2026-01-02 20:30:00
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Whether it’s AI-generated music artists debuting on the Billboard charts, music labels courting TikTok virality, Grammy-nominated artists using AI to help write lyrics, or streaming services making it increasingly difficult to listen to full albums, watching the music industry slowly deteriorate has made me feel pessimistic about its future.
So in November, when Rosalía dropped her new song “Berghain”—a lush, operatic pop single sung in German, English, and Spanish and accompanied by a full symphony orchestra and choir—my interest was piqued. I became really invested watching an interview between the Spanish pop star and Zane Lowe about her fourth studio album, Lux. Rosalía told Lowe that the album was an excuse to do what she was craving most at the time: reading and studying about “spirituality and broadening my horizons of what spirituality is.” As she continued to speak with Lowe, it became clear just how much research went into making this album. And since Lux’s debut on Nov. 7, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about the intricacies of her work.
Separated into four “movements,” like a classical symphony, Lux explores religion, femininity, celebrity, desire, forgiveness, heartbreak, and more over the course of 15 dynamic tracks of classically inflected pop. Throughout the project, she delivers a beautiful, at times haunting, vocal performance that paints a vivid picture even for listeners who don’t understand all 13 languages she sings in (among them: Spanish, Catalan, English, Ukrainian, and Arabic). With the help of the London Symphony Orchestra and Catalan choirs, along with a host of other performers including Bjork and Yves Tumor, Rosalía blends flamenco, folk, and classical traditions with her distinct electronic production, making classical music more accessible to a general audience.
Lux also has a cultural and historical specificity that extends its reach globally. In her lyrics, Rosalía blends her experiences with those of female saints and religious figures from around the world, such as Teresa de Jesús and Sun Bu’er. “I lost my tongue in Paris, / my time in LA / my heels in Milan, / my smile in the UK, / But my heart has never been mine / I always give it away,” Rosalía sings on “Reliquia.” While these lyrics could be simple metaphors for Rosalía’s vulnerability in love and fame, she said they’re also inspired by Saint Rose of Lima, whose relics were “scattered around the world.”
With each song, the album builds layer upon layer for listeners to engage with. Rosalía has described the album as maximalist; on it, she holds nothing back for her audience, doesn’t simplify, and instead invites them to explore the work on their own terms. Along with its critical acclaim, Lux debuted at No. 1 across five Billboard charts: Top Latin Albums, Top Latin Pop Albums, Classical Albums, Classical Crossover, and World Albums. The album also earned Rosalía her first top 10 on the Billboard 200, debuting at No. 4.
Rosalía’s Lux shows that the public is hungry for something more complex from its pop music. And while we probably won’t see people rushing to get music theory degrees, start researching the lives of saints, or even see more pop artists begin singing opera, I’ve found that for me, the album has been a catalyst to learn about so many different pieces of music and art history. Over Thanksgiving, it started a conversation with classically trained friends about Rosalía’s year-long translation process and the 12th-century mystic, poet, and composer Hildegard von Bingen. It was also how I discovered a 1976 Patti Smith interview, sampled on the song “La Yugular,” in which Smith speaks about her desire to push boundaries as an artist: “It’s just like going through one door. One door isn’t enough. A million doors aren’t enough. You have to go beyond.” It has also led me to explore opportunities locally to listen to orchestras and watch opera (currently, I’m considering whether to purchase tickets for an upcoming performance of the Philadelphia Orchestra, or to watch the Alabama Symphony Orchestra when I head home to see my family). Whichever show I attend, I’m glad that Lux exists to spark conversations and give me at least a little hope for the future of the music industry.
2026-01-02 20:27:00
This story was originally published by bioGraphic and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In 1987, wildlife veterinarian Mark Pokras was in his office at Tufts University in Massachusetts when a colleague from New Hampshire called. “I’ve got a dead loon here,” she said. “If I bring it down to you, can you tell me how it died?”
Understanding what’s killing wild animals is often the first step to saving them, and over the course of his career, Pokras has necropsied everything from whales to hummingbirds. Yet this was his first loon—in part because common loons (Gavia immer) had only recently begun repopulating New England after being nearly extirpated by 300 years of hunting, pollution, and habitat loss. European settlers so disliked these “ill-shap’d” birds that nature writer Henry David Thoreau described his neighbors on Walden Pond in Massachusetts shooting them just for fun. By the early 1900s, common loons—which winter on the coast and spend summers nesting along inland lakes—had disappeared from their breeding grounds in Massachusetts and much of New Hampshire, and been reduced to a fraction of their former abundance elsewhere in New England. Places with names like Loon Pond didn’t see nesting loons for more than a century.
With the banning of DDT and the passage of the US Clean Water Act in the 1970s, however, loons began returning to the region, and people came to see them as symbols of a recovering wildness. The birds’ red eyes and geometrically patterned black-and-white plumage are instantly recognizable, but loons are most beloved for their long, tremulous vocalizations. In the same way that a train whistle symbolizes the freedom and loneliness of travel, loon calls have come to represent a specific, nostalgic kind of northern wilderness: piney woods, the clean smell of a lake, perhaps a rustic cabin tucked away on shore. Flannel shirts, bug spray, an early morning fishing trip. Scientists say that smell is the sense most strongly connected to memory, but for people with a connection to such lakes, there’s nothing like the sound of a loon to conjure an entire place, an entire feeling. Some locals can identify individual birds by the sound of their voices.
Pokras witnessed loons’ rebranding firsthand. As a kid in the 1950s, he remembers occasionally seeing and hearing loons while canoeing with his dad, but loons were no more or less popular than any other wild animal. Today, homes across northern New England display loon flags and loon mailboxes, and gift shops sell loon blankets, loon sweatshirts, loon wine glasses, and nearly any other item you can imagine with a loon on it. Maine residents can get a license plate featuring a loon, and one New Hampshire resident told me that people who grow up there often get one of three tattoos: the state area code (603), the state motto (“Live Free or Die”), or a loon. She chose the loon.
Pokras doesn’t have a loon tattoo, nor any other tattoos for that matter. But he’d become enchanted by loons while volunteering to rescue seabirds after a series of oil spills in New Jersey, and when his colleague asked if he’d necropsy a dead loon on that otherwise ordinary day in 1987, he readily agreed.
Cutting into the bird, Pokras discovered that it had suffered from lead toxicosis, more commonly known as lead poisoning. Loons eat pebbles to help digest food in their gizzard, and this one may have mistaken a lead sinker left behind by a fisherman for a pebble, or perhaps eaten a fish with a lead sinker in its body. In Pokras’s X-ray, the sinker showed up as an unnaturally round ball amid a mess of partially digested fish and shellfish. After the bird ate it, the lead would have leached toxicants into the bloodstream, causing impaired vision, gastrointestinal distress, neurologic issues, and ultimately death.
“This is weird,” Pokras remembers telling his colleague. “We’ll probably never see this again. But if you ever find another dead loon, give me a call.”
“This is weird. We’ll probably never see this again. But if you ever find another dead loon, give me a call.”
That sentence changed the trajectory of his life.
Today, Pokras and his colleagues have necropsied nearly 5,000 dead loons, mostly from New England. Other scientists and veterinarians have necropsied more from across the species’ breeding range, which extends across most of Canada and the northern United States. In nearly every place—from the Maritimes to Minnesota to Washington State—lead poisoning is the leading cause of death for adult loons in freshwater habitat. A loon that ingests a single 28 gram (1 ounce) lead sinker left behind by a fisherman will likely die in two to four weeks.
The late poet Mary Oliver witnessed this loss. In a poem titled “Lead,” she wrote that “the loons came to our harbor / and died, one by one / of nothing we could see.”
In an era when many species are declining because of multipronged, seemingly intractable problems, the solution to protecting loons is relatively straightforward. Anglers simply need to swap their old lead jigs and sinkers for tackle made from tungsten, steel, tin, or bismuth. Given loons’ immense popularity, you might think that would be an easy sell. But although conservationists have tried educating the public for decades—and although Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Massachusetts have laws regulating the use and sale of lead fishing tackle—lead is still responsible for around 25 to 30 percent of loon deaths in most states and provinces, and until recently, nearly 40 percent in New Hampshire. Why?
The answer, at least in the United States, is entangled with gun rights.
I meet up with Mark Pokras on a green, humid summer morning at the headquarters of the Loon Preservation Committee (LPC), a nonprofit based near Lake Winnipesaukee, the largest lake in New Hampshire. Though he retired from Tufts in 2015, Pokras facilitates an interorganizational effort to study loons and drives from his home in Maine to LPC’s wood-shingled building a few times a year to help run a summer research fellowship for graduate students. Today, two Tufts students, Brynn Ziel and Khangelani Mhlanga, are preparing to necropsy a female loon who had been brought to a wildlife rehabilitation center earlier. The loon had been alive but emaciated, with a length of fishing line emerging from her sinuous neck. Unable to save the bird, staff euthanized her, then sent her frozen body to LPC for examination.
Now, the body is splayed on a stainless steel grate above a large, shallow sink, like the kind that might be used for dog grooming. The loon’s organs—esophagus, gizzard, liver, intestines—glisten in the fluorescent lights, and the interns’ nitrile-gloved hands are smeared with blood. Ziel uses forceps to pluck pieces of shellfish from the gizzard, while Mhlanga works on severing the head. The loon is surprisingly large up close—about the size of a goose. The digits on her webbed feet look like long, gnarled human fingers topped with black nails.
Pokras occasionally chimes in with an observation, and Harry Vogel, LPC’s senior biologist and executive director since the late 1990s, looks on from across the room. We’re two hours into the necropsy, and the frozen bird is starting to thaw. The room smells a bit like roadkill.
“They’re a lot prettier on the outside,” Vogel comments.
“I’m biased,” Mhlanga says, “but I think they’re pretty on the inside, too.”
The interns continue disassembling the bird’s internal architecture in silence, then Mhlanga pulls out a fishing hook as long as her finger. “Huh,” Pokras says, examining it. “This is the CSI part—the detective work…I’m looking at this and asking, ‘Is that the reason the bird is emaciated?’”
Fishing hooks aren’t typically made of lead—it’s too pliable—so the team doesn’t suspect lead poisoning. Perhaps the hook inhibited the animal’s ability to hunt or swallow, leading to starvation. Still, the necropsy is valuable because it contributes to an ongoing record of the lives and deaths of New England loons across five decades.
When Pokras first realized the scope of lead poisoning while necropsying loons in the 1990s, he imagined the problem would be solved relatively quickly. After all, once Silent Spring author Rachel Carson publicized the harm that DDT was causing to birds and other wildlife in North America in the 1960s, legislators and the general public mobilized against the agrochemical industry and worked to ban DDT in much of the world, saving the lives of countless birds and ensuring that springtime still resonates with their songs.
Yet efforts by LPC and others to educate anglers about the dangers of lead tackle and convince them to switch to non-lead gear hardly moved the needle. And by the time conservationists took their work to Congress in the late 1990s, hoping for a federal ban, it was becoming harder to pass environmental legislation. Voters in the US were increasingly divided by party lines, and politicians were increasingly influenced by a powerful group: the National Rifle Association, or NRA.
As Pokras and his colleagues were spreading the word about the dangers of lead fishing tackle in the ’90s, it just so happened that other conservationists had begun noticing that piles of guts contaminated by lead bullets and left behind by hunters were poisoning scavengers, like bald eagles and California condors. (The US Fish and Wildlife Service had banned lead shot—a type of ammunition used for bird hunting that consists of a spray of small pellets rather than a single bullet—for hunting waterfowl in 1991, but other types of lead bullets were still used for hunting larger animals, and continue to be used today.) Conservation groups across the country began lobbying for a federal ban on lead bullets. And the NRA responded in force. As one NRA website currently states: “The use of traditional (lead) ammunition is currently under attack by many anti-hunting groups whose ultimate goal is to ban hunting.”
But how did the fight over lead bullets thwart efforts to regulate lead fishing tackle? Many hunting and fishing organizations have ties to the NRA, and they maintain that any effort to regulate tackle will open the door to regulating ammunition, and that any effort to regulate ammunition is an assault on Americans’ gun rights.
“One of the unusual things about lead is there are very few other toxic materials that have a huge public lobby in favor of them,” Pokras says. “You don’t see a lot of members of the public out there campaigning [for] more DDT or neonicotinoid pesticides. But with lead there’s a huge, wealthy, politically influential contingent supporting it.”
When Pokras retired in 2015, he had decades of data showing that lead fishing tackle was killing loons, along with some 7,500 peer-reviewed scientific papers that unequivocally show the dangers of lead for wildlife. When I asked why he continues to necropsy loons to amass new data despite this preponderance of proof, his answer is concise: “We haven’t solved the problem yet.”
Lead—an element found not just on Earth but throughout the solar system—has always been attractive for human industry. The earliest known case of metal smelting can be found in 7,000-year-old lead beads found in Asia Minor. The Roman empire produced 72,000 metric tons of lead at its peak, much of it was used to make vessels for eating and drinking and pipes for moving water; the word “plumbing” comes from the Latin word for lead, plumbum. And lead has been harming people and animals for nearly as long as we’ve used it. Lead seeping from a Greek mine was already polluting the environment some 5,300 years ago, while an Egyptian papyrus from 3,000 years ago depicts a case of homicide by lead poisoning.
Still, lead remains popular, used in everything from car batteries to computer screens.
Global lead production increases annually, with more than 4 million metric tons (some 10 billion pounds) mined or extracted through recycling in 2024 alone.
Before traveling to New Hampshire to seek out loons, I’d met with Elaine Leslie, the retired chief of biological resources for the National Park Service, at her home in rural southwestern Colorado. When Leslie was leading the Park Service’s biology department in the early 2010s under Barack Obama’s administration, she helped enact an internal ban on lead ammunition in all US national parks and preserves. Hunters and gun advocates weren’t thrilled—“I got death threats,” Leslie tells me matter-of-factly—but the US Fish and Wildlife Service followed suit by banning lead ammunition in certain national wildlife refuges, and began making moves toward a more comprehensive ban. The state of California also banned lead bullets in condor habitat in 2007, eventually followed by a statewide ban. For a while, it seemed as though scientists and conservationists were making progress.
But when President Donald Trump took office in 2017, his administration largely reversed the Park Service’s ban on lead bullets. (Rangers must still use non-lead bullets when dispatching an injured animal.) It also restricted the agency from spending money on research, education, or other efforts to reduce lead impacts to wildlife and people. Such pushback is bolstered by gun advocates who claim there’s no research proving that lead has population-level effects on wildlife. In the case of California condors, they say, California’s lead ban hasn’t reduced mortality rates, so the lead in condors’ blood must be coming from a different source. (Scientists say it’s because condors regularly cross into states like Arizona and Nevada and eat meat left by hunters who used lead bullets.) Critics also claim that non-lead ammunition is more expensive, which used to be true but is becoming less so. And they allege that non-lead ammunition is less effective—another argument that has been disproved in peer-reviewed research. Still, the backlash against regulating lead at the federal level has only grown in recent years, with federal legislators introducing bills to protect hunters’ and anglers’ right to lead tackle and bullets. California remains the only state with a complete ban on lead ammunition.
Sitting in the shade of her porch sipping iced tea, I asked Leslie, a wildlife biologist by training, if the science showing the dangers of lead to animals is well established. She let out an incredulous laugh. “There’s so much peer-reviewed science out there,” she said. “There’s study after study.”
“Those are the very top of the iceberg. Grizzly bears are impacted. Coyotes are impacted. Ravens are impacted. Any animal that eats another animal can be impacted.”
For months after our meeting, Leslie sends me those studies by email. Research has shown lead poisoning in doves, whooping cranes, eagles, owls, and many other birds. And as Leslie points out, those are only the animals that are monitored. “I mean, those are the very top of the iceberg,” she says. “Grizzly bears are impacted. Coyotes are impacted. Ravens are impacted. Any animal that eats another animal can be impacted.” While not every animal that absorbs lead dies from it, the bioaccumulation may lead an animal to become sluggish or disoriented and get struck by a car or fly into a power line it would have otherwise avoided. Lead poisoning, Leslie says, is an underreported issue.
While most animals killed by lead poisoning encounter the element from bullets, loons are predominantly killed by lead fishing tackle, which is theoretically less contentious to regulate—especially in progressive regions like New England. That’s why, beginning in the early 2000s, loon conservationists turned their focus to state-level laws. They also kept their efforts to ban lead tackle separate from efforts to ban lead ammo, in the hope that it might be an easier pill for lawmakers to swallow.
New Hampshire became the first to ban certain types of lead fishing tackle in 2000, and subsequently strengthened its laws to become some of the most stringent in the nation. Vermont, Massachusetts, and Maine followed, though the details differ so much from state to state that education and enforcement remain challenging. “We thought great, problem solved,” says Vogel, the LPC director. “But then we realized the problem was not solved.”
Today, even after the bans have been in place for years, LPC continues to receive loons each year who have died of lead poisoning. Vogel and his colleagues initially thought this was because the birds were swallowing old lead sinkers buried in the muck at the bottom of lakes. But after necropsies demonstrated that the months when most loons died of lead poisoning coincided with the months when freshwater fishing was at its peak, the team realized that the deaths came from current use. Fishermen were still using—and even purchasing—lead sinkers and spinners.
Back at the LPC’s headquarters on the shores of Lake Winnipesaukee, Pokras shows me a lead lure that he picked up at a fishing store in Maine a few weeks prior. “This is actually a good thing,” Vogel chimes in, with characteristic optimism. It means conservationists don’t have to figure out how to remove old tackle sunk at the bottom of lakes. If they can just figure out how to keep new lead tackle from getting into the environment, the benefit to birds should be almost immediate. And fortunately, they’ve found a promising solution.
After the interns finish taking samples of the dead loon’s organs to send off for testing, they seal what’s left of the body in a heavy-duty trash bag for disposal at the local dump. As they wrap up, I head upstairs to the education center and gift shop. A recording of loon calls plays softly, and educational exhibits share information about loons, including the fact that they can dive to depths of 60 meters (200 feet) to hunt for fish, and that their name comes from the Swedish word for clumsy, lom—a nod to loons’ notorious ineptitude on land.
On one wall, a taxidermied loon appears to be suspended mid-swim in a glass case, its neck stretched out and its webbed feet splayed behind it like propellers. Affixed to the glass is a placard: “This loon died after ingesting lead fishing tackle.” A table below displays a jar half full of lead sinkers: “This small Mason jar contains enough lead fishing tackle to kill every adult loon found in New Hampshire!” Nearby, a wooden bowl carved in the shape of—you guessed it—a loon holds non-lead tackle that visitors can take home for free. Brochures urge people to earn credit for more new tackle by turning in their old lead gear.
This is part of New Hampshire’s pioneering lead tackle buyback program. LPC gets generous donations from loon lovers, and along with support from the state’s department of fish and game, some of that money becomes $20 vouchers to sporting goods stores given to people who turn in lead tackle. Banners and flyers publicizing the lead buyback program are displayed at waste transfer stations, government offices, shops, and community lake associations, and Scouts can earn a badge for collecting lead tackle from their community. Since its launch in 2018, people have dropped off nearly 80,000 pieces of lead tackle; in 2024 alone, 78 kilograms (172 pounds) of lead tackle were turned in, marking a 119 percent increase over the prior year. Maine has taken the work a step further—in addition to buying tackle from individual anglers, the conservation nonprofit Maine Audubon buys stock directly from merchants, keeping lead tackle off the shelves and helping stores comply with newly tightened state regulations.
For loons, the combination of legislation, education, and buyback programs seems to be working. Lead poisoning is no longer the number one killer of loons in Maine. And in New Hampshire, lead-related deaths dropped 61 percent between the late 1990s and 2016, and fell another 34 percent since then. “I suppose you could see New Hampshire as a leader,” Vogel says, “But that’s also driven by necessity. The problem was the most severe here.”
Vogel is optimistic that states like Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Washington—all of which have significant loon habitat—will one day follow suit, along with his home country of Canada, where 94 percent of common loons breed. Canada already bans lead tackle and ammo in national parks and wildlife areas but allows it elsewhere. Resistance to a Canadian national ban seems to come from a more basic reluctance to change, rather than fear of losing gun rights, along with the fact that loons are so abundant in Canada that preventing lead poisoning feels less urgent.
Europe, meanwhile, is far ahead. The European Union, Norway, and Iceland already ban lead in all wetlands, and the EU is considering a proposal to ban lead from all fishing and hunting gear. Denmark already has a complete ban, and the United Kingdom will enact one beginning in 2026.
With the necropsy complete, I follow Vogel and Ashley Keenan, LPC’s field crew coordinator, to a small motorboat docked on Lake Winnipesaukee. The southern part of the lake bumps with party boats and Jet Skis, but these northern reaches are quieter, scattered with islands and ringed with coves where dark sweeps of pine forest feather the shore.
Vogel and Keenan are tracking this year’s loon chicks. Unlike ducks and many other waterfowl, loons hatch only one or two eggs per year and don’t typically reproduce until they’re six years old, making population-level growth slow. Out of 32 nesting pairs of loons scattered across Lake Winnipesaukee’s 179 square kilometers (69 square miles) in the spring of 2025, 12 chicks had survived as of August. The figure is slightly below average, although survival rates fluctuate. (One year, 23 chicks survived, Vogel tells me; a few years later, only three did.) During Keenan’s last patrol, the eggs in one nest perched on a tiny island hadn’t yet hatched, and today she’s trying to find out if the chicks have emerged.
Keenan steers toward the island, cuts the motor, and jumps into the shallows. She aims her binoculars at a cluster of lichen-splattered boulders. We wait in silence. Nothing.
“Goddamn it,” she says, climbing back into the boat. One egg might still be there, but there’s no sign of the second egg or a living chick. She guesses it was picked off by a predator, perhaps an eagle. Vogel speculates that unseasonably hot summer weather contributed to the lower-than-usual survival rate. Loon parents who need to cool down by going for a swim must leave their eggs unguarded, opening them to predation or overheating under the blazing sun.
Although common loon populations are holding steady or even growing slightly across their range, loons are increasingly susceptible to the impacts of climate change, as well as avian malaria, shoreline development, and collisions with recreational motorboats. And this region—one of the first in North America to be settled by colonists, and still one of the most densely developed on the continent—echoes with stories of species that have disappeared, from mountain lions to American chestnuts. People here know that survival is never guaranteed, and that keeping common species common requires effort, sacrifice, and care. For loons specifically, it means keeping as many adults of reproductive age alive as possible.
“This is probably the most intensely managed species in New Hampshire,” Vogel says. “And despite that, we’re still having trouble maintaining reproductive success.”
Just then, a white-haired woman in a kayak approaches our boat, waving her arms. “I’m just trying to find out what happened to my baby loon,” she calls out. Her name is Dotty Wysocki, and she’s been watching nesting loons near her summer cottage here for three decades. “We name ’em and everything,” she tells me in a thick Boston accent. “We really get involved. I’m constantly looking for them.”
Wysocki tells us that she saw a newly hatched chick alive earlier in the week but hasn’t spotted it since. When Keenan affirms that the chick is likely dead, Wysocki lowers her eyes. She wishes she could have done more; when she was younger, she and her friends used to watch the chicks in four-hour shifts to scare off eagles and other predators.
At the end of her poem about lead poisoning in loons, Mary Oliver wrote: “I tell you this to break your heart / by which I mean only / that it break open and never close again / to the rest of the world.”
As Wysocki paddles away and Keenan starts up our motor, both seem dispirited, perhaps even a little heartbroken. But their concern for the fate of this one tiny chick nonetheless fills me with hope. It’s the kind of love that can save a species, and indeed, the only thing that ever has.
2026-01-01 20:30:00
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
My Instagram algorithm has decided that I am a woman, and, therefore, I must want to lose weight.
In 2025, that meant it was impossible for me to scroll through my feed without being visually assaulted by ingratiating marketing campaigns, encouraging me to shed those last few pesky pounds via drugs, specifically off-label GLP-1.
For a brief moment, companies found it profitable to showcase physical diversity and promote the idea of loving your body just the way it is. Not so anymore.
In one ad, I am being pitched “looser jeans.” In another, I am being patronized by a cake: “PSA for the girls,” states shoddily Photoshopped frosting. “You don’t need to be obese to start a GLP-1.”
In practice, though, you do—at least according to the US Food and Drug Administration, which has only approved GLP-1 drugs for people with clinical obesity or Type 2 diabetes and for people who are overweight with weight-related comorbidities. The companies that manufacture the name-brand GLP-1s like Ozempic, Zepbound, and Wegovy haven’t meaningfully tested the drugs on people with BMIs lower than 27.
The sponsored ads that bombard my feeds, from telehealth companies like Willow, Noom, Fridays, EllieMD, and Midi Health, are technically promoting another product: compounded GLP-1 injections and tablets. These are not FDA-approved; they are custom-made by pharmacists and usually include small doses of semaglutide, the active ingredient in Ozempic, along with other ingredients. EllieMD, for example, offers a “longevity microdose” that includes B12.
The FDA has been clear on this. “Compounded drugs should only be used in patients whose medical needs cannot be met by an FDA-approved drug,” states an FDA release warning against the use of unapproved GLP-1 drugs for weight loss.
But the ads I’ve seen overwhelmingly focus on cosmetic changes, not improved health. Some discuss quickly dropping a handful of pounds before a big event, like a wedding. To obtain a prescription, you still need to talk to a doctor, who is tasked with assessing your medical history and needs. Willow’s website is explicit about the end game here: “Proven medicine that powers fast cosmetic weight loss.”
Willow, Noom, Fridays, and EllieMD did not respond to requests for comment. Midi Health told me it takes a medically focused, clinician-led approach to prescribing GLP-1 medications. “When our clinicians prescribe these therapies, it is because there is a clear medical benefit and as part of a comprehensive care plan focused on a woman’s overall health. GLP-1s have FDA-approved indications beyond obesity, including diabetes, sleep apnea, and long-term weight maintenance…We also recognize that BMI is an imperfect tool designed for research, not individualized medical care,” said Midi Health.
To be fair, it isn’t just the off-label drugs that are getting backed by an aggressive marketing push. In 2023, when Ozempic went mainstream, more than 4,000 semaglutide ad campaigns flooded the internet. That same year, print ads for “a weekly shot to lose weight” swept the New York City subways. Ro, the company behind that campaign, now has a series of video ads with Serena Williams. It was depressing to have my TV-watching experience interrupted by a close-up shot of the indomitable tennis star injecting a drug that can cause muscle loss and fatigue.
All these ads are nauseating because they traffic in the assumption that weight loss is a universal goal; the question is just whether you’d like to lose 5, 10, or 50 pounds. But I do not want to lose weight. I have spent more than half of my life trying to squash my urge to lose weight—and be free of the deeply inscribed messaging that thinner is a better, more desirable form. It’s been many years since I’ve restricted calories or purged after a meal, habits I picked up before I was even through puberty. Still, sometimes I falter. I’ll find myself redownloading MyFitnessPal or using my finite attention to perform caloric mental math, calculating the damage done by a tablespoon of cooking oil or the splash of milk added to my morning coffee.
This disordered history probably makes me the perfect demographic for receiving targeted GLP-1 ads. It’s very possible that my attention lingers, subconsciously, when I come across them on my feed. And if that’s the case, the algorithm has almost certainly noticed, and taken it as an invitation to send me more—despite all of the times I’ve clicked “not interested.”
To research this piece, I decided to see if I’d actually be eligible to microdose the GLP-1 being promoted to me. I filled out two online quizzes from the companies Noom and Hers. I lied about past eating disorder history by checking a box.
Hers—a women’s telehealth company that launched in 2018 with a focus on sexual wellness and skincare and has since become better known for offering weight loss drugs—warned me that my prescription would not be “evaluated for safety, effectiveness, or quality by the FDA.” It asked me harrowing questions such as, “How disruptive would vomiting, constipation, and diarrhea be to your daily life?” And then, thank God, Hers told me I didn’t qualify.
Noom let me right in. After it thanked me for taking the “important (and hard) first step” of sharing my current weight, it prompted me to buy my “personalized plan” for shedding 10 pounds in seven weeks.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about the long-term side effects of GLP-1 drugs, but they do appear to be beneficial for those who medically need them. I am not one of those people. And as the multibillion-dollar semaglutide market explodes across the globe, it’s disappointing to see it stamp out the last remaining shreds of the mid-2010s “body positivity” movement.
For a brief moment, companies found it profitable to showcase physical diversity and promote the idea of loving your body just the way it is. Not so anymore. The resounding message—on social media, on TV, in the goddamn subways—is that thin is back in. And companies are doing what they’ve always done best: exploiting our insecurities to cash out.
2025-12-31 20:30:00
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Alice Wong, disabled oracle and disability justice leader, died on November 14 at the age of 51. Alice, who had spinal muscular atrophy, will be the subject of a hybrid celebration of her life in the coming spring. She will continue to mean so much to disabled people, both those she counted as close friends and those acquainted with her via social media and her writings.
“What I will do is spend my time, energy, and labor intentionally with the people I care about,” Alice wrote in a Time essay last year. And based on loving tributes from friends of hers, she certainly did.
One thing, of many, that I very much admired about Alice was her dedication to helping Palestinians in Gaza. On her website, Disability Visibility Project, she wrote in 2023, “I know that genocide is a mass disabling event and a form of eugenics.” The same year, along with Jane Shi and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, she started Crips for eSims for Gaza, which has raised more than three million dollars to help Palestinians in Gaza have access to the internet.
Alice also highlighted the genocide in Gaza when accepting her 2024 MacArthur “genius” Grant, writing:
I stand in solidarity with the people of Palestine in their struggle for freedom and self determination. In times of crisis, writers, like all artists, have a responsibility to speak truth to power—to say the unsaid, to think the unthinkable, to question narratives that frame what is considered the truth. Disabled liberation is intertwined with the liberation of all people. By being in community with others, I learned that mutual aid and community organizing are acts of love. I also learned that activism isn’t supposed to be palatable or convenient.
“She spoke up for Palestinians, and some people were not happy about that, and there were people who challenged her voice, that maybe her genius grant should be rescinded,” her friend Yomi Young recounted in an interview. “And Alice stood firm, and she was unflinching, and she would not back down.”
The grant was also very important to her independence, as her friend Rebecca Cokley wrote in the Nation: “It meant she could pay someone to receive the support necessary for basic functions like accessing nutrition, changing her clothes, and using the bathroom. I often wonder what her fellowship could have looked like if those basic needs were already met at the level and quality she needed.”
Alice was very attuned to how politics impact disabled people, as when she co-created the #CripTheVote movement with her friends Andrew Pulrang and Gregg Beratan. As Pulrang said, “our goal has been to just foster discussion amongst ourselves and then to make that conversation noticeable by politicians, people running for office, people in office, and sometimes to reach out to them directly and give them an avenue to talk to us directly.”
In a July 2024 piece for Teen Vogue, Alice—who couldn’t mask to protect herself from Covid due to a tracheostomy—also passionately wrote against mask bans, writing that “the mask is the unsightly marker of deviant individuals: the sick, the immunocompromised, the disabled, and the protester who wishes to keep their identity anonymous.” She also supported Proposition 50 in California, which passed shortly before her death.
When I was very much an up-and-coming disability journalist, Alice was always kind to me, often reposting my calls for sources, which led more people in the disability community to trust me. I was fortunate to be part of a Bitch Media Access series she co-edited in 2021, and when I was ranting about the University of California graduate workers’ union representatives not meeting the needs of disabled workers, she invited me to write a piece for Disability Visibility Project.
In an obituary for Literary Hub, journalist Steven Thrasher recounted a story where Alice, who could no longer eat, gave Thrasher cookies. Thrasher said he needed to lose weight. Alice’s response? “EAT THE FUCKING COOKIES!!!!” What a nice, blunt, and enthusiastic friend she was.
I last saw Alice in person in August, when I was moderating a panel discussion she was on for the documentary Life After, which explores the ways in which assisted suicide programs and policies can be harmful to disabled people. “Ableism is everywhere,” she said at the time, “and it rears its head in legislation and the way society is constructed, interlocked with white supremacy.”
And yet, it’s still so important to have hope. As Alice wrote in an Instagram post that went up after her death: “I’m honored to be your ancestor and believe that disabled oracles like us will light the way to the future. Don’t let the bastards grind you down. I love you all.”
2025-12-31 20:30:00
The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. This is a non-exhaustive and totally subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy, discontent, or curiosity. Happy holidays.
Before the mass deportations. Before DOGE eviscerated government agencies, demoralized civil servants, and obliterated lifesaving aid programs. Before the ludicrous confirmation hearings for dangerous and eminently unqualified Cabinet officials. (Remember Rep. Matt Gaetz? He’s the one who never made it that far.) Before Congress demonstrated its craven obedience and its crawling sycophancy to President Donald Trump. Before yet another Supreme Court case threatened to expand presidential power or further undermine voting rights.
And just a day after Trump’s oligarch-padded inauguration and frenzied signing of executive orders, the soft-spoken Episcopalian minister who has been the Bishop of Washington, DC, since 2011, quietly and thoughtfully delivered a message. Her audience: the president, the vice president, and a congregation of government officials and GOP notables at the traditional inaugural prayer services, held at the Washington National Cathedral.
“I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now,” Bishop Mariann Budde said directly to Trump. “There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican, and independent families, some who fear for their lives.”
“The people who pick our crops, and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meatpacking plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals,” she continued. “They may not be citizens, or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals.”
This was not the first encounter the first female bishop of the Washington diocese had with Trump, and it’s likely that the grudge-holder-in-chief already was predisposed to dislike her and anything she might preach that day. Back in June 2020, in the midst of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter protests, Trump—flanked by Ivanka and Jared, Attorney General William Barr, and a few other administration officials—marched across Lafayette Square near the White House for a photo op at St. John’s Church. Unrelated to Trump’s appearance, it was later revealed, police had just cleared protesters from the park with tear gas. “We have the greatest country in the world,” Trump said, clutching a Bible and standing in front of the historic church. “Keep it nice and safe.”
The Episcopalian diocese of Washington encompasses 86 congregations, including St. John’s, which was first established in 1815 and is known as the “church of the presidents.” The night before Trump appeared, some of the protesters had turned violent, setting fires in the church basement and outside. As bishop, Budde responded and expressed her support for peaceful protests.
The president’s unexpected appearance was another matter.
She told the Washington Post, “I am the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington and was not given even a courtesy call, that they would be clearing [the area] with tear gas so they could use one of our churches as a prop.” In a since-deleted post on X, she also offered a few observations directed to the president, describing his message as being “antithetical to the teachings of Jesus and everything that our church stands for.” She continued, “The President did not come to pray; he did not lament the death of George Floyd or acknowledge the collective agony of people of color in our nation. He did not attempt to heal or bring calm to our troubled land.”
Back then, Trump did not bother to respond.
Fast-forward to the second day of his second term, and Trump’s resting-sulk-face was impassive as Budde delivered her message of mercy and Christ-like behavior. He had already signed a raft of executive orders, and 10 of them explicitly targeted migrants. She noted, “Our God teaches us that we are to be merciful to the stranger, because we were all once strangers in this land.” Speaking of God, she even appealed to Trump’s sense of having been somehow chosen after surviving an assassin’s bullet with only minor injuries. “You have felt the providential hand of a loving God,” she said. “In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now.”
Naturally, none of this sat well with the president or his party. Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.), for instance, suggested Budde, a US citizen, should be deported.
For his part, Trump was not going to permit Bishop Budde to get away with this level of insubordination. Perhaps during the service, he was already composing the fusillade of threats and insults that he posted on his social media platform Truth Social late that night. Referring to her as a “Radical Left hard line Trump hater,” he complained that she was not only “nasty in tone” but also “not compelling or smart.” Add to that, the service was “very boring” and “uninspiring” and “[s]he and her church owe the public an apology.”
She withstood all the vitriol. She certainly was threatened. Her friends reportedly were concerned about her safety. But Budde responded philosophically—in fact, heroically, given the temper of the times. She kept focused on what was much more important than the newly reelected president’s temper tantrum. “It’s not just the one sermon,” she told the National Catholic Reporter at the time. “We just need to continue to believe what we believe in and stand for the things we stand for—and that’s the work, right?”
It’s been nearly a year since then, but I often think that this might have been the only time the president was forced to sit (relatively) still and quiet and listen to someone stand up for the victims of his cruel policies. From her pulpit, she spoke about the qualities of mercy that are repeated by religious people all the time. But this time, facing all these powerful and vindictive people, she was not just pastoral, she was heroic.
2025-12-31 20:30:00
This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
In the past decade at the forefront of US politics, Donald Trump has unleashed a barrage of unusual, misleading, or dubious assertions about the climate crisis, which he most famously called a “hoax”.
This year has seen Trump ratchet up his often questionable claims about the environment and how to deal, if at all, with the threats to it. In a year littered with lies and wild declarations, these are the five that stood out as the most startling.
Upon re-entering the White House in January, Trump revealed an unusual fixation would become an immediate priority for his administration—the fate of an endangered, three-inch-long fish that lives in California.
The unassuming delta smelt, Trump said rather uncharitably, is “an essentially worthless fish” which had been lavished with water flows that should instead go to nearby farmers or help fight the devastating wildfires that were raging hundreds of miles south in Los Angeles.
On his first day in office, Trump issued an eye-catching executive order titled “Putting people over fish” that demanded water be diverted from the smelt’s habitat and towards needy people.
Experts were quick to point out that water situated so far away would not aid the firefighting effort in LA, with the small amount of water provided to keep the Sacramento-San Joaquin delta ecosystem intact overshadowed by the much larger forces at play in California, such as the climate crisis, which has spurred monumental droughts in the region.
Continuing on the aquatic theme, Trump’s first month in the most powerful office on the planet also included a bizarre tirade against offshore wind energy for its supposed impact upon whales.
The president said that “windmills” were “dangerous,” citing the example of whales being washed ashore in Massachusetts as proof that “the windmills are driving the whales crazy, obviously.”
While there was a spate of dead and sick whales becoming stranded ashore, Trump’s own federal government scientists have rejected the idea that wind turbines placed in the ocean are to blame.
“At this point, there is no scientific evidence that noise resulting from offshore wind site characterization surveys could potentially cause whale deaths,” the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration states. “There are no known links between large whale deaths and ongoing offshore wind activities.”
The main threats to whales continue to be entanglement in fishing nets, boat strikes, and altered prey behavior due to a rapidly heating ocean from the climate crisis, which is causing whales to have to forage closer to land, experts say.
This hasn’t deterred Trump from enacting a long-held grudge against wind energy by halting planned projects and stating that “we don’t allow the windmills and we don’t want the solar panels” in August. The president has also claimed that wind is “the most expensive energy there is”—a false claim: wind and solar are, in fact, among the cheapest sources of power that have ever existed.
In September, Trump delivered a remarkable, often fact-free speech to the United Nations, in which he said that climate change is the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world”, blaming “stupid people” for predictions that have hobbled countries with a costly “green scam.”
“I have a little standing order in the White House. Never use the word ‘coal’. Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”
But perhaps the most unusual revelation in the speech was Trump outlining how he has sought to directly rebrand coal as a clean power source. “I have a little standing order in the White House,” he said. “Never use the word ‘coal’. Only use the words ‘clean, beautiful coal’. Sounds much better, doesn’t it?”
Coal is, in fact, far from clean. It is the dirtiest of all fossil fuels in terms of the carbon it emits when burned, which then heats up the planet, and gives off air pollutants that routinely harm the heart and lung health of those who live near coal power plants.
Black lung disease, meanwhile, is an affliction many coal miners have suffered after directly inhaling coal dust. The Trump administration axed a program that screened coal miners for the respiratory condition.
The federal government, across different administrations, has lavished funding for plans to install carbon capture facilities at coal plants to stop harmful emissions from escaping, but this has yet to be implemented in any meaningful way in the US.
In the same speech to beleaguered-looking diplomats at the UN, Trump scoffed at the scientific reality of global heating, instead claiming that scientists had just changed their minds from the planet cooling down.
“It used to be global cooling,” he said. “If you look back years ago in the 1920s and the 1930s, they said, global cooling will kill the world. We have to do something. Then they said global warming will kill the world. But then it started getting cooler.”
The world is not cooling down. It is heating up at the fastest rate in the history of humanity, due to the burning of fossil fuels and, to a lesser extent, deforestation. Scientists are unequivocal about this, as can anyone able to grasp a simple temperature graph.
In the 1920s and 1930s, the field of climate science wasn’t as developed as it is now, but even then there was an understanding of the greenhouse effect, and few scientists in the decades since have expressed concerns about “global cooling” compared with those warning of planetary heating.
The Earth is thought to have been in a long, gentle cooling pattern for thousands of years due to natural forces, but this was upended by the industrial revolution, with the vast amounts of heat-trapping gases emitted over the past 150 years setting us on a completely new and dangerous path. The world is now hotter than at any previous point in human civilization.
Last month, Trump announced new investigations related to the climate crisis. Not to find more about the severity of global heating and its implications—more to target those who have told the world about it.
“It’s a little conspiracy out there,” the president said at a US-Saudi investment forum in Washington. “We have to investigate them immediately. They probably are being investigated.”
It’s unclear who “they” are—scientists, Democratic politicians, the insurance companies pulling out of states because of the crushing cost of climate-driven disasters? But Trump pushed on.
“Their policies punish success, rewarded failure, and produced disaster, including the worst inflation in our country’s history,” he said.
While the Trump administration has fired scientists, hauled down mentions of the climate crisis from government websites, and banned federal employees from uttering verboten words such as “emissions” and “green”, the reality remains that the world is warming up, and past projections of this have been generally accurate.
Some of the most accurate forecasts of global heating came from the fossil fuel industry, which knew of the dangers from the 1950s onward and produced strikingly accurate projections of future heat in the 1970s.
Instead of informing the world of this peril, however, oil and gas companies instead set about a decades-long campaign to downplay and distort this science in order to maintain their lofty position in the global economy.
Trump has not called for an investigation of these companies, choosing instead to openly solicit campaign donations from them in return for rollbacks of clean air protections once he became president—a promise he has largely fulfilled.
