to escort oil tankers through the embattled channel. “No matter what, the United States will ensure the FREE FLOW of ENERGY to the WORLD,” Trump wrote on social media, before later declaring “death, fire, and fury” if Iran continues its shipping blockade. On Sunday, he told Fox News that ships holding there should “show some guts” and push through.
The president made no mention of fertilizer—or food.
Rahul Bali of WABE, Atlanta’s NPR station and a Grist partner, contributed reporting.
2026-03-13 23:36:18
On Thursday, college football coach turned Senate dunce Tommy Tuberville took to X to quote-retweet a post from the account @EndWokeness. The original tweet were side-by-side photos of New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani and a plane hitting the second tower on 9/11. “Less than 25 years apart,” the account wrote.
Tuberville’s contribution? “The enemy is inside the gates,” he wrote.
That story was picked up quickly the likes of the Washington Post, Fox News and Politico, which even wondered aloud on X if Tuberville was suggesting that Muslims were the enemy.
Actually, no. On Friday, Tuberville clarified his intentions. “To be clear, I didn’t ‘suggest’ Islamists are the enemy,” he wrote. “I said it plainly.”
Got it, Coach.
And he’s still going:
Really clears things up.
2026-03-13 21:30:00
Who could have guessed they would be the ones on my mind? It was a personal appointment, perhaps the most intimate variety, and MAGA characters don’t normally seep into my private life. But there I was last month, at some point between a transvaginal ultrasound and substantial bloodwork, pondering the lives of Karoline Leavitt, Usha Vance, and Katie Miller.
These three women are at the forefront of a trend: a so-called mini “baby boom” unfolding across the upper echelons of the Trump administration. In other words, Leavitt, Vance, and Miller are pregnant, each with due dates in late spring or summer. Their pregnancies have been accompanied by a bit of culture war, too: Fox News noted the “full boom” as evidence that the women are enthusiastic devotees of the administration’s pronatalist agenda. There was Vice President JD Vance, who at a March for Life rally shortly after his family’s announcement, declared: “Let the record show, you have a vice president who practices what he preaches.” In a December Instagram post announcing her pregnancy, Leavitt thanked Trump, a self-declared “fertilization president,” for “fostering a pro-family environment in the White House.” Miller regularly supplies her X account with expressions of pronatalist, anti-contraceptive concerns about the country’s declining birth rate.
I found myself in the unlikely position of envying the cheerfully un-ambivalent, un-conflicted, pregnant ladies of MAGA.
But back to me, in the doctor’s office. I am not pregnant, nor do my husband and I know if we ever want to be again after having a baby a little more than four years ago. Should we stick with one, this objectively awesome kid, we’d be a part of the fastest-growing family unit in the United States. “One and done,” as they say, would be normal and good, fine and familiar. Still, there isn’t much about our undetermined decision-making process that has felt stable. Instead, I face a steady source of neurotic turmoil, a topic I have now discussed across three therapists, one of whom, in January, suggested that I visit a reproductive endocrinologist to discuss the option of embryo freezing. Which is what brings me to a fertility clinic in New Jersey, where I found myself in the unlikely position of envying the cheerfully un-ambivalent, un-conflicted, pregnant ladies of MAGA.
It’s not easy for me to admit envy, considering that I find some aspects of this mini baby-boom a bit unsettling, from the implication that the vice president may be procreating to advance a political project to the overt eugenics that animate the administration’s push for more babies. But even so, in the midst of my private ambivalence, I have been spellbound by the easy certainty, or more accurately, the supreme public confidence with which Leavitt, Vance, and Miller appear to be growing their families. Their remarks convey the impression that, for some, choosing to become pregnant is as uncomplicated as waiting for the favored political winds to be at their backs and saying, “Let’s do this.” That certainty, even if performed, eludes me, and frankly, I desire it. Whether I decide to have another kid or not, I want to be secure in the choice, like these women seem to be.
When I reached out to Peggy Heffington, a historian at the University of Chicago and author of Without Children: The Long History of Not Being a Mother, to talk through all this, I was surprised, even comforted, to hear that some of what had informed her book was her own “personal place of being someone who has never felt sure about having kids.”
“For me, it was a grey area,” she said. “It always felt like there were other factors at play. That it’s never just about desire, it’s about context.”
It’s exactly this context that Leavitt, Vance, and Miller don’t appear to acknowledge. As Miller wrote in a February X post: “Women are biologically destined to have children. Biology equips women with unique tools and predispositions that make children more aligned with female physiology and psychology. You don’t need to wait for that perfect moment to have kids, you just need to have them.”
“You don’t need to wait for that perfect moment to have kids, you just need to have them,” Miller wrote.
It would take reams upon reams to unpack the arrogance of Miller’s assertions. But it’s her last claim, that women “just need to have” kids and forget the factors that go into the decision-making process, that elides the legitimate and troubling reasons why so many of us can’t decide. A short list: anxiety over the climate crisis, conflicts over career ambitions, the physical stresses, regret over the first one, and fears of identity loss. Then there are the brutal realities of having a child in a country lacking family-friendly policies: paid family leave, affordable child care, flexible working arrangements, and access to affordable fertility treatments.
“We’ve changed society in ways that have made it far more challenging” to have kids, Heffington said. “The way we work has come into conflict with the demands of a large family. We’ve made really deliberate decisions towards an individualized society that lacks support for families.”
And then there’s the sheer, mind-blowing expense. But you won’t hear about any of that from Leavitt, Vance, or Miller.
The contours of my own indecision bend toward freedom. That sweet ability to take the trip out of the group chat—Mallorca, Malibu, Granada, San Francisco!—that only grows the further you are from those grueling newborn days. The liberty to finish entire books without interruption, to ponder a surprising return of ambition, to take care of oneself in a way that feels uniquely dependent on the calculus of zero diapers, one daycare bill, and the 1,273 early illnesses that laid the groundwork, finally, for a more robust immune system. I can’t help but worry that another baby could be the destruction of that freedom. All of which, I imagine, smacks of selfishness among today’s pronatalists who see declining birthrates as threats to humanity.
It’s easy to brush off their messaging as weirdo creepiness, because, well, it is. But their dedication to portraying the illusion of a picture-perfect world of motherhood can trigger an ache not unlike the complex emotions some, including women experiencing infertility and miscarriage, feel when coming across Instagram pregnancy and birth announcements. Still, I never expected the trigger to come from prominent families of the federal government.
This has precedent. To understand how governments can stigmatize a woman’s ambivalence, we need only to go back 121 years to Theodore Roosevelt in 1905, speaking to the National Congress of Mothers:
There are many good people who are denied the supreme blessing of children, and for these we have the respect and sympathy always due to those who, from no fault of their own, are denied any of the other great blessings of life. But the man or woman who deliberately foregoes these blessings, whether from viciousness, coldness, shallow-heartedness, self-indulgence, or mere failure to appreciate aright the difference between the all-important and the unimportant—why, such a creature merits contempt as hearty as any visited upon the soldier who runs away in battle, or upon the man who refuses to work for the support of those dependent upon him, and who, though able-bodied, is yet content to eat in idleness the bread which others provide.
Roosevelt sets up a clear delineation between those who deserve empathy because they cannot conceive, and people who either choose not to or, like me, who struggle to decide, and should therefore be despised. For Roosevelt, his speech continued, we are the “creatures” who form “the most unpleasant and unwholesome feature of modern life.” Such harsh views are not dissimilar to Vance’s “childless cat ladies” dig or this administration’s countless efforts to inject “family values” and conservative gender norms across daily American life.
“The existence of women of this type,” Roosevelt continues, “forms one of the most unpleasant and unwholesome features of modern life.”
The contours of my own indecision bend toward freedom. To take care of oneself in a way that feels uniquely dependent on the calculus of zero diapers, one daycare bill, and the 1,273 early illnesses that laid the groundwork, finally, for a more robust immune system.
I don’t know how I’ll land on the decision to go for another. Shortly after the initial ultrasound, a financial counselor informed me that my mediocre insurance wouldn’t cover the treatment, which, should I eventually move forward with freezing and implantation, would cost just north of $37,000. (So much for Trump’s promise of free IVF, indeed.) But cost is far from the main factor making this decision feel, at times, impossible.
Was there ever a moment of uncertainty for the women of MAGA’s baby boom? Could they even empathize with a woman who can’t figure it out? It’s impossible to know. But portraying it as an easy decision, that just so happens to conveniently align with a political ideology, is to push a quieter cruelty. That they have entered my consciousness, in the most intimate of settings, must be some kind of proof of their propagandistic success.
“Don’t we all want that ease?” Heffington said. Looking at declining birth rates in the US, where the material and political contexts of daily life have changed so drastically over the last two centuries, she added, “There’s a feeling that this ease has been taken from us.” You just wouldn’t know it from the women of MAGA.
2026-03-13 19:30:00
On a quick break between calls, Kathleen’s co-worker asked her where she could learn more about unionization efforts at their company. Check Instagram, she replied. Kathleen’s manager quickly came over to reprimand her; two days later, she was fired.
Workplace crackdowns on union activity are a familiar story; most go unchecked. But Kathleen’s employer has drawn fire repeatedly from members of Congress.
Kathleen worked for ZP Better Together, one of the two major American video relay service providers. Together with Sorenson Communications—owned by private equity—they provide most video relay services for Deaf people making phone calls in the United States. ZP Better Together was private equity–owned until its 2025 acquisition by France’s Teleperformance SE, a public corporation that has acquired multiple other private equity–owned firms.
ZP Better Together and Sorenson are in the midst of a unionization effort for ASL interpreters; workers at both companies have alleged efforts to stop the union drive. (ZP has also been under fire for allegedly subjecting Colombian workers to a traumatic work environment.)
“I was fired for misuse of company time, misuse of company technology, misuse of company resources and solicitation,” Kathleen told me. She had been with the company since July 2024 and believes her termination came in direct response to her unionization efforts. (ZP Better Together did not respond directly to questions regarding Kathleen’s employment and termination, but a spokesperson for the company said that it “respects the legal rights of its employees.”)
For Deaf people, video relay services are essential to connect to the world. Through the work of ASL interpreters on video relay services, Deaf people call doctors’ offices, speak to service providers, chat with friends, and complain to their elected officials. If the ASL interpreters serving them are burned out, then Deaf people suffer. The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to oversee video relay services, and the firms that provide them, under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But workers are arguing that the agency, particularly under Trump appointee and political hatchetman Brendan Carr, is not doing a good enough job.
Kathleen started to get more deeply involved in union organizing efforts in the fall of 2025, she said, because she was so frustrated by how she was treated as an employee with disabilities—not an unusual factor in union drives, but especially ironic for an organization that serves disabled people. Management at the firm didn’t allow her to wear her hearing aids for a month and a half, ostensibly because of concerns about their Bluetooth capabilities, until relenting when she submitted additional medical paperwork; she also faced difficulties getting accommodations for a spinal injury.
“If it was an addendum to the previous accommodation, they would throw out the previous paperwork and just go by the new one,” Kathleen told me, “which is how I ended up losing my [Americans with Disabilities Act] breaks at one point.”
The union drive at both firms kicked off in 2024 under the Office and Professional Employees International Union (OPEIU) in an effort to win improved pay, better and more consistent hours, and more manageable working conditions—like time for breaks between calls or the involvement of certified Deaf interpreters. All of this, organizers told me, would help workers better serve Deaf people. Instead, ZP Better Together and Sorenson’s ASL interpreters say they’re dealing with anti-union attitudes, including the firing of organizers at one of the two providers.
“Teleperformance has launched a union-busting campaign against ASL interpreters at ZP Better Together. In the last three months, we have had four people terminated that we believe was for union activity,” OPEIU director of organizing Brandon Nessen said in a statement that urged Teleperformance to reinstate the workers. “These included highly experienced interpreters, and one of very few interpreters who is fluent in multiple Puerto Rican sign languages.”
The service the interpreters provide is critical enough—and scarce enough—that the union-busting allegations have received Congressional attention. On February 26, more than 70 House Democrats sent a letter to Teleperformance, to refrain from union-busting, warning the company that they would be paying close attention to its compliance. It wasn’t the first time: in 2025, 23 Democratic House reps also chided Teleperformance for infringing on workers’ rights.
“Companies that benefit substantially from federally administered programs and public funds have a heightened obligation to uphold strong labor standards,” the letter reads. “For a company like yours, now reliant on these programs for a significant portion of its US revenue, meeting that obligation requires earnest collaboration with labor unions.”
Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Teleperformance said in a statement that the firm rejects the allegations in the congressional letter.
“I love my job. You don’t go through 10 years of learning a language because you hate it,” Kathleen said. “The industry that I seem to have joined is exploitative. It shouldn’t be that way.”
2026-03-13 19:30:00
For years, Utah has been a hub of the private adoption industry, drawing pregnant women and prospective adoptive parents from across the country thanks to its notoriously permissive laws and thriving network of agencies. But the practice can become exploitative, as I reported in an investigation for Mother Jones and PBS News Hour last year, with some expecting mothers feeling pressured or rushed into relinquishing their babies after being enticed to Utah by promises of cash stipends and free lodging.
Now, Utah lawmakers are dramatically reining in how adoption agencies operate in the state. The state legislature passed a bill late last month with a veto-proof supermajority that will increase oversight and transparency of the industry and introduce protections for birth parents. Gov. Spencer Cox is expected to sign the legislation into law this month.
“We need to take care of them, and it didn’t seem like these women were being taken care of.”
The legislation introduces a 72-hour revocation period after adoption papers are signed, during which a birth mother can change her mind for any reason; prohibits agencies from advertising financial incentives to expecting mothers; bans lump sums paid out to birth mothers; requires adoption agencies be registered as nonprofits by 2027; and creates a consortium of adoption agencies, run by the state’s Department of Health and Human Services, to oversee the implementation of the new guardrails and collect data on the industry.
Republican state Rep. Katy Hall, the bill’s sponsor and a nurse who worked for years in postpartum care, knows that birth mothers are in a fragile place. “We need to take care of them, and it didn’t seem like these women were being taken care of,” she says.
She’s not sure she was aware of the state’s reputation as a hub for adoption tourism until watching the News Hour investigation. The video tells the story of Tia Goins, a mother who was flown from Detroit to Salt Lake City by adoption agency Brighter Adoptions and, she says, pressured to give up her child. Only after she relinquished her child did agency owner Sandi Quick coordinate Goins’ flight home. On the way to the airport, Quick—who now goes by Sandi Benson—gave Goins $4,000 in cash.
(Benson said last year that she had always centered the needs of birth mothers and that she ensures that mothers “fully understand the implications of adoption.” The adoptive mother said that Goins was a “willing and active participant” in the process.)
Adoption reform has historically been contentious in Utah, in part due to a strong adoption industry lobby. But a stream of investigative stories—The Cut, the Times of London, and the Salt Lake Tribune also published investigations into predatory practices in Utah—helped bring other adoption agencies to the table, says Hall. “I think as those other agencies saw the reputation of Utah possibly being damaged by those couple bad actors in the space, they were more willing to say, ‘Okay we see that something needs to change and we’re willing to do what that takes.'”
“The reality was there was a reputation to address,” says Democratic state Sen. Luz Escamilla, who has pushed for adoption reform for years. She notes that the state has been home to several high-profile adoption scandals over the years, including the case of Paul Petersen, the Arizona official who pleaded guilty in 2020 to human smuggling and other charges for operating a multi-state adoption scheme that brought in pregnant women from the Marshall Islands.
Brighter Adoptions, meanwhile, announced late last month that it was suddenly closing. “The legal landscape of adoption has changed significantly in the last year,” Benson wrote in an email to prospective adoptive families, “making advertising more difficult” and leading to “opposition in bringing moms to Utah.” (Benson didn’t respond to requests for comment for this story.)
“I think I’m probably still a little bit in shock,” says Ashley Mitchell, cofounder of Utah Adoption Rights and a longtime advocate for adoption reform. “When we had that final vote go through the senate to pass, I just cried.” Mitchell says Utah will now be operating with similar legislation to other states. “I think it’s embarrassing,” she says, “that it’s taken so long and so many people have had to have been hurt.”
