2025-11-02 21:00:00
Climate stories usually start the same way: fire, flood, loss, collapse. The charts are grim. The vibes are worse. But there’s another story in the numbers that starts with what’s working, what’s already being built, and how far we’ve actually come.
Hannah Ritchie is a data scientist at the University of Oxford and the author of Clearing the Air, a book that offers encouraging answers to some of our hardest questions about the climate. She’s a “data optimist” who doesn’t ignore the dangers of climate change, but recognizes how the world is decarbonizing faster than most of us realize.
The real bottleneck now, Ritchie argues, isn’t technology so much as belief. Belief that progress is still possible without shrinking our world; belief that the cleaner option can also be the better, cheaper one; belief that the future is worth racing toward.
I invited Ritchie onto The Gray Area to talk about the dueling climate narratives of denial vs. despair, where individual choices meet systemic change, and how the politics of clean energy are quietly shifting. We also get into nuclear, agriculture, carbon removal, and the kind of story that might move people from doomscrolling to building.
As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What changed your mind about the path we’re on?
Two things. First, zooming way out. If you look across decades and centuries, humans have solved a staggering number of problems. Poverty, hunger, child and maternal mortality, life expectancy — almost any human-development metric you pick has improved dramatically, especially in the last 50 years. You don’t get that perspective from the news cycle; you get it from long-run data. We are capable of solving big problems.
Second, zooming in on climate. We are still in a bad place and progress has been too slow. But we have made progress, and there are now objective trends you can’t see in a headline: the collapse in the costs of solar, wind, and batteries; the pace at which those technologies are being deployed; the rate at which grids are getting cleaner. If you step back and look at the data, the scale and speed of these shifts are unmistakable.
But your views have shifted, right?
They shifted a lot. Fifteen years ago, I was a doom person. I was convinced climate change would make my life unlivable. The change wasn’t a personality transplant; it came from the data. Stepping back, getting the long view, and then watching the cost curves and deployment numbers bend changed my mind.
We seem stuck between denial and despair. Why is the nuanced middle so hard to sustain?
Partly human psychology: We’re tuned to scan for threats. Partly media dynamics: Nuance doesn’t perform. Extremes get clicks and shares, so that’s what we see. If your information diet is headlines and feeds, you’ll mostly encounter the “nothing to see here” take or the “end times tomorrow” take. Even journalists tell me they want to publish more measured stories – and then watch them die in traffic. It’s kind of a feedback loop between what’s produced and what we reward.
The question you get most often is: Are we doomed? I think what people are really asking is whether anything we do — innovation, growth, building — really makes a difference. How do you think about our agency at this stage of the crisis?
“Every tenth of a degree matters. Even if we miss a target, pushing for a lower peak still saves lives and ecosystems. It’s not binary.”
We have a lot of agency. All credible pathways show the range of future temperatures is driven by choices we make now. People imagine “the threshold” – cross 1.5°C or 2°C and it’s over. But impacts are incremental. 1.6 is worse than 1.5, 1.7 worse than 1.6. That means every tenth of a degree matters. Even if we miss a target, pushing for a lower peak still saves lives and ecosystems. It’s not binary.
And agency isn’t just “individual” or “systemic.” That’s a false choice. Governments and firms make the substitutes available, affordable, and easy — clean power, efficient buildings, EVs, good transit, better food options. But once those exist, people have to choose them. Individuals create the demand signal that drives the systemic change forward.
You note that the world is improving faster than people think, but the public mood is still grim. How much do people actually care about climate action?
More than we assume. International surveys show majorities in every country say climate change is real and want more action – including in the US. There’s polarization, and the partisan gap in the US is larger than elsewhere, but even many Republicans express support. Crucially, Republicans underestimate how many other Republicans care. It’s a quiet consensus.
“Saying you care,” of course, isn’t the same as paying a premium. The lesson I take is: People are receptive to solutions, but the alternatives have to be there and affordable. Many cannot and will not pay more. Build good substitutes at good prices and adoption follows.
Politically, asking people to give up things they like is a hard sell. Substitutes are better than sacrifice. Is that what makes you optimistic?
Yes. Ten years ago, even after the Paris Agreement, solar and wind were far more expensive than coal and gas. It seemed implausible to me that the world would voluntarily choose costlier energy for decades. Then the costs collapsed. Solar is down around 80 to 90 percent, wind around 70 percent, batteries around 90 percent in a decade. In many places, solar and wind are simply the cheapest new power. The short-term economic incentive now aligns with the long-term climate imperative. That’s a very different political proposition than “pay more now for a benefit later.”
So growth and climate action aren’t opposites anymore. The bottleneck is belief.
Exactly. Some countries still see growth as “drill, baby, drill.” The US has elements of that mindset. Contrast that with China, which sees internal-combustion engines and fossil power as 20th-century tech, and wants to build the 21st-century industries: solar, wind, batteries, EVs, electrification. The belief that “green = decline” lingers in some places, but it’s increasingly disconnected from the economics.
How do you talk to people who are skeptical or even hostile?
The psychology matters. With skeptical audiences, it often helps to lead with energy security, innovation, and local benefits rather than abstract global climate goals. “Build” beats “ban.” People respond to positive visions — more reliable, cheaper, cleaner energy; better air; less dependence on petrostates — more than to austerity pitches.
You point out that red states have built a lot of clean energy — sometimes more than blue states. What’s going on?
Look at the data: A huge share of US wind was built in red states along the wind belt. Texas is surging on solar and batteries. Often the driver wasn’t “net-zero,” it was local air quality, landowner income, or energy independence. State-level rules that make it feasible to build quickly matter a lot. So there’s a split: State politics can be pragmatic and pro-build even when national politics are combative or, lately, restrictive toward new renewables.
Internationally, rich-world hypocrisy has long been a problem: “Don’t develop the way we did.” Is that still blocking progress?
It was real and still lingers. Countries like mine [the UK] built prosperity by burning fossil fuels without constraint. Many poor countries understandably want energy to escape poverty. Telling them “you can’t” rings hypocritical, especially when rich countries still use far more fossil energy per person today.
But dynamics are shifting. One promising sign is surging exports of affordable Chinese solar to countries like Pakistan and across Africa. That opens a leapfrog path — build modern systems without locking into coal and gas. We should still worry about equity and early adopters tend to be the wealthy within those countries. A national grid that delivers low-cost electricity to everyone, and can power industry, remains essential so progress doesn’t deepen internal inequality.
Let’s hit a few contested topics. Nuclear: misunderstood workhorse or unacceptable risk?
It’s one of the most misunderstood. Nuclear is very low-carbon and uses little land. The fear centers on safety, anchored to three high-profile events: Three Mile Island (no deaths), Fukushima (no direct radiation deaths), and Chernobyl (estimates vary, somewhere around 400–4,000 deaths). Any death is tragic, of course, but we have to compare orders of magnitude. Fossil fuels kill millions annually through air pollution every year, even before you count climate impacts. On a per-unit-of-electricity basis, nuclear is hundreds to thousands of times safer than fossil fuels. Closing nuclear while keeping coal and gas running makes no safety sense.
Agriculture is a quieter giant in the climate world. How big a deal is it?
Enormous. We turn half of the world’s habitable land into farms. Agriculture is the leading driver of biodiversity loss, deforestation, freshwater use, and water pollution. For climate, it’s roughly a quarter to a third of global emissions. And impacts vary hugely by product. Animal products generally require more land and cause higher emissions than plant-based foods; larger animals tend to be worse. If everyone went vegan tomorrow, agricultural land use would fall by around 75 percent.
But this isn’t all-or-nothing. We’ll get more impact if half the population cuts back a lot than if a small share goes fully vegan. Meat reduction — especially from high-impact products — is one of the most powerful personal levers.
Are there climate things we obsess over that don’t really move the needle?
Yes. Plastic, from a climate perspective, is one. People fixate on recycling. I recycle and you should too. but the carbon benefit of recycling plastics is marginal compared with the climate impact of the stuff we put in our bags. In the UK you pay for plastic bags; culturally, forgetting your tote feels like a moral failing. Meanwhile, the food choices that dwarf the bag’s footprint get little thought. It’s not that recycling is pointless; it’s that we misallocate attention. Focus where the impact is largest.
Okay, where is the largest impact for ordinary people?
Support the buildout — politically and personally. Back leaders and policies that make clean options cheaper and easier. Then choose those options: Switch to clean power when you can, electrify cars and home heating as the options become affordable, ride good transit, reduce high-impact foods.
Just as important: how we talk about this. A public that sees the benefits of clean energy — cheaper bills, cleaner air, quieter cities, more reliable systems — gives governments and companies the “permission” to go faster. Culture makes policy possible.
Motivation is the perennial question. How do we move people?
Story matters. The danger story was necessary to wake the world up. Most people are awake now. The next job is the solutions story. We need a credible vision of the world we want in 2050 and a believable path to get there. People need to know there is a path, and that walking it brings collective benefits: health, security, prosperity. “Here’s what we’re building and why you’ll like living there” beats “Here’s what you must give up.”
Paint that 2050 picture. If we mostly get this right, what does everyday life look like?
Energy is cheaper and more reliable. Most countries control much more of their own supply. They’re less vulnerable to distant shocks. Cities are quieter and cleaner; air is better. We use less energy to deliver more services because the system is more efficient end-to-end. Transport is largely electrified. Buildings are comfortable without waste. And we have more resilience — to weather, to geopolitics — because the system is diversified and local where it makes sense.
You dedicate the book to your niece, Mava, who may live to see the 22nd century. What do you hope she says about us in 50 years?
That we were at a crossroads and chose well. That we used the position we’re in — and the tools at our disposal — to build a safer, cleaner, fairer world for her generation and the next. Pride would be nice. Relief might be closer to the truth. But the choice is ours.
So…are we doing it?
We can. And in many places, we are. The optimistic story is an opportunity, not an inevitability. My job — our job — is to push so that opportunity becomes the path we take.
Listen to the rest of the conversation and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
2025-11-02 20:00:00
Animal rights advocates often contrast humanity’s dismal treatment of animals farmed for food with our adoration bordering on worship of pet cats and dogs — the point being that these distinctions between animals that are equally sentient are arbitrary, hypocritical, and pointlessly cruel.
The comparison makes an important point, but it also conceals a grimmer reality: Humans treat the animals that we categorize as beloved companions horribly, too, breeding millions of them in puppy mills and even experimenting on tens of thousands of them every year in labs. And that in turn reveals something more fundamental about our relationship to animals. Whether they’re chickens, pigs, or dogs, the problem is the same: Nonhuman animals are commodities with no rights and few legal limits on what can be done to them.
Nevertheless, because of their relatively privileged position in human society, lab experimentation on dogs has attracted intense scrutiny in recent years. In 2022, the Virginia-based beagle breeder Envigo, which was one of the top suppliers of dogs for lab research in the country — essentially a factory farm for lab animals — shut down under pressure from a Department of Justice probe alleging that the company was grossly mistreating its dogs, even by the minimal standards set by the Animal Welfare Act (AWA).
Then, last week, the second largest remaining supplier of beagles to labs across the US (used for research including drug toxicity testing), Ridglan Farms outside Madison, Wisconsin, agreed to close its dog sales operation by July 2026 to avoid being prosecuted for felony animal cruelty. (Ridglan will still be allowed to conduct on-site animal research, for which it uses a small share of its dogs, but it won’t breed dogs to supply to other labs.)
At an evidentiary hearing last year, former Ridglan employees said they’d performed crude surgeries on beagles without pain relief, including removing prolapsed eye glands and cutting out their vocal cords, a measure meant to reduce noise from the densely packed barking dogs. “It still haunts me every day,” testified Matthew Reich, who worked at Ridglan from 2006 to 2010.
After Ridglan closes, only one major supplier of dogs for lab research will remain in the country. Dog experimentation in the US, in other words, might be approaching its end.
What’s remarkable about these two closures is how exceedingly unusual they are. For the minority of lab animals who are protected under the Animal Welfare Act (rats and mice, along with several other classes of animals, are not covered by the law), research labs and breeders across the US are subject to federal oversight and inspections, where violations are routinely uncovered, from banal failures like filthy conditions and unfed animals to grotesque ones like accidentally scalding monkeys to death with industrial cleaning equipment.
But consequences of the kind that could actually prevent more animals from being mistreated are rare to nonexistent. The US Department of Agriculture can issue fines, which legally max out at $14,575 per violation, though the agency often discounts them significantly; the USDA’s Office of Inspector General has called penalties for violating the AWA “basically meaningless,” treated by violators as “a cost of doing business.”
Although Envigo and Ridglan agreed to close under deals with law enforcement, the primary driving force behind these outcomes was arguably — and, in Ridglan’s case, certainly — years of investigative work and pressure from animal rights advocates. Envigo became a major regional story after PETA released an undercover investigation there in late 2021. Ridglan, meanwhile, which houses around 3,000 beagles at any given time and sells them to university and private labs, had been the target of an undercover investigation by activists from the animal rights group Direct Action Everywhere (DxE).
In 2017, the activists entered the farm and found dogs confined in small, dirty stacked metal cages inside foul-smelling windowless sheds, spinning around in circles from boredom. They removed three beagles from the facility, in a tactic DxE calls “open rescue.”
Following that investigation, the three activists — Wayne Hsiung, Eva Hamer, and Paul Picklesimer — were charged with felony burglary and theft, which came with the potential to each spend more than a decade in prison. But those charges were dropped last year, and, in a remarkable reversal, Hsiung, along with a coalition of local animal advocacy groups, managed to flip the case on its head: They successfully petitioned a Wisconsin judge to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Ridglan for animal cruelty.
It was a momentous result for animal advocates (including several people I personally know who’d been campaigning against Ridglan in Madison, where I live), and perhaps DxE’s greatest achievement to date. (In August 2021, before I was at Vox covering these issues for a living, I wrote to the Dane County district attorney to urge him to drop charges against the activists.) The judge’s decision implicitly affirmed something that the animal rights movement has been saying for decades. Law enforcement systematically ignores the abuse of animals in large-scale enterprises like factory farms and labs, and these facilities often rely on the privilege of nonenforcement to operate. In her order granting the activists’ petition for a special prosecutor, Judge Rhonda Lanford found probable cause to believe Ridglan violated Wisconsin’s animal cruelty laws, writing that the local district attorney had failed to act despite receiving reports of potential animal welfare violations.
The animal research community’s response to these findings has been mostly to close ranks. No prominent pro-animal research organization has, to my knowledge, publicly voiced concern over alleged conditions at Ridglan or called for accountability.
Americans for Medical Progress (AMP), a nonprofit that advocates for biomedical research using animals, told me in a statement that “Ridglan filled an important role in advancing veterinary medicine. … As that research capacity diminishes, it could become much harder for researchers to study and discover new ways to treat diseases in dogs and other animals. Responsible, well-regulated research remains essential to improving animal health and ensuring veterinarians can provide the best possible care.” (Ridglan’s dogs are used in both human and veterinary research, not solely for veterinary applications.) Last year, an AMP representative told Science magazine that Ridglan’s staff “put animal welfare first. They really abide by all of the strict regulations — everything that is in place.”
Proponents of animal research see themselves as locked in an existential war over the legitimacy of experimenting on animals (particularly animals that Americans treat as family), a war that has increasingly engaged members of the general public and politicians on both the left and right. The animal research community does not want to give an inch to animal rights advocates, nor accept limits on researchers’ autonomy to use animals as they see fit.
The rest of us, though, do not have to buy that premise. We have a choice of whether to accept the infliction of extreme suffering on gentle, trusting beagles, particularly for research with such an uneven record of helping humans. As Harvard bioengineer Don Ingber told me earlier this year, “everyone admits that animal models are suboptimal at best, and highly inaccurate more commonly.” If that’s true, it surely can’t be the case that science sees animal life as infinitely expendable.
Although ethical limits are sometimes framed as opposed to scientific progress, they are, in fact, constitutive of it. The slow unraveling of dog experimentation suggests that our better moral judgments can override institutional inertia — but it also shows how arbitrary the lines are that we draw between species, and how much further we have to go beyond the animals we’ve decided to love.
2025-11-01 20:30:00
For years, obesity rates in the US have gone in one direction: up. From the first year it was launched, Gallup’s National Health and Well-Being Index has found that the share of US adults reporting obesity has climbed and climbed, rising from 25.5 percent in 2008 to 39.9 percent in 2022. That survey caught the last leg of an epidemic that has been spreading for decades, with estimated obesity prevalence tripling over the past 60 years.
It’s not that the country hasn’t tried to fight weight gain. But from the $33 billion Americans spend each year on weight loss products and services to government efforts like first lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move campaign or Make America Healthy Again, little has worked. Many doctors and patients came to believe the rise in obesity may be all but biologically inescapable, despite the grave health risks that accompany it.
But maybe not. According to the latest results from Gallup’s survey, self-reported obesity has started to fall, declining by nearly 3 points to 37 percent in 2025. The self-reporting part is an important limitation — people’s reporting of their weight tends to be imprecise — and we’ll need more definitive proof from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to be sure, but it’s some of the earliest evidence that the US may finally be turning a corner on one of the biggest health crises of the modern age.
And the main reason it appears to be happening isn’t because weight-loss experts have stumbled upon a new diet that always works (we haven’t and probably never will) or because we’ve managed to ban all unhealthy junk food (we haven’t and almost certainly never will). It’s likely because of the growing use of glucagon-like peptide-1 agonists, better known as GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy.
What’s changed is we now have highly effective weight-loss medicines working at a scale that we’ve never seen before.
Older weight-loss drugs tended to shave off only a few percentage points of body weight, and they came with tough trade-offs and quick weight rebound. The new drugs, which were originally developed to treat diabetes, are targeting the biology that makes weight so hard to lose and keep off: They dial down hunger in the brain, slow gastric emptying, and improve post-meal insulin signaling. In large randomized trials, semaglutide 2.4 mg — the active ingredient used in medicines like Ozempic — produced about 15 percent average weight loss over 68 weeks when paired with basic lifestyle support. Other combinations have reached as much as 20 percent on higher doses.
Those effect sizes are big enough that, when even a modest share of adults use them, you can start to see movement in the population data. And as further data from Gallup shows, more and more Americans are trying these drugs, with the survey finding that more than 12 percent of adults reported taking them in the second and third quarters of 2025, up from less than 6 percent in early 2024.
And while much of the media coverage around these drugs has focused on weight and appearance, the health benefits seem to go much further. In 2024 the Food and Drug Administration added cardiovascular risk as a reason to be prescribed the GLP-1 drug Wegovy, grounded in results from a major trial that showed fewer heart attacks, strokes, and cardiovascular deaths in adults with obesity or overweight and established heart disease. The FDA’s action also opened a door for Medicare coverage in patients with cardiovascular disease — an early sign that access for these expensive medicines could expand beyond the well-insured.
It’s still early days, but if the national obesity curve keeps bending down, the benefits would be enormous. Obesity multiplies risk across nearly every major cause of death; even small, sustained declines in prevalence translate into millions fewer people living with diabetes, heart disease, sleep apnea, and painful joint disease — and billions saved in medical costs over time. The CDC pegs direct medical spending tied to obesity at roughly $173 billion. Turning that curve even a little would represent significant relief.
But we’re a long way from solving this problem. For one thing, as effective as they are, these drugs behave more like statins than antibiotics: They work while you take them. When people stop, weight regain is common.
And GLP-1s do come with side effects that for some patients have been serious enough to lead to discontinuation. Scientists also still aren’t sure about some of the longer-term effects of the drugs, which can include muscle loss and changes to sex drives. And don’t forget the four-figure monthly side effect on the wallet if GLP-1s need to be paid for out of pocket. Obesity is already linked to lower socioeconomic status, and that disparity could worsen if GLP-1s remain out of reach for all but high-income people.
Chances are, though, that the current generation of GLP-1s is the worst and most expensive we’ll ever have. Drug companies are already experimenting with pill forms of the medicine, which would make dosing more precise and lower the barrier to access: as much as 20 percent of the American public has some form of needle phobia (or trypanophobia, for those who want a great Scrabble word).
I’ll admit there’s something uncomfortable about the idea of solving obesity primarily through a drug. After all, as Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is fond of saying, can’t we fix obesity through healthier food and more exercise? But while our food system could surely be improved and most of us don’t get enough exercise, it’s not as if we haven’t tried, whether as individuals or as a country. The simple fact is that the contemporary environment is one that is heavily weighted toward the obesogenic. GLP-1 drugs seem to offer the best chance to tilt the scales back in our favor.
A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!
2025-11-01 19:00:00
Every tech company now seems to have their own AI: Google Gemini. OpenAI’s ChatGPT. MetaAI. Spending for AI is reaching record highs, powering a big boom for the stock market. Even the White House wants in on the fun.
So are we in an AI bubble — an overblown investment period that’s bound to deflate? Yes, argues Paul Kedrosky, a partner with SK Ventures and a fellow at MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. But not the bubble everyone thinks we are in. “AI is obviously a hugely important technology,” Kedrosky told Today, Explained co-host Noel King. So what, then?
It’s the money going into the AI infrastructure like data centers that concerns Kedrosky: “We’re spending this prodigious amount of money on the underlying infrastructure for AI with probably no likelihood of recovering most of that cost, and a significant likelihood that most of those assets become worthless because of the speed at which they depreciate.”
What happens when the bubble pops? And can past bubbles tell us anything about what is to come?
Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
How much money is going into these data centers?
It’s going to be on the order of trillions now. Forecasts are in excess of $2 trillion in data center spending ahead. But an increasing fraction of the money that’s being spent on all of these things that allow us to distribute AI, like electricity, is coming from debt. And debt comes with obligations. You don’t get to just walk away from it. So that makes this moment even more perilous.
If AI is so important, why does it not make sense for trillions of dollars to be rushing in? Isn’t this what we should be doing?
We should be. But the problem, of course, is that there’s this idea of what’s called a rational bubble. Everybody thinks they’re doing the right thing, but when you add everybody’s “right thing” together, you end up with a prodigious amount of waste.
It’s no different than if you go back to the 19th-century railroad bubbles in both the UK and the US. There was simply too much track, too many enthusiastic railroad builders building almost adjacent tracks to the same locations. And this led to an incredible amount of waste. But it also led to company failures and various market crises across the 19th century in the US and repeatedly in the UK. It’s not as simple as saying, “Well, this is important, so we should build it and not care what it costs and not care about the consequences.”
If so many smart people think that we are in a bubble, why is money still flowing into data centers and other AI infrastructure at the rate that it is?
I’m not convinced that many people think it is a bubble. As I talk to people in technology, the most common response I get is not only is this not a bubble, but it’s probably the most important technology of our lifetime. We have an opportunity to build a super-intelligence, a god-like intelligence on top of all of these chips and buildings and this AI electricity thing we’re creating. And to say we should slow down at this point, according to the technology community, is just a huge error. But there are people outside of technology who say, “Oh, this is an incredible amount of spending.” The Bank of England said it. Other people are cautioning about it, but not inside of technology.
The United States and humanity broadly has had no shortage of bubbles throughout history. You mentioned the railroads; walk us through some famous American bubbles.
The railroad is probably among the most prominent in the US and that was, again, an enthusiasm for the idea. The same thing happened in the ’20s during electrification. In the 1920s we went from a single-digit percentage of rural areas having access to electricity, [to] by the end of the decade it was more or less ubiquitous. Everyone had access to electricity. But at the same time, that gave rise to this proliferation of utility companies, of ventures that were doing all kinds of questionable things in terms of overspending. You could argue that electrification and the frenzy around it gave rise to the stock market rise of the ’20s, which led to the crash of ’29 and helped precipitate the Great Depression.
People are pretty familiar with the telecom and dot-com bubbles, but the closest historical analogy to what’s happening now genuinely is railroads and electrification. In the same way that we don’t need to have two sets of tracks to Philadelphia, we probably don’t need the same number of companies delivering what are called these large language models, these AI models that people are using. These will naturally shrink.
How destructive are bubbles and what do they tend to destroy?
All of them do immense damage. It’s a question of how big the bubble is and where the damage goes.
So if you’re just holding an index fund and thinking you’re being very conservative, you’re actually soaking in AI right now. If everything reverses, goes 20 or 30 percent in the other direction, you’re much poorer than you were. That’ll change your spending. And that has implications for recessions.
Isn’t it always the case that the bubble bursts and then what it leaves behind is, maybe not something beautiful, but something workable?
That’s kind of a line of patter from the technology community. But the reality is almost every financial, every technology revolution has caused huge damage and can take decades before we get back to where we were before. And as the famous line in economics goes, in the long run, it may work out, but in the long run we’re also all dead.
2025-11-01 03:45:00
Hurricane Melissa has led to at least 50 deaths across the Caribbean as of Friday afternoon. It has now weakened into a post-tropical cyclone, veering eastward away from the Americas.
In its wake, the storm carved a massive swath of destruction across Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba as it lashed the region with howling winds and torrential downpours. For Jamaica, Melissa was the strongest hurricane the island had experienced on record when it made landfall on Tuesday with winds at 185 miles per hour, putting it firmly in Category 5.
“We have never had a Category 5 hurricane in our country,” Dana Morris Dixon, Jamaica’s minister of education, skills, youth, and information said at a news conference Friday. “The devastation in the west is unimaginable.“
Ahead of of its arrival, the National Hurricane Center issued a blunt warning for Jamaica: “THIS IS AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS AND LIFE-THREATENING SITUATION! TAKE COVER NOW!”
Hurricane Melissa has been an extraordinary storm, even among the many massive, fast-growing, devastating cyclones that have been erupting in the Atlantic Ocean in recent years.
The hurricane caused landslides, power outages, and flash floods, and the death toll is likely to climb higher as rescuers reach towns cut off by damages from the storm and begin to search for the missing.
It’s clear that Melissa will leave a lasting scar on the islands in its path. It’s likely to be the strongest tropical cyclone in the world this year. “For Jamaica, it will be the storm of the century for sure,” World Meteorological Organization tropical cyclone specialist Anne-Claire Fontan told reporters in Geneva, Switzerland.
As Melissa fades away, here are a few key things to keep in mind:
It’s hard to overstate just how powerful this storm was, and how quickly it erupted. Melissa is now tied with Hurricane Dorian in 2019 and the 1935 Labor Day hurricane as the strongest storm to ever make landfall, and certainly the strongest to hit Jamaica. The last time Jamaica took a direct hit from a hurricane was in 1988 from Gilbert.
Melissa also grew quickly. Its wind speed more than doubled in 24 hours, from 70 mph to 140 mph. The threshold for rapid intensification is wind speeds increasing by at least 35 mph in 24 hours.
A hurricane’s devastation doesn’t only come from its strong winds. Even a weaker cyclone can leave a trail of death and destruction when it hits a vulnerable area, and much of the lasting havoc comes from water, not wind. Earlier this year, the remnants of Tropical Storm Barry, for example, moved inland and collided with another weather system over Texas and triggered flash floods that killed at least 90 people.
Jamaica is particularly vulnerable because its mountainous geography can create the ideal conditions for flash floods. And as the country faces a housing shortage and rising prices that are driving many into substandard living conditions, increasing the human and property toll of the storm.
“There is no infrastructure in the region that can withstand a Category 5,” said Jamaican Prime Minister Andrew Holness in a news conference Monday.
Hurricane season officially runs from June 1 to November 30. In its early season outlook in May, NOAA anticipated a 60 percent chance of “above-normal” hurricane activity in the Atlantic Ocean this year, with up to 19 named storms and five of those turning into major hurricanes. The agency’s updated forecast in August slightly lowered the chances of above-normal activity to 50 percent. Forecasters saw that there was ample warm water in the Atlantic Ocean — a necessary ingredient for hurricanes — and atmospheric conditions that make it easier for cyclones to form.
From an American perspective, this season felt unusually quiet. There have been 13 named Atlantic storms this year so far. This year became the first time in a decade that no hurricane made landfall in the US by the end of September. But while most tropical storms in the Atlantic didn’t hit the US, several did strike the Caribbean. There were also major storms that churned out at sea and still caused houses to collapse in places like the Outer Banks in North Carolina. Melissa is the third Category 5 hurricane this year, after Erin and Humberto, making 2025 one of the most active years on record when it comes to the most severe storms.
“It’s been a busy season,” said Monica Medina, a former senior official at NOAA under President Barack Obama. “It’s just the storms have not hit the US.”
While the season as a whole may have seemed unusually calm before Melissa, there’s still another month to go, and the fuel for another massive storm remains ready.
And historically, some of our most catastrophic storms hit during unusually quiet seasons. “There’s this old phrase: All it takes is one,” said Michael Fischer, an assistant professor at the University of Miami studying hurricane modeling. Fischer noted that hurricane activity in 1992 was significantly below average, but that was the year Hurricane Andrew struck Florida and became, at the time, the costliest storm to hit the US, causing $26 billion in damages. Hurricane Katrina in 2005 broke that record with more than $100 billion in damages during a more active season. “We have to be careful before we make assessments of this hurricane season,” Fischer said. “So far it’s been a bit, perhaps a bit quieter than what was expected in terms of the total number of named storms, but the book is not done being written yet.”
Update October 31, 3:45 pm ET: This story was originally published on October 29 and has been updated multiple times with new reporting on Hurricane Melissa.
2025-11-01 02:56:00
On Thursday night, the president of the Heritage Foundation — the MAGA right’s leading think tank — welcomed an open Nazi into his political coalition.
You might think I am exaggerating. I assure you I am not. The Nazi in question here, podcaster Nick Fuentes, has described Adolf Hitler as “really fucking cool” and said “perfidious Jews” must “be given the death penalty” after “we take power.”
And on Thursday, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts released a video defending this person’s inclusion in polite-right politics: describing Fuentes not as a hate-monger to be banished from the decent right, but as a coalition member whose view of Jews-as-evil-traitors should be politely debated.
“The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right,” Roberts said. “I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But canceling him is not the answer.”
This is an epochal moment for American conservatism. In the past, the movement felt the need to hide bigotries — including antisemitism — behind a thin veil of plausible deniability. But with Fuentes, there’s no hidden message: He just says, over and over again, that Jews are evil and the source of America’s biggest problems. If someone like him can be considered one of Roberts’s “friends on the right,” then the movement’s leadership is now conceding that overt antisemitism is a legitimate political position in the MAGA movement.
Now, prominent conservative figures — like writers Erick Erickson and Rod Dreher — are aghast, raging against Fuentes’ newfound acceptability. Most strikingly, former Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) weighed in against Roberts, accusing Heritage of “carry[ing] water for antisemites.”
Earlier this week, I suggested the GOP might be in the opening stages of a civil war over the status of Jews in American life. I’m now convinced that it is. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.
To understand what’s happening right now, you need to understand the man who served as the bridge between Fuentes and Roberts: Tucker Carlson.
Carlson and Fuentes had, as recently as August, openly hated each other (Carlson memorably called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid”). But, increasingly, they’ve come to be two sides of the same coin. While Fuentes is openly and violently antisemitic, Carlson has mainstreamed similar ideas more subtly — by, for example, implying the Jews killed Jesus during Charlie Kirk’s memorial and elevating revisionist “histories” of World War II in which the real bad guy was not Adolf Hitler but rather Winston Churchill.
Earlier this week, they buried the hatchet: Carlson released a fawning interview with Fuentes that serves, in large part, to make the extremist look far more reasonable than he sounds on his own show. There was no open support for Hitler, though Fuentes did (to Carlson’s chagrin) manage to say something nice about another mass-murdering antisemite: Joseph Stalin.
The sit-down was, in many respects, a kind of concession on Carlson’s part: Though he once attempted to push Fuentes aside, it seems he has since he realized he didn’t have the muscle to do so. Fuentes’ supporters, called “groypers,” had come to make up a huge percentage of the GOP youth cadres. In his post on the Carlson-Fuentes meetup, for example, Dreher cited a rough estimate from “a big player in conservative politics” that “30 to 40 percent of the Republican staff in Washington under the age of 30 are Groypers.”
These people make up a core audience that Carlson couldn’t afford to alienate; their existence explains why he and fellow podcaster Candace Owens have been leaning so hard into antisemitism in recent broadcasts. The young conservatives who watch online shows and streamers like this stuff, and they’re more than willing to pay for it.
But Carlson is more than just part of the online right’s ecosystem: He is one of the MAGA right’s most influential voices, bar none. He spoke in prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention and, by all accounts, played a major role in the elevation of JD Vance to the vice presidency. Once he platformed Fuentes, it blessed the “weird little gay kid” outside of the internet fever swamps: making it okay for leading Trump-aligned figures to openly court Fuentes and his groyper hordes.
Carlson’s decision to do this met with real resistance: Both National Review magazine and Sen. Ted Cruz lit into him over it.
“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing — then you are a coward and complicit in that evil,” Cruz said.
This is the absolutely critical context for Roberts’ ultimate intervention. His primary goal in the video was not defending Fuentes per se; it was defending Carlson against these post-Fuentes attacks.
“We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” Roberts said. “That includes Tucker Carlson — who remains, and as I’ve said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”
Roberts’s video shows why Carlson’s friendly sit-down with Fuentes was so important — ”one of the most dangerous videos ever in MAGA media,” as The Bulwark’s veteran right-watcher Will Sommer puts it.
When Carlson decided to back Fuentes, he put his own reputation on the line as well. The inevitable attacks on Carlson personally from people like Cruz activated Carlson’s allies in mainstream MAGA world, like Roberts, to defend him.
And there was no way to do that without, implicitly or explicitly, saying that it’s okay to let people like Fuentes into the right’s broader tent.
Thus, Carlson’s choice to sit down with Fuentes had a very real and direct effect: leading the right’s top think tank to admit a Hitler worshipper as a legitimate discussion partner. Fuentes is now, in a very real sense, mainstream himself.
Now, the Fuentes-Carlson-Roberts axis is waking up Trump-aligned conservatives to the rot in their movement. People like Dreher, a postliberal writer who moved to Hungary in large because he admires Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian-right regime, are calling for a purge. As Dreher writes:
I simply cannot understand the logic behind treating Fuentes as a normal political actor — even if he has a relatively big following. He is a deeply bad man, with no redeeming qualities. If his mode of discourse, and beliefs, become part of the mainstream of conservatism, we’re done, and we will deserve it…
A line must be drawn between us and the likes of Fuentes…because they cannot be reasoned with, don’t want to reason with anybody, and are driven by nothing but the pleasure of hating and transgressing. They will poison anything they touch.
I wish them well in this quest: Truly, I do. Fuentes is every bit as awful as Dreher says; it is paramount for the safety of my community (American Jews) that people like him succeed in booting Fuentes from the coalition.
But I also wish they would engage in a little self-reflection. Because without it, their quest might be doomed to fail.
The dominant strain of right-wing punditry has been preoccupied with the overwhelming dangers of “cancel culture” and “wokeness” — Dreher published an entire book labeling it “soft totalitarianism.” In doing so, they defended and apologized for bigotry coming from people like Trump and Carlson when they railed against the evils of mass migration, Islam, and urban crime.
In doing so, they elevated anti-anti-bigotry into a kind of defining ideological principle: that accusations of bigotry, and not bigotry itself, is the real problem. The popularity of this attitude makes it exceptionally difficult for the right to police its own; any attempt at saying “this far, and no farther” is met with accusations of wokeness and cancellation.
“It’s not even ‘no guardrails’ — it’s policing to make sure there aren’t guardrails,” as Richard Hanania, an influential writer on the right (and himself a former white nationalist forum poster), put it to me in a recent interview
This is the “no enemies on the right” logic that allowed Vance to dismiss the pro-Hitler texts among New York Young Republicans — and was explicitly deployed by Kevin Roberts in his dual defense of Carlson and Fuentes.
As long as it holds sway in the minds of most Republicans — as long as they believe that the very idea of enforcing standards is the greatest form of political perfidy — it will pose a massive barrier to any kind of effort to excise Fuentes, let alone Carlson, from the coalition.
People like Roberts will be there to defend them, using the language that Republicans have used to excuse every single awful thing Trump and others in his tent have been saying about minorities for years. And it’ll work.
“I’m afraid the campus speech debates of the 2010s dulled the discernment of many conservatives,” Giancarlo Sopo, a former Trump campaign adviser on Hispanic outreach, posted on X. “However depraved the sentiment, criticism becomes taboo, and ostracism unthinkable, so long as one gestures vaguely toward ‘the right.’”
So the current struggle within the right does not just require open confrontation with Fuentes. It requires some soul-searching about what the more mainstream right did to open the door for him.
Update, October 31, 2:56 pm: This story was originally published at 1:50 pm and has been updated to include a quote from former Sen. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.