2025-11-29 01:00:00
Editor’s note: This story was originally published on November 22, 2023, and reflects events that took place that year. We’re republishing it in its original form for this year’s Thanksgiving week.
Late into the night on November 2, a few animal rights activists opened an unlocked barn door and stepped foot into a sea of turkeys living in gruesome conditions. It was one of several barns at a sprawling factory farming operation in Owatonna, Minnesota, that raises turkeys for Jennie-O, the country’s second-largest turkey producer and this year’s supplier to the annual White House turkey pardon ceremony.
“We documented a lot of really horrific health issues,” activist Kecia Doolittle, one of the investigators, told Vox. “It was about as bad as you can imagine.”
They found numerous turkeys who were dead and rotting, Doolittle said, and many who had trouble walking. There were also live birds pecking at dead birds, and dozens of birds with visible wounds — each a sign of cannibalism, a persistent problem in turkey farming.
Doolittle also alleges there were a number of turkeys who were immobilized and unable to access food and water. In a letter to Steele County’s attorney and local law enforcement, Bonnie Klapper — a former assistant US attorney advising Doolittle — said the conditions are a violation of Minnesota’s animal cruelty law, which stipulates that “No person shall deprive any animal over which the person has charge or control of necessary food, water, or shelter.” (Minnesota is one of the few states that don’t exempt agricultural practices from their animal cruelty statute.)
“It smelled terrible,” Doolittle said. The air made her throat burn, likely due to high ammonia levels from the turkeys’ waste, which gives the birds eye and respiratory issues.
The activists found a sign on the property that read, “Jennie-O Turkey Store cares about turkeys — you should, too!”
“Jennie-O Turkey Store takes the welfare of the animals under our care seriously and has robust animal care standards throughout our supply chain,” a spokesperson from Hormel Foods, Jennie-O’s parent company, told Vox via email. “We conduct routine audits at our facilities to ensure that our standards are being met with animal-handling practices and policies set forth by the National Turkey Federation and the American Veterinary Medical Association.”
Doolittle rescued two of the birds — whom she later named Gabriel and Gilbert — and took them to veterinarians in Wisconsin, who urged her to euthanize Gilbert. “They both had really severe infections, they both had parasites,” Doolittle said, but Gilbert was in especially bad shape, with a wound under his wing, an infection on his face, and pecking wounds on part of his genitalia.
But Doolittle wanted to give him a chance to recover. Both birds were treated and given a combination of antibiotic, pain relief, and antiparasitic drugs; Gabriel is on the mend, while Gilbert’s condition remains touch and go.
Sherstin Rosenberg, a veterinarian in California and executive director of a sanctuary for rescued poultry birds, wrote in a veterinary opinion that Gabriel and Gilbert’s condition “suggests serious animal welfare problems” in Jennie-O’s facility.
The findings, while disturbing, are common across the turkey industry. Numerous animal welfare groups have found similar conditions at operations run by Jennie-O’s competitors — even the ones that brand themselves as more humane. That’s because turkey farming is incredibly uniform, with companies using generally the same practices and the same breed — the Broad Breasted White turkey — that’s been bred without regard for their suffering.
Like everything else in the US — cars, homes, cruise ships — the turkey has become supersized.
The poultry industry has made turkeys so big primarily through selective breeding. The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize — you guessed it — the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk.
Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially.
Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor.
Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever done, Mason wrote.
In stressful, crowded environments, turkeys can be aggressive and peck one another, and even commit cannibalism. Instead of giving turkeys more space and better conditions, producers mutilate them to minimize the damage. They cut off a quarter to a third of their beaks, part of their toes, and their snoods — those fleshy protuberances that hang over their beaks — all without pain relief.
Turkeys are excluded from federal laws meant to reduce animal suffering during transport to the slaughterhouse and during slaughter itself, so you can imagine — or see for yourself — how terribly they’re treated in their final hours. According to the nonprofit Animal Welfare Institute, the Jennie-O slaughter plant near the farm Doolittle investigated was cited nine times in 2018 by the US Department of Agriculture for turkeys who’d been mutilated by malfunctioning equipment.
Strangely, despite the horrific reality of turkey farming, we still use the animal as a symbol of giving thanks. Nowhere does the song and dance of celebrating turkeys while we torture them feel more disconcerting than at the White House’s annual turkey pardon.
Every Thanksgiving, the US president “pardons” a turkey or two in what is essentially a PR stunt for the turkey industry, as the birds are selected by the chair of the National Turkey Federation, an industry trade association. This year, that was Steve Lykken, president of Jennie-O.
The two turkeys selected for this year’s pardon — named Liberty and Bell — could have ended up among the 46 million or so birds on Thanksgiving tables this year. Instead, they were transported from Minnesota, the country’s top turkey-producing state, to Washington, DC, in a stretch black Cadillac Escalade. “They’re on their way in a pretty lavish coach,” Lykken told Minnesota Public Radio.
The annual story makes for feel-good if hammy coverage by the nation’s largest news organizations, but it papers over the darkness of American factory farming — including not just the animal cruelty but also the dangerous working conditions at slaughterhouses, environmental pollution, and unfair treatment of turkey contract farmers.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment about the Jennie-O investigation video.
This year, industry is especially looking forward to the pardon amid the devastating bird flu. The disease, which has been resurging this fall, has resulted in the killing of 11.5 million potentially infected turkeys since early 2022. Increasingly, producers are killing the birds in the most brutal fashion imaginable, deploying a method called “ventilation shutdown plus” that uses industrial heaters to kill them via heatstroke over the course of hours.
“To have something that’s fun, that can draw positive attention to our industry, is very welcomed” in light of the outbreak, Ashley Kohls, executive director of the Minnesota Turkey Growers Association, told Minnesota Public Radio about this year’s pardon.
This week, Liberty and Bell will be moved to the University of Minnesota to live out the rest of their lives. If the turkeys knew what went on there, they might not want to go: The university helped build the state’s turkey industry and still conducts research on turkeys to ensure the industry’s success. The university’s interim president formerly served as the president of Jennie-O and the CEO of Hormel, its parent company.
Meanwhile, Doolittle’s pardoned turkeys, Gabriel and Gilbert, assuming both survive, will spend the rest of their lives at an animal sanctuary, showing humans what these birds can be like when allowed to live on their own terms. “They’re just the most curious, loving, intelligent guys,” Doolittle said.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-11-28 20:30:00
A cuddly animal wearing a beanie should not incite violence. And yet, this is what occurred in some Starbucks shops earlier this month after the coffee chain released a limited line of teddy bear-shaped tumblers as a part of their holiday merchandise.
The “Bearista” cup, which was originally sold in South Korea and retails for $30, is reportedly sold out across Starbucks locations in the United States — but not before customers hassled baristas and tussled with each other in line to get their hands on one. Stories of frustrated Starbucks fans standing in long lines at the crack of dawn and accusing employees of hogging the cups made headlines and went viral on TikTok. Starbucks apologized to customers for the frenzy but stopped short of confirming whether they would restock the cups.
For now, these glass critters are being sold on eBay, sometimes for exorbitant prices. Meanwhile, shoppers who managed to procure the Bearista cup in store are posting their wins.
The Bearista cup is just the latest entry on a list of seemingly random but extremely hard-to-get merchandise that’s gone viral this year, from Labubus to Owala water bottles to Trader Joe’s micro tote bags. That certain low-cost novelty items can attract huge lines isn’t exactly new. (Cabbage Patch Kids and Beanie Babies are canonical examples.) What’s new is the extent to which these relatively cheap trinkets have become status symbols and an innovative way to distinguish oneself.
Status symbols are traditionally thought of as expensive luxury items that indicate one’s class. But in a time when affordability is driving the political conversation, young consumers are finding alternative ways to convey their social stature. It isn’t a flex anymore to splurge on a designer bag or an expensive car. Status can be earned by getting your hands on something rare, even if it only costs 30 bucks. Even wealthy people are embracing these less glitzy but in-the-know signifiers.
In the case of all these conspicuous or wearable commodities, the goal is to invest and partake in the online attention economy.
While some of the hottest items of the year have necessitated elaborate hunts or long wait times, this isn’t always intentional on the brand’s part. Many companies use artificial scarcity as a marketing tactic, partaking in seasonal or limited product drops to boost sales, while others may not anticipate the initial demand of new products and run out of supply, according to Tara Sinclair, head of the economics department at George Washington University. In any case, these shortages lend themselves to social media content that sparks intrigue and turns the purchasing of these products into full-blown experiences.
On TikTok and YouTube, the search to find a special-edition Stanley cup or a Dubai chocolate bar has become its own subgenre. Users post trips to their local grocers or big box stores where they scour the aisles, either successfully or unsuccessfully, for the latest trendy purchase. Others have filmed themselves going dumpster diving behind stores. In some cases, recorded confrontations between especially committed customers, and even theft of these items, have helped these products generate buzz. Much of the conversation around Stanley cups and Labubus, for example, was about the outsized emotional reactions people seem to have to them, adding a mysterious value to these products.
Given that these products are not financially out of reach for working and middle-class consumers, the thrill of attaining these items seems largely wrapped up in beating your competition, whether through time, dedication, or pure luck.
That said, these items still signal a level of financial privilege. (A $30 mug is more expensive than the paper cup that you usually get with your coffee at Starbucks.) And the amount of time and energy spent scavenging these items “is a way of signaling being part of a club,” says Sinclair.
“When we think about products of scarcity, there’s typically two ways that we pay for them, money or our time,” she says. “Spending time scouring a store is not so different from spending your money on it because you could, otherwise, potentially be working and earning money during that time.”
Even so, it’s notable that our idea of status symbols is expanding to include a variety of low-end and easily collectible things. For a generation riddled with economic anxiety and navigating a slimming job market, it feels appropriate that cost-friendly items are suddenly carrying a lot more esteem.
This fits into a larger trend of Gen Z spending on so-called “affordable luxuries,” that some have theorized as a recession indicator. To many, the current craze around these low-cost products seems like a re-treading of the “lipstick effect,” a term that dates back to the 2001 recession. At the time, Estée Lauder chair Leonard Lauder noted that the company had experienced a rise in lipstick sales, inspiring a theory that says consumers are less likely to spend on expensive, luxury goods in the midst of an economic crisis, instead opting for cheap indulgences. After all, luxury spending is slowing down and could continue this trajectory for a while.
But Silvia Bellezza, associate professor of business at Columbia University, isn’t totally convinced that Gen Z’s obsession with trinkets and tumblers is primarily a response to harsh economic times, given that people are always falling for these novelty items. These alternative status symbols could also be driven by an interest in acquiring taste or “cultural capital.”
Bellezza has found that “traditional markers of superiority,” like cars and designer clothes, become too mainstream and diluted when they are mass-produced. This leads to consumers, including affluent people, finding more clever and original ways to distinguish themselves.
“Mixing and matching high and low is a very clever way to stand out and show that you’re even superior to engaging in all the traditional high-status products, and you can dictate your own fashion,” says Bellezza.
This would probably explain why celebrities and billionaires alike are incorporating Lababus and canvas totes into their high fashion wear. Plus, she says consumers want to be seen with items that can only be perceived and understood by a certain subset of people, a behavior referred to as “horizontal signaling.” A Trader Joe’s tote, for example, is mostly understood as a trendy fashion item and not just a utility bag to a specific group of young, very online urbanites.
Given that social media is such an integral part of Gen Z’s shopping experiences, it’s only natural that owning status symbols is more about achieving social clout than signaling actual currency. Waiting in line, fighting crowds, and tracking down these affordable items may be extremely inconvenient, but it’s suitable for a cohort with an uncertain financial future. In the meantime, why not rack up views?
2025-11-28 20:00:00
President Donald Trump has been trying to use the Department of Justice as his personal law firm. Under Trump’s DOJ, cases are dropped for personal political reasons or built without evidence. The DOJ has also sought to prosecute Trump’s adversaries and political foes, including James Comey, the former FBI director, and Letitia James, the New York attorney general whose office filed a civil lawsuit against Trump in 2022.
Those cases have faced some challenges: On Monday, a federal judge threw out the government’s charges against Comey and James.
But Trump’s attempts to use the Justice Department for political ends are leaving their mark inside the department as well. Emily Bazelon, a staff writer at the New York Times Magazine, spoke to some of the thousands of DOJ attorneys who have resigned or been fired since January. Through their stories, she navigated us around the turmoil happening at the department, the pushback to Trump’s directives, and where it all leaves us.
Below is an excerpt of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
Let’s go back to the beginning. It is day one of the new Trump administration, and what is going on at the DOJ?
On the very first day, Trump first of all makes it clear that lawyers who are personally loyal to him are going to be in charge of the Justice Department. That starts with the attorney general, Pam Bondi, but there are other people he puts in place as well. And then the other thing he did was that he pardoned all of the people accused of rioting and violence on January 6th in the insurrection at the US Capitol.
This was the biggest investigation in the history of the Justice Department. They felt really strongly that this was a really important signal to send – that the US government would not tolerate the kind of violence and disruption that could have derailed the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election. Prosecutors had devoted themselves to these cases. It was just a huge blow to the people who worked on all of these matters.
In February, President Trump’s pick for attorney general, Pam Bondi, is confirmed. Tell us about her and tell us what the so-called “Pam Bondi mixtape” is.
Pam Bondi is a former state’s attorney from Florida. She had prosecutorial experience. She was also a personal lawyer for Donald Trump. And this kind of idea of a mixtape, as one of the lawyers put to us, was that she issued a flurry of 14 memos on her first day. She paused the enforcement of certain corruption laws that prosecutors traditionally work hard on and make a priority. She talked about zealous advocacy — the idea of the lawyer’s commitment as being a commitment that was to the President as opposed to simply the Constitution. And there were other kinds of moves like that, that just made it clear that all of the priorities of the Justice Department were shifting.
What were they shifting to?
They were shifting to President Trump’s agenda: an agenda that was against any kind of diversity efforts, an agenda that was toward immigration work and away from traditional aspects of the Justice Department’s purview, like prosecuting public corruption.
I want to ask you about some of the specific cases that these attorneys talked to you about when you interviewed them. There was a lawyer who said they lost their job in April because of Mel Gibson. What happened there?
This is the pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer, who my colleague Rachel Poser interviewed. And Oyer’s story is that she was reassigned to this unit that was looking into pardons of people who’d been accused of gun crimes. And the idea came up of pardoning Mel Gibson, who had a misdemeanor conviction for domestic violence.
And it’s been strongly suggested to her, she says, that Gibson had a personal relationship with the president. She was basically given the message that she needed to find some way to pardon Mel Gibson. But because of his history of domestic violence, she was very reluctant to do that. She said no to the idea of a pardon, and she was immediately fired.
Moving forward in time, let’s talk about what you learned was happening in the Civil Rights Division. There’s one story you tell about something called the “Firefighter Cases.” What happened there?
My colleague Rachel interviewed a lawyer named Brian McIntyre in the Civil Rights Division. He had been working on a case in Georgia where Black people and white people were applying for positions in the fire department at about the same rate, but 90 percent of the hires were white people. And so Brian McIntyre was wondering why.
And when they asked the fire department, the answer was that Black people tended to have more student loan debt. And so then the fire department said, “Okay, well, our problem with that is if you have a firefighter and he’s deeply in debt and fighting a fire, he might steal grandma’s pearls.” So this was apparently the reason for hiring fewer Black firefighters. And the Civil Rights Division sued.
In February, they got a note saying that the Attorney General Pam Bondi wanted to withdraw the case and they went further in a way that was really distressing to the lawyers by asking for additional language in dismissing the case that would say that it was all about reverse discrimination. In other words, the real victims here were white people. And so these lawyers in the Civil Rights division, they really wrestled with whether they could sign this order because they didn’t think it was true. And in the end they did not sign it.
As the year progresses, how does the Trump administration start divvying up resources at the DOJ? What do we see Trump prioritizing?
There’s a really important order that happens where about a third of the manpower and resources of law enforcement agents is supposed to start going to immigration work. And that means that these FBI agents are not going to be doing the things they were doing before because their work hours are a finite resource.
Prosecutors told us that they saw these agents being pulled off of cases involving white collar crime or national security, counter-terrorism, child exploitation. Those are the kinds of big cases that just take a lot of labor. And so if you have your FBI agents out on the street picking up people for immigration detention, then they’re not going to be able to do these more longer-term cases that, in the view of the prosecutors, are very important for keeping Americans safe.
Moving forward to late September, Donald Trump has demanded that the DOJ pay him $230 million for investigations into him that happened during the Biden administration. How does that play out within his Department of Justice?
This is a really unprecedented demand. And also remember that the people who are going to decide whether Trump gets this big payout are his appointees, his former lawyers in the Justice Department, right? Pam Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche.
From the point of view of the Justice Department lawyers we interviewed, this just seemed comically corrupt to them. They just really couldn’t imagine how the president could think this was an appropriate use of federal funds.
One of your sources told you it would take a lot of restraint not to retaliate in the next administration. This person said they have a list in their head of career people who are helping the administration they want to hold to account. Did you come away from this reporting concerned that there is a cycle of retribution here that may be becoming entrenched?
It’s too soon to say there is going to be a lot of temptation to move in that direction because some people are going to feel like they’re surrounded by people who they watched do things that were unethical or traitorous to the colleagues around them. It’s hard to let all of that go.
I think there are different ways that could be addressed. There are employment repercussions, like questions of whether everyone gets to stay in the job. And then there’s the much more serious question of whether they’re going to be criminal investigations. That’s the kind of tit for tat retaliation that I think could really send the justice system into a tailspin.
Another of your sources tells you that the average American does not really care what is happening at the Justice Department because we think it doesn’t affect us. Is there an argument that this does in fact affect us, that we should really care what’s going on here?
I think there is: the rule of law. The idea of the stability of law is vital to American prosperity and social well-being, right? I mean, stability is honestly the most important thing we get from law. And when you live in a country where the president can turn the huge might of federal law enforcement against anyone he wants, then you’re kind of betting it’s not going to be you. But the odds are not the same as they were before when this kind of retribution was just off the table.
And since Watergate, we have lived in a country where there was a very deliberate, carefully erected separation between the White House and its political influence and investigations and criminal prosecutions from the Justice Department. So once that is gone, eventually you see that play out in all kinds of ways in Americans’ lives. Even if it starts by seeming it’s just about a few people like James Comey and Letitia James.
2025-11-28 19:45:00
The most recent jobs numbers paint a pretty grim picture of the labor market and the apparent havoc AI is wreaking on it. After warnings about unemployment among recent grads earlier this year, the newest report suggests that AI’s impact is reaching a broader group of workers. There were over 150,000 layoffs in October, which makes it the worst October for layoffs in over two decades, and about 50,000 of those have been attributed to AI. Overall, 2025 has seen more job cuts than any year since 2020.
It’s too soon to tell how much AI is really to blame for these job losses, even if companies are blaming AI in public statements. A team of researchers from the Yale Budget Lab and Brookings has argued that the broader labor market isn’t being disrupted any more by AI than it was by the internet or PCs, and that recent college grads are being displaced due to sector-specific factors. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, however, has predicted that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white collar jobs. So, which is it?
There is a lot we don’t know about what will happen with AI in general — looking at you, AI bubble — and it’s too soon to tell whether AI will actually deliver on its most ambitious promises or be more transformative than past tech revolutions.
But, to shed some light on the jobs question in particular, I called up Neil Thompson, principal research scientist at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL). He’s been studying everything from why diminishing returns on frontier models will shape AI’s future to how automation changes the value of labor. Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
For the past couple of years, your work has pushed back on the idea that automation is always bad for workers and that AI will take all of our jobs. But, in the past few months, we’ve seen tens of thousands of job losses attributed to AI. What’s going on?
My guess is that we have two different phenomena going on at the same time. One is that AI is becoming more prevalent in the economy. I think, for some cases, like customer service, that’s probably pretty legitimate. Indeed, these systems seem awfully good at those tasks, and so, there are going to be some jobs that are being taken over by these systems.
At the same time, it would be surprising to me if these systems were able to do as many things as the job loss numbers imply. And so, I suspect that there’s also a mix of either people deciding to cut the jobs and put some of that blame on AI, or they’re cutting the jobs in advance with an aim to do more AI. They’re sort of pushing their businesses towards it and seeing what’s going to happen.
Why is there such dissonance between those who say AI will take away half our jobs and those who say AI isn’t the reason we’re seeing so much upheaval in the labor market?
A whole bunch of people are talking about incredibly rapid change — a capability increase, which could do things that humans can do. For most businesses there are very large last-mile costs that are involved with actually adopting these systems. Someone using ChatGPT just in the interface is very different than “we now run our business and trust that every time the system is going to run, it’s going to get it right.” That’s a different level. You often need to bring in specific data. There are a lot of costs that come with that. So, these last-mile costs can be very important and can really slow adoption even when systems are quite good.
Apart from that cost, there’s also a matter of a system being good, and a system being good enough to be better than a human. They’re not quite the same thing.
Earlier this year, you published a paper with your MIT colleague David Autor that used expertise as a framework for understanding how automation affects the value of labor. Historically, it’s not all bad, right?
When we think of automation, we have in our mind a sort of doom scenario, where, as automation happens, the number of jobs that are out there in that occupation go down, the wages in that occupation go down, and you’re like, “boy, this has been a pretty terrible story.”
But, if you look at the last 40 years of automation — this is not AI automation, this is just computerization and things like that — we know that a lot of routine tasks were automated by this process. If you look at people who had routine tasks, what you find is a bunch of that stuff got automated, but also their wages didn’t go down. Some went up, some went down. That’s kind of a puzzle.
What we think is going on is that, when automation happens to a particular occupation, it really, really matters which of the tasks of that occupation are getting automated. In particular, if you have automation of high-expert tasks — so the things that you do that are most expert — that has one effect, and if you have automation at the least-expert tasks, you’ll get a different effect.
Can you give me a couple of examples?
Think about taxi drivers. The most expert thing you did was know all of the roads in a city. You knew all the little back roads. You knew all the little shortcuts. You were the expert on that. Then, Google Maps and MapQuest come in, and all of a sudden, anybody who can drive a car can do a pretty good job of doing that. In that case, your most expert tasks got automated away. Because the most expert things are gone, your wages go down.
But, counter to this doom cycle version of this, wages go down, but the number of people in that profession goes up, because now, a whole bunch of people who didn’t used to know all the streets can suddenly drive an Uber.
At the other extreme, think of proofreaders. Spellcheck comes in. A whole bunch of stuff that they used to do is now automated, but it was the least expert thing that they did. The meaningful thing they did was to reorganize your paragraphs and make sure that you were thinking about the right thing and phrasing things in the right way, not the spelling part.
So, if you look at what happens to them, their least expert tasks got automated. What was left was more expert. And so, because they were using their expert stuff more of the time, their wages have actually gone up faster than the average — but there are now fewer of them.
So, you have this interesting effect where the Uber drivers’ wages went down, but there were more of them. And for the proofreaders, wages went up, and there were fewer of them. And both of those have pluses and minuses.
So, clearly, AI is not the first technology to automate aspects of work in the computer era. But does the same expertise framework hold true further back in history? Would we see similar patterns in the Industrial Revolution and automating textile workers’ work?
One of the examples that my co-author likes to talk about is skilled artisans. Think about the wheelwrights, and the blacksmith, and all of those people, these used to be incredibly expert jobs. And through industrialization, we figured out how to do that on production lines and other places where the average expertise was lower, but there were vastly more wheels being produced and vastly more people involved in the production of wheels.
And then, of course, we have lots of modern examples as automation comes in, and some of the things that we do get automated, we actually become more expert in the things we’re doing because we don’t have to do the basic things anymore.
Companies like Google and OpenAI are promising that their technology will do much more than automate basic tasks, and they’re spending hundreds of billions of dollars on infrastructure to make it — call it artificial general intelligence or superintelligence — happen. We’re hearing a lot about an AI bubble lately, because it’s not clear if these tools will actually work before the bill comes due. How will we know when AI has proven itself?
I don’t think that the question is really, is AI going to prove itself. I think it is clear that these capabilities are improving fast enough. It’s going to be incredibly useful, I think, and I think there’s going to be a lot of adoption. There’s going to be a lot of benefits that flow from it.
To me, the question in terms of the AI bubble is more about valuations. This is going to be useful, but is that the right valuation? It is going to matter a lot. It’s going to have a lot of these effects. The question is, are we building out even faster than those effects are going to kick in, or the opposite?
A recent Pew Research Center survey showed that Americans are more concerned than excited about the technology. Why is AI so unpopular?
I want to be hesitant about putting myself too much in people’s heads, but I think it is understandable that people have anxiety about what AI is going to do and how it’s going to change their jobs, because it’s a very powerful tool. I think it will change a lot of people’s jobs — yours included, mine included.
I think it is particularly hard when faced with that and not knowing how much of the job is going to be replaced or how much am I going to have to adjust in ways that could be painful. I think we will learn more about that in the next little while.
There’s a second piece which is really, really hard. Historically, when new technologies have come in and automated things, humans have moved to doing new tasks. New tasks are created that didn’t exist before but are actually important for employment. We really don’t know what those new tasks are going to be ahead of time. That lack of visibility is a challenge. But it is worth saying that, historically, there’s been a remarkable wellspring of new tasks and new jobs that have emerged. And so, I think we should feel confident that there are going to be a bunch of those that will come.
There will be a transition. In many cases, we should think of that as being similar to previous transformations. The question is how fast it happens. If it’s medium- to long-term, humans are pretty good at saying, “okay, if these are new tasks that we are particularly good at and the technology is not, let’s adapt to do those tasks.” But if it happens all at once, and a lot of the transitions and displacement happens in a compressed period of time, that’s going to make it much harder for the economy to adjust.
It sounds like you’re saying that there’s a fear of the unknown, and there are a lot of unknowns right now. But, we’ve gone through major technological transformations before this one. We just don’t know how long it will take, or what we’ll be doing on the other side of it. That doesn’t sound super comforting.
Let me just add a little twist to that. It is definitely the case that if you look historically, we have seen patterns where new technologies come in. There is some churn in the economy, some people are hurt by that, and we should be cognizant of that. We should expect that could happen now, as well. But in the medium term, we adjust well.
In terms of AI, I think we can take some comfort from those historical lessons. And the question is just: Is AI in some way different than these previous technologies that would make us think that we would get a different outcome?
I think the people who think that we’re going to get to AGI quickly, their answer would be yes. If it can do everything we can do, and it can do that next year or the year after, that is very different than previous technologies. That makes it pretty hard to adjust. If it rolls out, it does some tasks, it takes a long time to do other tasks, well then I think we’re much more in a world where we can adjust in the way that we have in the past.
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2025-11-28 19:18:00
If you’re arrested in America for a minor charge — say, for speeding or loitering — the punishment from the legal system might end up being the least of your worries. You might wake up a few months later and see your arrest, filmed through a police body camera, with a million views on TikTok or YouTube. A few days later, it might have 5 million views, or 20 million. Your face would be next to dozens of other faces of the recently arrested, all on monetized, for-profit social media channels. And it would be almost impossible to get the videos taken down.
Like so much of the algorithm-driven internet, this particular subsection can be easy to miss. But it’s massive. A popular YouTube channel like Code Blue Cam averages over 10 million views a video, and has totaled more than a billion across hundreds of videos. Another, Midwest Safety, has totaled over 1.5 billion views. There are dozens like this, all with similar names: “Body Cam Watch,” “PoliceActivity,” “EWU Bodycam.” At least one channel is represented by an agency that represents more traditional influencers.
These channels are now well-known enough that recent arrestees have posted specifically about the fear of ending up on these channels. “I literally have panic attacks about this,” one posted on Reddit. “If my video was released I’d go off the deep end.” Another: “I feel like it will not only affect my chances of getting into a good career, but that millions of people would see me acting like a drunken idiot.”
Each channel gets its content from the same basic model: Someone uses public records requests to obtain video from police arrests, lightly edits the video, adding maybe a brief AI narration or captions, and then hits “publish.” Many videos take the same shape: somebody drunk or otherwise intoxicated yelling, speeding, throwing things, hitting cops; that person being arrested while crying, screaming, spitting, and so on. That said, there are videos of people being arrested for just about anything, from shoplifting to murder and kidnapping cases.
The faces of the people who are arrested are almost never blurred, and, depending on the channel and state of the footage, bystanders’ or family members’ faces often aren’t blurred either. Some channels give judicial outcomes, others don’t. Some have full names of those arrested, others redact. There’s little rhyme or reason. Even videos of cases of alleged child abuse feature entirely unblurred children as they’re questioned by police about their father, whose full name is given. And, of course, at the time of their arrest, none of these people have been convicted of a crime.
In a world where civilians make TikToks about embarrassing conversations they overheard on the train, it’s easy to argue that people deserve their privacy. But in this case, granting it might come with a cost. Access to video involving police, who can and do commit misconduct and crimes, has a real value to journalists and to the public. It’s difficult to know how to balance immense and cruel public embarrassment with the right of the public to monitor law enforcement.
This phenomenon of YouTube body camera channels illuminates multiple strange trends in American life: the public becoming the hyperpublic, the use and misuse of public records laws, and every last bit of government policy becoming warped for somebody somewhere to make a buck. The story of how this niche industry popped up and what it means takes us through the influencer industry, public records laws, and the long history of Americans enjoying video of people getting handcuffs slapped on them.
Body-worn cameras have had a remarkably rapid uptake by police. The first US pilot programs began in 2012, but their popularity surged after the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, when the Obama administration authorized $75 million in funding for local police departments to buy and deploy these cameras.
The cameras have enjoyed high support among the public over the years, sometimes exceeding 90 percent. Between 2022 and 2023, over 80 percent of local police officers reportedly wore cameras.
This creates a nearly endless supply of footage, which can be obtained through state transparency and open-records laws. But the people requesting the most usually aren’t on a crusade for justice. They are interested in having footage of someone’s shoplifting arrest rack up millions of views for profit.
Every state has its own laws regarding public access to body camera footage, and the specific application and interpretation of each of those laws is the subject of frequent litigation between news organizations and police departments. Trying to get a video that shows potential police misconduct? Even if you file an open records request, if there’s a chance the video shows police behaving badly, departments claim various exemptions (around active investigations, for instance) and drag their feet. (The same dynamic occurs at the federal level.)
According to a ProPublica investigation, “departments across the country have routinely delayed releasing footage, released only partial or redacted video or refused to release it at all.” That’s one reason police reformers have long been skeptical of the utility of transparency alone, and studies showed that cameras resulted in muddled effects at best, whether in reducing police misconduct or in better uncovering it after the fact.
But whatever the aggregate statistics show, there clearly are individual cases of misconduct being uncovered via open records requests. Traditional media use the same public records laws in their reporting, which certainly does uncover misconduct and generally inform the public.
Cases of county sheriffs drinking and driving, questionable shootings by officers, and other cases of potential misconduct appear on some of these body cam channels.
Yet on these channels, videos of possible police misconduct are dwarfed by lurid arrests for often minor charges. Police departments won’t resist public records requests that merely show ordinary citizens being embarrassed and officers in a sympathetic light. And an average YouTube viewer probably prefers to be titillated rather than depressed by police violence. So while you wait for videos of abusive police behavior, in the meantime, you can get footage for videos like “Karen Trashes Dollar General When She Doesn’t Get Hired” or “Drunk 18-Year-Old Girl Completely Loses It During Arrest” or “Woman Sets Porta Potty On Fire Because She Doesn’t Like It.”
Humiliating the arrested via government disclosure has a long history in the United States. “Publish-for-pay” websites acquire mugshots through public records, post them with name and arrest information, and then require payment to remove them. Numerous states have tried to either restrict the release of mugshots or require sites to remove them for free if requested, but it remains a live problem, and reforms have been undone in the name of being tough on crime. Plenty more sites publish tens of thousands of mugshots with no option for removal, presumably just for ad revenue.
Any sufficiently old reader will remember “mugshot galleries,” a staple of many even legitimate news outlets because they were reliable generators of user clicks through endless slideshows. Most newsrooms have drastically scaled back the use of mugshots, especially since the murder of George Floyd, but they’re still widespread online, with multiple cottage industries selling services to remove them, suppress them via Google search result alterations, and so on.
Beyond photos, Cops, the 1990s television staple that ran until 2020, is a remarkably similar format to modern body cam channels, with footage of arrests with no narrator or presenter, and at least the appearance of an unedited, cinema verite style. (In reality, police departments screened footage before it was ever broadcast and had final cut privileges.) It was a source of constant controversy for its endless depictions of people who are poor or have a mental illness as something to be gawked at. The podcast Running From Cops found numerous apparent misrepresentations on Cops, including “a young woman was denied a bail bond until she signed the form giving Cops permission to air her arrest for possession of cocaine.” According to the podcast, it was later determined it wasn’t cocaine, but that didn’t stop Cops from airing the episode as a rerun.
Running From Cops’s analysis also found that, compared to generic arrest statistics, Cops showed 10 times more arrests than you’d expect for sex work, probably for the sleazy reason you would guess. That pattern has continued on these body cam channels, where it is impossible not to notice just how many videos are of young women, sometimes with the single most revealing frame of the video being used as the thumbnail.
Police in general have to deal with the staggering number of records requests, which takes time and money even for the videos that merely show them doing their jobs. Each request can include multiple cameras taking hours of footage that needs to be reviewed and redacted by department staff. For example, one New Jersey town had over 1,500 requests in just the month of June, requiring more than 300 hours of work to review.
Faced with a deluge of requests for police footage, states like Ohio and Wisconsin have passed laws allowing police departments to charge fees to body cam requesters, which might seem like common sense — until you realize that highly lucrative channels would probably find it the easiest to pay, while local journalists and newspapers would find it the hardest.
“This tool that was sold to us as a police accountability tool should not be turned into a shaming-random-civilians tool.”
Adam Schwartz, Electronic Frontier Foundation
In general, states have not found solutions that provide both privacy and transparency, and reading through state legislature debates leaves one with whiplash. In Alabama, where body cam footage is not broadly accessible, footage of the death of an 18-year-old shot by police has been withheld for months. As a result, the state is debating legislation to require its release within 30 days. And in Rhode Island, watchdogs have questioned “inexplicable gaps” in footage of police shootings, 30 minutes of “missing audio” from footage of police cooperation with US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and other discrepancies that rely on loopholes in state law.
But in New Jersey, where footage is much easier to obtain, legislators have considered tightening the rules to require consent of the arrestee to publish footage. This came after a channel “only requested DWI stops involving young women, some being underage,” and, at least according to news reports, offered to remove one woman’s video only if she paid for its removal, an echo of mugshot extortion.
The dichotomy between potentially profound, even criminal, police misconduct and admittedly embarrassing but often harmless arrest footage understandably leads some to say we have to accept the release of the latter in order to get the former. That’s the conclusion of a thoughtful essay by Scott Gordon in Tone Madison, an independent and local news outfit in Wisconsin whose reporters’ abilities to do their jobs have been affected by the state’s imposition of fees for footage. He writes: “A YouTuber making a quick buck from these materials is, well, just the cost of having a modicum of transparency in our society.”
Is there any kind of middle ground here?
The Electronic Frontier Foundation was an early critic of body-worn cameras worn without safeguards. Their fear at the time (and today) was primarily of police misuse, through retention of footage, facial recognition technology, and other technologies allowing widespread state surveillance.
In an interview, EFF’s privacy litigation director Adam Schwartz laid out something close to first principles around release of footage that seem reasonable:
As he said to me, “This tool that was sold to us as a police accountability tool should not be turned into a shaming-random-civilians tool.”
These guidelines, while reasonable, would likely require more funding for police and court systems in order to be implemented properly. And even under these guidelines, a reasonably large number of videos would still wind up online. That’s because of just how many arrests, even for fairly minor crimes, involve police using force of some kind — whether a taser, pepper spray, less-lethal ammunition, or standard ammunition — without falling into misconduct. It’s also because these channels do in fact also publish content in the public interest.
What do the channels themselves say about all this? Alex Smith is the founder of Midwest Safety, one of the largest channels, and the only one I contacted that was willing to answer written questions on the record. Midwest Safety employs around 50 people, and Smith says they spend between eight and 80 hours per video, which explains their noticeably high production values. In defense of the channel, Smith cited multiple videos Midwest Safety published that show misconduct by law enforcement and those in a “position of trust” like a pastor. He also provided a description of their internal “right to be forgotten” policies, which depend on “severity of crime and the public interest in the incident.” He described internal rules that limit but do not prohibit, for instance, footage of self-harm or domestic violence.
Midwest Safety is likely the most responsible of these channels, and whatever thoughtfulness they have is not the norm. They were, for instance, the only channel I could find with any listed process for a video to be removed. And they also still publish videos like “Extreme Karen Goes Crazy on Fast Food Employees,” which primarily involves a woman sitting on a toilet in a women’s bathroom talking to police before being arrested.
Whatever one thinks of the right balance when it comes to police body cam footage, this problem seems unlikely to stay limited to arrest footage. Modern technology has mutated public access and transparency into a kind of hyperpublic. Consider courtrooms, a setting that almost anyone would think has to be open to the public. When Covid-19 shut down in-person courtrooms, some judges understandably opened their hearings to public YouTube streams for that very principle. But public to a person who is willing to physically go and sit in a courtroom and watch proceedings and public to anyone willing to open YouTube are so drastically different that they may as well be different words.
Predictably, some of those judges have clearly become enamored with their online audience. In Detroit, a judge chatted with YouTube commenters during cases, including during child sexual assault cases, until live chat while streaming was banned by a higher court. In Texas, defense attorneys have taken to printing cards to warn clients appearing before a particular judge that they’re being watched on livestream, because his honor has repeatedly gone viral for reprimanding defendants with lines like, “I will put you over my knee like a little child and I’m going to spank you.” Even if a judge would act like this without a camera, why does it need to be broadcast? Does the principle of public access to courtrooms really mean 9 million views for a hearing about a misdemeanor that required four hours of community service?
Defendants might need to be handed cards warning them they’re being filmed in court, but fear of YouTube arrest infamy is starting to become common knowledge, even for those as they’re being arrested. In one recent video, police are called to a Walmart due to a fire that they discover was actually arson. A 17-year-old girl, screwing around in an admittedly dangerous way, used a lighter on fake plants, which are very flammable.
No one was hurt, but the store’s merchandise was totaled for a $7.6 million loss. She ended up serving 60 days in jail and getting eight years of probation. In the video, the visibly distraught 17-year-old says, “I didn’t take my meds today,” “I’m really sorry,” “I thought it would just die out,” “I don’t want to kill myself,” in between weeping.
She then asks the officer, “Do you have a body camera? Oh, Jesus Christ, this is so embarrassing, is this going to be published to YouTube?” The officer responds, “No, no…” then corrects himself, “Well, I can’t promise that.”
It has over 6 million views in six months.
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.
2025-11-27 23:49:41
Today, tens of millions of Americans will partake in a national ritual many of us say we don’t especially enjoy or find meaning in. We will collectively eat more than 40 million turkeys — factory farmed and heavily engineered animals that bear scant resemblance to the wild birds that have been apocryphally written into the Thanksgiving story. (The first Thanksgiving probably didn’t have turkey.) And we will do it all even though turkey meat is widely considered flavorless and unpalatable.
“It is, almost without fail, a dried-out, depressing hunk of sun-baked papier-mâché — a jaw-tiringly chewy, unsatisfying, and depressingly bland workout,” journalist Brian McManus wrote for Vice. “Deep down, we know this, but bury it beneath happy memories of Thanksgivings past.”
So what is essentially the national holiday of meat-eating revolves around an animal dish that no one really likes. That fact clashes with the widely accepted answer to the central question of why it’s so hard to convince everyone to ditch meat, or even to eat less of it: the taste, stupid.
Undoubtedly, that has something to do with it. But I think the real answer is a lot more complicated, and the tasteless Thanksgiving turkey explains why.
• Why Americans eat turkey on Thanksgiving, despite many of us not liking it very much!
• What life is like for a Thanksgiving turkey.
• What to eat instead of turkey, and why you might even see going turkey-free as more authentic to the values of Thanksgiving.
Humans crave ritual, belonging, and a sense of being part of a larger story — aspirations that reach their apotheosis at the Thanksgiving table. We don’t want to be social deviants who boycott the central symbol of one of our most cherished national holidays, reminding everyone of the animal torture and environmental degradation that went into making it. What could be more human than to go along with it, dry meat and all?
Our instincts for conformity seem particularly strong around food, a social glue that binds us to one another and to our shared past. And although many of us today recognize there’s something very wrong with how our meat is produced, Thanksgiving of all occasions might seem like an ideal time to forget that for a day.
In my experience, plenty of people who are trying to cut back on meat say they eat vegetarian or vegan when cooking for themselves — but when they are guests at other people’s homes or celebrating a special occasion, they’ll eat whatever, to avoid offending their hosts or provoking awkward conversations about factory farming.
But this Thanksgiving, I want to invite you, reader, to flip this logic. If the social and cultural context of food shapes our tastes, even more than taste itself, then it is in precisely these settings that we should focus efforts to change American food customs for the better.
“It’s eating with others where we actually have an opportunity to influence broader change, to share plant-based recipes, spark discussion, and revamp traditions to make them more sustainable and compassionate,” Natalie Levin, an acquaintance of mine from vegan Twitter, told me.
Hundreds of years ago, a turkey on Thanksgiving might have represented abundance and good tidings — a too-rare thing in those days, and therefore something to be grateful for. Today, it’s hard to see it as anything but a symbol of our profligacy and unrestrained cruelty against nonhuman animals. On a day meant to embody the best of humanity, and a vision for a more perfect world, surely we can come up with better symbols.
Besides, we don’t even like turkey. We should skip it this year.
In 2023, my colleague Kenny Torrella published a wrenching investigation into conditions in the US turkey industry. He wrote:
The Broad Breasted White turkey, which accounts for 99 out of every 100 grocery store turkeys, has been bred to emphasize — you guessed it — the breast, one of the more valuable parts of the bird. These birds grow twice as fast and become nearly twice as big as they did in the 1960s. Being so top-heavy, combined with other health issues caused by rapid growth and the unsanitary factory farming environment, can make it difficult for them to walk.
Another problem arises from their giant breasts: The males get so big that they can’t mount the hens, so they must be bred artificially.
Author Jim Mason detailed this practice in his book The Ethics of What We Eat, co-authored with philosopher Peter Singer. Mason took a job with the turkey giant Butterball to research the book, where, he wrote, he had to hold male turkeys while another worker stimulated them to extract their semen into a syringe using a vacuum pump. Once the syringe was full, it was taken to the henhouse, where Mason would pin hens chest-down while another worker inserted the contents of the syringe into the hen using an air compressor.
Workers at the farm had to do this to one hen every 12 seconds for 10 hours a day. It was “the hardest, fastest, dirtiest, most disgusting, worst-paid work” he had ever done, Mason wrote.
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In the wild, turkeys live in “smallish groups of a dozen or so, and they know each other, they relate to each other as individuals,” Singer, author of the book Consider the Turkey, said last year on an episode of the Simple Heart podcast. “The turkeys sold on Thanksgiving never see their mothers, they never go and forage for food… They’re pretty traumatized, I’d say, by having thousands of strange birds around who they can’t get to know as individuals,” packed together in crowded sheds.
From birth to death, the life of a factory-farmed turkey is one punctuated by rote violence, including mutilations to their beaks, their toes, and snoods, a grueling trip to the slaughterhouse, and a killing process where they’re roughly grabbed and prodded, shackled upside down, and sent down a fast-moving conveyor belt of killing. “If they’re lucky, they get stunned and then the knife cuts their throat,” Singer said. “If they’re not so lucky, they miss the stunner and the knife cuts their throat while they’re fully conscious.”
On Thanksgiving, Americans throw the equivalent of more than 8 million of these turkeys in the trash, according to a 2024 estimate by ReFED, a nonprofit that works to reduce food waste. And this year will be the fourth Thanksgiving in a row celebrated amid an out-of-control bird flu outbreak, in which tens of millions of chickens and turkeys on infected farms have been culled using stomach-churning extermination methods.
When I search for the language for this grim state of affairs, I can only describe it in religious terms, as a kind of desecration — of our planet’s abundance, of our humanity, of life itself. On every other day of the year, it’s obscene enough. On a holiday that’s supposed to represent our gratitude for the Earth’s blessings, you can understand why Thanksgiving, for many vegetarians or vegans, is often described as the most alienating day of the year.
I count myself among that group, although I don’t dread Thanksgiving. I’ve come to love it as a holiday ripe for creative reinvention. I usually spend it making a feast of plant-based dishes (known by most people as “sides,” though there’s no reason they can’t be the main event).
To name a few: a mushroom Wellington, a creamy lentil-stuffed squash, cashew lentil bake, a bright autumnal Brussels sprout salad, roasted red cabbage with walnuts and feta (sub with dairy-free cheese), mushroom clam-less chowder (I add lots of white beans), challah for bread rolls, a pumpkin miso tart more complex and interesting than any Thanksgiving pie you’ve had, and rasmalai, a Bengali dessert whose flavors align beautifully with the holidays.
Vegan turkey roasts are totally optional, though many of them have gotten very good in recent years — I love the Gardein breaded roast and Field Roast hazelnut and cranberry. You can also make your own.
The hardest part of going meatless is not about the food (if it were, it might not be so hard to convince Americans to abandon parched roast turkey). “It’s about unpleasant truths and ethical disagreements being brought out into the open,” Levin said, about confronting the bizarre dissonance in celebrations of joy and giving carved from mass-produced violence.
These conversations are not easy, but they are worth having. And we don’t have to fear losing the rituals that define us as Americans. To the contrary, culture is a continuous conversation we have with each other about what we hold dear — and any culture that’s not changing is dead. There’s far more meaning to be had in adapting traditions that are no longer authentic to our values. We can start on Thanksgiving.
Update, November 27, 2025, 7:30 am: This story was originally published in 2024 and has been updated for 2025.