2025-09-13 04:35:00
In the hours and days after Charlie Kirk’s killing, the breadth of people — particularly younger ones — sharing grief and shock on newsfeeds, Instagram stories, or TikTok livestreams might have been surprising.
They were not just avowed conservatives or loyal Trump voters, but seemingly apolitical people: old classmates or hometown friends who never posted much about current events — until now. For liberals or people in their 30s it might have seemed unexpected.
But the reactions are just one sign of Kirk’s influence, and how his movement and style of politics might linger after his death.
Kirk was a generational figure, who redefined how politics, political media, and Gen Z culture worked for his followers, allies, and political opponents.
To understand that lasting influence — why he resonated with Gen Z — it might be helpful to break down the elements of his appeal:
At least for the conservative Gen Z, Kirk held a kind of mythic status: He went from being essentially a nobody — the barely 18-year-old founder of a scrappy activist group — to a conservative kingmaker before age 31.
He made himself indispensable to the Republican Party. President Donald Trump was reelected last year with levels of youth voter support not seen for a Republican since the 2000s. Kirk was largely credited with helping to bring that about through his nonprofit, specifically by going after disengaged or passive young men.
The organization Kirk launched, Turning Point USA, started off in 2012 as a ragtag group trying to establish a foothold on any college campus. In their first year, it had about 9,200 Facebook followers, 15 campus affiliates, and 40 bloggers.
By the 2020s, Turning Point had essentially become the “youth faction of the Republican Party,” according to the Gen Z writer, researcher, and consultant Rachel Janfaza — a massive national network of more than 800 college chapters, millions of social media followers, and nearly $100 million in fundraising in 2024, that also supported other right-leaning youth-focused organizations.
Before Turning Point’s arrival to campuses, “you had shells of organizations with College Republicans and Young Republicans, who weren’t entirely influential by any means, and Turning Point was the cool new organization,” Joe Mitchell, a 28-year-old former Iowa state representative who Kirk mentored, told me. “People actually wanted to go to their events, and you didn’t have to beg people to come.”
Kirk advised and helped financially support the launch of Mitchell’s own nonprofit, Run Gen Z, which aims to get young conservatives elected to local and state office. Kirk provided the same mentorship and launching pad to a whole generation of young conservatives activists, he said.
But Turning Point also changed the way conservatism was viewed on college campuses — turning it into a mainstream cultural and social identity, not just a set of political beliefs.
“Every hot new speaker on the conservative circuit was going to be at a Turning Point event.”
Joe Mitchell, Run Gen Z founder
“He totally changed the game on a culture perspective of what is cool and what people wanted to be a part of, and that had a huge impact on the way that the conservative movement has been viewed over the past few years,” Mitchell told me. “It’s much more culturally cool and there’s a good vibe around conservatives, because people are energized. … And it’s not like boring old white people all the time. … You go to these Turning Point events, and [you would see] the [pro-gay and lesbian] Log Cabin Republicans, and the Black conservatives, and the Jewish coalition.”
Combining these annual Young Black Leadership, Young Women’s Leadership, and Young Jewish Leadership Summits, plus the tentpole Turning Point annual conference, young conservatives suddenly had large-scale gathering spaces on campuses and events around the country, complete with slick festival-style production and A-list political celebrities.
“Don. Jr was going, Tucker Carlson was going, the president was going — every hot new speaker on the conservative circuit was going to be at a Turning Point event,” Mitchell said.
And that new coolness didn’t remain in the political sphere: It blended into the mainstream culture, contributing to the sense that society in general was shifting right, Janfaza said.
“Republicans have been so good at politically coding culture [in the 2020s] — that was Charlie,” she said. “You see all these athletes and celebrities and others who are coming out and speaking out, and I don’t think that would have happened for anybody. He was unique in that way, where he had these relationships and people respected what he was doing in the cultural zeitgeist.”
Kirk’s mastery of social media was another of his skills. He changed the way political debate and discussion spread, while building a personal brand that stretched beyond his supporters and into the mainstream.
It’s not far-fetched to say that his followers and his opponents developed parasocial ties to him as they would to a celebrity, an artist, or even a podcaster. He was easily recognizable, his voice was ubiquitous online, whether in videos promoting or sharing his views, or in counters and rebuttals by his political opponents or critics. And he was well-known enough by people across the political (and apolitical) spectrum to be parodied on TV shows like South Park.
“I’ve seen, a lot of people saying, in the aftermath of his assassination, people have been saying that they felt like they knew him, even though they never did,” Janfaza told me about her own conversations with young people this week. “That’s something that is rare. You feel that with celebrities or with athletes or people like that, people who are public figures. But for there to be a political figure who can draw that type of appeal and that type of engagement — that is something that’s really hard to come by in this era of politics.”
And that was in no small part due to the way he used and quickly adapted to the changing political and social media ecosystem, employing short, quippy podcast clips, in-person confrontations like the one he was hosting when he was assassinated, and longer style debates of the “1 woke teen vs. 20 Trump supporters” style that now go viral.
“A lot of [his] most viral videos are of in-person events, the debate videos — those are things that are happening in person, and that’s what went so viral,” Janfaza said.
That sense of interpersonal connection boosted that sense of closeness between his audience and him, and it changed the way other conservative and liberal influencers began to share their own content.
“He had surpassed the Jesse Watters and the Tucker Carlsons and the Ben Shapiros and he was the top guy,” Mitchell said. “He reached so many different types of demographics and age groups, he just hit so many different aspects.”
It wasn’t just that Kirk had a podcast, or a youth organization, or a faith-based program, Mitchell told me. It was also that he developed a network of other young conservative influencers, like Candace Owens, Benny Johnson, and Alex Clark — a young conservative media universe that both saturates young conservative media diets and offers aspirational examples of the kind of activists and speakers some young conservatives want to be.
Finally, Kirk also tapped into the idiosyncrasies of Gen Z — a generation that is simultaneously more progressive and more Republican than young people have been in the recent past.
Central to this is a rejection of the establishment. As the mainstream of America grew more progressive in the 2010s, some young people’s rejection of the status quo, and distrust in established institutions and voices, created a kind of oppositional counterculture among the new youth. This led to an embrace of open debate, scrutiny, and skepticism that has made Gen Z more open to conservative and Republican entreaties over the last five years.
“I keep hearing from young people since this happened, that again, people may not have agreed with everything that he said, but they respected the fact that the conversation was being had at a time when young people are prioritizing freedom of speech more than I’ve ever seen before,” Janfaza told me.
She said that part of the frustration that young people have with the status quo, with older leaders and generations, including college administrators, politicians, or other activists, is the sense that “they are afraid to touch certain subjects.”
Kirk talked about anything and everything “and that’s what was so impressive about what he was doing, it was really tapping into that sense, and he was very cognizant of the fact that people wanted to have these conversations, the controversial conversations.”
That Kirk said controversial or, at times, bigoted things wasn’t something that turned off young people — even some of his opponents. His brand, and his practice of his belief in free speech, was about inviting debate, offering opportunities to disagree with someone or sharpen your own arguments.
And this brand of debate arose at a time when Gen Z was unwilling to be defined in neat ideological or partisan categories.
“Young people don’t want to be boxed in on one side or the other; they have nuance in their beliefs, they can take a little bit from this point of view and a little bit from that point of view, and they want to hear and have their positions challenged,” Janfaza said. “Kirk created a place where that’s possible. And there’s going to be a lot lost.”
2025-09-13 02:00:00
In the days since the killing of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, the overwhelming response on the left has been shock and horror. No one of prominence has justified the killing; hundreds, from Democratic Party leadership on down, have condemned political violence.
But below the unanimity is a subtler debate: not about how to respond to Kirk’s death, but how to think about his life.
On the one hand are sober commemorations of Kirk’s approach to democratic politics. Kirk, these authors say, had an admirable commitment to free discourse — going on tours where he would debate all sorts of people on often-hostile college campuses. He was killed while doing exactly this, answering a question about mass shootings.
I recently watched a video, posted on his own channel, of him debating a student about eating animals. The student easily beat Kirk, who wasn’t prepared for the arguments of a pro-life vegan weightlifter. Yet Kirk didn’t shirk from the challenge, taking the young man seriously and trying to rebut as best he could. There’s something admirably democratic about that.
He wasn’t just a guy who went around debating, but a plugged-in political operative close to the Trump White House who actively promoted extremism.
The other side argues that this portrayal leaves out crucial context. Kirk’s political activities, they argue, were often destructive of the democratic process he’s been suggested to embody. He wasn’t just a guy who went around debating, but a plugged-in political operative close to the Trump White House who actively promoted extremism. Mourning him uncritically whitewashes his role in the degradation of our politics.
Kirk vehemently defended Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election and sent seven buses of activists to the January 6 rally that culminated in the storming of the Capitol. His organization, Turning Point USA, maintained a “professor watch list” designed to chill left-wing speech on campus and lionized vigilante killer Kyle Rittenhouse. He endorsed authoritarian policies, demonized his political opponents, and said a tremendous amount of objectively bigoted stuff — warning of “prowling Blacks [who] go around for fun to go target white people” or that “Islam is the sword the left is using to slit the throat of America.”
So how should we remember Charlie Kirk — as someone who engaged in the process of democratic deliberation, or someone who degraded or coarsened it?
Both. Or, maybe, neither.
Kirk didn’t die of old age or even natural causes. Our posthumous conversation about his life is, at least for the moment, inextricably bound up with the manner of his death: He was assassinated in the midst of a public political debate.
Whenever a prominent political figure is killed, it invariably creates mistrust between political factions — something the extreme right is counting on in their post-Kirk killing push for a violent crackdown on the left. It is incumbent on every citizen in a democracy to think about how the way we talk about the killing plays into this dynamic: whether it intensifies partisan hatred or signals a renewed commitment to peaceful civil discourse.
I take that to be the intent of the people praising Kirk’s willingness to engage in the democratic process. But I think it’s possible to do so without sanitizing the ways in which his persona and political approach degraded that very same process — and how such whitewashing can provide cover for the further degradation of our politics in the weeks and months to come.
Threading this very fine needle, however, requires thinking carefully not just about what we say, but the way we say it.
I want you to think about two sentences.
The first: “Charlie Kirk had terrible politics, but no one should be killed for their beliefs.” The second: “No one should be killed for their beliefs, but Charlie Kirk had truly terrible politics.”
Semantically, the two sentences are the same. Yet the shift in syntax subtly, but fundamentally, changes the message being communicated.
The first sentence puts its emphasis on the killing: The concluding thought, the dominant consideration, is that political killing is wrong. When the speaker cops to their dislike of Kirk, they are doing so to emphasize that Kirk’s killing was an awful thing, even though I detested Kirk and what he stood for.
The second sentence, by contrast, uses an observation about Kirk’s badness to attenuate the condemnation of his killing. The speaker is signaling that the emphasis shouldn’t be on Kirk’s killing, but on his low moral character and malign political influence. At worst, such a formulation can seem like a coward’s justification: an attempt to insinuate that Kirk deserved to die without risking the social opprobrium that comes with outright saying it.
There is a certain strain of the Kirk conversation on the left that comes across as a lengthier version of that sentence. When the bulk of an article or video is about attacking Kirk, perfunctory condemnations of his killing do not change the impression that what you really want to say is that he kinda had it coming.
Which, to be clear, is an evil sentiment that must be rejected.
The killing of Charlie Kirk is, first and foremost, a tragedy for his family. This was a human being, no more or less human than the rest of us. He was the father of two young children; they and their mother now have to face life without him.
It’s also a nightmare for the country. Democracies shouldn’t have political killings, or even killings that seem political. They endanger the foundation of the system, the mutual trust between citizens that allows them to place their faith in elections to resolve their disputes.
Standing for democracy means standing on that principle — with no qualifications or cowardly clauses.
At the same time, I also think that there is some reason to prefer the first formulation — “Charlie Kirk had terrible politics, but no one should be killed for their beliefs” — over the shorter, simpler, “no one should be killed for their beliefs.”
Why? Because CBS just hosted Jack Posobiec to eulogize Kirk.
Posobiec is a serially dishonest political extremist who represents everything wrong with our politics. He became famous in 2016 for spreading the Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which led to a man opening fire in a Washington, DC, restaurant under the delusion that he was rescuing trafficked children hidden in its basement. Posobiec spent years associating professionally with white nationalists, including personally targeting Jewish journalists for harassment.
Yet in 2021, Kirk hired him at Turning Point USA and brought him into his confidence. As a TPUSA contributor, his behavior has remained extreme.
In 2024, Posobiec gave an allegedly ironic speech at a conservative conference where he called for “the end of democracy,” holding up a cross and saying, “We will replace it with this, right here.” I say allegedly because his 2024 book, titled Unhumans, explicitly states that “democracy has never worked to protect innocents from the unhumans.” These “unhumans?” Pretty much the entire political left.
The point is not that Charlie Kirk’s life can be reduced to his elevation of Jack Posobiec. Rather, it’s that Posobiec is an illustration of the kind of politics that Kirk helped drag into the Republican mainstream. When CBS chose to bring him on, on Thursday, to give a fawning interview about Kirk’s virtues, they were allowing Kirk’s posthumous glow to shine onto a living man who is currently working to set our politics aflame.
In fact, in that very interview, Posobiec implicitly calls for violent retribution. Inexplicably asked by host Major Garrett whether Kirk would prefer an “Old Testament” or “New Testament” response to his killing, Posobiec leaves little room for doubt.
“Charlie was a big fan of the Old Testament,” Posobiec says. “Justice needs to be done here.”
We cannot, as a polity, allow our horror at Kirk’s killing to rob us of our moral and political senses. We must not let people like Posobiec, who literally declares his political enemies “subhuman,” be given a perch to call down Biblical vengeance on the left merely because he had some proximity to Kirk, who knowingly embraced radicalism while alive. Just in the past few weeks, Kirk called for arresting anti-Trump mayors and accused Rep. Jasmine Crockett (who is Black) of being part of an “attempt to eliminate the white population in this country.” The method of his politics may have been democratic, but its substantive ends were bent towards repression and exclusion.
We can — and we must — full-throatedly condemn Charlie Kirk’s killing, without any cowardly “buts.” Yet we must also not allow the further degradation of our politics by Kirk’s living allies, who would turn him into a martyr to the cause of assailing democratic freedoms.
There are lines in both directions. And neither can be crossed.
2025-09-12 20:30:00
The other day, economist Tyler Cowen made an offhand observation that took me aback a bit: that the French, today, enjoy “the longest financed retirements ever seen in the history of the world.”
Verifying the “history of the world” part is beyond my historical skill level. That said, the OECD’s Pensions at a Glance report from 2023 confirms that French retirees are enjoying a lot of years off the job.
French men, per the report, left the labor force at an average age of 60.7. At that point, they have a life expectancy of 84, meaning they can expect 23.3 years in retirement, longer than any of the other countries the OECD examined (mostly rich peer nations plus a few select others). French women can expect 26.1 years in retirement, which is beaten by Luxembourg, Spain, Slovenia, and the world leader, Saudi Arabia, but still very high. (The Saudi case is more about women working fewer and shorter stints than in more liberal polities, as opposed to retirement policy.)
French men and women alike can expect over five additional years in retirement compared to Americans.
Incidentally, the French government fell this week in part due to opposition parties demanding that the centrist coalition in power go back on its decision to raise the formal retirement age from 62 to 64. Funding 23 to 26 years of retirement per person is expensive, which is exactly why President Emmanuel Macron raised the age in the first place, but when the elderly voter bloc is only growing in size, failing to pay that money out can be politically suicidal.
As a non-Frenchman, this fight inevitably makes me think about the coming retirement battle in the US. Our Social Security trust fund is due to be depleted in about eight years. Under current law, when that happens, retirees will see an across-the-board cut of about 23 percent in their benefit levels. Everything I know about how the US government works tells me it will not get to that point. The question, then, is what a deal to prevent those cuts would look like.
One obvious way to avoid the French predicament is to do what Macron did: raise the retirement age. There are two components to the aging problem hitting the US and other rich nations’ pension systems. One is that, because of the size of the baby boom population, more people are hitting retirement age than ever. The number of retired workers newly receiving Social Security hit 3.4 million in 2022, compared to under 2 million in 2000.
Raising the retirement age doesn’t solve this issue. But it does partially address the second issue, which is that the average time spent in retirement has risen as nutrition and medicine have improved. A man born in 1900 and turning 65 in 1965 could expect to live 12.9 more years. The Social Security Administration estimates that a man born in 1960 and turning 65 this year can expect 18.4 more years. Even accounting for the trend of people claiming Social Security later in life, that’s a good number of additional years that the program has to pay out per male retiree.
Between 2000 and 2022, the US gradually raised the retirement age for full Social Security benefits from 65 to 67. But most bipartisan proposals to reform Social Security (that is, proposals with any shot of passage) envision some kind of further age increase. Two years ago, Sens. Angus King (I-ME) and Bill Cassidy (R-LA) floated raising the normal retirement age to 70. The Bipartisan Policy Center brought together some ex-politicians and experts in both parties to put together a plan, which wound up advocating an age of 69.
One of the key political virtues of a retirement age increase is that it’s a benefit cut that doesn’t present itself quite as obviously as a benefit cut.
But it does amount to a cut, and potentially a large one. Right now, a 67-year-old woman can expect to live 18.5 more years. Suppose she has to wait until age 70 to claim the same amount of benefits she can now claim at 67. That eats up three of her 18.5 years of expected benefits, an over 16 percent cut. The cut for men, with our shorter lifespans, is even larger in percentage terms.
The most important question to ask about it, though, is whether it’s an across-the-board benefit cut, or in fact a regressive one. There are strong arguments that it is the latter.
The eminent Social Security expert and economist Alice Munnell recently highlighted a chart from the program’s actuary’s office that underlined a pretty concerning gap and trend:
If you don’t speak Social Security jargon, this can be a little hard to parse. Essentially, it’s comparing two groups: men born in 1930 considering retirement in 1992 and men born in 1960 considering retirement in 2022. In both groups there is a large gap in life expectancy between the people who earned the least in their careers and those who earned the most. In 1992, the highest-earning men could expect to live 8.4 years longer than the lowest-earning men. In 2022, they could expect 10.3 more years. (“Highest-earning” here means the highest-earning fifth, This is not exactly Elon Musk money: in 2020, being in the top quintile as a man meant an average monthly income of at least $6,391, or $76,692 annually.)
Put differently: not only is there a big life expectancy gap between rich and poor people, but also the gap seems to be growing.
This puts retirement age discussions in a different light. Suppose we’re considering raising not the normal retirement age (now 67) but the early age (now 62), at which point retirees can claim reduced benefits. If we raise the age by three years, then men in the highest income bracket get a cut of 3 divided by 25.6, or about 11 percent. Men in the lowest income bracket get a cut of 3 divided by 15.3, or almost 20 percent. The specific numbers are different if you’re considering raising the normal retirement age, or looking at female workers, but the overall takeaway is the same: raising the age of retirement amounts to a bigger cut for poorer workers.
Recently, economists Henry Aaron at Brookings and Mark Warshawsky got into a heated dispute about how to make sense of these numbers. Warshawsky argues against using life expectancy numbers like those above on the grounds that they inevitably require one to make projections (we don’t know, of course, how long people who retired in 2022 will in fact live, chiefly because most of them haven’t died yet), and for restricting analysis to men aged 65-69. Aaron argues that this is too restrictive (everyone, including insurers, relies heavily on life expectancy projections as well) and neglects that women, for instance, have seen lifespan inequality increase.
To my non-expert eye, Aaron has the better of this specific dispute. But it’s worth emphasizing that the lifespan gap between rich and poor need not be increasing in order for hiking the retirement age to be regressive on net. If, in 30 years, rich men are still living 10 more years in retirement than poor men, an increase in the retirement age will still hit poor men harder than rich men, even if the gap itself hasn’t grown.
The traditional Republican approach to Social Security has been to call for its shortfall to be closed entirely with benefit cuts; the traditional Democratic approach has been to rely entirely on tax hikes. Neither of these has any shot in hell of happening, especially if the Senate filibuster remains in place.
I highly doubt that there are 50 Republicans in the Senate now willing to vote for major benefit cuts, and there certainly aren’t the 60 that would actually be needed. Similarly, I put the odds of Democrats ever electing 60 senators willing to pass a huge payroll tax hike, even just on top earners, at near zero.
Sign up here to explore the big, complicated problems the world faces and the most efficient ways to solve them. Sent twice a week.
If there’s going to be reform before the trust fund runs out in 2033, it’s going to have to be on a bipartisan basis and involve pretty huge concessions by each side. And I suspect some kind of a retirement age increase will be part of the deal.
If that happens, the best option out there is one that Wendell Primus, Tara Watson, and Jack Smalligan outline in their recent Brookings reform plan. They would raise the retirement age — but only for the top 40 percent of earners. Most retirees would not see the age rise at all, while the top fifth of earners would see it rise to 70. Those in the 60th to 80th percentiles would see smaller hikes. Along with other progressive benefit cuts and tax hikes, the plan would fix the program’s solvency issue.
This retirement age change would make the system somewhat more complicated, as people would have to look up what their specific retirement age is based on their income. But it’s the only plan I’ve seen that keeps the most popular kind of benefit cut from being painfully regressive.
2025-09-12 19:30:00
When it comes to AI, as California goes, so goes the nation. The biggest state in the US by population is also the central hub of AI innovation for the entire globe, home to 32 of the world’s top 50 AI companies. That size and influence have given the Golden State the weight to become a regulatory trailblazer, setting the tone for the rest of the country on environmental, labor, and consumer protection regulations — and more recently, AI as well. Now, following the dramatic defeat of a proposed federal moratorium on states regulating AI in July, California policymakers see a limited window of opportunity to set the stage for the rest of the country’s AI laws.
This week, the California State Assembly is set to vote on SB 53, a bill that would require transparency reports from the developers of highly powerful, “frontier” AI models. The models targeted represent the cutting-edge of AI — extremely adept generative systems that require massive amounts of data and computing power, like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, xAI’s Grok, and Anthropic’s Claude. The bill, which has already passed the state Senate, must pass the California State Assembly before it goes to the governor to either be vetoed or signed into law.
AI can offer tremendous benefits, but as the bill is meant to address, it’s not without risks. And while there is no shortage of existing risks from issues like job displacement and bias, SB 53 focuses on possible “catastrophic risks” from AI. Such risks include AI-enabled biological weapons attacks and rogue systems carrying out cyberattacks or other criminal activity that could conceivably bring down critical infrastructure. Such catastrophic risks represent widespread disasters that could plausibly threaten human civilization at local, national, and global levels. They represent risks of the kind of AI-driven disasters that have not yet occurred, rather than already-realized, more personal harms like AI deepfakes.
Exactly what constitutes a catastrophic risk is up for debate, but SB 53 defines it as a “foreseeable and material risk” of an event that causes more than 50 casualties or over $1 billion in damages that a frontier model plays a meaningful role in contributing to. How fault is determined in practice would be up to the courts to interpret. It’s hard to define catastrophic risk in law when the definition is far from settled, but doing so can help us protect against both near- and long-term consequences.
By itself, a single state bill focused on increased transparency will probably not be enough to prevent devastating cyberattacks and AI-enabled chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons. But the bill represents an effort to regulate this fast-moving technology before it outpaces our efforts at oversight.
SB 53 is the third state-level bill to try to specifically focus on regulating AI’s catastrophic risks, after California’s SB 1047, which passed the legislature only to be vetoed by the governor — and New York’s Responsible AI Safety and Education (RAISE) Act, which recently passed the New York legislature and is now awaiting Gov. Kathy Hochul’s approval.
SB 53, which was introduced by state Sen. Scott Wiener in February, requires frontier AI companies to develop safety frameworks that specifically detail how they approach catastrophic risk reduction. Before deploying their models, companies would have to publish safety and security reports. The bill also gives them 15 days to report “critical safety incidents” to the California Office of Emergency Services, and establishes whistleblower protections for employees who come forward about unsafe model deployment that contributes to catastrophic risk. SB 53 aims to hold companies publicly accountable for their AI safety commitments, with a financial penalty up to $1 million per violation.
“The science of how to make AI safe is rapidly evolving, and it’s currently difficult for policymakers to write prescriptive technical rules for how companies should manage safety.”
Thomas Woodside, co-founder of Secure AI Project
In many ways, SB 53 is the spiritual successor to SB 1047, also introduced by Wiener.
Both cover large models that are trained at 10^26 FLOPS, a measurement of very significant computing power used in a variety of AI legislation as a threshold for significant risk, and both bills strengthen whistleblower protections. Where SB 53 departs from SB 1047 is its focus on transparency and prevention
While SB 1047 aimed to hold companies liable for catastrophic harms caused by their AI systems, SB 53 formalizes sharing safety frameworks, which many frontier AI companies, including Anthropic, already do voluntarily. It focuses squarely on the heavy-hitters, with its rules applying only to companies that generate $500 million or more in gross revenue.
“The science of how to make AI safe is rapidly evolving, and it’s currently difficult for policymakers to write prescriptive technical rules for how companies should manage safety,” said Thomas Woodside, the co-founder of Secure AI Project, an advocacy group that aims to reduce extreme risks from AI and is a sponsor of the bill, over email. “This light touch policy prevents backsliding on commitments and encourages a race to the top rather than a race to the bottom.”
Part of the logic of SB 53 is the ability to adapt the framework as AI progresses. The bill authorizes the California Attorney General to change the definition of a large developer after January 1, 2027, in response to AI advances.
Proponents of the bill are optimistic about its chances of being signed by the governor should it pass the legislature, which it is expected to. On the same day that Gov. Gavin Newsom vetoed SB 1047, he commissioned a working group focusing solely on frontier models. The resulting report by the group provided the foundation for SB 53. “I would guess, with roughly 75 percent confidence, that SB 53 will be signed into law by the end of September,” said Dean Ball — former White House AI policy adviser, vocal SB 1047 critic, and SB 53 supporter — to Transformer.
But several industry organizations have rallied in opposition, arguing that additional compliance regulation would be expensive, given that AI companies should already be incentivized to avoid catastrophic harms. OpenAI has lobbied against it and technology trade group Chamber of Progress argues that the bill would require companies to file unnecessary paperwork and unnecessarily stifle innovation.
“Those compliance costs are merely the beginning,” Neil Chilson, head of AI policy at the Abundance Institute, told me over email. “The bill, if passed, would feed California regulators truckloads of company information that they will use to design a compliance industrial complex.”
By contrast, Anthropic enthusiastically endorsed the bill in its current state on Monday. “The question isn’t whether we need AI governance – it’s whether we develop it thoughtfully today or reactively tomorrow,” the company explained in a blog post. “SB 53 offers a solid path toward the former.” (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI, while Future Perfect is funded in part by the BEMC Foundation, whose major funder was also an early investor in Anthropic. Neither organization has editorial input into our content.)
The debate over SB 53 ties into broader disagreements about whether states or the federal government should drive AI safety regulation. But since the vast majority of these companies are based in California, and nearly all do business there, the state’s legislation matters for the entire country.
“A federally led transparency approach is far, far, far preferable to the multi-state alternative,” where a patchwork of state regulations can conflict with each other, said Cato Institute technology policy fellow Matthew Mittelsteadt in an email. But “I love that the bill has a provision that would allow companies to defer to a future alternative federal standard.”
“The natural question is whether a federal approach can even happen,” Mittelsteadt continued. “In my opinion, the jury is out on that but the possibility is far more likely that some suggest. It’s been less than 3 years since ChatGPT was released. That is hardly a lifetime in public policy.”
But in a time of federal gridlock, frontier AI advancements won’t wait for Washington.
The bill’s focus on, and framing of, catastrophic risks is not without controversy.
The idea of catastrophic risk comes from the fields of philosophy and quantitative risk assessment. Catastrophic risks are downstream of existential risks, which threaten humanity’s actual survival or else permanently reduce our potential as a species. The hope is that if these doomsday scenarios are identified and prepared for, they can be prevented or at least mitigated.
But if existential risks are clear — the end of the world, or at least as we know it — what falls under the catastrophic risk umbrella, and the best way to prioritize those risks, depends on who you ask. There are longtermists, people focused primarily on humanity’s far future, who place a premium on things like multiplanetary expansion for human survival. They’re often chiefly concerned by risks from rogue AI or extremely lethal pandemics. Neartermists are more preoccupied with existing risks, like climate change, mosquito vector-borne disease, or algorithmic bias. These camps can blend into one another — neartermists would also like to avoid getting hit by asteroids that could wipe out a city, and longtermists don’t dismiss risks like climate change — and the best way to think of them is like two ends of a spectrum rather than a strict binary.
You can think of the AI ethics and AI safety frameworks as the near- and longtermism of AI risk, respectively. AI ethics is about the moral implications of the ways the technology is deployed, including things like algorithmic bias and human rights, in the present. AI safety focuses on catastrophic risks and potential existential threats. But, as Vox’s Julia Longoria reported in the Good Robot series for Unexplainable, there are interpersonal conflicts leading these two factions to work against each other, much of which has to do with emphasis. (AI ethics people argue that catastrophic risk concerns overhype AI capabilities and ignores its impact on vulnerable people right now, while AI safety people worry that if we focus too much on the present, we won’t have ways to mitigate larger-scale problems down the line.)
But behind the question of near versus long-term risks lies another one: what, exactly, constitutes a catastrophic risk?
SB 53 initially set the standard for catastrophic risk at 100 rather than 50 casualties — similar to New York’s RAISE Act — before halving the threshold in an amendment to the bill. While the average person might consider, say, many people driven to suicide after interacting with AI chatbots to be catastrophic, such a risk is outside of the bill’s scope. (The California State Assembly just passed a separate bill to regulate AI companion chatbots by preventing them from participating in discussions about suicidal ideation or sexually explicit material.)
SB 53 focuses squarely on harms from “expert-level” frontier AI model assistance in developing or deploying chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear weapons; committing crimes like cyberattacks or fraud; and “loss of control” scenarios where AIs go rogue, behaving deceptively to avoid being shut down and replicating themselves without human oversight. For example, an AI model could be used to guide the creation of a new deadly virus that infects millions and kneecaps the global economy.
“The 50 to 100 deaths or a billion dollars in property damage is just a proxy to capture really widespread and substantial impact,” said Scott Singer, lead author of the California Report for Frontier AI Policy, which helped inform the basis of the bill. “We do look at like AI-enabled or AI potentially [caused] or correlated suicide. I think that’s like a very serious set of issues that demands policymaker attention, but I don’t think it’s the core of what this bill is trying to address.”
Transparency is helpful in preventing such catastrophes because it can help raise the alarm before things get out of hand, allowing AI developers to correct course. And in the event that such efforts fail to prevent a mass casualty incident, enhanced safety transparency can help law enforcement and the courts figure out what went wrong. The challenge there is that it can be difficult to determine how much a model is accountable for a specific outcome, Irene Solaiman, the chief policy officer at Hugging Face, a collaboration platform for AI developers, told me over email.
“These risks are coming and we should be ready for them and have transparency into what the companies are doing,” said Adam Billen, the vice president of public policy at Encode, an organization that advocates for responsible AI leadership and safety. (Encode is another sponsor of SB 53.) “But we don’t know exactly what we’re going to need to do once the risks themselves appear. But right now, when those things aren’t happening at a large scale, it makes sense to be sort of focused on transparency.”
However, a transparency-focused bill like SB 53 is insufficient for addressing already-existing harms. When we already know something is a problem, the focus should be on mitigating it.
“Maybe four years ago, if we had passed some sort of transparency legislation like SB 53 but focused on those harms, we might have had some warning signs and been able to intervene before the widespread harms to kids started happening,” Billen said. “We’re trying to kind of correct that mistake on these problems and get some sort of forward-facing information about what’s happening before things get crazy, basically.”
SB 53 risks being both overly narrow and unclearly scoped. We have not yet faced these catastrophic harms from frontier AI models, and the most devastating risks might take us entirely by surprise. We don’t know what we don’t know.
It’s also certainly possible that models trained below 10^26 FLOPS, which aren’t covered by SB 53, have the potential to cause catastrophic harm under the bill’s definition. The EU AI Act sets the threshold for “systemic risk” at the smaller 10^25 FLOPS, and there’s disagreement about the utility of computational power as a regulatory standard at all, especially as models become more efficient.
As it stands right now, SB 53 occupies a different niche from bills focused on regulating AI use in mental healthcare or data privacy, reflecting its authors’ desire not to step on the toes of other legislation or bite off more than it can reasonably chew. But Chilson, the Abundance Institute’s head of AI policy, is part of a camp that sees SB 53’s focus on catastrophic harm as a “distraction” from the real near-term benefits and concerns, like AI’s potential to accelerate the pace of scientific research or create nonconsensual deepfake imagery, respectively.
That said, deepfakes could certainly cause catastrophic harm. For instance, imagine a hyper-realistic deepfake impersonating a bank employee to commit fraud at a multibillion-dollar scale, said Nathan Calvin, the vice president of state affairs and general counsel at Encode. “I do think some of the lines between these things in practice can be a bit blurry, and I think in some ways…that is not necessarily a bad thing,” he told me.
It could be that the ideological debate around what qualifies as catastrophic risks, and whether that’s worthy of our legislative attention, is just noise. The bill is intended to regulate AI before the proverbial horse is out of the barn. The average person isn’t going to worry about the likelihood of AI sparking nuclear warfare or biological weapons attacks, but they do think about how algorithmic bias might affect their lives in the present. But in trying to prevent the worst-case scenarios, perhaps we can also avoid the “smaller,” nearer harms. If they’re effective, forward-facing safety provisions designed to prevent mass casualty events will also make AI safer for individuals.
If SB 53 passes the legislature and gets signed by Gov. Newsom into law, it could inspire other state attempts at AI regulation through a similar framework, and eventually encourage federal AI safety legislation to move forward.
How we think about risk matters because it determines where we focus our efforts on prevention. I’m a firm believer in the value of defining your terms, in law and debate. If we’re not on the same page about what we mean when we talk about risk, we can’t have a real conversation.
2025-09-12 18:45:00
Mere hours after the killing of Charlie Kirk, President Donald Trump blamed the “radical left” and signaled a crackdown was coming — despite the killer’s identity and motives remaining unknown.
In an Oval Office statement on Wednesday, Trump said his administration would “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it.”
What exactly he might mean, and what it will look like in practice, remains to be seen. But several prominent right-wing commentators called for taking action against progressive donors and nonprofit groups that they asserted (with zero evidence) were somehow responsible for the killing. Others called for action against the Democratic Party itself.
It’s a dangerous moment, similar to those many other countries — including the United States — have faced in the past. An awful act of violence like Kirk’s killing can become the justification for a government campaign of repression against political opponents who had nothing to do with that killing.
One dark way situations like this often play out is that, as outrage is peaking, the ruling party passes “emergency laws” stripping civil liberties protections or giving the government new legal powers to go after its perceived internal enemies.
But, in the US right now, there’s a huge obstacle to something like that: the Senate filibuster.
The filibuster — a procedural maneuver with which a bill that lacks the support of 60 senators can be blocked — means Trump and the GOP’s 53-seat Senate majority can’t pass whatever they want into law. Either they have to abide by the complex and restrictive budget reconciliation process (which is exempt from the filibuster), or else they need to win over some Senate Democrats.
So, as long as the Senate filibuster sticks around, any repression campaign from Trump would have to rely on existing law or executive authority — or get Democratic votes.
Which is why it’s ironic that, in the days before the shooting, Democrats were in the midst of psyching themselves up for a confrontation that could very plausibly lead to the filibuster’s demise.
For years, the filibuster has been a punching bag for progressives, who blame it for restricting what Democratic presidents can do. Many would be happy to see it go, even now.
And yet, Trump’s attempt to centralize power — and this talk about taking action against progressive donors and groups — shows why the filibuster is actually quite valuable in times of authoritarian threat. If it goes, that’s one fewer guardrail still holding Trump back.
Before Kirk’s killing, the hottest topic among Democrats was whether the party’s senators should filibuster to block a new funding bill — and force a federal government shutdown until their demands are met.
Back in March, the last government funding expiration date, Senate Democrats decided not to force a shutdown via filibuster, and the party’s base was apoplectic. Now, the new deadline of September 30 is approaching, and Democrats are debating what they should do this time.
The loudest voices calling for a shutdown fight are motivated by deep concern over Trump’s authoritarianism and a belief that Democrats need to do more to fight back against it. Demanding new restrictions on Trump’s authoritarian moves — and forcing a government shutdown if those demands aren’t met — is one way to do that, my former colleague Ezra Klein argues.
It’s important, though, to try to think a few steps ahead about how a shutdown fight will play out.
Let’s say Senate Democrats really do shut down the government via filibuster, making demands that Trump and Senate Republicans consider unacceptable. And let’s assume — a big assumption, but let’s go with it — that Democrats actually close ranks, hold firm to their demands, and resolve to keep the government shut down indefinitely.
What happens next? I see no plausible world in which Trump meekly caves. Instead, what will happen is that the Senate GOP will face increasing pressure — from Trump and their base — to ram through a rules change that ends the filibuster and gives them the power to make new laws on their own.
Some might argue that Senate Republicans always cave to Trump when he wants something. But that simply isn’t true. Trump has wanted the filibuster gone since the first year of his first term — but Senate Republicans have consistently rejected his demands, preferring to keep it. That’s eight years of not caving on this particular topic.
Senate procedure is a funny thing. It takes 60 votes to overcome a filibuster for a typical bill. But, a majority of 51 senators — or 50 plus the vice president — can, if they so desire, ram through a rules change getting rid of that requirement. This is known as the “nuclear option.”
As you can tell from the name, the nuclear option is considered extreme, and there are longstanding norms against casually invoking it. Still, Senate leaders from both parties in recent years have from time to time used it to alter the rules around confirming nominees; in fact, Republicans deployed it this very week. But for legislation, the current 60-vote threshold to overcome a filibuster has remained unchanged since 1975.
However, if Senate Republicans become convinced that Democrats are abusing the filibuster, if they think Democrats have become completely intransigent in forcing a shutdown with no end in sight, and if they face enough pressure from the right, they will be provoked to end it.
That is: Klein’s shutdown strategy, intended to resist Trump’s authoritarianism, could well result in Trump attaining more power.
Let me spell out this dynamic again. Currently, Senate Republicans do not want to eliminate the filibuster. They’re happy to keep it around (it’s a convenient excuse for telling Trump that no, they can’t do this or that). But, if Senate Democrats use the filibuster in a way they feel is completely unacceptable — like, say, shutting down the government indefinitely if demands they consider unrealistic aren’t met — and if they feel sufficient heat from the right, they will change their minds.
Klein argues that Senate Democrats providing their votes to a status quo government funding bill would be “complicity.”
But, if you’re highly concerned about the authoritarian threat posed by Trump, why would you stoke a confrontation that could well end in one of the last major constraints on his power being removed?
What does a world without the filibuster look like?
Many progressives have long said it would look quite good, actually — better for the country and better for Democrats, and the progressive agenda specifically.
But they’re relying on out-of-date arguments honed in a very different political world — and failing to update their thinking for the threat Trump now poses.
Progressive anti-filibuster sentiment began to congeal in 2009, when Klein and others made the case that the Senate would be better off without it. The immediate context was annoyance that President Barack Obama and Democratic congressional majorities were being hampered from passing the agenda of their liking. The debate roared back in a similar context when President Joe Biden took office in 2021.
The more high-minded argument was that the filibuster is simply bad for democratic accountability. A president and congressional majorities should, the argument goes, be able to actually pass what they want to pass. A majority should get to enact its agenda, and then it will be up to voters to decide whether they like that agenda — and render their verdict in the next election.
Paired with this high-minded argument is an ideologically self-interested one. Progressives believed that ending the filibuster would be more helpful to their ideological and policy aims more than it would be to conservatives’ aims. After all, the argument went, all conservatives want to do with the government is cut taxes; progressives actually want to do things to help people, and the filibuster is holding them back.
The opening months of the second Trump administration should dispel this dangerous complacency — and should especially dispel any illusion that the right doesn’t want to “do anything” with government.
Trump’s appointees have displayed enormous imagination in how they’ve weaponized federal powers to threaten and coerce various societal actors. But they could do much, much more if they had greater authority to rewrite laws.
The filibuster effectively constricts the horizon of the possible. Trump’s retribution agenda is so centered on executive branch powers for that reason. In Project 2025 and other efforts, right-wing thinkers spent years dreaming up ways to enact their agenda through the executive branch, because passing new (non-reconciliation) laws seemed so implausible.
If, all of a sudden, the filibuster went away, and it became possible for Trump to pass whatever new laws he wanted — so long as he bullied enough GOP swing votes into going along — the horizon of the possible would change.
Here’s one concrete example: Back in March, Trump issued an executive order making various demands on states to change their voting systems. But the order is dubiously legal, and it’s unclear how impactful it will be. A new law would be a much more powerful and effective way for Trump to reshape elections.
That gets to one glaring flaw in the aforementioned high-minded argument for filibuster reform. The argument holds that a majority should get to enact its agenda unchecked by the minority and that it should be up to voters to render their verdict on that agenda in the next election.
But what if a president, free of the filibuster, passes new laws interfering with that next election? What if a president, after a national tragedy, seizes the moment to pass emergency laws cracking down on his political opponents?
At a time when so many guardrails holding Trump back are bending and breaking, it seems quite dangerous for Democrats to risk gambling away one of the biggest ones remaining.
2025-09-12 18:00:00
BROOKLYN, New York — When people imagine what nature looks like, this probably wouldn’t be it. On an overcast afternoon in August, I stood next to a strip of plants between the sidewalk and the street in Central Brooklyn, no more than a block from a six-lane highway. An ambulance wailed in the distance. It smelled of exhaust. This was New York City after all.
But this narrow patch of green was full of life — of what you might call nature. Furry bumblebees hovered around clusters of shaggy white flowers. Iridescent flies appeared and then disappeared, like flecks of glitter briefly catching the light. And on the underside of a few leaves were the unmistakable pinhead-sized eggs of a monarch butterfly, which look like tiny lemon candies.
Cities like New York are obviously not known for their wildlife. You won’t find wolves or jaguars or other charismatic megafauna strolling the streets or hunting in big city parks. But if you know what to look for and take a moment to observe your surroundings, you can find interesting and even rare animal species everywhere. I recently learned, for example, that NYC has more than 200 species of native bees, including the Gotham sweat bee — a species that scientists first discovered in the city.
In the summer and early fall, NYC is also home to a large number of monarch butterflies, America’s most iconic bug. Nationwide, these Halloween-colored insects are imperiled. Their population has declined so much in recent decades that the Biden administration proposed listing them late last year under the Endangered Species Act, a powerful environmental law that’s considered a last resort for species facing extinction. Yet in NYC, you can still find them all over — even in tiny patches of plants near a highway. This is a pretty strange situation: A species that may be federally protected in the same category as animals like sea turtles and manatees is fluttering around the largest and most densely populated city in the country.
How are monarchs holding on in New York when they seem to be in such steep declines nationwide?
Over a few weeks in August, I traveled to urban ecosystems across the city to try to answer this question. And along the way, I learned something valuable — that helping wildlife is a lot easier than you might think.
Monarchs aren’t just nice to look at. They also lead miraculous, almost improbable, lives. Like many birds, whales, and caribou, monarchs migrate. Each fall, nearly all the butterflies that live east of the Rocky Mountains — including those in New York City — fly to the same grove of fir trees in the mountains of Central Mexico, often traveling some 2,000 miles. They ride out winter clumped together on the trees, often in such great numbers that they cause the branches to droop.
Their springtime behavior is even more remarkable: The butterflies migrate back north for the summer, but it takes them two to three generations to get there. The adults in Mexico will fly to the southern US, lay eggs, and die. Their offspring will complete the next leg, flying a bit further north. That happens again and again until the butterflies reach the northern US and parts of southern Canada, where they breed and their offspring start the process all over.
All kinds of mysteries surround this process — including how tiny-brained insects coordinate an intergenerational relay race — but what’s clear is that fewer butterflies are making it to Mexico. Each winter, scientists measure the number of acres occupied by monarchs in those fir trees. Between 1993 and 2002, the first 10 years of monitoring, butterflies were clumped on trees across an average of about 21 acres. That’s an area roughly equal to 16 American football fields. During this past winter, however, monarchs occupied just 4.4 acres.
Scientists blame these declines largely on the loss of milkweed, the only plant that monarch caterpillars can eat. Milkweed once grew abundantly throughout the Midwest in places like Iowa and Kansas, the core breeding range for monarchs. Yet in recent decades, herbicides sprayed by farmers on corn and soybean fields, which blanket the region, destroyed an enormous number of milkweed plants. Researchers estimate that between 1999 and 2014, herbicides and the destruction of grasslands for farmland, homes, and other infrastructure killed more than 860 million stems of milkweed in the Midwest. These chemicals — which farmers still use — also kill native wildflowers that provide food for adult monarchs, fueling their long migrations.
It’s no surprise, then, that conserving monarchs requires protecting what little milkweed remains, and planting more of it. That’s why NYC is important. Even though it’s built for humans and full of concrete and traffic, the city has been creating pockets of habitat that sustain monarchs and other native bugs. And if that approach can work here, it can work anywhere.
While monarchs live complicated lives, their needs are fairly simple: milkweed plants for their larvae, or caterpillars, and pesticide-free wildflowers for the adults. “The average insect spends three-quarters of its life as a larva or an egg,” said David Lohman, an insect ecologist at the City University of New York. “The whole habitat for that part of the life for most insects, including monarchs, is a single plant.”
If seeded with the right plants — specifically, with native plants, those that evolved here — even small spaces in cities can meet those needs. For example, the patch of plants I visited in Central Brooklyn, part of a community garden called Prospect Farm, was only four feet wide, but it had more than a dozen stems of common milkweed. That’s where I spotted the monarch eggs: They were on the underside of the plants’ thick, oblong leaves. It’s hard to overstate the value of native plants, like milkweed or bee balm. They’re ecosystem anchors, drawing in native insects, which in turn draw in native birds, building out links in the food chain.
“It’s amazing that if I plant these plants, I’m automatically supporting pollinators or beneficial insects,” said Matthew Morrow, the head of horticulture at NYC’s Department of Parks and Recreation (NYC Parks), who says he’s known within the agency as the native plant proselytizer. “Run that up the chain, and I’m supporting bird life and other things that feed on all of these creatures.”
Until recently, native plants, other than trees, weren’t common in gardens, parks, and other green city spaces. Professional and home gardeners gravitated toward nonnative ornamentals, like daffodils and tulips, which were widely available in nurseries and bred to fit a conventional aesthetic: tidy and uniform with big flowers, bold colors, and a long bloom. Native plants, meanwhile, tend to have a different look, appearing messier and sporting subtler flowers. As important as common milkweed is for monarchs and other insects, for example, it looks, as its name might suggest, a bit like a weed, especially when it’s not flowering.
But attitudes are changing. For many years, scientists and environmental advocacy organizations have been trying to raise awareness about insect declines and the value of locally adapted plants. Those efforts are paying off: Gardeners in parks, suburbs, and city homes are now planting far more native plants. They’re also becoming slightly more comfortable with a wild aesthetic, in some cases even leaving sticks and dead leaves around because they know insects nest in them.
“My goal is to remove the invasives and to replant with native plants,” said Emily Stringer, a professional gardener at De Matti Park, a small green space in Staten Island. Native plants like mountain mint, a perennial with pale lavender flowers and mint-scented leaves, offer much more ecological value than some ornamentals, said Stringer, who works for NYC Parks.
She’s been transforming De Matti into a native plant refuge since the start of the pandemic, she told me, when I met her in the park on a hot August afternoon. “There’s a lot more life, no doubt about it,” Stringer said, speaking with a strong Staten Island accent.
During a brief walk through the park, I saw a dozen or so monarchs bouncing around the native flowers. At one point, something large and flying appeared in front of a cluster of purple flowers. It was the size of a golf ball, with a green head, a shrimp-like tail, and a comically long proboscis — the straw-like mouth part that insects use to drink nectar. Its wings moved so fast they were a blur, allowing it to hover. I later learned this was a hummingbird moth.
This shift to native plants is happening in all kinds of spaces across the city, including big parks, small parks, community gardens, and backyards. I even met a guy who does what he calls “guerilla gardening” in northern Manhattan. He plants milkweed and other native plants in parks and tree wells, typically without explicit permission from city officials. It’s these efforts that are helping sustain monarchs and other native bugs in New York.
“Every little bit counts,” said Keith De Cesare, a guerrilla gardener who also describes himself as an educator, artist, and naturalist. “No spot is too small.”
(I asked NYC Parks about Keith. A spokesperson told me that “guerrilla gardeners are often well-intentioned and deserve recognition,” but some of the species they plant might not be appropriate for the location. “Certain plants can grow too tall and obstruct sight lines, while others may fall over, creating potential slip and trip hazards,” the spokesperson told me.)
On a sunny morning in late August, I visited Brooklyn Bridge Park, an 85-acre public landscape along the East River, which separates Manhattan from Brooklyn. It’s one of my favorite spots in the city — a park near the Brooklyn Bridge built atop old shipping docks that looks onto downtown Manhattan.
My first stop was a small field of wildflowers on Pier 6, not far from the water. In the background was the Manhattan skyline, where helicopters buzzed like flies overhead, while in the foreground was a chunky monarch caterpillar. I watched the animal — an accordion of black, white, and yellow — chew its way through a milkweed leaf, and then another. It was seemingly oblivious to the fact that it lives in one of New York’s wealthiest areas.
As I moseyed along the edge of the flower field, I watched adult monarchs, too. They flew from flower to flower, moving up and down as if guided by a conductor, occasionally pausing on a milkweed leaf to lay a single egg.
Brooklyn Bridge Park is entirely human-made and built over what was essentially an industrial wasteland. But now it’s a complex ecosystem and a refuge for a number of important species, including monarchs. That ecosystem is rooted, unsurprisingly, in native plants: They’ve been a part of the park since it opened in 2010, and even more so now. During my visit, Evelyn Manlove, a horticulturist at the park, told me she chooses plants based in part on the insects they may attract, like milkweed for monarchs and curly everlasting, a perennial wildflower, for lady butterflies.
These city spaces are essential for animals, but they’re not just for them. They clearly help humans, too. Plenty of research shows that spending time in parks can lower stress and the risk of psychiatric disorders. Scientists have also linked listening to birdsong to mental health benefits — and native plants tend to attract more birds. I find that watching butterflies move through space or caterpillars chew through leaves is almost meditative. Maybe it’s the experience of awe. Maybe it’s the benefit of just drawing your attention to the present.
On another afternoon, I traveled further north in Brooklyn to a small patch of prairie near the Williamsburg neighborhood. The prairie, which is open to the public, is a green dot in an ocean of gray: To the east and south was the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, a major highway, and to the west and north were warehouses, parking lots, and apartment buildings.
This space was once a cemetery for the US Navy. But long after it was decommissioned — the cemetery ran out of space and the Navy decided to close it and moved most but not all of the bodies to another cemetery — a nonprofit called Brooklyn Greenway Initiative turned it into a meadow. It’s an oasis of sorts, filled with more than 100 native plant species including common milkweed, coneflowers, and asters. From within the prairie, now known as the Naval Cemetery Landscape, you can hear cars honking and engines revving, but also the trill of a common yellowthroat — a yellow and green warbler — or the high-pitched cheep of a cedar waxwing.
“When the world overwhelms, we can find comfort in nature’s resilience. We, too, can be the trees.”
— visitor at the naval cemetery landscape in brooklyn
The city-nature dichotomy offers something special, said Avvah Rossi, the head of horticulture for Brooklyn Greenway Initiative. And that something is best captured by a public notebook tethered to a bench in the meadow. It’s essentially a guestbook for visitors, and part of a project led by another organization, called Nature Sacred, to study the effect of green spaces on human well-being.
“Grateful for the softness and pause that nature provides us,” one person wrote. “When the world overwhelms, we can find comfort in nature’s resilience. We, too, can be the trees.”
“I feel less alone surrounded by nature,” wrote another. “I can feel the trees whispering to each other. I don’t understand them, but they make me feel included. It’s nice to be part of something.”
“Thank you, tree, for providing a space to piss on,” wrote a third person.
It’s not like New York is some kind of insect sanctuary. Like any city, it’s full of concrete and traffic and light pollution that can make it hard for monarchs and other native bugs to survive. Monarchs use sunlight to navigate. Some moths, meanwhile, have been shown, rather incredibly, to navigate with the stars. Both of these feats are likely much harder in a city full of artificial light. Research also makes it clear that cities alone can’t save monarchs — rural areas, including agricultural lands, also need to play a role.
Yet urban pockets of native plants clearly help. That’s what I find so special about monarchs and other native bugs: It doesn’t take much to support them. Bringing back California condors or coral reefs is not something that normal people can easily do, or know how to do. But we can all help conserve monarchs and myriad other animals by simply planting some native flowers.
Earlier in the summer, I met a naturalist named Chris Kreussling at his home in Flatbush, a neighborhood in Central Brooklyn below Prospect Park. His place was easy to pick out since his front yard is basically a prairie.
Kreussling’s home is perhaps the best example of what one person can do for native insects in New York City. A garden of native plants envelops his home in bright yellows, purples, and pinks, turning it into a hotspot for native insects. “My garden is my main observatory,” said Kreussling, a retired software developer who loves bugs. “You can just see how much biodiversity there is.”
As we walked around the garden, Kreussling, who helps run a local organization to conserve pollinators, pointed out what I would normally miss. Weevils, tiny beetles with large snouts. The nests of cicada-killer wasps. Leaves with perfectly round holes made by leaf-cutter bees (the bees build nest cavities with the pieces). I was struck by the simple realization that this whole tangled world of life is invisible until you pay attention.
Kreussling told me that sometimes people ask him what he does about insect damage on his plants. “I celebrate it,” he told me. It means the garden is doing its job, he continued — it feeds life.
As we searched for critters, a monarch flew by and landed on a plant called ironweed, which has small purple flowers shaped like pom-poms. I hustled over to watch it feed as Kreussling continued looking for less obvious critters. Some scientists call monarchs the pandas of the insect world: They draw a lot of attention, and often overshadow less charismatic species.
That attention, however, is valuable, said Emily Erickson, an urban ecologist and monarch expert. It can inspire people to care about the natural world, she said, and the lesser-known and less charming creatures that inhabit it. “People seem to be more likely to do positive actions if they feel more connected to what they see flying around in their yard,” she said.
I don’t have a yard. I don’t even have a stoop. Can city-folk like me help, too?
While reporting this story, I learned about an organization called Monarch Watch that runs a butterfly tagging program to help monitor the monarch migration. The group sells tiny, lightweight stickers — the tags, each printed with a unique ID — designed to adhere to monarch wings. And each fall, volunteers around the country apply those stickers to monarchs as they’re traveling south. Then in the winter, Monarch Watch records the IDs they find on monarchs in Mexico. The data the group collects helps scientists figure out where monarchs are coming from and how many are dying along the way.
Tagging is a way for anyone to support monarchs, but first, of course, you need a butterfly. Volunteers often catch the insects in the wild with nets. I, however, decided to try to raise one in my apartment, a la elementary school activity.
On an August evening, I went to Central Park and found a monarch egg on a common milkweed leaf. I took it home and put the leaf in a Tupperware container in my kitchen.
By morning, the egg had hatched into a caterpillar. It was no larger than an eyelash, and every day, it doubled in size. When the caterpillar got too big for its exoskeleton, it’d wiggle out of it, eat the remains, and form a new one — a zero-waste bug! The caterpillar chewed through milkweed leaves so quickly that it became hard to keep its crucial food supply stocked. (Let’s just say there might be a few leaves and branches missing from milkweed plants in my neighborhood.)
One morning, when it was a little larger than a Tootsie Roll, I noticed the caterpillar hanging upside down from a leaf, like a sleeping bag pinned up to dry. Then it turned into a chrysalis, a hard shell that protects the insect as it transforms into a butterfly. It was like a theatrical costume change: Within minutes, the caterpillar had unzipped its old skin, revealing the emerald green chrysalis underneath.
About 10 days later, there was a butterfly. We — even my bug-unfriendly partner — were surprisingly excited. We had raised a butterfly! Her wings were missing two dots normally found on males, suggesting she was a female.
I delicately picked her up and carefully placed the sticker, which has a strong, pressure-sensitive adhesive, on her wings. We then carried her to a nearby park, hiked to a field of native wildflowers, and let her go.
She’s just one butterfly, and her chance of making it to Mexico is slim. A large portion of monarchs die along the way from car strikes, storms, and a lack of pesticide-free flowers from here to Central Mexico, underscoring the point that conserving migratory species can’t just happen in one place.
Still, it’s pretty remarkable that her journey begins here, in the nation’s largest city.
Before there were skyscrapers and parking lots and a crosshatch of city streets, New York was a wild place, a mosaic of coastal forests, prairies, and marshes. We’ve since changed the landscape in some irreversible ways that make it inhospitable to animals that once lived here. But as city gardeners and naturalists showed me, a little effort — a little green — can go a long way, benefitting us, monarchs, and other wildlife alike.
And if NYC can be a place where monarchs can flourish, so can anywhere. They really just need something to eat.
