Mother JonesModify

2025-11-28 20:30:00

Zohran Mamdani and President Donald Trump had a surprisingly chummy meeting in the Oval Office last week, especially after Trump had described Mamdani during the New York City mayoral campaign as a “100 percent Communist lunatic,” a “total nut job,” and a “Jew hater.” A reporter asked the mayor-elect, often depicted in the press as a class-baiting socialist, if he thought Trump was really a “fascist.” In the awkward moment that followed, Mamdani had barely time to respond before Trump interrupted in a jovial fashion, assuring him that it was “okay” to call him one. Mamdani acknowledged that he did, while Trump relieved the tension by laughing it off.

During the meeting, the two New Yorkers from the polar ends of the political spectrum discussed immigration, real estate and crime, zoning laws, and utility costs, and agreed on one issue that is one of the president’s passions: They both want to build more in New York City. As Trump told reporters while he sat behind his desk, with Mamdani standing behind him, “Some of his ideas really are the same ideas that I have. We agree on a lot more than I would’ve thought.”

New York’s next mayor has made housing the centerpiece of his political identity, promising to unleash the public sector to build affordable homes that the private market has failed to build. Affordable housing is a major problem all over the country, but especially in New York. A controversy over one garden spotlights a broader policy question—whether urban planners can deliver both housing and ecological health in an era of climate stress. Or will New York and other American cities continue to trade one public good for another?

Like President Trump in his past as a real estate developer building glass skyscrapers, Mamdani is facing serious opposition to his desire to replace green space with residential housing. Consider his quest to construct public housing for elderly on the site of the Elizabeth Street Garden—a whimsical pocket of Manhattan filled with neoclassical statues, pear trees, and rosebushes. In one of his final official acts to block his path, on November 3, after Mayor Eric Adams had already stepped down as a candidate but one day before the election, he quietly designated the garden as parkland “permanently.” Now, Mamdani will need the approval of the State Legislature to construct housing on the site. Building housing for the unhoused was one of Mamdani’s campaign promises. When Adams’ decision came to light, Mamdani expressed his annoyance: “It is no surprise that Mayor Adams is using his final weeks to cement a legacy of dysfunction and inconsistency.” 

Adams countered that his decision was about “protecting his legacy.” Yet, in pursuing this cause, he is doing an about-face. Adams, too, once tried to bulldoze the garden to build housing for low-income seniors. He lost to a fierce coalition of neighborhood activists.

It’s easy to see both sides. The city’s affordable housing shortage has reached crisis proportions—more than 91,133 people sleep in the main New York City shelter system, and 25 percent of renters spend more than half their income on housing. Yet green space, too, has shifted from luxury to necessity. Trees and gardens cool the air, clean the lungs, and soothe the mind. Environmental justice advocates rightly insist that a healthy city requires both roofs and roots. But as real estate prices soar, New York’s leaders are pressed into what feels like an unforgiving binary—homes or habitats, people or plants.

It doesn’t have to be that way. There was a time when common green spaces were part of everyday urban life. In colonial New England, villagers foraged, grazed animals, and gathered wood on the green and in shared forests. Commons provided the material cornucopia that powered essential common law rights to food, fuel, and shelter. When commoners moved to cities, they brought these practices with them—transforming waste ground and food scraps into fertile soil for small gardens. Shared land served as the foundation for civic infrastructure that we hold dear today. Before it became a jewel of the elite in the 1850s, sections of Central Park were once a patchwork of green shantytowns, built by working people who grew food and raised animals on “wasteland.” The same was true of Hyde Park in London, Rock Creek Park in Washington, DC, and the Fenway in Boston.  

As a historian, I look to the distant past, but you don’t have to go too far back in time to see the service of urban greenspace. In Washington in 1950, the US Department of Agriculture counted more than 2,000 hogs and 74,000 chickens, long after laws had banned both types of animals from the city. As late as the 1950s, in cities as different as New York, Washington, Cleveland, Detroit, and Memphis, large numbers of working people relied for subsistence on their backyard gardens and on food grown on roofs and balconies. Home-grown provisions saved people money to pay rents and mortgages. In 1940, some of the poorest neighborhoods of Washington, east of the Anacostia River, where 94 percent of the population was Black, had some of the highest rates of homeowner occupancy, second only to the high-income DuPont Circle neighborhood. The green lungs of our cities were born not of wealth, but of necessity.

In the decades that followed, regular people, not business or city leaders, held cities together during economic downturns. They cleaned up unregulated dumping and generally kept their neighborhoods from descending into a scene from Planet of the Apes. In the 1970s, as New York City teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, developers abandoned buildings, and landlords torched their properties for insurance money. New Yorkers stepped in to claim the ruins.

By 1990, neighbors in all five boroughs, but especially on the Lower East Side, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, turned vacant lots into an estimated 800 community gardens. (In the 2000s, Mayor Rudy Giuliani sought to auction off many of the garden lots, but protestors saved most of them.) In the same spirit, in 1991, Allan Reiver—a scavenger of forgotten art and architectural fragments—leased several lots on Elizabeth Street to save them from becoming a parking lot. He filled them with plants and sculpture, creating the lush, eccentric sanctuary that stands today.

The real question is not whether to preserve one garden, but how to reclaim the idea of the urban commons. For the last 100 years, New York City’s shared spaces have been shaped not by the people who live in them but by the infrastructures built to move them—or exclude them.

In the 1940s, Robert Moses, the “master builder” who never held elected office, remade the city for the automobile. His parkways to Long Island’s beaches, deliberately engineered with low overpasses, barred buses and thus working-class visitors. His web of expressways gutted neighborhoods from the Bronx to Red Hook in the name of progress, displacing hundreds of thousands of working poor to house the middle and upper classes. He famously declared that “a city without traffic is a ghost town.” Moses’ ghost lingers in the grid: nearly a quarter of New York’s land area is devoted to streets and parking lots. Each car registered in the city effectively enjoys one and a half parking spaces, while the city’s human residents scramble for housing. Streets and parking lots, devoted to moving and storing cars, are the commons of our age. 

But the era of the city-as-parking-lot is ending. In 2010, the Environmental Protection Agency launched the “Green Streets Program,” encouraging communities to redesign streets with gardens, bioswales, bike paths, and permeable pavement, a green infrastructure that naturally manages stormwater, reduces pollution, and creates more resilient and healthier communities. Mamdani’s proposal for high-speed bus lanes, pedestrian walkways, and the transformation of parking lots into public housing promises to turn New York toward a viridescent horizon. As the city is reconfigured with fewer cars, New Yorkers could, as in the past, take it further, transforming the new wastes (pavement) into a blooming bounty. Curbside gardens could replace idling cars. Parking lots could be transformed into orchards and community plots. Major avenues could be reborn as edible forests of fruits, nuts, herbs, and flowers, as the famed “Gangsta Gardener” Ron Finley has been doing in South Central Los Angeles. “To change a community,” Finley says, “you have to change the soil.”

Cities in Europe are already showing what that might look like on a large scale. In the past two decades, the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, has replaced more than 50,000 parking spaces and hundreds of car lanes with parks, bike paths, and tree-lined promenades. The banks of the Seine, once choked with traffic, are now a riverfront park. And Parisians appeared to be fully supportive of the transformation. Earlier this year, they voted to ban cars from an additional 500 streets. Nitrogen dioxide levels that once sat in the red zone have fallen into the green.

Amsterdam is doing the same. So is Copenhagen, where a devastating 2011 flood led engineers to rip up asphalt and replace it with wetlands, ponds, and rooftop gardens to absorb the next deluge. London, improbably, is reintroducing beavers to help manage stormwater—and in the process, Londoners are learning how to care for and live with beavers.

These European projects configure civic infrastructure differently. Climate infrastructure, equity infrastructure, and survival infrastructure are what students of urban planning study today. The impasse between the former and future mayor over the Elizabeth Street Gardens is a false conflict. Climate adaptation and social justice are not competing priorities. They are two sides of the same project—a new vision of the urban commons visible in Mr. Mamdani’s campaign plan to turn 500 asphalt school yards into 500 neighborhood green spaces. “When we stand up and say that we have an agenda to transform our city schools, to renovate 500 public schools, to build 500 green schoolyards, to create thousands of union jobs, to transform 50 schools into resilience hubs, and to prioritize those that have long been forgotten,” he told a Nation reporter, “that is an agenda we are willing to fight for. That is an agenda we are willing to defend.”

Kate Brown is the Distinguished Professor in the History of Science at M.I.T. and author of Tiny Gardens Everywhere: The Past, Present, and Future of the Self-Provisioning City, which will be published in February by Norton.

2025-11-27 20:30:00

This story was originally published by Vox and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Thursday, tens of millions of Americans will partake in a national ritual many of us say we don’t especially enjoy or find meaning in. We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys—factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable.

“It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché—a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”

So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid.

Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.

Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story—aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all?

Our instincts for conformity seem particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. And although many of us today recognize there’s something very wrong with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all occasions might seem like an ideal time to forget that for a day.

In my experience, plenty of people who are trying to cut back on meat say they eat vegetarian or vegan when cooking for themselves—but when they are guests at other people’s homes or celebrating a special occasion, they’ll eat whatever, to avoid offending their hosts or provoking awkward conversations about factory farming.

But this Thanksgiving, I want to invite you, reader, to flip this logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes, even more than taste itself, then it is in precisely these settings that we should focus efforts to change American food customs for the better.

“It’s eating with others where we actually have an opportunity to influence broader change, to share plant-based recipes, spark discussion, and revamp traditions to make them more sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie Levin, a board member at PEAK Animal Sanctuary in Indiana and an acquaintance of mine from vegan Twitter, told me.

Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings—a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols.

Besides, we don’t even like turkey. We should skip it this year.

In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella published a wrenching investigation into conditions in the US turkey industry. He wrote:

The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize—you guessed it—the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk.

Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially.

Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor.

Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever done, Mason wrote.

In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the new book Consider the Turkey, said on a recent episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food…They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds.

From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.”

On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of about 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to an estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the third Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods.

When I search for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can only describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration—of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On every other day of the year, it’s obscene enough. On a holiday that’s supposed to represent our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving, for many vegetarians or vegans, is often described as the most alienating day of the year.

I count myself among that group, although I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. I usually spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (known by most people as “sides,” though there’s no reason they can’t be the main event).

To name a few: a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a bright autumnal brussels sprout salad, roasted red cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add lots of white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart more complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align beautifully with the holidays.

Vegan turkey roasts are totally optional, though many of them have gotten very good in recent years—I love the Gardein breaded roast and Field Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You can also make your own.

The hardest part of going meatless is not about the food. (If it were, it might not be so hard to convince Americans to abandon parched roast turkey.) “It’s about unpleasant truths and ethical disagreements being brought out into the open,” Levin said, about confronting the bizarre dissonance in celebrations of joy and giving carved from mass-produced violence.

These conversations are not easy, but they are worth having. And we don’t have to fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. To the contrary, culture is a continuous conversation we have with each other about our shared values—and any culture that’s not changing is dead. There’s far more meaning to be had, I’ve found, in adapting traditions that are no longer authentic to our ethics and violate our integrity. We can start on Thanksgiving.

2025-11-26 20:30:00

Terri Williams, who lives in northern Texas, started volunteering as a high schooler in the mid-1970s—at first for Planned Parenthood, educating people about birth control. In retirement, she hasn’t stopped.

Linda McMahon’s 2024 nomination as President Donald Trump’s Secretary of Education, a prelude to attempts in dismantling the department, led Williams to double down on her efforts, which now center on helping elementary schoolers excel.

The work also keeps Williams sane. Following politics leaves her “ready to tear somebody’s hair out,” she said.“After I hang out with the kids, I’m in a great mood—there’s nothing like 17 people screaming, ‘Miss Terri!’ when you walk into the room.”

Williams is one of a legion of retired people responding to the tears in the country’s social fabric by volunteering in their communities, rather than staying frozen in fear—work that has taken on new urgency under the second Trump administration.

A January study in the journal Social Science & Medicine found that volunteering slows down aging in retirees: the DNA of people who volunteered the equivalent of one to four hours a week showed distinctive biomarkers associated with decelerated epigenetic aging, with the most pronounced effects among retired people.

“People might do better, physically, psychologically, socially, if they have a role that they think is important and they identify with,” said Cal J. Halvorsen, a gerontological social work scholar at Washington University in St. Louis and one of the authors of the study. “In the American context, we take our jobs very seriously, and so we were curious if volunteering after retiring or when you’re no longer working might have a different effect on your epigenetic aging.” 

That study is just part of a growing body of research on the health benefits of volunteering for retirees, a major benefit for older Americans who have mobilized for election defense and other core public services under attack. Another study published in February found that volunteering in early retirement among Americans also reduced rates of depression by around 10 percent—again, a more pronounced effect than in the general population.

“If you retired and you’re volunteering for something, then you still might feel that connection to something greater than yourself,” Halvorsen said. 

Karen Edwards, in Connecticut, spends around 40 hours a week volunteering for a myriad of causes. Edwards, who still takes precautions against Covid, does most of that work remotely (and wears a mask to local Indivisible events), supporting the electoral process in races like the 2020 Senate elections in Georgia and the more recent 2025 Wisconsin Supreme Court race.

“I did a lot of virtual work, phone calls, texting, a little bit of research here and there, and then also what’s called vote curing,” Edwards said, “helping people who had made errors on their absentee ballots or had never received their ballot.”

Frank Thompson, a Vietnam War veteran based in Arizona, spends four to ten hours a week trying to get people to register to vote. Thompson, a longtime conservative, had been largely disconnected from politics—but Donald Trump’s first run for office, in 2015, changed his views.

“It got me going,” Thompson said, “and I decided I needed to get back and jump back in and try to help talk to people about voting.”

Thompson now works with the Arizona Poor People’s Campaign and the veterans group Common Defense. “I’m doing this so my granddaughters will have the future that their grandmothers had,” he said. “When you start losing freedoms, you know you’re going in the wrong direction, and I don’t believe that that’d be right for them.” 

Julie Peskoe, in New York, focuses on reproductive health care and refugee work—already a volunteer, she stepped up her work after retiring three years ago.

“My refugee work is very hands-on, doing things like helping refugees find jobs,” Peskoe said. “With my synagogue, we resettled a couple of families from Afghanistan and from Ukraine and have continued to have a relationship and work with them.”

The people I spoke with believe their volunteering makes a difference—sometimes keeping up an impact they had during their careers, like Edwards, in Connecticut, a doctor by training and former vice president at a nonprofit for people with intellectual and developmental disabilities.

“I believe I’m helping to restore or maintain democracy,” Edwards said. “I’m just doing it in a different way.”

This article was written with the support of a journalism fellowship from the Gerontological Society of America, the Journalists Network on Generations and the John A. Hartford Foundation.

2025-11-26 20:30:00

I began this morning, as I do every morning, by reading my daughter a book. Today it was Arthur Dorros’ Abuela, illustrated by Elisa Kleven. Abuela is a sweet story about a girl who imagines that she and her grandmother leap into the sky and soar around New York City. Dorros does an elegant job weaving Spanish words and phrases throughout the text, often allowing readers to glean their meaning rather than translating them directly. When Rosalba, the bilingual granddaughter, discovers she can fly, she calls to her grandmother, “Ven, Abuela. Come, Abuela.” Her Spanish-speaking grandmother replies simply, “Sí, quiero volar.” Their language use reflects who they are—a move that plenty of authors who write for adults fail to make.

Abuela was one of my favorite books growing up, and it’s one of my 2-year-old’s favorites now. (And yes, we’re reading my worn old copy.) She loves the idea of a flying grandma; she loves learning bits of what she calls Fanish; she loves the bit when Rosalba and Abuela hitch a ride on an airplane, though she worries it might be too loud. Most of all, though, she loves Kleven’s warm yet antic illustrations, which capture urban life in nearly pointillist detail. Every page gives her myriad things to look for and gives us myriad things to discuss. (Where are the dogs? What does Rosalba’s tío sell in his store? Why is it scary when airplanes are loud?) I’ve probably read Abuela 200 times since we swiped it from my parents over the summer, and no two readings have been the same.

I don’t start all my days with books as rich as Abuela, though. Sometimes, my daughter chooses the books I wish she wouldn’t: ones that have wandered into our house as gifts, or in a big stack someone was giving away, and that I have yet to purge. These books have garish, unappealing computer-rendered art. Some of them have nursery rhymes as text, and the rest have inane rhymes that don’t quite add up to a story. One or two are Jewish holiday-oriented, and a couple more are tourist souvenirs. Not a single one of these books has a named author or illustrator. None of their publishers, all of which are quite small, responded to my requests for interviews, but I strongly suspect that these books were written and generated by AI—and that I’m not supposed to guess.

The maybe-AI book that has lasted the longest in our house is a badly illustrated Old MacDonald Has a Farm. Its animals are inconsistently pixelated around the edges; the pink circles on its farmer’s cheeks vary significantly in size from page to page, and his hands appear to have second thumbs instead of pinkies. All of these irregularities are signs of AI, according to the writer and illustrator Karen Ferreira, who runs an author coaching program called Children’s Book Mastery. On her program’s site, she warns that because AI cannot create a series of images using the same figures, it generates characters that are—even if only subtly—dissimilar from page to page. Noting this in our Old MacDonald, I checked to see whether it was copyrighted, because the US copyright office has ruled out copyright for images created by machine learning. Where other board books have copyright symbols and information—often the illustration and text copyright holders are different—this one reads only, “All rights reserved.” It’s unclear what these “rights” refer to, given that there is no named holder; it’s possible that the publisher is gesturing at the design, but equally possible that the statement is a decoy with no legal meaning.

I have many objections to maybe-AI books like this one. They’re ugly, whereas all our other children’s books are whimsical, beautiful, or both. They aren’t playful or sly or surprising. Their prose has no rhythm, in contrast to, let’s say, Sandra Boynton’s Barnyard Dance! and Dinosaur Dance!, which have beats that inspire toddlers to leap up and perform. (The author-illustrator Mo Willems has said children’s books are “meant to be played, not just to be read.”) They don’t give my daughter much to notice or me much to riff on, which means she gets sick of them quickly. If she chooses one, she’s often done with it in under a minute. It gives me a vague sting of guilt to donate such uninspiring books, but I still do, since the only other option is the landfill. I imagine they’ll end up there anyway.

But I should admit that I also dislike the books that trigger my AI radar—that uncanny-valley tingle you get when something just seems inhuman—out of bias. I am a writer and translator, a person whose livelihood is entirely centered and dependent on living in a society that values human creativity, and just the thought of a children’s book generated by AI upsets me. Some months ago, I decided I wanted to know whether my bias was right. After all, there are legions of bad children’s books written and illustrated (or stock photo–collaged) by humans. Are those books meaningfully and demonstrably different from AI ones? If they are, how big a threat is AI to quality children’s publishing, and does it also threaten children’s learning? In a sense, my questions—not all of which are answerable—boil down to this: What makes a good children’s book, and how much does it matter if a children’s book is good?

I’m not the only one worried about this. My brother- and sister-in-law, proud Minnesotans, recently sent us a book called Count On Minnesota—state merch, precisely the sort of thing that’s set my AI alarms ringing in the past—whose publisher, Gibbs Smith, includes a warning on the back beside the copyright notice: “No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies and systems.” Count On Minnesota is nearly wordless and has no named author, but the names of its artist and designer, Nicole LaRue and Brynn Evans, sit directly below the AI statement, reminding readers who will be harmed if Count On Minnesota gets scraped to train large vision models despite its copyright language.

In this sense, children’s literature is akin to the many, many other fields that generative AI threatens. There’s a danger that machines will take authors’ and illustrators’ jobs, and the data sets on which they were trained have already taken tremendous amounts of intellectual property. Larry Law, executive director of the Great Lakes Independent Booksellers Association, told me that his organization’s member stores are against AI-created books—and, as a matter of policy, refuse to stock anything they suspect or know was generated by a large language or vision model—because “as an association, we value artists and authors and publishers and fundamentally believe that AI steals from artists.” Still, Law and many of GLIBA’s members are comfortable using AI to streamline workflow. So are many publishers. Both corporate publishing houses and some reputable independent ones are at least beginning to use AI to create the marketing bibles called tip sheets and other internal sales documents. According to industry sources I spoke to on background, some corporate publishers are also testing large language and vision models’ capacities to create children’s books, but their attempts aren’t reaching the market. The illustrations aren’t good enough yet, and it’s still easier to have a human produce text than to make a person coach and edit a large language model.

Other publishers, meanwhile, are shying away. Dan Brewster, owner of Prologue Bookshop in Columbus, Ohio—a shop with an explicit anti-AI policy—told me, “The publisher partners we work with every day have not done anything to make me suspect them” of generating text or illustrations with AI; many, he added, have told him, “‘You’re never going to see that from us.’” (Whether that’s true, of course, remains to be seen.) In contrast, Brewster has grown more cautious in his acquisitions of self-published books and those released by very small independent presses. He sees these as higher AI risks, as does Timothy Otte, a co-owner and buyer at Minneapolis’ Wild Rumpus, a beloved 33-year-old children’s bookstore. Its legacy and reach, he says, means they “get both traditionally published authors and self-published authors reaching out asking you to stock their book. That was true before AI was in the picture. Now, some of those authors that are reaching out, it is clear that what they’re pitching to me was at least partly, if not entirely, generated by AI.”

Otte always says no, both on the grounds Law described and because the books are no good. The art often has not just inconsistencies, but errors: Rendering models aren’t great at getting the right number of toes on a paw. The text can be equally full of mistakes, as children’s librarian Sondra Eklund writes in a horrified blog post about acquiring a book about rabbits from children’s publisher Bold Kids, only to discover that she’d bought an AI book so carelessly produced that it informs readers that rabbits “can even make their own clothes…and can help you out with gardening.” (Reviews of Bold Kids’ hundreds of books on Amazon suggest that its rabbit book isn’t the only one with such issues. Bold Kids did not respond to repeated efforts to reach them for comment.) The text of more edited AI books, meanwhile, tends to condescend to young readers. Otte often sees books whose authors have “decided that there is a moral that they want to give to children, and they have asked a large language model to spit out a picture book that shows a kid coming up against some sort of problem and being given a moral solution.” In his experience, that isn’t what children want or how they learn. “Kids are weird!” Otte says. “They’re joyfully weird, and if you spend time with them and are able to get that weirdness and that playfulness out of them, you can really understand why a moralizing book really comes across as gross. The number of times I’ve seen kids make a stank face at a book that’s telling them how to be!”

But is a lazy, moralizing AI book any worse than a lazy, moralizing one written by a person? When I put this question to Otte, the only distinction he could come up with was the “ancillary ethical concerns of water usage and the environmental impact that a large language model currently has.” Other book buyers, though, pointed out that while AI can imitate a particular writer or designer’s style or mash multiple perspectives together, it cannot have a point of view of its own. Plenty of big publishers create picture books and board books—which are simple, sturdy texts printed on cardstock heavy enough to be gnawed on by a teething 8-month-old—in-house, using stock photos and releasing them without an author’s name. Very rarely is the result much good, and yet each publisher does have its own visual signature. If you’re a millennial, you can likely close your eyes and summon the museum-text layout of the pages in a DK Eyewitness book. It’s idiosyncratic even if it’s not particularly special. To deny our children even that is to assume, in a sense, that they have no point of view: that they can’t tell one book from another and wouldn’t care if they could.

Frankly, though, I’m less concerned with the gap between bad AI and bad human than I am with the yawning chasm between bad AI and good human, since bad children’s books by humans are the ones more likely to become rarer or cease existing. If rendering models get good enough that corporate publishers stop asking humans to slap together, let’s say, stock-photo books about ducks, those books could, in theory, vanish. That doesn’t mean Robert McCloskey’s canonical, beautiful Make Way for Ducklings will go out of print. But it’s much less expensive to publish a book that was written years ago than it is to pay an author and illustrator for something new. It’s also less expensive to print a picture book like Make Way for Ducklings than a board book, with its heavier paper and nontoxic (again: gnawing baby) inks. AI could be no menace at all to picture-book classics, but it could make high-quality contemporary board books go extinct.

It doesn’t help that everyone from parents to publishers is susceptible to undervaluing board books. It’s very difficult to argue that the quality of a picture book doesn’t matter, since they are the ones that most children use to learn to read. But it’s easy to dismiss board books, which are intended for children not only too young to read, but too young to even follow a story. Can’t we just show a baby anything? According to Dr. John Hutton, a pediatrician and former children’s bookstore owner who researches the impact reading at home has on toddlers’ brain function and development, we shouldn’t. In fact, we should avoid reading our kids anything that bores us. Beginning in utero, one of the greatest benefits of shared reading is bonding, and unsurprisingly, Hutton has found that the more engaged parents are in the book they’ve chosen, the greater its impact on that front. But reading to babies is also important, he explained, because the more words a child hears, the greater their receptive and expressive vocabularies (that is, the words they know and can say) will be. This, starting around age 1, lets parents and children discuss the books they’re reading, a process that Hutton told me “builds social cognition and later dovetails with empathy.” It does this by training children’s brains to connect language to emotion—and to do so through imagination.

Hutton presented this as vital neurological work. “Nothing in the brain comes for free,” he told me, “and unless you practice empathy skills—connecting, getting along, feeling what others are feeling—you’re not going to have as well-developed neural infrastructure to be able to do that.” It’s also a social equalizer. Research has shown that reading aloud exposes children whose parents have lower income levels or educational backgrounds to more words and kinds of syntax than they might otherwise hear—and, Hutton notes, this isn’t a question of proper syntax. Rather, what matters here is creativity. Some of the best board books out there bend or even invent language—only instinct and imagination can tell you what Boynton means when she writes in Dinosaur Dance! that “Iguanodon goes dibbidy DAH”—and this teaches their little listeners how to do the same.

Of course, not all good board books’ strength is linguistic. Ideally, Hutton says, a book’s text and illustrations should “recruit both the language and visual parts of your brain to work together to understand what’s going on.” From ages 6 months to 18 months, my daughter was enamored with books from Camilla Reid and Ingela Arrhenius’ Peekaboo series, which have minimal text, cheery yet sophisticated illustrations, and a pop-up or slider on each page. My daughter loved it when I read Peekaboo Pumpkin to her, but she also loved learning to manipulate it herself. It was visually and tactilely appealing enough to become not just a book, but a toy—and it was sturdy enough to do so. She’s got plenty of other books with pop-ups, but Peekaboo Pumpkin and Peekaboo Lion are the only ones she hasn’t more or less destroyed.

Reid and Arrhenius publish with Nosy Crow, a London-based independent press. I reached out to ask if the company was concerned about AI threatening its business and got an emphatic no from its preschool publishing director and senior art director, Tor England and Zoë Gregory. England immediately highlighted the physical durability of Nosy Crow’s books. “We believe in a book as an object people want to own,” she said, rather than one meant to be disposable. They invest in them accordingly: England and Gregory visit Arrhenius in Sweden to discuss new ideas and often spend two or three years working on a book. Neither fears that AI could compete with the quality of such painstaking work, which, for the most part, is entirely analog. Some of Nosy Crow’s books do make sounds, though—something I generally hate, but I make an exception for the shockingly realistic toddler giggle in What’s That Noise? Meow! Gregory told me that while working on that book, she couldn’t find a laugh she liked in the sound libraries Nosy Crow normally uses, so she went home, set her iPhone to record, and tickled her daughter.

But somebody shopping on Amazon won’t hear that giggle. Nor can an online shopper identify a shoddily printed book, which may well be cheaper than Nosy Crow’s but will certainly withstand less tugging and chewing before it falls apart. A risk that Otte and the other buyers I spoke to identified—and while it serves booksellers’ interests to say this, it is also an entirely reasonable projection—is that while independent bookstores and well-curated libraries will continue to stock high-quality books like Nosy Crow’s, Amazon, which is both the largest book retailer and the largest self-publishing service in the nation, will grow ever fuller of AI dreck. If corporate publishers turn to AI to write and illustrate their board books, this strikes me as very likely to occur. It would mean that parents with the time and resources to browse in person would be likely to provide significantly higher-quality books to their pre-reading-age children than parents searching for “train book for toddlers” online. A good board book could become one more educational advantage that accrues disproportionately to the elite.

In Empire of AI, journalist Karen Hao writes that technology revolutions “promise to deliver progress [but have a] tendency instead to reverse it for people out of power, especially the most vulnerable.” She argues that this is “perhaps truer than ever for the moment we now find ourselves in with artificial intelligence.” The key word here is perhaps. As of now, AI children’s books are on the fringes of publishing. Large publishers can choose to keep them that way. Doing so would be a statement of conviction that the quality and humanity of children’s books matter, no matter how young the child in question is. When I asked Hutton, the pediatrician, what worried him most about AI books, he mentioned the example of “lazy writing” they set, which he fears might disincentivize both hard work and creativity. He also pointed to an often-cited MIT study showing that writing with ChatGPT dampened creativity and less fully activated the brain—that is, it’s bad for the authors, not just the readers. Then he said, “You know, there are things we can do versus things we should do as a society, and that’s where we struggle, I think.”

On this front, I hope to see no more struggle. We should not give our children, whose brains are vulnerable and malleable, books created by computers. We shouldn’t give them books created carelessly. That’s up to parents and teachers, yes—but it’s also up to authors, illustrators, designers, and publishers. Gregory told me that “there’s a lot of love and warmth and heart” that goes into the books she works on. Rejecting AI is a first step toward a landscape of children’s publishing where that’s always true.

2025-11-26 20:30:00

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

It’s not often that the governors of California and Florida are on the same page, but this week they’re aligned in opposition to the White House’s latest plan to expand offshore oil drilling near both their shores. 

The Trump administration’s plans, announced Thursday by the Department of the Interior, propose offering as many as 34 offshore drilling leases across nearly 1.3 billion acres off the coasts of Alaska, California and Florida. That would open up waters that haven’t had new leases in decades—or in some cases ever, environmental groups said—and reverse previous policy by the Biden administration that aimed to slow down offshore oil development.

“The Biden administration slammed the brakes on offshore oil and gas leasing and crippled the long-term pipeline of America’s offshore production,” said Interior Secretary Doug Burgum in a statement with the plan’s announcement. “By moving forward with the development of a robust, forward-thinking leasing plan, we are ensuring that America’s offshore industry stays strong.” 

Republican Gov. Mike Dunleavy of Alaska praised the move. But California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, both quickly spoke up against it. 

“Donald Trump’s idiotic proposal to sell off California’s coasts to his Big Oil donors is dead in the water,” Newsom wrote Thursday on X, echoing his own earlier words. “We will not stand by as our coastal economy and communities are put in danger.”

DeSantis reiterated his support for a 2020 memorandum preventing offshore oil and gas leasing in parts of the Gulf of Mexico—including off Florida’s coast—through 2032.

“President Trump’s 2020 memorandum protecting Florida’s eastern Gulf waters represents a thoughtful approach to the issue,” he wrote on X. “The Interior Department should not depart from the 2020 policy.” 

Meanwhile, at COP30 in Brazil, amid fire and extreme heat, dozens of world leaders have called for a swift phaseout of oil, gas and coal, as global temperatures and emissions soar past the thresholds outlined in the Paris Agreement a decade ago. The federal government is notably absent, although the country’s civil sector, oil and gas lobbyists and Newsom himself have made their presence known. 

Last month, more than 100 lawmakers signed a letter to President Donald Trump and Burgum, strongly opposing any new offshore oil and gas leases off the Atlantic and Pacific coasts, in the Arctic Ocean and in the Eastern Gulf. 

“This is a matter of national consequence for coastal communities across the country, regardless of political affiliation,” the letter read.

Both California senators signed the letter, but neither senator from Florida or Alaska did. 

On Thursday after the announcement, Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) posted on X that he fought for years to keep drilling off Florida’s coasts and supported the 2020 memorandum. 

“I have been speaking to [Burgum] and made my expectations clear that this moratorium must remain in place, and that in any plan, Florida’s coasts must remain off the table for oil drilling to protect Florida’s tourism, environment, and military training opportunities,” the post read.

Asked for comment, the White House deferred to the Department of the Interior, which did not respond.

Although Trump’s plans have prompted bipartisan condemnation—and lawmakers are already readying to fight the move—the announcement received a more positive reception from the oil industry.

Mike Sommers, CEO of the American Petroleum Institute, an oil and gas industry group, said in a statement that the plan is a “historic step” in developing the country’s offshore oil resources. API has for decades lobbied to block climate action and support fossil fuel expansion.

“We applaud Secretary Burgum for laying the groundwork for a new and more expansive five-year program that unlocks opportunities for long-term investment offshore and supports energy affordability at a time of rising demand at home and abroad,” Sommers said.

According to a New York Times analysis, the oil and gas industry contributed at least $75 million to Trump’s 2024 election campaign, which doesn’t account for “dark money” donations that can’t be tracked. Trump has responded by slashing renewable energy initiatives and doubling down on fossil fuels. According to the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, industry executives are already making millions of dollars off their investment. 

Still, the availability of leases doesn’t guarantee that drilling will occur, said Frank Maisano, a senior principal at Bracewell LLP, a lobbying firm that represents clients across the energy sector, including oil and gas.

“Nobody knows what will happen,” Maisano said, adding that it’s possible companies may take on leases without drilling immediately.

Maisano said he felt positively about the White House plan because it creates clarity on where leases are available. He added that he believes activity off the Florida coast, which has infrastructure and clear drilling opportunities, is more likely than off California. 

Brian Prest, an economist and fellow at the energy and environment research nonprofit Resources for the Future, said in an email to Inside Climate News that development of these leases could be fraught. 

“It’s not clear to what degree there will be industry interest in these leases, but even if some lease sales do end up getting bought, I wouldn’t be surprised if ten years from now there’s no new development to show for it,” Prest wrote. “But who knows!”

California has led efforts to restrict offshore drilling since a devastating 1969 oil spill off the Santa Barbara coast. In Florida, concerns about tourism, recreation and coastal ecosystems—as well as the disastrous 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf—have prompted bipartisan support for moratoriums on offshore drilling. 

In Alaska, the announcement represents the latest of Trump’s plans to expand fossil fuel development in the state. Among them are six oil lease sales in the Cook Inlet, a crucial Beluga whale habitat. The Republican-controlled Congress, meanwhile, recently overturned a measure that protected nearly half of Alaska’s National Petroleum Reserve—the largest block of public land in the country, which contains diverse wetland ecosystems and key habitats—from oil drilling. 

Recently, ConocoPhillips proposed exploratory drilling in the Arctic wilderness, threatening the migratory route of a caribou herd relied on by a local community for subsistence hunting. 

All three states are already seeing acute impacts of climate change, including sea level rise, precipitation changes, heat waves and coastal flooding and erosion. 

The Los Angeles wildfires at the start of the year killed an estimated 440 people and were among the most costly domestic weather-related disasters on record. Climate change is driving increased wildfire risks across the state.

Florida faces retreating shores and increasingly intense storms, alongside an ensuing home insurance crisis. Last year, Hurricanes Helene and Milton hit the state hard, killing more than 70 people, according to the National Hurricane Center.

Alaska—parts of which are warming four times faster than the rest of the country—is experiencing melting glaciers and food insecurity. Recently, entire villages were destroyed and more than 1,500 people were displaced by Typhoon Halong, supercharged by unusually warm waters. 

Environmental groups blasted the White House announcement. Irene Gutierrez, a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the potential impact is significant.

“This is a bad idea,” she said. “This is looking towards the past rather than to the future, and this is really a time when we should be investing in renewable energy and affordable energy and not these sort of speculative oil developments off the coast.”

Gutierrez added that drilling in Arctic waters off Alaska’s shores is particularly risky given wind and icy conditions that would make it difficult to clean up oil spills, as well as local dependence on fish. She urged members of the public to weigh in on the administration’s plan. The public comment period will begin on Nov. 24. 

“We are tracking next developments in the plan to see what happens and to see if the administration actually listens to what the public wants here, which is no dangerous oil developments off the coast,” she said. 

2025-11-26 06:09:10

For many environmental advocates, the COP30 climate negotiations ended this weekend in disappointment. The annual United Nations conference, which brought together more than 190 countries in Belém, Brazil, concluded without any firm plans to phase out fossil fuels—a key step scientists say is urgently necessary to address the climate crisis.

In part, experts say, that’s because of the United States, which had been noticeably absent from the summit. While more than 100 local US leaders reportedly attended, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, the Trump administration sent zero delegates—marking the first time in the talks’ 30-year history that leadership from the world’s largest economy (and largest historical emitter of CO2) had no official presence.

At the beginning, says Matt McDonald, a professor of international relations at the University of Queensland in Australia, the lack of an American delegation may have offered a sense of “relief” to some countries hoping to negotiate bold climate action. Donald Trump, after all, might be something of a wet blanket at a climate conference; he has repeatedly referred to climate change as a “hoax,” and withdrew from the Paris climate agreement twice.

But as the talks continued, McDonald says, the vacuum left behind by the US may have also “emboldened” petrostates like Russia and Saudi Arabia to resist plans to move away from oil, coal, and gas.

Indeed, much like the Paris agreement 10 years ago, the lukewarm agreement officials ultimately settled on at COP30 doesn’t include the term “fossil fuels.”

“A climate deal without explicit language calling for a fossil fuel phaseout is like a ceasefire without explicit language calling for a suspension of hostilities,” climate scientist Michael E. Mann posted on Bluesky.

That’s despite the fact that, at this year’s conference, the first draft of an agreement proposed several suggestions on ending the international fossil fuel habit. More than 80 countries rallied behind the idea. “This is an issue that must not be ignored, cannot be ignored, and we are saying very, very clearly must be at the heart of COP,” said UK energy minister Ed Miliband.

“The intensity and the clarity of this call was new and unprecedented in the history of COPs,” said Genevieve Guenther, a founding director of End Climate Silence.

“There’s certainly been a break from some of the same ways of talking about thinking about discussing pathways forward,” said Max Boykoff, a University of Colorado Boulder climate communications researcher at who attended the conference.

That was perhaps facilitated by the US’ absence, which Boykoff said “provided a motivating push for the rest of the world to say, ‘This is time for us to be stepping forward.'”

How exactly the coalition of nations backing a fossil fuel phaseout crumbled is a mystery; the press is not allowed to observe negotiations, but global oil powers reportedly lobbied hard for its exclusion. By the end of the weekend, the goal set out under the 2015 Paris agreement—to limit warming to below 2 degrees Celsius—seemed further away than ever.

But as McDonald sees it, while the overall climate outlook isn’t great, there are reasons not to abandon all hope for climate action.

As he noted in a piece for The Conversation in October, the world is making modest progress on CO2 emissions, with or without the US. Some scientists believe emissions are close to peaking, he writes, driven in part by “unprecedented global investment in renewable energy.” China, currently the largest emitter of carbon emissions, although still very much invested in fossil fuels, has also invested record-breaking amounts in renewable energy, particularly wind and solar, and has committed to reducing carbon emissions by at least 7 percent by 2035.

“China is an economic realist,” McDonald says, operating with the long-term understanding that “renewables are going to be where it’s at, rather than fossil fuels.” Still, he notes, China did little to advocate for a fossil-free agreement at COP30, largely avoiding the debate.

Individual US states can make a dent in global emissions, too. “California is the really obvious example,” McDonald says, “because it is incredibly consequential for global emissions. It’s a massive economy”—the fourth in the world, to be exact, and home to one of the largest carbon-trading markets.

In Belém, Newsom was among the most vocal US leaders to attend, reportedly saying that Donald Trump’s absence was an “opportunity” for local leaders to step up. “He pulled away,” Newsom told reporters, according to the Guardian. “That’s why I pulled up.”

Even without all countries on board, a significant subset of climate-minded nations could have real impact. In response to the lack of global consensus on dropping fossil fuels, a group of at least 24 countries, led by Colombia and the Netherlands, has announced that it will hold a counter-conference in April to establish a plan to do just that.

“There is a world in which these nations band together and create a global trading bloc that could essentially force the petrostates to start decarbonizing,” says Guenther. “I’m not claiming this would be easy,” she says, “but I’m saying it could be a way forward.”