2025-08-23 03:00:00
Whether it’s Brat, White Boy, Hot Girl, Barbenheimer or way back to the Summer of Love, Americans love to give summer a theme.
Yet, in 2025, we just couldn’t get it together to make this summer anything.
It’s not for a lack of options to get excited about — we had Labubus, Coldplay cheaters, And Just Like That, Jet2 Holidays, and a new American pope to choose from. Nor is it a lack of trying, because there’s few things Americans love more than turning a season into a shared experience, even if participation is somewhat ironic.
But this summer, the only real shared theme was our unstoppable apathy.
Take, for instance, the lack of a “song of the summer,” a tradition that goes back decades if not centuries. These days, we can usually identify it as the song blasting from car stereos as they head to the beach or similar. Despite super popular tunes from Netflix’s impossibly charming, animated feature K-Pop Demon Hunters, the best efforts from Addison Rae’s paean to passenger princess romance, and the barrage of interchangeable Christian-coded rock, there wasn’t one inexorable, summertime smash that defined the last few months. Charli XCX, whose Brat summer finally ended after over a year, attempted to pass the mantle to 26 or so artists (including the aforementioned Rae). Like the others, none of these options took hold.
The closest thing we got to a song of summer was actually an eight second soundbyte cut from the low-cost UK airline Jet2. People shared and posted their personal bloopers (falling, flailing, failing, flopping) with the opening intro, “Nothing beats a Jet2 Holiday…” But that trend was more about looking back at our embarrassing moments with sardonic glee, not a rallying cry for this summer’s parties. The only thing it made clear was that the public yearns for America’s Funniest Home Videos.
It’s not like there weren’t other dominating trends either. But no one has been brave or unhinged enough to dub the last few months “Hot Labubu summer.”
This summer wasn’t about what we loved, it was about what we obsessed with but — like the tiny mythical elf turned plastic trinket that is Labubu — kind of hated. Whether it was Dubai Chocolate, pickles, West Village Girls, ChatGPT and AI, the $19 Erewhon strawberry, or Sydney Sweeney’s jeans, everything we talked about this summer (and for the past year) seemed to be fueled by disdain. If everyone genuinely liked Labubus, they wouldn’t be nearly as inescapable as they are now.
The truth may be that we’re all burnt out and the idea of putting in the work to make the time of year we’re in “fun” is impossible. Everything somehow became exhausting. Perhaps monoculture didn’t die as much as we found a way to tire it out, making even our obsessions loathsome. These days, everything is one minute away from becoming a political culture war.
Charli XCX’s “Brat summer,” for instance, was never really invented to be made into a Kamala Harris endorsement, so when that happened, it did seem to siphon the joy out of it. There is nothing fun about being made to think about whether Harris is or is not Brat, and it was inexorably worse listening to wonks parse out the question online. It’s not unlike watching the White House’s social media account vaporize the delight out of a Jet2 Holiday trend. Apparently, there are now people upset over the Cracker Barrel logo because it removed the man and his barrel.
Is Kamala still Brat? Is Cracker Barrel woke? Will Jet2 disavow the White House?
These questions feel like cruel punishments. When will the United Nations step in? The battles are constant, and in this time of great sociopolitical upheaval, no entity truly has the level of culture dominance necessary to “declare” anything that feels truly mass.
There are signs that this American exhaustion is not bound to summer.
Apple orchard aficionados and corn maze maestros across the country were briefly plunged into a pre-seasonal panic when it was announced that Christian Girl Autumn was not happening this year, according to the most important Christian Girl who celebrates Autumn.
“I just — I’m not going to be able to post fall videos this year,” said influencer Caitlin Covington, who has been the earnest and ironic avatar for the fall season and all of its aesthetics (cider doughnuts, chunky knitwear, leaves changing, Vermont, pumpkins, etc.) since 2019.
Her reasoning? It was just too much. “It’s just a lot of pressure to make each video better than the last, make each fall trip better, and I just really need a break this year,” she added.
To all the 63-degree-loving fall girlies, this must’ve been what it felt like to watch Achilles fall in the last moments of the Trojan war. Unlike Achilles, however, Covington, with a fresh blowout, announced that she was “just kidding” a few hours later.
When Covington mentioned that she was tired, the public reaction wasn’t shock or admonishment, but relatability. We’re drained, too. Enjoying a trend called “Christian Girl Autumn” as the comments talk about trad wives and gender roles? Pass, too hard.
We can’t even cobble together a summer celebration that we can all agree on. The only thing we may all actually share in this fall is a continuation of our hot weather apathy, a burnt out numbness that not even a Christian Girl Autumn may fix.
That is, unless Covington’s fall photoshoot is really, really good.
2025-08-23 02:30:00
The hunger crisis in Gaza reached another grim milestone on Friday when the world’s leading hunger watchdog confirmed that a famine is taking place within the enclave, amid Israel’s ongoing blockade and bombardment.
The Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), the consortium of humanitarian groups and UN agencies that monitors and classifies global hunger crises with a five-phase classification system, considers a famine to be taking place in an area when at least 20 percent of households face an extreme lack of food, at least 30 percent of children are acutely malnourished, and at least two people out of 10,000 die per day from malnutrition. The IPC issued an alert this week that found those conditions now exist in parts of Gaza and are expected to expand in September. In response to the report, UN Secretary General António Guterres called the famine “a man-made disaster, a moral indictment — and a failure of humanity itself.”
The IPC has been warning for months now that Gaza was on the brink of famine. The Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS Net), an analysis body set up by the US Agency for International Development, assessed that famine conditions were “possible, if not likely” as far back as May 2024.
While malnutrition has been a serious issue for Gaza throughout the war since it began after Hamas’s October 7, 2023, attack, and to a lesser extent even before that, the situation has dramatically worsened since March, when a short-lived ceasefire between Israel and Hamas broke down and Israeli authorities halted all food aid into Gaza for two months. While food shipments eventually resumed, much of it is now delivered by a much-derided new US-backed nonprofit called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. The GHF operates a small handful of sites — compared to hundreds that were in place before Israel’s March ban on aid — which critics say makes it difficult for the most vulnerable Gazans to access food. The Israeli government says the new system is necessary to prevent Hamas from stealing the food, though the New York Times reported in late July that two senior Israeli military officials said there was no evidence of aid being “systematically” stolen.
Famine classifications are rare. In the IPC’s 20-year history, there have been only four: in Somalia in 2011, South Sudan in 2017 and 2020, and Sudan last year. Though the distinction matters little to people who are starving, the IPC is set up to confirm the conditions on the ground. But it does not “declare” famine — governments are supposed to do that, but given that modern hunger crises are mainly driven by war or deliberate political policy, they very rarely do. The Israeli government is no exception: It is already pushing back on the IPC’s report, with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu calling it “an outright lie,” and the foreign ministry accusing the experts of lowering the threshold for one of the criteria, the proportion of acutely malnourished children. (The New York Times summarizes the threshold dispute, which involves two different methods of measuring malnutrition and what the IPC says is a lack of data.) In other crises, advocates have criticized the IPC for being too slow to issue a famine classification, saying that by the time it’s in place, it’s often too late to stop the worst of the suffering.
If governments rarely acknowledge that a famine is happening, and if famine conditions or something very close to them are often in place long before the official statement is made, what’s the point? Advocates say that a famine classification can focus attention, political capital, and donor dollars on a crisis hot spot. While evidence of that is mixed, there are cases such as Somalia in 2011 where funding dramatically increased after a famine was announced.
But this just highlights the degree to which much of the international humanitarian system is not set up for a conflict like the war in Gaza. This isn’t a case like Somalia or Sudan, which struggle to get the attention of the media and wealthy governments. Photos of emaciated children in Gaza have been on the covers of the world’s leading news sites for weeks (though these too have been politicized). The US government, for better or worse, is deeply enmeshed in both diplomacy and aid in Gaza, to say nothing of the involvement of governments in the Middle East and Europe. A lack of resources is also not the problem here. There are already thousands of trucks worth of aid sitting outside Gaza’s borders and within them. Aid agencies say they can’t deliver the food in adequate amounts because of delays and restrictions put in place by the Israeli government and because — given the fact that aid can only enter at a limited number of places and times — they are often mobbed by desperate Gazans before they can reach distribution points.
This is not a neglected conflict, and the issue is neither a lack of attention nor inadequate resources. The problem is political will. And that’s something the IPC is not set up to provide.
2025-08-23 01:10:00
President Donald Trump’s effort to prosecute his political enemies heated up Friday, as the FBI conducted an early morning search at the home of John Bolton, a one-time adviser who Trump has bitterly feuded with for years.
The search, which an administration official said was “court authorized,” reportedly pertains to an investigation into Bolton for leaking classified information. Trump has insisted that Bolton should be prosecuted since 2020.
Unusually, several top DOJ and FBI officials posted (in vague terms) about the search on social media as it was happening. “NO ONE is above the law… @FBI agents on mission,” FBI director Kash Patel posted at 7:03 am.
“Public corruption will not be tolerated,” Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino responded. “Justice will be pursued. Always,” Attorney General Pam Bondi chimed in.
Coming after the Epstein files debacle that made these officials look incompetent and disingenuous, this messaging is their effort to prove that they are, in fact, delivering the retribution the MAGA base and the president crave.
The Bolton investigation is one of several that are reportedly underway against top Democrats and former Trump aides. But the early morning search is the most visible sign of investigative activity in any of these probes yet. Whether any of these will result in charges, though, remains to be seen.
Trump himself was indicted for mishandling classified documents that he’d taken to Mar-a-Lago after he left office in 2021. (A right-wing judge slow-walked the prosecution, preventing it from going to trial.)
But Trump’s effort to have Bolton sent to prison — and his broader desire to prosecute Democrats, officials who investigated him, and former aides who turned against him — goes back further, to his first term. And so far, it seems significantly more effective this time.
Bolton, a hawkish hardliner who served in foreign policy roles in several GOP administrations, was Trump’s national security adviser for about a year and a half during Trump’s first term, until his tenure ended in acrimony in September 2019.
After departing the White House, Bolton immediately began writing a book about his experience, with many unflattering accounts of Trump’s conduct. (He called it The Room Where It Happened, after a song in the musical Hamilton.) Word of the book’s contents related to Trump’s first impeachment proceedings leaked, and the president was furious.
To try to stop the book’s publication, Trump claimed that it contained classified information, and he insisted that he would “consider every conversation with me, as president, highly classified.” He went on: “So that would mean that if he wrote a book and if the book gets out, he’s broken the law. And I would think that he would have criminal problems.”
Or, in tweet form: “Washed up Creepster John Bolton is a lowlife who should be in jail, money seized, for disseminating, for profit, highly Classified information.”
Trump’s assertion that “every conversation” with him was classified is preposterous, but the question of what counts as classified information has long been thorny for former officials trying to disclose national security policymaking details. Bolton at first followed the typical process for such disclosures by submitting his manuscript to National Security Council officials for “pre-publication review,” so they could suggest striking anything classified. But Trump appointees eventually pushed out the official conducting the review, and essentially brought the process to a halt.
Wanting to get the book out before Trump’s reelection, Bolton then decided to go ahead and publish in June 2020 without the government’s okay. The administration sued to try to block it, and though a judge had some very harsh words for Bolton, he let the publication proceed, saying, “the damage is done.”
By September 2020, prosecutors had convened a grand jury looking into the matter. But in 2021, after Trump lost reelection and DOJ leadership changed hands, the case was reportedly closed.
With Trump back in office, the prosecution has evidently been revived. An official involved in the investigation told the New York Times that the investigation was about Bolton leaking classified information to damage Trump — it wasn’t just about the book and included actions Bolton took in the past few years.
During Trump’s first term, he repeatedly demanded prosecutions of his political enemies, but these prosecutions kept not happening.
As I wrote at the time, DOJ officials who understood and cared about the law kept slow-walking or bottling up investigations they thought were bogus. Trump often fumed about this, but couldn’t manage to do anything about it.
His second term is a different story. He’s staffed the top ranks of the DOJ and the FBI with personal loyalists who are not only willing to do his bidding, but they’re eager to be seen as doing his bidding. That’s evident in Bondi, Patel, and Bongino taking credit for the Bolton search. All three care about their “cred” among the MAGA base, and want to take a victory lap, even if it makes the investigation look more political.
Then there’s “Eagle” Ed Martin, who earlier this year did a stint as US attorney for the District of Columbia, but now is heading the Justice Department’s “Weaponization Working Group.” This group is purportedly targeting people who weaponized law enforcement against Trump and his allies, but in practice seems to be doing their own weaponization against targets like Sen. Adam Schiff (D-CA) and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
In practice, we’re still a long way away from Trump’s political enemies being locked up. To bring charges, prosecutors will have to convince grand juries to indict. To sustain charges, they’ll have to convince judges that they’re appropriate. To convict, they’ll have to convince juries. And even after conviction, there’s the appeal process.
But it’s clear that any internal hesitations the DOJ once had about being seen as targeting Trump’s enemies are gone. Now, that’s exactly how it wants to be seen.
2025-08-23 00:15:00
There are things you can do to prepare yourself for parenthood: Read the books, take the classes, set up a college fund. Nothing can truly prepare you for the overwhelm.
More specifically, nobody tells you how hard it is to keep up with the logistical demands and bureaucratic bloat. If deciding what to eat for dinner was annoying before children, try meal planning for a week with a family. There are chores to do, school emails to answer, trips to plan, bills to pay, and only so many minutes in the day.
Running a family has become akin to running a small business for many Americans. So it’s no surprise that a cottage industry has cropped up to support those fledgling families using a range of tools borrowed from work culture. Offering everything from AI-powered assistants to wall-mounted touchscreens, these tech companies promise to provide your family with its own command center or operating system — a software-based solution to the societal problem of parenting while overwhelmed.
The need for such a fix has cropped up as the demands of parenting have escalated. A 2025 report from the Office of the Surgeon General showed that nearly half of American parents said that “most days their stress is completely overwhelming.” Women tend to carry more of the mental load. The vast majority of parents in opposite-sex households say the mother spends more time managing schedules, according to a Pew Research Center poll published in 2023. A separate study found that mothers, on average, did 71 percent of the cognitive labor at home — child care, cleaning, scheduling, finances, managing relationships — while men did just 29 percent.
It’s no surprise that a cottage industry has cropped up to support those fledgling families using a range of tools borrowed from work culture.
“This work of organizing the family is work, and it’s falling on women, particularly in different-sex couples,” said Allison Daminger, an assistant sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and author of the upcoming book What’s on Her Mind: The Mental Load of Family Life.
There’s no relief in sight for most families. The cost of child care has steadily increased in recent years, and most working parents do not have access to paid family leave. An app won’t solve these policy challenges, but it might make a tired parent’s day slightly more streamlined.
“We have some of the most family hostile public policies and workplace practices of any high-income country, and parents are absolutely strapped for time and money,” said Brigid Schulte, director of the Better Life Lab at New America and author of Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time.
“Are these apps the answer? No, they’re not,” Schulte told me. “At most they’re Band-Aids. They can help people manage, keep their heads above water, but the real solutions we need are much bigger than any app.”
That was my experience trying out many of these new tools. The touchscreen in my kitchen is not paying for pre-school. However, I’m in no position to run for Congress and champion the cause, because I still have to make a pediatrician appointment, schedule a playdate, and plan the next week’s worth of family meals.
My child is not yet 2, but my wife and I already feel the strain of administrative overload. And we learned the hard way that just creating a new Google Calendar wasn’t going to cut it, where family obligations get mixed in with work meetings and personal to-dos, turning the whole thing into a soup of confusion.
That led me to check out dedicated family calendar apps, like Maple, before exploring full fledged family command centers, like Skylight.
The idea of using software to help families stay organized is not new. Some 20 years ago, a couple of former Microsoft employees created an online family organizer called Cozi, which is still around today. It wasn’t until the pandemic that the concept really took off, though.
I’m in no position to run for Congress and champion the cause, because I still have to make a pediatrician appointment, schedule a playdate, and plan the next week’s worth of family meals.
Skylight, makers of the touchscreen in my kitchen, started out as a digital picture frame company over a decade ago. In September 2020, the company made a meaningful pivot toward building a family command center with the launch of the Skylight Calendar, which syncs with existing digital calendars, like Google Calendar and Outlook, but puts the entire family on one screen. There are also tabs for a to-do list, a grocery list, and a meal plan, all of which are also available on a mobile app. Skylight has since added features, like a gamified chores tab for kids, and an AI assistant called Sidekick that converts emails and even pictures of things like fliers and recipes into calendar events and meal plans. The 27-inch Cal Max, launched last year, costs up to $600, plus an additional $80 a year for access to all the features.
Hot on Skylight’s heels is an app called Maple, which launched in February 2021. Initially described as “the back office of every family,” Maple has gone through a few iterations, including one that enabled parents to sell “ready made plans” to other families, but the app is primarily a family calendar powered by to-do lists. You can create to-dos, assign them to members of the family, and then see a schedule of everything that needs to be done. There’s also a meal planner, a family messaging platform, and a project management feature that’s surprisingly good at planning birthday parties. It costs $40 a year to sync external calendars, get rid of ads, and access AI features.
I know what you’re thinking: Google and Apple software can do a lot of this stuff for free. And you’d be right. There’s no need to pay for a dedicated family calendar app, if you want to bootstrap existing software, including what you use for work, to stay organized.
Tech-savvy parents have been doing this for years. In 2016, a dad in Sweden went semi-viral for blogging about using Slack to keep track of his family and helped inspire The Atlantic story, “The Slackification of the American home.” Emily Oster, the economist turned parenting guru, canonized the concept in The Family Firm, a book about using off-the-shelf enterprise software like Asana to keep her family organized a few years ago. Just last year, the New York Times spoke to a number of parents, many of whom worked in the venture capital or crypto industries, that use project management tools like Trello and Notion to run their families like startups.
“Tasks and chores, to-do lists, grocery lists: There are apps that do those individual things better than we do,” Michael Segal, co-founder and CEO of Skylight, said in an interview. “It’s just more convenient to do it all in the place where you go to manage the family and home.”
Michael Perry, Maple’s co-founder and CEO, similarly told me that his company’s job is “building a calendar that’s all encompassing for seven days a week of our life as a working parent.” Maple also invites its users to join a Slack community, where they can weigh in on features they love or hate or check out upcoming releases, like Maple’s new web app, which is set to launch this fall.
Skylight and Maple are the two family assistants I’ve used the most, but they’re hardly the only ones. Hearth sells its own giant touchscreen calendar for your kitchen, and Jam looks like a Maple clone with some Gen Z design flair. Apps like Milo and Ohai lean into the AI of it all, promising to use chatbots to keep your family organized. There are also tech companies trying to connect parents. Honeycomb says it helps parents “share the mental and logistical load” via group chats and smart calendars, and the Sandwich Club is an AI-powered advice platform that lets other parents weigh in on your questions.
Together, these companies comprise a burgeoning new industry, referred to as famtech. There’s even an industry association dedicated to promoting its interests, drumming up investment, and pushing for policy changes for caregivers, like paid family leave. “Liken it to where financial services has fintech, we look at the care economy as having famtech as its innovation sector,” said Anna Steffany, executive director of FamTech.org, “and we look at family technology as all things addressing the caregiving space.” One trend report, which Steffany contributed to, values the care economy at nearly $650 billion.
It’s easy to feel skeptical about a single app or kitchen-based touchscreen that promises to make parents’ lives easier. Heck, I’ve been using both for a few weeks now, and it’s certainly nice not to have to text my wife every time there’s a change in the schedule or to remind me who’s on preschool pickup duty that day.
Then again, I’m also starting to wonder if using a parenting app just means I’m giving up more data about my family in the services of better targeted ads. (The privacy policies of both Maple and Skylight say the companies may collect and share personal data with third parties.) I’m also acutely aware that having a new tool to manage my family means I’ve got yet another thing to manage.
“When you’re trying to integrate across so many different apps and systems and interfaces, the real cost benefit ratio can get thrown off,” said Daminger, the UW-Madison professor. “Sometimes we’re trying to make things easier, but in the end, we actually end up just creating new forms of labor.”
A version of this story was also published in the User Friendly newsletter. Sign up here so you don’t miss the next one!
2025-08-22 22:10:00
“We are imposing a complete siege on [Gaza]. No electricity, no food, no water, no fuel — everything is closed. We are fighting human animals and we must act accordingly.”
That was Yoav Gallant, then the Israeli defense minister, two days after Hamas’s attack on October 7, 2023, killed some 1,200 Israelis and took 250 more hostage. The following week, Israel’s national security minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, echoed a similar sentiment: “So long as Hamas does not release the hostages,” he posted on X, “the only thing that should enter Gaza is hundreds of tons of air force explosives — not an ounce of humanitarian aid.”
Israel, in other words, did not engineer a famine in Gaza overnight. From the war’s outset, Israel has been blocking humanitarian aid from entering the Gaza Strip, to varying degrees, resulting in the spread of preventable diseases, including malnutrition, across the territory. In fact, since late 2023, international organizations have been warning that Gaza has been on the brink of famine. In April of last year, Save the Children confirmed that children had been dying from starvation. And now, the UN-backed Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) — the world’s leading authority on hunger crises — has officially determined that there is a famine in Gaza City and its surrounding areas, adding a warning that famine will rapidly spread to other parts of the Gaza Strip without immediate intervention.
So why is it that it took this long for the world to turn its attention to this humanitarian disaster?
Part of the answer is that in recent weeks, the situation really has gotten much more dire, after Israel ended its 42-day ceasefire with Hamas in March and stopped allowing any aid into Gaza for two months, as my colleague Joshua Keating recently wrote.
But there’s another factor: The images coming out of Gaza have been absolutely heart-wrenching. Photos and videos have gone viral — on news sites and on social media — clearly showing malnourished babies starving to death, as well as those showing children and adults with their skin clinging to their bones with barely anything in between. “It is tragic that it takes those types of really graphic, really horrible images to break through,” said Alex de Waal, an expert on famine who serves as the executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University. “And that is such a terrible commentary on just a gargantuan failure.”
This, of course, is nowhere near the first time horrific images from Gaza have surfaced and sparked outrage around the world. But there’s something about the visibility of a human-made famine that, for many people — including some of Israel’s most ardent supporters — crosses a moral threshold.
Starving an entire population cannot be spun as collateral damage or merely the cost of war — a messaging tactic that Israel has turned to to justify its killing of innocent people despite plenty of evidence that it has routinely targeted civilians. “You can’t starve anyone by accident. It has to be deliberate and sustained,” de Waal said. “It is beyond dispute that you have to starve people systematically because it takes so long.”
Indeed, Israel’s use of starvation as a weapon of war has been well-documented by human rights organizations since 2023, and both Gallant and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have been indicted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court, including the use of starvation as a method of warfare.
Israel’s mass starvation of Gaza is, by definition, a form of collective punishment — imposing potentially fatal consequences on every Palestinian living in the enclave, whether they are a combatant or an innocent civilian. That’s why using starvation as a weapon of war is illegal under international law.
But that wasn’t always the case. What Israel is doing is part of a long history of weaponizing food and basic resources. Still, while there are many examples of countries intentionally creating or exacerbating famine conditions on populations, there are also aspects of Israel’s current policies in Gaza that are unique.
Using starvation as a weapon of war wasn’t always explicitly illegal under international law. The siege of Leningrad by the Nazis and their allies, which lasted from 1941 to 1944, was one of the deadliest sieges in history, killing more than 1 million people.
Many of these deaths were attributed to starvation. An American-run tribunal, however, determined that the forced starvation was compatible with international law. After all, it was a tactic that the Allies themselves had used as well, notably in their blockades of German-occupied territories and in Japan.
There are many examples throughout history of famines that were either entirely engineered or deliberately made worse through reckless colonial and war policies. In 1943, as the British empire’s colonial rule of the Indian subcontinent was nearing its end, the Bengal famine killed up to 3 million people.
Since then, studies have uncovered scientific evidence that the famine was not a result of climate conditions like serious drought. Instead, British policies, under Prime Minister Winston Churchill — which included confiscating rice and boats from the coastal parts of Bengal and exporting rice from India to other parts of the empire — seriously exacerbated famine conditions. Churchill denied this, saying that the reason there was a famine was because Indians were “breeding like rabbits” and suggesting that if the situation was indeed as dire as people claimed, then Mahatma Gandhi would be dead.
Another example is the Holodomor, the famine that killed millions of Ukrainians under the Soviet Union in the early 1930s. Joseph Stalin pursued a range of policies that engineered famine conditions — including restricting the movement of people, seizing grain even when there wasn’t enough to feed the local population, and exporting grain even as Ukrainians starved — in part, historians argue, to tamp down Ukrainian nationalist movements. Several countries and scholars have since recognized the famine as an act of genocide.
The US also used blockades as a means to advance its war interests. One of its military campaigns against Japan during World War II was named “Operation Starvation” — which aimed to destroy Japan’s economy by limiting the distribution of food and other imports. The military assault deprived Japan of essential raw materials and led to food shortages. That, along with naval blockades and America’s destruction of agricultural infrastructure contributed to widespread malnutrition and starvation.
It was only after World War II that the Geneva Conventions of 1949 established some rules about the responsibility to allow food and other essentials into enemy territory for vulnerable populations. But even then, by and large, starvation tactics were still permissible.
“The reason it was permitted was because the Americans and the British rather liked using it,” de Waal said. “It really wasn’t until the British and the Americans had abandoned their colonial wars — the American one being Vietnam in the ’70s — that they thought, ‘Okay, now we’re not going to fight these kinds of wars, and we can get around to banning it.’”
The Additional Protocols to the Geneva Conventions, which were agreed to in 1977, finally prohibited the “starvation of civilians as a method of warfare [or combat].” And just over 20 years later, in 1998, the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court officially codified weaponizing starvation as a war crime.
Any food shortages in Gaza have been directly triggered by the Israeli siege, not by any market failures or climate disasters, since Israel has the capacity to allow more food in at a moment’s notice.
“Here, what we see is all the ingredients coming together in a deliberate way. We see the [Israeli leaders’] statements; we see the total bombing of all the food production,” said Neve Gordon, a professor of human rights law at Queen Mary University of London. “I don’t think there’s [another] case in history, because other cases had to do with other stuff going on that were not human-made. Here, the whole starvation — from beginning to end — is human-made.”
Israel has also significantly limited traditional aid groups’ operations and, for months, entirely blocked aid from entering Gaza. Generally, UN-coordinated aid providers, which include UN agencies and established NGOs, have been able to enter and operate in war zones.
But since the ceasefire ended in March, Israel has placed unprecedented constraints on those organizations. Instead, since May, Israel has been coordinating with the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly formed US- and Israel-backed private entity that operates militarized distribution sites in central and southern Gaza.
GHF has denied that its system is unsafe. But it operates far fewer distribution sites than experts recommend — dramatically decreasing the number of aid sites that were in place before Israel instituted its total blockade in March, making it more and more difficult for Palestinians to access food.
Israeli troops have also shot at aid-seekers at GHF’s distribution sites, and, according to the UN, some 1,000 Palestinians have been killed trying to get aid from GHF. Gordon calls GHF “a famine profiteering company,” adding that it “does not actually provide the necessary food, while producing these hunger games that everyone was watching, [showing] starving people are going to get food and getting shot at.”
Israeli government officials have defended GHF and instead blamed Hamas for the food shortages, accusing the group of looting humanitarian supplies despite Israeli military officials saying that there’s no proof that Hamas has systematically stolen aid. But the UN and many NGOs have called for GHF to be shut down, calling it dangerous and ineffective — a departure from established international humanitarian relief systems and a rejection of basic humanitarian principles.
While Egypt has been complicit in enforcing the blockade through its border with Gaza, the reality is that even aid going into Gaza through the Egyptian border has to go through Israeli inspection. The result is that Israel has effectively vacuum-sealed Gaza, with full control of what aid gets in.
Israel could have chosen to prevent a famine at any point. Instead, it has repeatedly hampered or entirely rejected efforts to deliver life-saving aid to Palestinians — all in contravention of international law. “Israel is not unique at all in using hunger as a weapon of war,” de Waal said. “What is unique about the Israeli one is just how rigorous and how sustained it is, and how it is in defiance of an international humanitarian capacity that can respond just like that. So if Netanyahu wanted every [child in Gaza] to have breakfast tomorrow, it can be organized.”
One example of Israel’s (and the world’s) capacity to stop the worst from happening is the polio vaccination campaign that happened last year. When polio — which had been eradicated from Gaza for 25 years — resurfaced as a result of the humanitarian and sanitation crisis imposed by Israel’s war, governments around the world pressured Israel to agree to a humanitarian pause in combat, in order to vaccinate children across the Gaza Strip. In the middle of the war, the vaccination campaigns were successful, reaching 95 percent of the target population. An effort to stop malnutrition can be similarly efficient.
The faster Israel relents and allows unimpeded aid delivery, the more lives can be saved. But unfortunately, it’s already too late for far too many Palestinians in Gaza. “Even if there was divine intervention — and we had a ceasefire and the best doctors and the right kind of food — I think we’d still have hundreds [or] thousands of deaths,” Gordon said. “But we’re not going to have that divine intervention.”
Update, August 22, 10:10 am ET: This article was originally published on August 7, 2025, and has been updated to include news of the IPC’s classification of famine in Gaza.
2025-08-22 20:00:00
Immigrant rights activist Guerline Jozef can’t count the number of frantic texts, calls, and emails she gets daily from Haitians in the United States terrified that some day soon, they won’t be able to feed their families anymore.
Not just those in the US, but their “mother, sister, niece, a cousin, a church member” back in Haiti, who heavily depend on their breadwinner abroad to survive.
“Entire neighborhoods are being provided for by the diaspora,” said Jozef, co-founder of the Haitian Bridge Alliance in San Diego. “Haiti is literally being held together by those of us who are outside of the country and sending money back home.”
Haiti’s decades-long humanitarian crisis deepens each day, forcing immigrants to send record-high payments back home in recent years. Each Haitian immigrant living abroad supports a dozen or so friends, family, or community members in their home country, many of whom rely on those payments to survive, Jozef says.
But that money — formally called remittances — is about to get more expensive to send, thanks to a new tax tucked into President Donald Trump’s new spending bill. The 1 percent tax passed as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill enacted by Congress last month and will go into effect starting January 1, 2026.
Though 1 percent might not sound like much, it could mean billions of dollars that never reach grandparents who need medical care, homes that fall into disrepair, and girls unable to stay in school.
About 200 million immigrant workers support about 800 million family members in their home countries each year — together, that’s roughly one in eight people worldwide. For every dollar that a wealthy nation sends in foreign aid, immigrants send almost four times as much back home, totaling over $700 billion worldwide — enough to buy up every home for sale in the US and still have billions to spare. In over 60 countries, remittances make up more than 3 percent of GDP, and in some places, they make up well over a quarter of the entire economy, the equivalent share of the entire manufacturing, retail, and health care industries in the United States combined.
When the tax goes into effect next year, Haitians could lose about $61 million annually in direct payments for food, shelter, and health care, according to the Center for Global Development. Globally, the losses will add up to about $4.5 billion.
This economic pain is on top of the absolute gutting of USAID, which around the world, once paid for almost half of all food aid, roughly 70 percent of the global response to HIV/AIDS, and contraceptive care for almost 50 million women and couples each year. The agency’s sudden demise has left a multibillion-dollar vacuum for peace building, humanitarian relief, and health infrastructure in dozens of low- and middle-income countries where those funds made a tremendous difference.
But as big of a deal as USAID was, remittances are actually an even bigger deal. And the US is targeting immigrants’ hard-earned cash at a moment when the world can afford it least. Many countries — like India, Guatemala, and the Philippines — will lose way more money from this 1 percent tax on remittances than they will from foreign aid cuts. Losing yet another lifeline will be beyond catastrophic — it could further destabilize countries already steeped in crisis.
If remittances fall, “it will mean more famine,” Jozef said. “It will mean more people dying.”
Immigrants in the US sent almost $100 billion overseas last year, mostly to low- or middle-income countries, making it the world’s largest source of remittances. Every family is different, but most immigrant workers send about 15 percent of their salary or upward of $300 per month back home.
Let’s say you’re an immigrant from Honduras trying to send some extra money home this month to help cover your brother’s back-to-school fees. One option is to ask your bank or use an app to initiate an international transfer — but the teller might not speak your language, you get paid in cash, and like most Hondurans, your family doesn’t have a bank account to transfer to anyway.
So instead, like most immigrants, you walk up the block to your local money transfer shop. Say, a Western Union nestled in your neighborhood pharmacy, and tell the agent how much money you want to send. You hand her your ID, a form, and a few hundred dollars over the counter. Right away, they take out about $15 in fees — plus an extra couple of dollars once the tax kicks in.
After a bit of paperwork, they process the rest, and in a few minutes, voilà. In Honduras, your mom walks to the Western Union shop up the street from your elementary school and picks up her cash.
It’s hard to overstate the importance of these payments. Remittances have been proven to reduce infant mortality, boost school enrollment, and fuel housing construction around the world. Studies show that they play a significant role in helping countries achieve sustainable development goals like clean water for all. Manuel Orozco, director of the Migration, Remittances, and Development Program at the Inter-American Dialogue, has been trying to get Americans to care about remittances for the past 30 years.
“I feel like I’m preaching the gospel of remittances and financial inclusion,” he said. “And all administrations, including the Biden administration, just didn’t want to pay attention to these issues.” But in many countries, “GDP growth basically depends on remittances.”
For example, Nepal’s tourism industry raked in a hefty $2.5 billion in 2023, but it was no match for the $11 billion Nepalese workers abroad sent home that year. Honduras relies twice as much on remittances as it does on agriculture, its next largest chunk of GDP. Guatemala’s economy is 10 times as dependent on remittances as it is on bananas, the country’s largest export.
And in places without food stamps or Medicaid, those payments function as a vast, invisible, global social safety net, ensuring that the world’s poorest don’t fall through the cracks.
More often than not, remittances directly support families’ basic needs like food, housing, education, and medical care, filling gaps that traditional aid programs might not reach, said Dulce Guzmán, executive director of Alianza Americas, a network of immigrant-serving groups based in Chicago. “They’re a huge pillar for sustaining life in our countries of origin.”
When remittances do get attention, it’s usually from Republicans, and it’s almost never a good thing.
“The purpose is not to be mean,” said Ira Mehlman, who works at the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform, which the Southern Poverty Law Center defines as a hate group for its hardline stance. The group lobbied hard for the 1 percent tax, which he hopes will encourage immigrants to self-deport.
“It’s no different than if you’re cruising along on the highway at 80 miles an hour and you see somebody else getting pulled over for speeding,” he argued. “You change your behavior, take your foot off the gas.”
Only it is very, very, very different. Because taking your foot off the gas here means cutting off millions of vulnerable people from the money they need to survive.
Under normal circumstances, remittances rise when foreign aid is cut, but that won’t be easy this time around with so many countries hit by both aid cuts and the tax on money transfers. The tax — which to Mehlman’s chagrin, a hodgepodge of fintech, free market, and pro-immigrant lobbyists haggled down from 5 percent in an initial proposal — will require senders to pay a 1 percent fee on all cash transfers.
Money transfer agents or bank tellers will be required to apply the tax on any cash, money orders, or cashier’s checks sent overseas, similar to a restaurant collecting a sales tax on the food and beverages it serves. If businesses fail to collect the tax as required, they’re on the hook for paying it themselves along with any penalties or interest fees.
Digital transfers will be exempt from the tax. But sending money between foreign bank accounts is not as simple as using Venmo or Zelle, which require a US bank account to use — something many immigrants and their families don’t have. Despite the rise of app-based providers like Remitly, which is tailor-made for overseas transfers, many immigrants still make the monthly trek to Western Union to send money home because that’s what they and their recipients — often elderly parents or grandparents — back home are used to and trust.
So let’s take a look at what this looks like for a family in El Salvador, for example. Without the $1,600 that Damaris Ortega sends home from Texas each month, her mother and three children in El Salvador could never afford to eat meat. Just the basics there — rice, beans, eggs, vegetables — cost “basically your entire salary” each month, she said.
“It harms industry. It harms individuals. It harms our national security.”
Ananya Kumar, who studies the future of money at the Atlantic Council
There would be no new clothes to wear to school. No money to pay tuition. No savings to go to college. If they ever got sick or hurt, her family couldn’t afford the gauze, bandages, or medications they’d need to bring to local hospitals that rarely have those on hand.
“The contributions we send from here to there — many families there live off of that,” Ortega, an organizer at the immigrant rights group CRECEN Houston, said in Spanish. “In fact, they subsist on it there. They need that money to survive.”
For Ortega, the tax will mean paying an additional $16 each month on top of the 6 percent fee many already pay on average to businesses like Western Union or MoneyGram.
Those fees add up in El Salvador, where the minimum wage is less than $2 per hour or $13 per day. With a new tax on top of existing fees, it means $112 less money for Ortega’s family each month, or $1,344 each year.
Or zooming out, El Salvador, which is set to be hit hardest per capita by the tax, will lose about $198 million annually when it goes into effect. That’s roughly 0.62 percent of the country’s entire GDP or a gobsmacking 1.1 percent if you count the $150 million it’s projected to lose from USAID cuts too. It’s as if the entire US agricultural industry were to disappear overnight.
“If it weren’t for the support of the community that sends remittances, I think there would be extreme poverty, more than there already is, in our countries,” Ortega said.
The good news is that even if the tax reduces remittances to an extent, “people are still going to send that money. It’s just going to take a different channel,” said Ananya Kumar, who studies the future of money at the Atlantic Council, a think tank focused on international security.
That’s especially true for those from rural, poorer, more vulnerable places with less digital and banking infrastructure — and the new tax specifically targets those cash-based transfers. More than one in five adults worldwide still don’t have a bank or mobile money account, and that’s especially true for women and those living in sub-Saharan Africa, where only about half the population has an account. Many immigrants in the US don’t have bank accounts either.
While someone who’s savvy with a smartphone may be able to send money tax-free, for those without banking or regular internet access, cash is still king — and it will be taxed.
Some of those senders could soon begin “moving into the shadows versus having legitimate businesses do it,” said Kumar, which would make them more vulnerable to scammers or criminal networks promising to send the money for less.
And that’s not good for anybody. “It harms industry,” Kumar said. “It harms individuals. It harms our national security.”
If the tax holds, The US is poised to make about $10 billion over the next decade. That’ll cover just 0.15 percent of the federal US budget for a year at most.
“It’s really a drop in the bucket for this country,” said Guzmán, the executive director of Alianza Americas. But elsewhere, that kind of money, “it’s transformative.”
Likewise, if we’re calculating generously, the gutting of USAID could save US citizens maybe $5 — one matcha latte pre-matcha shortage — per month. But at what cost?
Mexico, which receives the most US remittances, will lose over $1.5 billion per year from the tax, the steepest loss projected anywhere.
In Liberia, for example, aid cuts from the US alone have been so steep that they’re projected to lead to a full 2.6 percent decline in gross national income, the highest rate of any country, on top of which the remittance tax will shave off another 0.16 percent. That’s a total of over $100 million lost, more than the Liberian government allocated for education this year, in a country where the average salary is less than $3,000 per year.
In Mexico, remittances have already plunged by double-digit percentages in recent months, thanks in part to Trump’s immigration crackdown, a growing problem for low-income Mexicans who rely on remittances for up to 30 percent of their income and may soon struggle to afford basic goods. At a recent press conference, President Claudia Sheinbaum of Mexico quipped in Spanish that if the US “wants to charge taxes, they should go somewhere else — not to Mexico’s poorest people” who “receive and live off these remittances.”
Her country, which receives the most US remittances, will lose over $1.5 billion per year from the tax, the steepest loss projected anywhere. In an attempt to minimize the damage, she promised to reimburse Mexicans for the tax, and last month, launched a low-fee government debit card that can facilitate tax-free digital transfers.
But those solutions are probably too expensive or out of reach for poorer countries, where these payments make the biggest difference.
Still, remittances have proved remarkably resistant to crises in the past, like the Covid-19 pandemic, and some immigrants may manage to quickly move to tax-free digital platforms, a transition that Guzmán’s group plans to encourage in the year ahead.
But there’s no question that taken as a whole, these policies are “going to further destabilize these countries and push more people to leave,” Guzmán said. “These changes have deadly consequences.”
The United Nations has lobbied for years to decrease the cost of sending remittances precisely because they are so important to global development and because, frankly, it is greedy for wealthy countries to try to take a chunk of the all-important money that immigrants send home.
In Jozef’s words,“the people of Haiti need that money more than President Trump.”
But this was never about the money. It’s about “flooding the zone.” It’s about throwing a billion strands of spaghetti to the wall at once and seeing what sticks. If millions of people starve as collateral, then that’s because the system was broken to begin with.
And well, the system was broken to begin with. No country should be so vulnerable, so reliant on income from its citizens employed abroad, that a 1 percent tax could push them over the edge.
Yet, remittances and foreign aid remain many countries’ best bet for leveling the global playing field and “addressing those root causes” of forced migration in the first place, said Guzmán. For creating the conditions needed so that one day, countries like Haiti and El Salvador won’t need remittances anymore. Their citizens won’t need to leave at all.
“Even in the middle of all the chaos,” Jozef said, “that is still the goal.”