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 secretary 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.”
2025-11-25 22:45:00
Him?
Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s name may not appear in Olivia Nuzzi’s forthcoming memoir, American Canto. But the 71-year-old secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services is at the burning core of Nuzzi’s return to the public eye this month, after her firing last year over a “digital affair” with the then-presidential candidate while she covered the 2024 campaign for New York magazine. The unfolding drama, following the publication of a lavishly photographed New York Times profile and Vanity Fair excerpt, is expected to grow more fraught when a reported collection of “sexually charged” text messages appears next month.
American Canto, as it appears in Vanity Fair, is profoundly unreadable, packed with prose that relies on a reader’s tolerance to witness humiliating forms of self-sabotage. Nuzzi describes outrunning a California wildfire while, for some reason, obsessing over Kennedy as she tries to escape. (She also appears to invite readers into conflating the fire she is fleeing with the devastating Palisades wildfire that destroyed the region two months later.) As much as American Canto reads like a diaristic slot machine of half-thoughts and self-absorbed efforts at profundity, it is also startlingly effective in its depiction of a woman deteriorating in the throes of potent desire. Here is how Nuzzi describes “the Politician.”
I loved his brain. I hated the idea of an intruder therein. Others thought he was a madman; he was not quite mad the way they thought, but I loved the private ways that he was mad. I loved that he was insatiable in all ways, as if he would swallow up the whole world just to know it better if he could. He made me laugh, but I winced when he joked about the worm. “Baby, don’t worry,” he said. “It’s not a worm.”
Again, him?
When I asked to help explain Kennedy’s appeal, sexologist and professor Pepper Schwartz put it this way: “I once heard a woman say that she thought Henry Kissinger was sexy.”
Setting aside for a moment, if you can, his outsized role in destroying the country’s public health system, Kennedy often appears to be as physically distended as Nuzzi’s writing, as if he were perpetually out of breath and heaving from “picking up roadkill [his] whole life.” He works out shirtless in jeans and once attracted a man with thunderous flatulence to attend a speaking engagement. His own family calls him a “predator.” How can such ferocious desire be attached to this man?
When I asked for help in explaining his appeal, Pepper Schwartz, a sexologist and professor at the University of Washington, put it this way: “I once heard a woman say that she thought Henry Kissinger was sexy.” Still, men, and especially men in elite circles, have always been able to sell themselves with supposed “intelligence, power, and poetic talent.”
“The fact that this is a powerful, perhaps charming, well-placed person all weaves together for them to also be found sexy,” Schwartz continued. “That anybody ever found Henry Kissinger sexy is proof.”
As it happens, Kennedy’s wife, the actress Cheryl Hines, released her own memoir this month, published by the right-wing powerhouse, Skyhorse. (American Canto‘s release was reportedly pushed back to avoid overlapping book tours with Hines.) Unscripted starts ploddingly, with Hines charting her path from modest Florida upbringing to mid-level stardom at Curb Your Enthusiasm, until she eventually meets Kennedy at a celebrity ski fundraiser. That Hines dedicates nearly all of Unscripted‘s second half to their marriage is perhaps an acknowledgement that Hines also appreciates that the same question looms over her personal life: This guy?
Unscripted, while far more demure in its portrait of a woman in lust, offers hints. Upon bumping into Kennedy for the second time, Hines writes:
I don’t know how I missed how blue his eyes are. I felt his magnetic energy. There were so many things I hadn’t noticed before. The instantaneous electric connection swept me along.
Later, after they became engaged:
He brought an unpredictable sense of adventure I had never experienced in my life. I love everything about him, and I knew we were meant to find each other in this lifetime, as odd a couple as we seemed.
[…]
We both brought something to the relationship that the other was lacking. I err on the side of caution and prudence. I need to know how deep the water is before I jump off the cliff. Bobby is the opposite.
Squint and you start to see the contours of Kennedy’s appeal. The essence of his attraction, according to the women who love him, is in the intoxicating cocktail of heady romance and risk he seems to offer—whether it’s nearly getting killed by a yak in Bhutan, as Hines recounts, or feverishly texting about taking metaphorical bullets for one another as Nuzzi tells it. And for a moment, it all seems a bit banal, yet another iteration of the age-old “bad boy” allure.
“He looked at you like he wanted to devour your soul,” Hines recalls a friend telling her.
But uneasiness creeps in when considering Kennedy’s sex appeal against the decades of infidelity allegations—including rumors of once having 43 “mistresses“—and extramarital affairs that are widely believed to have contributed to his ex-wife’s suicide. Suddenly, an overt carnality takes hold. As Hines recalls a friend telling her at a dinner early in her relationship with Kennedy:
“He just looked at you like he wanted to devour your soul.”
Nuzzi similarly suggests an insatiable appetite.
He was the mouse and the architect of his maze. The giver of his own pleasure and torment. He desired. He desired desiring. He desired being desired. He desired desire itself. I understood this just as I came to understand the range of his kinks and complexes and how they fit within what I thought I understood of his soul.
Here, an absurd polarity begins to take shape. We have the scion of a powerful political family, seemingly tormented by a maddening hunger. But where Nuzzi and Hines see sex appeal, for much of the country, Kennedy is a reckless conspiracy theorist, whose appetite for danger as the nation’s top health official will result in a sicker America. And it’s Kennedy’s family, as his cousin Tatianna Scholssberg writes in a devastating New Yorker essay that revealed her leukemia diagnosis, that understands this with the precise agony of a family informed by relentless tragedy.
As I tried to grasp the contours of Kennedy’s appeal, I couldn’t help but think of some of the men whose loser behavior littered Jeffrey Epstein’s latest email release. There’s former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, soliciting a convicted sex offender for advice on matters such as how to get “horizontal” with a female economist he had been pursuing; Epstein’s brother asking about “photos of Trump blowing Bubba; the writer Michael Wolff acting as media adviser. These are powerful men whose ingratiation helped a sexual predator thrive with impunity.
Nuzzi and Hines remind me of the men in Epstein’s orbit, attracted to a different kind of “predator,” roadkill in a “freezer full of it.” Except that the real roadkill are innocent, and Nuzzi and Hines are not victims. As Vanity Fair’s new West Coast editor, Nuzzi has chosen to center her salacious affair as she returns to a day job. (Vanity Fair has since announced that it was reviewing its ties to Nuzzi following allegations by her former fiancé Ryan Lizza that she also once slept with yet another former source, who happened to be a powerful older politician, this time the former South Carolina Gov. Mark Sanford.) As for Hines, it is a distinct choice to go on national television to support a man’s pernicious anti-vaccine talking points.
“The very essence of romance is uncertainty,” Hines writes in Unscripted, quoting Oscar Wilde at least twice in her memoir to explain her devotion to Kennedy. But in doing so, she conveniently omits the rest of Wilde’s thoughts on the matter: “If I ever marry, I’ll try to forget the fact.”
Perhaps that’s what Hines is doing, too.
2025-11-25 20:30:00
On the night before Christmas in 1954, a Chicago housewife named Dorothy Martin begged her followers to step outside, sing together, and wait, at last, for the aliens.
Things hadn’t been going well for Martin, the leader of a small UFO-based religious movement usually known as the Seekers. She had previously told her followers that, according to her psychic visions, a UFO would land earlier that month and take them all to space; afterwards, a great flood would bring this fallen world to an end.
Research based on recently unsealed records claims the book When Prophecy Fails leans on lies, omissions, and serious manipulation.
When that prediction failed to happen, Martin said an updated psychic transmission—known as her “Christmas message”—had come through, saying they had spread so much “light” with their adherence to God’s will that He had instead decided to spare the world. She soon followed with another message commanding the group to assemble in front of her home and sing carols, again promising that they would be visited by “spacemen” who would land in a flying saucer and meet them on the sidewalk. Martin told the Seekers to notify the press and the public.
At 6 p.m. on Christmas Eve, the group gathered, sang, and waited; eventually, they retreated to Martin’s living room. A large crowd of journalists, curious gawkers, and some hecklers stood outside.
We know about these shifts because the Seekers were, unbeknownst to Martin or anyone else, full of undercover researchers covertly taking notes. The observers were primarily interested in what Martin and her followers would do when the aliens repeatedly failed to land. What transpired was recorded in a 1956 book, When Prophecy Fails, written by Leon Festinger, Henry W. Riecken, and Stanley Schachter. It is considered an enduring classic in the fields of new religious studies, cult research, and social psychology.
One Seeker, the book reported, said they actually had spied a spaceman in the Christmas Eve crowd wearing a helmet and “big white gown,” adding that he was invisible to nonbelievers. But in the face of another no-show, a more common response in the group, the authors reported, was to continue to insist that the spacemen would yet come, and their belief would not be in vain. The repeated “disconfirmation” of their beliefs that December, the researchers claimed, only strengthened their faith, and made them more eager to reach out, to convert nonbelievers, journalists, and anyone else who would listen.
The book is gripping, an in-depth social and psychological study of Martin’s group and how they behaved, both as it was forming and after their prophetic visions failed to take place. It has served as a key basis for the psychological concept of cognitive dissonance: what happens to people when they hold conflicting beliefs, when their beliefs conflict with their actions, or when they clash with how events unfold in the real world. The theory was taken further by Festinger, who wrote a widely-cited followup book on cognitive dissonance and how people try to engage in “dissonance reduction” to reduce the psychological pressure and unease they experience when confronted with conflicting information.
But a new study that examined Festinger’s recently unsealed papers claims that Prophecy leans on lies, omissions, and serious manipulation. The article, published this month in the peer-reviewed Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, also argues that, contrary to the researchers’ longstanding narrative, the group members all showed clear signs of quickly abandoning their beliefs when the UFOs failed to arrive, and that the group soon dissolved.
Thomas Kelly, the paper’s author, found that while core members of the group stayed active in UFO spaces, they did not keep insisting on a world-ending flood, or that aliens would land and take them away. To the contrary, Kelly says, the Seekers were quick to disavow those beliefs. Even Martin herself rebranded, insisting to an interviewer that she had never believed she’d be taken away by an actual spaceship.
“Dorothy Martin distanced herself completely from these events, even rewriting the story of how she developed her psychic powers,” Kelly writes in the paper, shifting from claiming they had emerged after she awoke one morning with a tingling sensation, to a story where they came about after “she had been in a car accident, developed cancer, and was miraculously healed by an appearance of Jesus Christ,” as she told an interviewer in the 1980s. “The failed prophecy and Christmas message were omitted entirely,” Kelly writes, from her later narrative.
Kelly’s paper not only undercuts the researchers’ claims and their application of the theory developed from them, but also alleges they committed scientific misconduct, including “fabricated psychic messages, covert manipulation, and interference in a child welfare investigation.”
“The conventional wisdom is just wrong.”
Subsequent studies of new religious movements failed to replicate Prophecy’s findings, which isn’t surprising: a well-known replication crisis has shown that findings in psychological studies often can’t be repeated. But in the worlds of psychology, social science, and the study of UFO cults, the book has has remained a narrative juggernaut, influencing how we talk about cults, systems of belief, what it takes to change one’s mind, and why people cling to “unreasonable” or disproven beliefs. (In over a decade spent reporting on conspiracy theories and alternative belief systems, I have repeatedly cited the book myself.)
Kelly hopes his paper will show that “the conventional wisdom is just wrong. The expected outcome of a failed prophecy, what normally happens, is that the cult dies.”
Kelly, a conservative-leaning researcher who’s worked on biosecurity and health policy, is not a social scientist or an expert on cults or new religious movements. Previously a fellow at the Horizon Institute for Public Service, a think tank that says it bridges the worlds of technology and public policy, today he says he works as a “consultant for different advocacy groups” that he declines to name. He has advocated for tax credits for living kidney donors and written a paper on expanding access to pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) for HIV. In addition to his Substack, he has written for right-leaning publications including the Federalist and City Journal. One could argue he’s pushed fringe ideas himself: a recent piece for the conservative Jewish magazine Tablet expresses concern about gain-of-function virology research, and gives credence to the idea that Covid-19 was created in a lab.
“This is a side project I care a lot about,” Kelly says of his work on Prophecy. He read the book a few years ago “out of personal interest” and found that it made him “really nervous.” He was bothered by the authors’ claims that Martin and the Seekers never tried to proselytize before their prophecy failed at the same time the book actually provides several examples of just that: Martin enthusiastically talked to journalists and anyone who would listen about her psychic visions, even after claiming she received a visitation from mysterious visitors warning her not to discuss them. Another member, Charles Laughead, sent letters to at least two editors promoting Martin’s prophecies.
Laughead and his wife Lillian were Martin’s two most important followers. Kelly was able to determine they, well before Christmas Eve 1954, were holding study groups at their house and engaging in aggressive outreach to try to tell the world about Martin’s visions. Charles Laughead, a physician, was actually twice fired by Michigan State University ahead of that Christmas Eve for trying to convert his student patients.
Given all this, the book’s claim that proselytization only took place after the Christmas message “nagged at me,” Kelly says. “It seemed like a strange interpretation.” He argues that the researchers twisted the group’s behavior to fit their thesis, downplaying the proselytization they did before the prophecy failed and playing up any proselytization that occurred after.
This interpretation is important, because the thesis of When Prophecy Fails is clear: after Martin’s failed prophecy, her group doubled down, not only by refusing to acknowledge that their core predictions had utterly failed, but banding together with a new zeal to spread them.
Both Prophecy and Festinger’s 1957 followup, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance, argued that the group employed cognitive dissonance to maintain internal consistency. According to Festinger and his coauthors, Martin and her followers reframed how situations had transpired, made changes and justifications to what they said they believed, and rejected information that didn’t align with their beliefs.
“I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe, and there isn’t any other truth.”
When Kelly looked at Festinger’s 1957 book, though, he felt that the details of the Seekers relayed there didn’t really match what was in Prophecy—that Festinger was, in his words, already “massaging” the facts to make them match his emerging theory of cognitive dissonance. For instance: while Prophecy concedes that a few people walked away from the group after disconfirmation, Festinger’s followup book describes a more total state of belief for everyone involved that grew even stronger after the disappointments of December 1954.
“The conviction of those persons who had met the disconfirmation together did not seem to waver,” Festinger wrote. “Indeed, the need for social support to reduce the dissonance introduced by the disconfirmation was so strong, and the social support so easily forthcoming from one another, that at least two of these persons, who before had occasionally shown some mild skepticism concerning certain aspects of the beliefs, now seemed completely and utterly convinced.”
Festinger’s papers, held at the University of Michigan, were unsealed in early 2025, giving Kelly more insight into the authors’ behavior during their time with the Seekers. Kelly says he was disturbed by what he found, including evidence of clearly unethical intervention and manipulation from the researchers and the observers they hired. He told me that he even found evidence the researchers briefly broke into Dorothy Martin’s house through a back door and looked around, though they found nothing of note; the incident is not mentioned in his published paper.
One focus of Kelly’s paper is Riecken, who immediately acquired a high-level of status in the group—he was even dubbed “Brother Henry”—for reasons that, Kelly writes, weren’t clear. The archival materials, he writes, show that Riecken manipulated his position “to shape group behavior including… pivotal events” in December 1954.
For example, according to notes by Riecken that were included in Festinger’s papers, after the spacemen initially failed to land that month, Riecken decided to bitterly mock Martin, calling a new psychic message she offered after the first time no aliens turned up “pretty dense.” Then he went aside with Charles Laughead, told him he was struggling with a lack of faith, and begged Laughead to reassure him. Laughead did so, responding with a long monologue about the need to stay committed.
“I’ve given up just about everything,” Laughead declared, according to Riecken. “I’ve cut every bridge. I’ve turned my back on the world. I can’t afford to doubt. I have to believe, and there isn’t any other truth.”
Riecken then returned to the group, proclaiming his doubts were gone and his faith restored. Reassured, Martin brightened and began frantically writing what would become her Christmas message. “Martin’s despair, Laughead’s defiant affirmation of belief, and the Christmas message were all driven by Riecken,” Kelly concludes.
Kelly writes that another paid observer, Liz Williams, also ingratiated herself to the group—even becoming part of the Laughead household—under false pretenses, claiming to have had psychic visions, including “a mystical dream in which a mysterious, luminous man rescued her from a flood.” According to Kelly’s research, she also tried to manipulate another, less popular group member—one Williams admitted to finding “stupid” and disliking—into thinking she was psychic by performing automatic writing sessions in front of her. “So much of her writing is about how much she hates this one woman,” Kelly noted dryly in our interview; in an appearance on the Conspirituality podcast, Kelly describes the research team as being “gleeful” about how “easily fooled” group members were.
“I wouldn’t have published this.”
The interference Kelly uncovered goes beyond manipulation. At one point, he writes that the Laugheads were being investigated by family services agents after Charles’ sister had contacted his bosses at Michigan State, concerned whether the Laugheads were fit to care for their two children. Williams and another observer, Frank Nall, intercepted a social worker affiliated with the university who had been sent to the Laugheads house, told her about the ongoing study, and instructed her not to interfere. The social worker, under pressure from her boss at the university, dropped the matter. (Prophecy notes that the Laugheads won a court case over their parental rights and moved their family away soon after the books’ events.)
Williams and Nall got married after their time at Michigan State and had a child together. Williams died in June at 99 years old, after a long career as a professor, researcher, and women’s rights advocate. Nall himself, now 100, has only spotty memories of his role in the study, and none of the incident involving the social worker. (“That was 75 years ago, how the hell do you expect me to remember that?” he said in a brief phone call, laughing.)
As for “Brother Henry,” Kelly writes that the researchers exploited Riecken’s exalted position in the group to the very end: “As the study wound to an end, the researchers wanted to gather additional information, so they invoked Brother Henry’s spiritual status,” having him proclaim himself “as the ‘earthly verifier’ who had been tasked with comparing the accounts of the members to what was already known to the Space Brothers.” Under that guise, he had Seekers sit with him for interviews and gained access to “private documents and ‘sealed prophecies’” belonging to Martin. According to notes by Riecken and Schachter, Riecken examined the box holding them, bound it with his own magical “Seal of Protection,” as the researcher called it, and gave it to another paid observer.
“This contradicts the account in When Prophecy Fails,” Kelly writes, which claimed the box had been obtained from a true believing member they called Mark. The authors even claimed that Mark, Kelly writes, “wanted to open the box to retrieve some of his own documents that had been sealed in there, but was unwilling to do so since it would risk breaching the seal.” The authors, he charges, “use this apparently fabricated incident as an example of belief surviving disconfirmation.”
One professor with extensive experience in archival research, cults, and religious studies isn’t persuaded by the arguments in Kelly’s paper, and isn’t convinced it meets the rigorous scholarly standards they would expect from a peer-reviewed article.
“I wouldn’t have published this,” says Poulomi Saha, a University of California-Berkeley associate professor in critical theory who is writing a book on the cultural fascination with cults. “This author ends up doing what he accuses the authors of When Prophecy Fails of doing, which is cherrypicking evidence,” says Saha, who reviewed Kelly’s paper at my request. Kelly used “a fairly narrow reading of limited archival materials,” Saha says, to argue that the researchers were “the singular lynchpins of what happens to this group,” as with Kelly’s interpretations that Laughead only delivered his monologue on continuing to believe because Riecken coaxed it out of him, and that Martin only wrote her Christmas message because of his influence as Brother Henry.
Saha was also concerned by Kelly’s admission that he could not read one of Martin’s notes he found in Festinger’s archive, which he describes as revealing that she told Brother Henry he was “the favorite son of the Most God.” Kelly writes in an endnote that the note saying this “was written in faded ink in an old‐fashioned style of hand‐writing (cursive) on thin paper which I found difficult to read.” Kelly says that he used ChatGPT to decipher the text, which, Saha says, “wouldn’t pass muster with any real historian.” (Kelly concedes the words AI determined to be “the Most God” were completely indecipherable to his own eyes, but says that was the only place he relied on a machine interpretation of the text.)
“We’re talking about different academic and scholarly methods 70 years ago.”
Saha also says the way Prophecy is generally viewed today is more nuanced than Kelly suggests. “It’s considered a really interesting case study. It’s not considered a definitive psychological theory.” It is never cited, they say, “as the reason some other event should be credible or not.”
Overall, Saha says Kelly’s paper “asks good questions,” ones that they hope will prompt other scholars to reevaluate Prophecy by also delving into Festinger’s archives. “If we want to critique the methods and think about how methodology has changed in 70 years, I would encourage that,” Saha adds. ”We’re talking about different academic and scholarly methods 70 years ago around things like participant observation.”
Indeed, unethical and grossly manipulative science was far from uncommon at the time the Prophecy authors were working. The Tuskegee experiments, a 40-year syphilis study in which Black men were left untreated, were ongoing. The CIA mind control experiments known as MKULTRA began in 1953; before they were halted in 1973, both soldiers and civilians would be drugged with LSD, barbiturates, and amphetamines, usually without their knowledge or consent. In the 1940s and ’50s, children at a Massachusetts school were secretly fed irradiated oatmeal in a study funded by the U.S. government and Quaker oats; survivors were eventually paid a $1.85 million settlement.
In that way, the alleged misconduct from the Prophecy researchers isn’t unusual, Kelly concedes: “It’s disappointing—it’s not surprising.” Other famous midcentury psychology studies also came under fire after a hard look, he points out, including the Stanford Prison Experiment, which purportedly demonstrated that people given the role of prison guards would quickly deploy brutality if ordered to do so, but which has been undermined by revelations of sloppy methodology and unethical researcher interference. An account of the murder of New York woman Kitty Genovese gave rise to a host of studies on the so-called bystander effect, but the notion that people watched idly while Genovese was killed has been proven false.
“The academic standards in the ’50, ’60s, and ’70s were perhaps not as high as they are today,” says Thibault Le Texier. He’s an associate researcher at France’s European Centre for Sociology and Political Science who reviewed a previous version of Kelly’s paper favorably when it was submitted to the journal American Psychologist. (It was not accepted; Kelly says the version was written before he gained access to Festinger’s files.)
It was a “time of great enthusiasm for psychology,” Le Texier says, when “you could do quite strange and uncontrolled studies” that would no longer be authorized. “When you look at the methodology of these studies, it’s based on a few elements or pieces of evidence. The experiment is not well controlled.”
Le Texier’s 2018 book critiquing the methodology and conclusions of the Stanford Prison Experiment was recently translated into English, and has been hailed in the scientific world as a serious challenge to the research’s validity. (Philip Zimbardo, the experiment’s lead researcher, who died in 2024 at the age of 91, defended the his work after Le Texier’s book was published in French and, in a 2020 paper, accused Le Texier of making “unusually ad hominem” attacks.)
“My research is really bad for the integrity of When Prophecy Fails, and bad for its use in new religious studies,” Kelly told me recently. That said, he adds, “in itself it doesn’t show that all cognitive dissonance theory is wrong.”
Le Texier agrees. “Cognitive dissonance theory has been proven on many other occasions,” he says. “There’s very strong literature on the subject. You can’t debunk the whole concept based on one experiment that’s flawed. It casts doubts on the seriousness of the authors and casts a dark shadow on their other work. But the theory of cognitive dissonance is a concept that lives on.”
Earlier this year, Kelly published another paper in a different journal arguing that “group demise” is a more common outcome after disconfirmation occurs. That’s also more or less what he found happened to the Seekers, even if Martin’s Christmas message after the aliens first failed to come briefly delayed its breakup.
“If Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is right, reappraisal of the value of When Prophecy Fails may be slow.”
“Rather than immediately admit to a hostile press that their beliefs were false,” he writes, “they instead acted as if their beliefs were true for up to several days after the prophecy failed.” Given that short timeframe, Kelly argues that the 1956 book’s authors wildly overstated the importance of their findings when they claimed “that their case study provided insight on the origins of the Christians, and the Millerites, and the Sabbateans who maintained their beliefs for years (or millennia) after outside events proved those religions wrong.” Kelly, an Episcopalian, argues it did no such thing, with the authors failing “to show any evidence of long‐term persistence of belief” of Martin’s UFO prophesies.
Sometimes, though, people’s belief or lack thereof is not black-and-white, says Saha, the Berkeley professor, especially when judged from the outside. “A failed realization does not always mean a loss of belief,” they explain. “You continue to believe and the world now says you’re wrong. That’s a profound psychological barrier to talking about it… We can’t know what people believe—only what they say.”
“That’s the question that this author doesn’t have any room for,” Saha says, finding Kelly “very dismissive” of the fact that group members continued to believe in UFOs.
After the failure of Christmas Eve, Kelly writes, the Seekers quickly dissolved. Martin briefly went into hiding, concerned she might be charged with disturbing the peace or contributing to the delinquency of a minor. She soon left Chicago and relocated to a “dianetics center” in Arizona, according to Prophecy. (Martin had been an early Scientology practitioner, in addition to her many other interests.)
“Exactly what has happened to her since, we do not know,” the Prophecy authors wrote, adding that, judging from a few letters received by the researchers and her followers, “she still seemed to be expecting some future action or orders from outer space.”
It isn’t true, Kelly argues, that Martin disappeared. She actually quickly and publicly recanted, telling Saucerian magazine in 1955 that she “didn’t really expect” to be picked up by “a spaceman.” Yet Prophecy, published in 1956, depicts her, in Kelly’s words, as “completely committed.”
“Within 2 years,” Kelly writes in his paper, “Martin was publicly denying any ability to predict the timing of cataclysms.” She would go on to a long and fruitful career in the New Age movement, renaming herself Sister Thedra, living mostly in Mount Shasta, California and throughout the Southwest, and transmitting psychic messages that she said had been delivered by various astral entities.
One of Kelly’s central points is that the main subjects in Prophecy were reachable and findable, and indeed, spent a lot of time talking to UFO magazines. The Laugheads and Martin even met up briefly in Latin America to study aliens again. So why didn’t anyone uncover this before?
The elisions in the book could have been clear, Kelly writes, had “anyone sent a postcard to Dorothy Martin, Charles or Lillian Laughead, or their daughter,” he says, concluding the book “could have collapsed decades ago.”
“You could have asked Dorothy herself,” Kelly says, or several other Seekers. Despite the pseudonyms deployed in the book, he says, “they weren’t hard to find.”
Kelly is realistic in his paper that his critical look at Prophecy may never be widely accepted—ironically, because its alleged inaccuracies might create some cognitive dissonance in the fields it has influenced.
“If Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance is right, reappraisal of the value of When Prophecy Fails may be slow,” Kelly writes in the paper. “If he is wrong, perhaps reappraisal will be swift.”
“If you spent a lot of your career teaching and citing this, it’s hard,” he told me.
“There are findings that people want to hear and findings that people don’t want to hear,” Le Texier says. “If studies such as the Stanford Prison Experiment and When Prophecy Fails gained a lot of attention and will probably continue to, in spite of being debunked, it’s also because these are fascinating stories, as riveting as a great movie.”
For now, at least, Prophecy continues to be widely referred to as a classic of the genre. The aliens, it must be said, have not yet landed.
2025-11-25 05:17:32
After teasing a plan by President Donald Trump to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies—currently on track to end within weeks—the White House has indefinitely delayed the announcement under pressure from congressional Republicans, MS NOW reported on Monday.
The last-minute change of plan signals the GOP’s priorities: the party has fought to cut or repeal the ACA since it entered law in 2010, and was uncompromising in opposing the subsidies during the record-breaking government shutdown that ended earlier in November.
“I don’t see how a proposal like this has any chance of getting majority Republican support,” an anonymous House Republican told MS NOW. “We need to be focused on health care, but extending Obamacare isn’t even serious.”
Unless a deal is reached, Affordable Care Act tax credits expanded during the Biden administration are set to expire at the end of 2025, which would lead to the largest-ever annual spike in ACA premiums. The enhanced credits led to more signups for health insurance through the ACA marketplace: Nearly 25 million Americans in 2025, more than double the roughly 11 million who used it in 2020, according to the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The last thing Republican elected officials want to see, the Center for American Progress’ Bobby Kagan posted on social media Monday, is a deal that protects ACA subsidies.
“That’s why they didn’t extend them in OBBBA, and that’s why they kept calling them a ‘December problem’ even though open enrollment began on November 1,” Kagan, the group’s senior director for federal budget policy, wrote.
It’s because congressional Republicans want the enhanced subsidies to expire. That’s why they didn’t extend them in OBBBA, and that’s why they kept calling them a “December problem” even though open enrollment began on November 1.
— Bobby Kogan (@bbkogan.bsky.social) November 24, 2025 at 10:36 AM
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Extending the enhanced ACA credits does have support among everyday Republicans: A November poll by KFF found that, among Republican and Republican-leaning independents, 72 percent who didn’t identify with MAGA—and almost half of MAGA supporters—wanted ACA tax credits to continue.
If Trump doesn’t sign legislation by December 15 to extend ACA tax credits, millions of Americans will be forced to pay far more—often several hundred dollars a month—for health insurance, or forgo it altogether.
2025-11-25 04:07:58
Late last week, the X social media platform rolled out a new “location indicator” tool, plans for which had first been announced in October. Suddenly, it became much easier to get information on where in the world the site’s users are actually posting from, theoretically helping to illuminate inauthentic behavior, including attempted foreign influence.
“It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease.”
As the tool started to reveal accounts’ information, the effect was like watching the Scooby Doo kids pull one disguise after another from the villain of the week. Improbably lonely and outgoing female American GI with an AI-generated profile picture? Apparently based in Vietnam. Horrified southern conservative female voters with surprising opinions about India-Pakistan relations? Based somewhere in South Asia. Scottish independence accounts? Weirdly, many appear to be based in Iran. Hilarious and alarming though it all was, it is just the latest indication of one of the site’s oldest problems.
The tool, officially unveiled on November 22 by X’s head of product Nikita Bier, is extremely simple to use: when you click the date in a user’s profile showing when they signed up for the site, you’re taken to an “About This Account” page, which provides a country for where a user is based, and a section that reads “connected via,” which can show if the account signed on via Twitter’s website or via a mobile application downloaded from a specific country’s app store. There are undoubtedly still bugs—this is Twitter, after all—with the location indicator seemingly not accounting for users who connect using VPNs. After users complaints, late on Sunday Bier promised a speedy update to bring accuracy up to, he wrote, “nearly 99.99%.”
As the New York Times noted, the tool quickly illuminated how many MAGA supporting accounts are not actually based in the US, including one user called “MAGA Nation X” with nearly 400,000 followers, whose location data showed it is based in a non-EU Eastern European country. The Times found similar accounts based in Russia, Nigeria, and India.
While the novel tool certainly created a splash—and highlighted many men interacting with obviously fake accounts pretending to be lonely, attractive, extremely chipper young women—X has struggled for years with issues of coordinated inauthentic behavior. In 2018, for instance, before Musk’s takeover of the company, then-Twitter released a report on what the company called “potential information operations” on the site, meaning “foreign interference in political conversations.” The report noted how the Internet Research Agency, a Kremlin-backed troll farm, made use of the site, and uncovered “another attempted influence campaign… potentially located within Iran.”
The 2o18 report was paired with the company’s release of a 10 million tweet dataset of posts it thought were associated with coordinated influence campaigns. “It is clear that information operations and coordinated inauthentic behavior will not cease,” the company wrote. “These types of tactics have been around for far longer than Twitter has existed—they will adapt and change as the geopolitical terrain evolves worldwide and as new technologies emerge.”
“One of the major problems with social media is how easy it is to create fake personas with real influence, whether it be bots (fully automated spam) or sockpuppet accounts (where someone pretends to be something they’re not),” warns Joan Donovan, a disinformation researcher who co-directs the Critical Internet Studies Institute and co-authored the book Meme Wars. “Engagement hacking has long been a strategy of media manipulators, who make money off of operating a combination of tactics that leverage platform vulnerabilities.”
Since 2018, X and other social media companies have drastically rolled back content moderation, creating a perfect environment for this already-existing problem to thrive. Under Musk, the company stopped trying to police Covid misinformation, dissolved its Trust and Safety Council, and, along with Meta and Amazon, laid waste to teams who monitored and helped take down disinformation and hate speech. X also dismantled the company’s blue badge verification system and replaced it with a version where anyone who pays to post can get a blue checkmark, making it significantly less useful as an identifier of authenticity. X’s remaining Civic Integrity policy puts much more onus on its users, inviting them to put Community Notes on inaccurate posts about elections, ballot measures, and the like.
While the revelations on X have been politically embarrassing for many accounts and the follower networks around them, Donovan says they could be a financial problem for the site. “Every social media company has known for a long-time that allowing for greater transparency on location of accounts will shift how users interact with the account and perceive the motives of the account holder,” she says. When Facebook took steps to reveal similar data in 2020, Donovan says “advertisers began to realize that they were paying premium prices for low quality engagement.”
The companies “have long sought to hide flaws in their design to avoid provoking advertisers.” In that way, X’s new location tool, Donovan says, is “devastating.”
2025-11-24 20:30:00
This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.
I’m eating Dawn the Yorkshire pig and she’s quite tasty. But don’t worry. She’s doing perfectly fine, traipsing around a sanctuary in upstate New York. Word is that she appreciates belly rubs and sunshine.
I’m in San Francisco, at an Italian joint just south of Golden Gate Park, enjoying meatballs and bacon not made of meat in the traditional sense but of plants mixed with “cultivated” pork fat. Dawn, you see, donated a small sample of fat, which a company called Mission Barns got to proliferate in devices called bioreactors by providing nutrients like carbohydrates, amino acids, and vitamins—essentially replicating the conditions in her body. Because so much of the flavor of pork and other meats comes from the animal’s fat, Mission Barns can create products like sausages and salami with plants but make them taste darn near like sausages and salami.
I’ve been struggling to describe the experience, because cultivated meat short-circuits my brain—my mouth thinks I’m eating a real pork meatball, but my brain knows that it’s fundamentally different and that Dawn (pictured above) didn’t have to die for it. This is the best I’ve come up with: It’s Diet Meat. Just as Diet Coke is an approximation of the real thing, so too are cultivated meatballs. They simply taste a bit less meaty, at least to my tongue. Which is understandable, as the only animal product in this food is the bioreactor-grown fat.
Cultivated pork is the newest entrant in the effort to rethink meat. For years, plant-based offerings have been mimicking burgers, chicken, and fish with ever-more convincing blends of proteins and fats. Mission Barns is one of a handful of startups taking the next step: growing real animal fat outside the animal, then marrying it with plants to create hybrids that look, cook, and taste more like what consumers have always eaten, easing the environmental and ethical costs of industrial livestock. The company says it’s starting with pork because it’s a large market and products like bacon are fat-rich, but its technology is “cell-agnostic,” meaning it could create beef and chicken, too.
Honestly, Mission Barns’ creations taste great, in part because they’re “unstructured,” in the parlance of the industry. A pork loin is a complicated tangle of fat, muscle cells, and connective tissues that is very difficult and expensive to replicate, but a meatball, salami, or sausage incorporates other ingredients. That allows Mission Barns to experiment with what plant to use as a base, and then add spices to accentuate the flavors. It’s a technology that they can iterate, basically, crafting ever-better meats by toying with ingredients in different ratios.
So the bacon I ate, for instance, had a nice applewood smoke to it. The meatballs had the springiness you’d expect. During a later visit to Mission Barns’ headquarters across town, I got to try two prototypes of its salami as well—both were spiced like you’d expect but less elastic, so they chewed a bit more easily than what you’d find on a charcuterie board. (The sensation of food in the mouth is known in the industry as “mouthfeel,” and nailing it is essential to the success of alt meats.) The salami slices even left grease stains on the paper they were served on—Dawn’s own little mark on the world.
I was one of the first people to purchase a cultivated pork product. While Mission Barns has so far only sold its products at that Italian restaurant and, for a limited time, at a grocery store in Berkeley—$13.99 for a pack of eight meatballs, similar to higher-end products from organic and regenerative farms—it is fixing to scale up production and sell the technology to other companies to produce more cultivated foods. (It is assessing how big the bioreactors will have to be to reach price parity with traditional meat products.)
The idea is to provide an alternative to animal agriculture, which uses a whole lot of land, water, and energy to raise creatures and ship their flesh around the world. Livestock are responsible for between 10 and 20 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions—depending on who’s estimating it—and that’s to say nothing of the cruelty involved in keeping pigs and chickens and cows in unsavory, occasionally inhumane, conditions.
“I also love the idea of taking their pork fat and putting it in a beef burger.”
Getting animal cells to grow outside of an animal, though, ain’t easy. For one, if cells don’t have anything to attach to, they die. So Mission Barns’ cultivator uses a spongelike structure, full of nooks and crannies that provides lots of surface area for the cells to grow. “We have our media, which is just the nutrient solution that we give to these cells,” said Saam Shahrokhi, chief technology officer at Mission Barns. “We’re essentially recapitulating all of the environmental cues that make cells inside the body grow fat, [but] outside the body.”
While Dawn’s fat is that of a Yorkshire pig, Shahrokhi said they could easily produce fat from other breeds like the Mangalitsa, known as the Kobe beef of pork. (In June, the company won approval from the US Department of Agriculture to bring its cultivated fat to market.)
Fat in hand, Mission Barns can mix it with plant proteins. If you’re familiar with Impossible Foods, it uses soy to replicate the feel and look of ground beef and adds soy leghemoglobin, which is similar to the heme that gives meat its meaty flavor. Depending on the flavor and texture it’s trying to copy, Mission Bay uses pea protein for the meatballs and sausages, wheat for the bacon, and fava beans for the salami. “The plant-based meat industry has done pretty well with texture,” said Bianca Le, head of special projects at Mission Barns. “I think what they’re really missing is flavor and juiciness, which obviously is where the fat comes in.”
But the fat is just the beginning. Mission Barns’ offerings not only have to taste good, but also can’t have an off-putting smell when they’re coming out of the package and when they’re cooking. The designers have to dial in the pH, which could degrade the proteins if not balanced. How the products behave on the stove or in the oven has to be familiar, too. “If someone has to relearn how to cook a piece of bacon or a meatball, then it’s never going to work,” said Zach Tyndall, the product development and culinary manager at Mission Barns.
When I pick up that piece of salami, it has to feel like the real thing, in more ways than one. Indeed, it’s greasy in the hand and has that tang of cured meat. It’s even been through a dry-aging process to reduce its moisture. “We treat this like we would a conventional piece of salami,” Tyndall said.
Cultivated meat companies may also go more unconventional. “I also love the idea of taking their pork fat and putting it in a beef burger—what would happen if you did that?” said Barb Stuckey, chief new product strategy officer at Mattson, a food developer that has worked with many cultivated meat companies. “Mixing species, it’s not something we typically do. But with this technology, we can.”
Of course, in this new frontier of food, the big question is: Who exactly is this for? Would a vegetarian or vegan eat cultured pork fat if it’s divorced from the cruelty of factory farming? Would meat-eaters be willing to give up the real thing for a facsimile? Mission Barns’ market research, Le said, found that its early adopters are actually flexitarians—people who eat mostly plant-based but partake in the occasional animal product. But Le adds that their first limited sale to the public in Berkeley included some people who called themselves vegetarians and vegans.
There’s also the matter of quantifying how much of an environmental improvement cultivated fat might offer over industrial pork production. If scaled up, one benefit of cultivated food might be that companies can produce the stuff in more places—that is, instead of sprawling pig farms and slaughterhouses being relegated to rural areas, bioreactors could be run in cities, cutting down on the costs and emissions associated with shipping. Still, those factories would need energy to grow fat cells, though they could be run on renewable electricity. “We modeled our process at the large commercial scale, and then compared it to U.S. bacon production,” Le said. (The company would not offer specific details, saying it is in the process of patenting its technique.) “And we found that with renewable energy, we do significantly better in terms of greenhouse gas emissions.”
Whether or not consumers bite, though, remains to be seen. The market for meat alternatives in the US has majorly softened of late: Beyond Meat, which makes plant-based products like burgers and sausages, has seen revenues drop significantly, in part because of consumers’ turn away from processed foods. But by licensing its technology elsewhere, Mission Barns’ strategy is to break into new markets beyond the United States.
The challenges of cultivated meat go beyond the engineering once you get to the messaging and branding—telegraphing to consumers that they’re buying something that may in fact be partially meat. “When you buy chicken, you get 100 percent chicken,” Stuckey said. “I think a lot of people go into cultivated meat thinking what’s going to come onto the market is 100 percent cultivated chicken, and it’s not going to be that. It’s going to be something else.”
Regardless of the trajectory of cultivated fat products, Dawn will continue mingling with llamas, soaking up the sunshine, and getting belly rubs in upstate New York—even as she makes plants taste more like pork.
