2025-06-03 02:00:00
Women weren’t allowed to officially serve in direct ground combat jobs when Emelie Vanasse started her ROTC program at George Washington University. Instead, she used her biology degree to serve as a medical officer — but it still bothered Vanasse to be shut out of something just because she was a woman.
“I always felt like, who really has the audacity to tell me that I can’t be in combat arms? I’m resilient, I am tough, I can make decisions in stressful environments,” Vanasse said.
By 2015, the Obama administration opened all combat jobs to women, despite a plea from senior leaders in the Marine Corps to keep certain frontline units male only. Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter told reporters that, “We cannot afford to cut ourselves off from half the country’s talents and skills.”
The policy change meant that women could become Army Rangers, the elite special operations infantry unit. The training school for the Rangers officially opened to women three months earlier. When Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver became the first women to graduate from the school in 2015, Vanasse taped their photos to her desk and swore she would be next, no matter what it took. She went on to become one of the first women to serve as an Army infantry officer and graduated from Ranger School in 2017.
After the Pentagon integrated women into combat jobs, the services developed specific fitness standards for jobs like infantry and armor with equal standards for men and women. Special operations and other highly specialized units require additional qualification courses that are also gender-neutral. To continue past the first day of Ranger School, candidates must pass the Ranger Physical Fitness test, for which there is only one standard. Only the semiannual fitness tests that service members take, which vary by branch, are scaled for age and gender.
Despite that, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to insist that the standards were lowered for combat roles. In a podcast interview in November, Hegseth said, “We’ve changed the standards in putting [women in combat], which means you’ve changed the capability of that unit.” (Despite Hegseth’s remark, many women worked alongside male infantry units in Iraq and Afghanistan, facing the same dangerous conditions.)
In the same interview, Hegseth said that he didn’t believe women should serve in combat roles.
In March, Hegseth ordered the military services to make the basic fitness standards for all combat jobs gender-neutral. The Army is the first service to comply: Beginning June 1, most combat specialties will require women to meet the male standard for basic physical fitness, something most women serving in active-duty combat roles are already able to do.
Vanasse told Noel King on Today, Explained what it was like to attend Ranger School at a time when some men didn’t want to see a woman in the ranks.
What is Ranger School?
I went to Ranger School on January 1, 2017. I woke up at 3 am that day in Fort Benning, Georgia, shaved my head — a quarter-inch all the way around — just like the men. Took my last hot shower, choked down some French toast, and then I drove to Camp Rogers, and I remember being very acutely aware of the pain that the school would inflict, both physically and mentally. I was also very aware that there was kind of half of this population of objective graders that just kind of hated my guts for even showing up.
They hated you for showing up because you’re a woman?
Back in 2016 and 2017, it was so new to have women in Ranger School. I used to think, I don’t have to just be good, I have to be lucky. I have to get a grader who is willing to let a woman pass.
I had dark times at that school. I tasted real failure. I sat under a poncho in torrential rain and I shivered so hard my whole body cramped. I put on a ruck that weighed 130 pounds and I crawled up a mountain on my hands and knees. I hallucinated a donut shop in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains and I cried one morning when someone told me I had to get out of my sleeping bag.
But I think all of those experiences are quintessential Ranger School experiences. They’re what everyone goes through there. And I think the point of the school is that failure, that suffering, it’s not inherently bad, right? In a way, I like to think Ranger School was the most simplistic form of gender integration that ever could have happened because if I was contributing to the team, there was no individual out there that really had the luxury of disliking or excluding me.
When you wanted to give up, what did you tell yourself? What was going through your head?
I don’t think I ever considered quitting Ranger School. I just knew that it was something that I could get through and had the confidence to continue. I had a thought going in of, What could be so bad that would make me quit? and the answer that I found throughout the school was, Nothing.
Did you ever feel like they had lowered the standards for you compared to the men who were alongside you?
No. Never. I did the same thing that the men did. I did the same Ranger physical fitness test that all the men took. I ran five miles in 40 minutes. I did 49 pushups, 59 situps, six pullups. I rucked 12 miles in three hours with a 45-pound ruck. I climbed the same mountains. I carried the same stuff. I carried the same exact packing list they did, plus 250 tampons for some reason. At no point were the standards lowered for me.
Whose idea was it for you to carry 250 tampons?
It was not mine! It was a misguided effort to have everyone very prepared for the first women coming through Ranger School.
In Ranger School, there’s only one standard for the fitness test. Everybody has to meet it, and that allows you to get out of Ranger School and say, “Look, fellas, I took the same test as the men and I passed.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is saying that Army combat jobs should only have one standard of fitness for both men and women. And there’s part of me that thinks: Doesn’t that allow the women who meet the standards to be like, look, We met the same standards as the men. Nothing suspicious here, guys.
I think gender-neutral standards for combat arms are very important. It should not be discounted how important physical fitness is for combat arms. I think there’s nuance in determining what is a standard that is useful for combat arms, right? But it’s an important thing. And there have been gender-neutral standards for combat arms.
In things like Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course, which is the initial basic training for officers going into the infantry, there are gender-neutral standards that you have to meet: You have to run five miles in 40 minutes, you have to do a 12-mile ruck. All of those standards have remained the same. Pete Hegseth is specifically referring to the Army Combat Physical Fitness test, and to a certain extent I agree, it should be gender-neutral for combat arms. But I think there’s nuance in determining what exactly combat arms entails physically.
Secretary Hegseth has a lot to say about women, and sometimes he says it directly and sometimes he alludes to it. What he often does is he talks about lethality as something that is critically important for the military. He says the Army in particular needs more of it, but he never really defines what he means by lethality. What is the definition as you understand it?
There’s a component of lethality that is physical fitness and it should not be discounted. But lethality extends far beyond that, right? It’s tactical skills, it’s decision-making, it’s leadership, it’s grit, it’s the ability to build trust and instill purpose and a group of people. It’s how quick a fire team in my platoon can react to contact. How well my SAW [Squad Automatic Weapon] gunner can shoot, how quickly I can employ and integrate combat assets, how fast I can maneuver a squad. All of those things take physical fitness, but they certainly take more than just physical fitness. There’s more to lethality than just how fast you can run and how many pushups you can do.
To an average civilian like myself, I hear lethality and I think of the dictionary definition, the ability to kill. Does this definition of lethality involve the ability, physically and emotionally and psychologically, to kill another person?
Absolutely.
And so when Secretary Hegseth casts doubt on the ability of women to be as lethal as men, do you think there’s some stuff baked in there that maybe gets to his idea of what women are willing and able to do?
Yes, possibly. I think the [secretary’s] message is pretty clear. According to him, the women in combat arms achieved success because the standards were lowered for them. We were never accommodated and the standards were never lowered.
What’s your response, then, to hearing the Secretary of Defense say women don’t belong in combat?
It makes me irate, to be honest. Like, it’s just a complete discounting of all of the accomplishments of the women that came before us.
Do you think that if Secretary Hegseth could take a look at what you did in Ranger School, and he could hear from you that there were no second chances, there were no excuses, there was no babying, the men didn’t treat you nicer just because you were a woman, do you think he’d change his mind about women serving in combat?
I’d like to think he would, but I’ve met plenty of people whose minds couldn’t be changed by reality. I’d love it if he went to Ranger School. He has a lot of opinions about Ranger School for someone who does not have his Ranger tab.
What is a Ranger tab, for civilians?
A Ranger tab is what you receive upon graduating Ranger School, which means you have passed all three phases and you are now Ranger-qualified in the military.
You have that. And the secretary of defense doesn’t.
He does not, though he has a lot of opinions about Ranger School.
Clarification, June 2, 2 pm ET: This story was updated to include more details about the Ranger School policy change.
2025-06-03 00:58:00
Nearly two decades ago, scientists made an alarming discovery in upstate New York: Bats, the world’s only flying mammal, were becoming infected with a new, deadly fungal disease that, in some cases, could wipe out an entire colony in a matter of months.
Since then, the disease — later called white-nose syndrome — has spread across much of the country, utterly decimating North American bats that hibernate in caves and killing over 90 percent of three bat species. According to some scientists, WNS has caused “the most precipitous wildlife decline in the past century in North America.”
These declines have clear consequences for human populations — for you, even if you don’t like bats or visit caves.
Bats eat insect pests, such as moths and beetles. And as they decline, farmers need to spray more pesticides. Scientists have linked the loss of bats in the US to an increase in insecticide use on farmland and, remarkably, to a rise in infant deaths. Insecticide chemicals are known to harm the health of newborns.
The only reason we know any of this is because of a somewhat obscure government program in the US Geological Survey (USGS), an agency nested within the Interior Department. That program, known as the Ecosystems Mission Area (EMA), is the biological research division of Interior. Among other functions, it monitors environmental contaminants, the spread of invasive species, and the health of the nation’s wildlife, including bees, birds, and bats.
The Ecosystems Mission Area, which has around 1,200 employees, produces the premier science revealing how animals and ecosystems that Americans rely on are changing and what we can do to keep them intact — or risk our own health and economy.
This program is now at an imminent risk of disappearing.
Are you a current or former federal employee with knowledge about the Trump administration’s attacks on wildlife protections? Reach out to Vox environmental correspondent Benji Jones on Signal at benji.90 or at [email protected] or at [email protected].
In the White House’s 2026 budget request, the Trump administration asked Congress to slash funding for EMA by about 90 percent, from $293 million in 2025 to $29 million next year. Such cuts are also in line with Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s conservative policy roadmap, which calls for the government to “abolish” Interior’s Biological Resources Division, an outdated name for the Ecosystems Mission Area.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration is also reportedly trying to fire government employees in the Ecosystems Mission Area, though a federal judge has so far blocked those efforts.
Eliminating biological research is not good. In fact, it’s very bad.
For a decade now, EMA’s North American Bat Monitoring Program, or NABat, has been gathering and analyzing data on bats and the threats they face. NABat produces research using data from hundreds of partner organizations showing not only how white-nose syndrome is spreading — which scientists are using to develop and deploy vaccines — but also how bats are affected by wind turbines, another known threat.
Energy companies can and do use this research to develop safer technologies and avoid delays caused by wildlife regulations, such as the Endangered Species Act.
The irony, an Interior Department employee told me, is that NABat makes wildlife management more efficient. It also helps reveal where declines are occurring before they become severe, potentially helping avoid the need to grant certain species federal protection — something the Trump administration would seem to want. The employee, who’s familiar with Interior’s bat-monitoring efforts, spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation by the Trump administration.
“If they want to create efficiencies in the government, they should ask us,” another Interior employee told Vox. “The damage that can be done by one administration takes decades to rebuild.”
In response to a request for comment, an Interior Department spokesperson told Vox that “USGS remains committed to its congressional mandate as the science arm of the Department of the Interior.” The White House did not respond to a request for comment. In a Senate appropriations hearing last week, Interior Secretary Doug Burgum refused to commit to maintaining funding for EMA.
“There’s no question that they don’t know what EMA does,” said a third Interior employee, who has knowledge of the Ecosystems Mission Area.
Ultimately, it’s not clear why the administration has targeted Interior’s biological research. EMA does, however, do climate science, such as studying how plants and animals are responding to rising temperatures. That’s apparently a no-go for the Trump administration. It also gathers information that sometimes indicates that certain species need federal protections, which come with regulations (also a no-go for President Donald Trump’s agenda).
What’s especially frustrating for environmental advocates is that NABat, now 10 years old, is starting to hit its stride.
“We should be celebrating the 10-year anniversary of this very successful program that started from scratch and built this robust, vibrant community of people all collecting data,” said Winifred Frick, the chief scientist at Bat Conservation International, an environmental group. “We have 10 years of momentum, and so to cut it off now sort of wastes all that investment. That feels like a tremendous loss.”
Meanwhile, the cost of maintaining the program is less than 1 percent of Interior’s overall budget.
The government’s wildlife monitoring programs are “jewels of the country,” said Hollis Woodard, an associate professor of entomology at University of California Riverside who works with USGS on bee monitoring. “These birds and bats perform services for us that are important for our day-to-day lives. Literally everything I value, including food, comes down to keeping an eye on these populations. The idea that we’re just going to wipe them out is just terrifying.”
Update, June 2, 12:58 pm ET: This article was originally published on May 29, 2025, and has been updated to include newly public details on the 2026 White House budget request.
2025-06-03 00:00:00
The world is hungry for more stuff: televisions, phones, motors, container ships, solar panels, satellites. That means the stuff required to make stuff is in high demand, and none more so than what are known as “critical minerals.”
These are a handful of elements and minerals that are particularly important for making the modern devices that run the global economy. But “critical” here doesn’t mean rare so much as it means essential — and alarmingly vulnerable to supply chain shocks.
In the US, the Geological Survey has flagged 50 minerals as critical to our economy and security. And including some among that larger group, the US Department of Energy is focused on 18 materials that are especially important for energy — copper for transmission lines, cobalt for cathodes in batteries, gallium for LEDs, neodymium for magnets in motors, and so on.
For governments, these minerals are more than just industrial components — they’re potential bottlenecks. If producers of these substances decide to restrict access to their customers as a political lever, if prices shoot up, or if more industries develop an appetite for them and eat into the supply, companies could go bankrupt and efforts to limit climate change could slow down.
That’s because these minerals are especially vital for so many clean energy technologies. They’re essential for the tools used to produce, store, transmit, and use electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. They’re vital to building solar panels, batteries, and electric motors. As the worldwide race for cleaner energy speeds up, the demand for these products is surging. According to the International Energy Agency, mineral demands from clean energy deployment will see anywhere from a doubling to a quadrupling from current levels by 2040.
But these minerals aren’t spread evenly across the world, which could leave some countries bearing most of the environmental burdens from mining critical minerals while wealthier nations reap the economic benefits and other countries get left out of the supply chain entirely.
“A world powered by renewables is a world hungry for critical minerals,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres at a panel last year. “For developing countries, critical minerals are a critical opportunity — to create jobs, diversify economies, and dramatically boost revenues. But only if they are managed properly.”
Right now, the US is a major consumer of critical minerals, but not much of a producer — a fact that’s become an obsession for the Trump administration. The president has signed several executive orders aimed at increasing critical mineral production within the US by relaxing regulations and speeding up approvals for new critical mineral extraction projects. In Congress, lawmakers are mulling spending billions of dollars to build up a critical mineral stockpile similar to the strategic petroleum reserve.
Even as the US government takes those steps, the international trade war that the Trump administration itself launched has begun to disrupt the global supply of critical minerals. China is one of the largest producers of critical minerals, particularly rare earth metals like dysprosium and terbium, but it has imposed limits on some of its critical mineral exports in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs, sending prices skyward.
The dawning awareness that the critical minerals everyone needs may not be readily available has led countries to redouble their efforts to find more of these materials wherever they can — in the ocean, across deserts, and even in space. In the near term, that means the world will need more mines to expand supplies of critical minerals.
And with the market for clean energy poised to expand even further, scientists are trying to find new alternative materials that can power our world without making it hotter. But it will take more time and investment before the plentiful can replace the precious.
Since the list of critical minerals is long and diverse, it’s helpful to narrow it down. And one mineral stands out: lithium.
The IEA estimates that half of the mineral demand growth for clean energy will come from electric vehicles and batteries, mainly from their needs for this soft, light metal. Depending on how aggressively the world works to decarbonize, lithium use is projected to increase by as much as 51 times its current levels by 2040, more than 10 million metric tons per year.
That’s because lithium is still the best material to store and release energy in batteries across a variety of applications, from the tiny cells in wireless earbuds to arrays of thousands of cells packed into giant batteries on the power grid. As more cars trade gasoline engines for electric motors, and as more intermittent wind and solar power connect to the grid, we need more ways to store energy.
While lithium is not particularly rare, getting it out of the earth isn’t easy. There are only a handful of places in the world that currently have the infrastructure to extract it at scale and at a low enough price to make doing so worthwhile, even with ever rising demand.
The US produces less than 2 percent of the world’s lithium, with almost all of it coming from just one mine in Nevada. The US has about 20 major sites where lithium could be extracted, according to the US Geological Survey, but building new mines can take more than a decade, and the timelines have only been getting longer. Because of their costs and the long-lasting environmental damage they can cause, mining projects have to undergo reviews before they can be approved. They often generate local opposition as well, stretching out project timelines with litigation.
But the US is motivated to build this out and there are already new lithium projects underway in places like the Salton Sea in California and the Smackover formation across the southern US. These sites would extract lithium from brine.
Could the US replace lithium and other critical minerals with cheaper, more abundant substances?
Not easily. “Substitution is not impossible, but depends on which material,” Sophia Kalantzakos, who studies environmental science and public policy at NYU Abu Dhabi, said in an email. Some materials are truly one of a kind, while others have alternatives that need a lot more research and development before they can step in. For example, there are companies investing in lithium alternatives in batteries, but they also have to build up a whole supply chain to get enough of the replacement material, which can take years.
And it’s not enough to mine critical minerals; they need to be refined and processed into usable forms. Here again, China leads, operating 80 percent of the world’s refining capacity. The bottom line is that there’s no immediate, easy answer to the critical mineral supply crunch right now. But there might be solutions that emerge in the years to come.
These challenges have spurred a wave of research and development. Engineers are already finding ways to do more with less. Automakers like Ford, Tesla, and the Chinese company BYD are increasingly turning toward lithium iron phosphate (LFP) batteries as an alternative to conventional lithium-ion cells. Not only does the LFP chemistry use less lithium for a given energy storage capacity, it also uses less of other critical minerals like nickel and cobalt, lowering its cost. The batteries also tend to be more durable and stable, making them less prone to catastrophic failure.
The US Department of Energy has invested in ways to make lithium-based batteries more efficient and easier to manufacture by redesigning the structure of battery components to store more energy.
Researchers are also investigating battery designs that avoid lithium altogether. Chemistries like aluminum ion and sodium ion, as their names suggest, use different and far more abundant elements to carry charges inside the battery. But they still have to catch up to lithium in terms of durability, safety, performance, and production scale.
“I think this lithium-ion technology will still drive much of the energy transition,” said Rachid Amui, a resource economist who coauthored a United Nations Trade & Development report on critical minerals for batteries. It will likely be decades before alternatives can dethrone lithium. Eventually, as components wear out, recycling could help meet some critical mineral needs. But demand for technologies like batteries is poised to see a huge jump, which means the world will have no choice but to grow its fresh lithium supplies.
There is some good news, though. Mining is getting more efficient and safer. “There’s so much autonomous technology now being developed in the mining industry that is making mining safer than we could have ever imagined 15, 20 years ago,” said Adam Simon, a professor of earth and environmental science at the University of Michigan. That’s helping drive down costs and increase the efficiency of mineral extraction. The number of known sources of lithium is also rising. KoBold Metals, a mining firm backed by Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos, is using AI to locate more critical mineral deposits all over the world.
The Energy Department is also throwing its weight behind domestic innovation. The department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, which invests in long-shot energy ideas, is funding 18 projects to increase domestic production of critical minerals. The program, dubbed MINER, is aiming to develop minerals that can capture carbon dioxide.
“Through programs like MINER and targeted investments in domestic innovation, we’re working to reduce reliance on foreign sources and lay the groundwork for an American energy future that is reliable, cost-effective, and secure,” said Doug Wicks, a program director for ARPA-E, in a statement to Vox.
There’s also a global race to secure more mineral supplies from far-flung places, all the way down to the bottom of the ocean. On parts of the seafloor, there are vast fields of nodules made of nickel, cobalt, lithium, and manganese. For mining companies, the argument is that mining the seafloor could be less damaging to the environment than drilling or brine extraction on land.
But the ocean floor is anything but a desolate place; there’s a lot of life down there taking many forms, including species that have yet to be discovered. One of the most lucrative areas for sea mining, the Clarion-Clipperton Zone in the Pacific Ocean, happens to have a rich ecosystem of sponges, anemones, and sea cucumbers.
Another factor to consider is that pulling up rocks from the bottom of the sea is inevitably expensive. The Clarion-Clipperton Zone can reach 18,000 feet deep. Hauling those minerals up, shipping them to shore, and refining them adds to their sticker price.
“I think it’s interesting and needed because of the [research and development] that it stimulates,” Simon said. “But economically, there’s no company right now who could actually mine the lithium in those clays from the bottom of the ocean.”
There are even companies that have proposed mining critical minerals from asteroids. One company, AstroForge, has already launched a test spacecraft into deep space. That’s an even dicier business proposition since working in space is even more expensive than trying to mine the bottom of the ocean. But space mining technology is a moonshot — still gestational and decades away from even returning a sample. The companies behind these proposals say that humanity’s hunger for these minerals is only growing and it’s prudent to start taking steps now toward building up supplies of raw materials in space.
But for the time being, there’s no easy way around it: powering a greener world means we will still need to extract far more critical minerals to turn away from fossil fuels and toward clean energy. Otherwise humanity will continue extracting and burning coal, oil, and natural gas, further heating up the planet.
2025-06-02 22:40:50
Air travel is such a common part of modern life that it’s easy to forget all the miraculous technology and communication infrastructure required to do it safely. But recent crashes, including near Washington, DC, and in San Diego — not to mention multiple near misses — have left many fliers wondering: Is it still safe to fly?
That concern is particularly acute at Newark Liberty International Airport in New Jersey, which has recently experienced several frightening incidents and near misses in as radio and radar systems have gone dark. This has left an under-staffed and overworked group of air traffic controllers to manage a system moving at a frenetic pace with no room for error.
Andrew Tangel, an aviation reporter for the Wall Street Journal, recently spoke to Jonathan Stewart, a Newark air traffic controller. When Stewart saw two planes potentially headed for a crash, he was worried that radar and radio communication systems might fail as they had days earlier.
According to Tangel, Stewart “sent off a fiery memo to his managers, complaining about how he was put in that situation, which he felt he was being set up for failure.” Stewart now is taking trauma leave because of the stresses of the job. After many delayed flights, United Airlines just announced that it will move some of its flights to nearby John F. Kennedy International Airport.
To understand how we arrived at our current aviation crisis, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Darryl Campbell, an aviation safety writer for The Verge.
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 your podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.
You recently wrote about all these issues with flying for The Verge — and your take was that this isn’t just a Newark, New Jersey, problem. It’s systemic. Why?
You’ve probably seen some of the news articles about it, and it’s really only in the last couple months because everybody’s been paying attention to aviation safety that people are really saying, Oh my gosh!
Newark airport is losing the ability to see airplanes. They’re losing radar for minutes at a time, and that’s not something you want to hear when you have airplanes flying towards each other at 300 miles an hour. So it is rightfully very concerning. But the thing is, what’s been happening at Newark has actually been happening for almost a decade and a half in fits and starts. It’ll get really bad, and then it’ll get better again.
Now we’re seeing a combination of air traffic control problems; we’re seeing a combination of infrastructure problems, and they’ve got a runway that’s entirely shut down. And the way that I think about it is, while Newark is its own special case today, all of the problems that it’s facing, other than the runway, are problems that every single airport in the entire country is going to be facing over the next five to 10 years, and so we’re really getting a preview of what’s going to happen if we don’t see some drastic change in the way that the air traffic control system is maintained.
We heard about some of these issues after the crash at DCA outside Washington. What exactly is going on with air traffic controllers?
The first problem is just one of staff retention and training. On the one hand, the air traffic control system and the people who work there are a pretty dedicated bunch, but it takes a long time to get to the point where you’re actually entrusted with airplanes. It can be up to four years of training from the moment that you decide, Okay, I want to be an air traffic controller.
Couple that with the fact that these are government employees and like many other agencies, they haven’t really gotten the cost-of-living increases to keep pace with the actual cost of living, especially in places like the New York and New Jersey area, where it’s just gone up way faster than in the rest of the country.
This is bad at Newark, but you say it promises to get bad everywhere else too.
The cost of living is still outpacing the replacement level at a lot of these air traffic control centers. And the washout rate is pretty high. We’ve seen the average staffing level at a lot of American airports get down below 85, 80 percent, which is really where the FAA wants it to be, and it’s getting worse over time.
At Newark in particular, it’s down to about 58 percent as of the first quarter of this year. This is an emergency level of staffing at a baseline. And then on top of that, you have — in order to keep the airplanes going — people working mandatory overtime, mandatory six-days-a-week shifts, and that’s accelerating that burnout that naturally happens. There’s a lot of compression and a lot of bad things happening independently, but all at the same time in that kind of labor system that’s really making it difficult to both hire and retain qualified air traffic controllers.
These sound like very fixable problems, Darryl. Are we trying to fix them? I know former reality TV star and Fox News correspondent — and transportation secretary, in this day and age — Sean Duffy has been out to Newark. He said this: “What we are going to do when we get the money. We have the plan. We actually have to build a brand new state-of-the-art, air traffic control system.”
To his credit, they have announced some improvements on it. They’ve announced a lot of new funding for the FAA. They’ve announced an acceleration of hiring, but it’s just a short-term fix.
To put it in context, the FAA’s budget usually allocates about $1.7 billion in maintenance fees every year. And so they’ve announced a couple billion more dollars, but their backlog already is $5.2 billion in maintenance. And these are things like replacing outdated systems, replacing buildings that are housing some of these radars, things that you really need to just get the system to where it should be operating today, let alone get ahead of the maintenance things that are going to happen over the next couple of years. It’s really this fight between the FAA and Congress to say, We’re going to do a lot today to fix these problems.
And it works for a little while, but then three years down the road, the same problems are still occurring. You got that one-time shot of new money, but then the government cuts back again and again and again. And then you’re just putting out one fire, but not addressing the root cause of why there’s all this dry powder everywhere.
People are canceling their flights into or out of Newark, but there are also all these smaller accidents we’re seeing, most recently in San Diego, where six people were killed when a Cessna crashed. How should people be feeling about that?
There’s really no silver bullet and all the choices are not great to actively bad at baseline. Number one is you get the government to pay what it actually costs to run the air traffic control system. That empirically has not happened for decades, so I don’t know that we’re going to get to do it, especially under this administration, which is focused on cutting costs.
The second thing is to pass on fees to fliers themselves. And it’s just like the conversation that Walmart’s having with tariffs — they don’t want to do it. When they try to pass it on to the customer, President Trump yells at them, and it’s just not a great situation.
The third option is to reduce the number of flights in the sky. Part of this is that airlines are competing to have the most flights, the most convenient schedules, the most options. That’s led to this logjam at places like Newark, where you really have these constraints on it. Right before all of this stuff happens, Newark was serving about 80 airplanes an hour, so 80 landings and takeoffs. Today, the FAA’s actually started to admit restrictions on it, and now it’s closer to 56 flights an hour, and that’s probably the level that it can actually handle and not have these issues where you have planes in danger.
But no airline wants to hear, Hey, you have to cut your flight schedule. We saw that with United: Their CEO was saying that the air traffic controllers who took trauma leave had “walked off the job,” which seemed to suggest that he didn’t think they should be taking trauma leave because you have to have more planes coming in. That’s a competitive disadvantage for him, but you also have to balance safety. It’s difficult to understand. It costs a lot of money to fix. This is your textbook “why governments fail” case study and it’s not really reassuring that in 24 hours I’m going to be in the middle of it again, trying to fly out of Newark.
Correction, June 2, 10:40 am ET: A previous version of this piece misstated what happened when Jonathan Stewart saw two planes potentially headed for a crash; he was worried that radar and radio communication systems might fail as they had days earlier.
2025-06-02 20:00:00
Everyone should have the right to decide if and when they have children. Yet over the past 50 years, the United States has built an economy that increasingly works against fertility — demanding more years in school and longer hours at work for people, especially women, in the years when it is biologically easiest for them to have children, and concentrating wealth and income among those past their reproductive prime.
As a result, American schools and workplaces are particularly ill-suited for supporting those who hope to start families earlier than average.
“If I were to complain about how society ‘has wronged me as a woman,’ it would be that it has treated my limited ‘fertility time’ with extreme disregard,” wrote Ruxandra Teslo, a genomics PhD student, recently on Substack. “At each step of the way I was encouraged to ‘be patient,’ do more training, told that ‘things will figure themselves out,’ even when I wanted and could have speedrun through things.”
The average age of a new mom is now 27.5, up from age 21 in 1970. I had no interest in having kids in my early twenties, but there are certainly reasons others might want that: Fertility decreases with age, and some find it easier to keep up with young children when they themselves are younger and have more energy. Others hope for larger families so may need to start conceiving earlier, or may prioritize making sure their own parents have many years to spend with grandkids.
Of course, discussing reproductive timelines is fraught. Having others invoke the fact that women experience a decline in fertility with age feels intrusive and insensitive. And the conversation is even trickier today, when anti-abortion activists are pushing a conservative pro-baby agenda from the highest echelons of government and the Heritage Foundation is putting out literature blaming falling birth rates on too many people going to graduate school. (The evidence for that is very weak.)
Yet it’s precisely in such moments that progressive leaders should offer clear alternatives that both respect women’s autonomy and ensure people can make less constrained choices.
If mainstream feminism ignores the barriers to early parenthood, the right will be all too eager to fill the void. “If the so-called feminists, as long as they play it by the elite rules, refuse to take seriously what [we] can do to support young families, then the right can move in and say, ‘You might as well give up on your stupid ideas and career aspirations,’” marriage historian Stephanie Coontz told me.
Not everyone wants to become a parent, but most women do still say they wish to have children one day. If we’re serious about reproductive justice, then it’s a mistake to ignore how our schools and workplaces have evolved to be broadly hostile to both fertility and parenthood. Having kids at a younger age is not inherently better — but for those who want to do it, the economy shouldn’t be working against them at every step.
Many women believe, correctly, that college and graduate education are important paths not only for their own financial well-being, but also to afford raising kids in a country that offers so little support to families. The idea that people can just up and abandon higher education to have kids, per the Heritage Foundation, isn’t serious.
“We’ve just done so much to obscure the reality and to make it seem like, oh, moms are asking for too much, or they’re postponing too long, or maybe they shouldn’t be going to school so much,” said Jennifer Glass, a sociologist at University of Texas Austin who studies fertility and gender. “What an idiotic thing to say. The only way that women can get wages that are at all comparable to what’s necessary to raise a family is by getting a college degree.”
Yet the US has built one of the longest, most expensive educational pipelines in the world.
One reason many American students take longer to finish undergraduate degrees (or don’t finish at all) is because of financial pressures that students abroad don’t face.
Nations like Germany, France, and Norway offer free or heavily subsidized university education, while others, including the UK and Australia, have manageable, easily navigable income-based repayment systems. American students are more likely to be juggling multiple jobs alongside coursework, stretching the time to graduation.
The timeline stretches even longer for medical, legal, and doctoral degrees — tacking on years of extra training and credentialing that aren’t required elsewhere.
“There’s been an increase in the number of years of schooling that is totally unnecessary,” Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist and Nobel Prize winner, told me, pointing to, among other factors, the explosion of post-docs and pre-docs, plus pressure for applicants to acquire some work experience before even beginning their graduate studies.
“I went to graduate school immediately after college, and schools like UChicago and MIT had rules then that if you were there for more than four years, you paid tuition, so that incentivized people to finish,” she said.
When educational timelines keep stretching with no structural support for parenting, the result is predictable: some people delay having children — or abandon those plans entirely.
This isn’t to say there are no parents on university campuses. There are roughly 3 million undergraduates — one in five college students — in the US today who have kids. But student parents are too often rendered invisible because most colleges don’t collect data on them and harbor outdated assumptions about who even seeks higher education.
“Colleges and universities still cater to what is considered ‘traditional students’ — so 18- to 24-year-olds who are getting financial assistance from their parents,” said Jennifer Turner, a sociologist at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
Student parents are far less likely to be receiving financial help from their own families than students of the same age and background without kids — and in general they’re more likely to struggle to afford basic needs. But most campuses neglect their unique challenges and fail to provide them with resources like on-campus housing, kid-friendly spaces, and child care support.
The Trump administration’s new budget proposal calls for gutting the only federal program that helps student parents with child care. And while pregnant students are entitled to some federal protections under the Americans with Disabilities Act and Title IX, in practice many students never even learn about them, or face intense stigma for using them.
For graduate students in particular, there’s no shortage of examples of students receiving both implicit and explicit signals to delay childbearing. Research found women were twice as likely as men to cite child care and parenting as reasons for leaving academia.
Whether or not women want to have children in their early or mid-twenties, many feel they can’t — because the career paths they pursue require longer routes to stability.
Women are more often funneled into professions that demand extra time, whether through extended schooling, slower advancement, or the need to earn extra credentials to prove themselves. Many fields where women are concentrated, like education, social work, psychology, and nursing, require graduate training for higher-paying roles. In contrast, men are more likely to enter skilled trades or businesses where higher earnings are possible without advanced degrees.
Goldin, the economist, pointed to the problem of the “rat race equilibrium” — where individuals over-invest accumulating credentials not because doing so is intrinsically valuable, but because everyone else is doing the same. In this situation, falling behind the pack carries high costs.
“People want a great job, so they stay in graduate school ‘too long.’ Firms want the best lawyer, so they keep associates for ‘too long.’ I don’t know what the optimal length is. But I do know that the addition of so many more years means that women will be more discouraged than will men,” she told me.
These extended educational timelines feed directly into jobs that are also not designed to support parenting during a woman’s prime childbearing years. Early-career workers typically earn less, have more precarious roles and rigid schedules, and often face more pressure to be fully available to employers to prove their commitment and worth.
Some then move on to what Goldin calls “greedy careers”: Law firms, consulting companies, and hospitals that demand total availability, rewarding those who can work weekends and penalizing those who seek more predictable schedules. For many parents it’s a double bind: the educational trajectories and high-paying jobs that make raising kids affordable are often the same ones with demands that make balancing family life nearly impossible.
Fertility tech hasn’t yet conquered the biological clock, but we did build this economy — which means we can rebuild it differently.
Advocating for more efficient and more affordable education isn’t a retreat from academic rigor, but a clear-eyed confrontation with institutions that remain indifferent at best to having children. The most forward-thinking places will see that compressed, focused educational paths aren’t diluting standards, but respecting the fullness of human lives and creating systems where intellectual achievement doesn’t demand reproductive sacrifice.
Exactly how to help students manage timelines will vary. For those looking at careers in math and science, for example, there may be opportunities to take advanced courses in high school. Others would benefit from more financial aid, or using experiential learning credit, or enrolling in accelerated BA/MA programs. Some employers should be rethinking their mandates for college degrees at all.
But even with educational reforms, parents would still face legal barriers that other groups don’t. It’s still legal in many cases to discriminate against parents in hiring or housing. Making parents a protected class would be a straightforward step toward making parenthood more compatible with economic security.
Stronger labor regulations could also curb workplace coercion, and policies like those in Scandinavia — which allow parents to reduce their work hours when raising young children — could make it easier to balance kids with holding down a job.
The rise of remote work offers additional paths forward, and expanding it could reduce the stark either/or choices many prospective parents face. And there are other policy ideas that could make parenthood more affordable even when people are early in their career. Other high-income countries offer parents monthly child allowances, baby bonuses, subsidized child care, and paid parental leave. The US could follow suit — and go further — by investing in affordable housing, reducing the cost of college, and decoupling health care from employment.
For now, our current system abdicates responsibility. As Glass points out, while parents are paying more to have children, it’s employers and governments that reap the benefits of those adult workers and taxpayers, without shouldering the decades-long costs of training and raising them.
“What no one wants to face is that 150 years ago, when everyone lived on farms, having children did not make you poor, but they do today,” said Glass. “Children used to benefit their parents, they were part of the dominion of the patriarch, and when children did well the patriarch benefited. Now it’s employers and governments who benefit from well-raised children.”
I understand the reluctance to have these conversations. We don’t want the government poking around in our bedrooms, especially when some lawmakers are already on a mission to restrict reproductive freedom. It’s tempting to say policymakers and institutions should just shut up about any further discussion regarding having kids.
But that’s not serving people, either. Many other countries already confront these challenges with much more deliberate care. Honest conversations about fertility don’t need to be about telling women when or whether to have children — they should be about removing the artificial barriers that make it feel impossible to have kids at different stages of life.
This would all certainly be much easier if men stepped up to take these pressures more seriously. “If men felt as compelled as women to take time off, if men were experiencing the same thing, I think we’d get a lot more creative,” said Coontz.
We should continue investing in fertility technology, and expanding access to those options for people who want to delay childbearing or may need help conceiving. But IVF and egg freezing are never going to be the right tools for everyone, and people deserve the support to have children as they study and enter the workforce, too. Biology isn’t destiny, but we shouldn’t ignore it.
2025-06-02 19:30:00
If you’ve been to an engagement party, bridal shower, or wedding, you’ve probably heard a well-meaning relative offer these sage words of wisdom: Marriage is work. Hard work. Persistent work. A lifelong project. The adage is instructive, but it’s also a warning — this relationship will try your patience, and for it to endure, you must be willing to put forth the effort.
This is undeniably true. All relationships require maintenance to survive. No two people will ever see eye-to-eye on everything, will never have enough time to spend together, and will, at some point, feel a gulf of distance between them. Healthy relationships are constant conversations; they require cooperation, give and take. Anything less is just complacency.
But, in today’s culture, relational upkeep is increasingly considered problematic. The rallying cry to “protect your peace” and incessant warnings around “red flags” encourage individuals to part with relationships that require any elbow grease, fine-tuning, or uncomfortable conflict resolution. This is, perhaps, a response to the longstanding expectation that women in heterosexual relationships will overlook, excuse, or attempt to correct bad behavior.
Wouldn’t it be nice, then, if you could pinpoint exactly how much “work” is too much work? If you could identify the number of times you’re supposed to re-tread the same old argument before you can throw in the towel? How do you decide when a rough patch is just reality?
In between the two extremes of “cut them off” and “do anything to make it work” is the goldilocks of romantic labor: enough effort from both parties to ensure the relationship can grow. While everyone maintains a different line for what they consider “too much” work, research supports the idea that people who put effort into their relationships are happier in the long run — and that work might look much more humdrum than you think.
But keeping a partnership afloat shouldn’t come at the expense of your own mental and physical health. As impersonal as it may seem, it helps to think of relationships as another job: Just like dissatisfied employees search for greener pastures, burnt-out couples shouldn’t be ashamed to leave a bad fit behind.
Working to maintain a romantic relationship is a somewhat recent phenomenon. Until the 20th century, people largely got married and stayed married — “and they didn’t really talk about their relationships in terms of this work analogy,” says Kristin Celello, an associate professor of history at Queens College, City University of New York and author of Making Marriage Work: A History of Marriage and Divorce in the Twentieth-Century United States.
But by the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, with divorce rates climbing, a hodgepodge group of social scientists, psychologists, and the media united in their panic concerning the sanctity of marriage. And thus, a brand new field was born: marriage counseling. That’s when the idea of marriage as work also took root, Celello says. The notion persisted in the ensuing decades, especially after the post-World War II divorce boom. It was thought that this essential work, Cellelo continues, was “the way to strengthen your relationship and also prevent divorce.”
Feminism in the late 1960s and ’70s helped promote the idea that relational upkeep shouldn’t exclusively fall to wives.
Throughout the 20th century, social movements called into question who this work benefits (spoiler alert: it’s men) and who all the responsibility falls to (it’s women). Until the 1970s, it was the wife who attended marriage counseling, Celello says. The problems in a marriage were largely blamed on a woman’s behavior. (“In the ’50s, the idea is, well, if your husband’s drinking, what are you doing to make him drink?” Celello says.)
Feminism in the late 1960s and ’70s helped promote the idea that relational upkeep shouldn’t exclusively fall to wives and encouraged women to set non-negotiables in their relationships. It slowly became the mainstream view during this time that “there are things that can happen in a marriage which you shouldn’t keep working,” Celello says, “like when it comes to abuse or infidelity.”
These days, a conservative-led push for higher marriage and birth rates along with the rise of the trad wife — which glamorizes the experience of a stay-at-home wife and mother — has once again valorized the idea of “work,” at least in a heterosexual marriage. “In conservative circles now, in the 21st century, we [have] sort of come back around to people don’t put enough respect on marriage, and that they don’t work hard enough,” Celello says, “and that maybe it’s okay if there’s some degree of even physical violence or, [what] others might see as abusive.” At the same time, a spate of popular divorce memoirs have encouraged women to leave marriages where they find themselves carrying most of the burden.
How much work you’re willing to put into a relationship largely depends on your attitude toward romantic partnerships. People generally fall into one of two camps when it comes to beliefs about romance, says Fabian Gander, a research associate at the University of Basel. One group puts a lot of stock in destiny — the idea that you’ve been brought together by fate and are soulmates. The other believes in growth — that a relationship can be nurtured and problems repaired over time. In a study from last year, Gander found that those who believe in soulmates are happier in the short term, but those who think of relationships as something you work for are more satisfied in the long run. Partnerships where both parties have strongly held destiny beliefs were less satisfied with their relationships over the years.
Other research has supported Gander’s findings. Research from 2012 found that effort was associated with satisfaction and stability in couples, whether they were living together, married, or in a new relationship post-divorce. The researchers measured effort based on how participants related to statements like “I tend to fall back on what is comfortable for me in relationships, rather than trying new ways of relating” and “If my partner doesn’t appreciate the change efforts I am making, I tend to give up.”
Couples who are highly connected and have more successful marriages, a 2022 study found, were more likely to be intentional and proactive about showing compassion, spending time together, and being kind to one another. They also underwent regular “relationship maintenance,” that included expressing needs, discussing problems, and setting goals for improving the relationship.
Why does work — or a belief in the power of effort — seem to equate to relationship satisfaction? “Probably because [these couples] are prepared to invest effort,” Gander says. “They know that I cannot just relax.… Maybe they know that this isn’t how things work out best.”
Couples who have more successful marriages were more likely to be intentional about showing compassion, spending time together, and being kind to one another.
Gander is also continuing to study what type of “work” the happiest couples engage in. As a part of the research, Gander and his team asked couples what activities they did together over the course of two and a half years, ranging from going hiking and doing dishes to talking on the phone and having sex. Couples who maintained shared activities remained happy, and, in some cases, got happier over time. “Of course, real life is hyper-complicated, but one part of the answer may be that couples need to keep up the level of interactions,” Gander says. “These things are always intertwined. So if I’m in a happy relationship, I will gladly do something with my partner, and the other way around if I’m not happy.”
In today’s hyper-busy, over-scheduled world, the renowned relationship therapists John and Julie Gottman have their own suggestions for couples looking to put in extra work. Couples who hope to strengthen their relationships should spend an extra six hours together, focusing on quick chats at the beginning and end of each day (20-odd minutes a day), showing physical affection (five minutes a day), and scheduling a weekly date night (two hours a week).
More time, more conversation, and more vulnerability doesn’t always serve a relationship. Especially if you’re the only one partaking. In even the healthiest of partnerships, there will be an imbalance between an “over-functioner” and an “under-functioner,” according to Lexx Brown-James, a licensed marriage and family therapist and sexologist. Over-functioners have “been taught to be hyper efficient,” Brown-James says, “which begets an under-functioner partner… who doesn’t do as much in the family or in the relationship, because it’s permissible to do so.”
This dynamic inevitably breeds frustration. The over-functioner believes their partner doesn’t carry their weight, whether with household chores, emotional conversations, or child care, and the under-functioner feels bossed around. “They come to therapy saying ‘we have communication problems,’” Brown-James says. “I often say that it’s not a communication problem, it’s an intimacy problem. Neither one of you is risking being vulnerable, whether that’s saying I need help, or I feel like I’m failing, or I feel like I’m not good enough, or I’m struggling with what you’re doing right now.”
The researchers John and Julie Gottman devised a cheat code for improving relationships: Spend an extra six hours a week together. Here’s how to build that time into your schedule.
Absent those honest conversations, resentment can brew; you can burn out on your relationship. You might stick it out because you’ve been taught relationships are work, after all.
In these moments, Brown-James says, it’s often imperative to look within. Society often reinforces gendered stereotypes that dictate women serve as the over-functioners and men as the under-functioners. To buck those narratives, you have to get comfortable asking yourself what it is you really need out of this relationship. This is especially important if you’re not used to expressing your desires in a relationship in order to please your partner.
“That work on self means that you know what you want,” Brown-James says, “you’re able to verbalize it, you’re able to recognize when you get it, and you’re also able to reciprocate and see that you’re the person that can deliver what the other person wants.” Sometimes, that independent work occurs at different paces, sometimes it doesn’t occur at all. And it’s okay to not want to wait for your partner to reach their own clarity.
Before calling it quits, consider what your goal of the relationship is, Celello says. Is it to be married (and stay married)? Is it to coparent children? Is it financial security? “How does a partnership enable you to do that or not?” Celello says. Your idea of appropriate effort may change based on each of these goals.
On occasion, however, despite countless conversations and attempts to bridge divides and truly hear each other out, all that work isn’t enough. No one can tell you when you’ve crossed that threshold.
Throwing in the towel shouldn’t be seen as a sign of defeat. It signals a willingness to find happiness elsewhere, even if that’s solo. “People, when they don’t like their jobs,” Celello says, “will start a new career, and they’ll find other sources of accomplishment and enjoyment.” That’s work worth honoring, too.