2025-04-25 05:56:10
This story appeared in The Logoff, a daily newsletter that helps you stay informed about the Trump administration without letting political news take over your life. Subscribe here.
Welcome to The Logoff. President Donald Trump signed an executive order that takes aim at a longtime core principle of civil rights law known as disparate impact. And though he can’t get rid of it entirely on his own, he may be hoping conservative justices on the Supreme Court will.
What is disparate impact? It’s the legal concept that certain practices can violate federal civil rights law because they affect certain demographics differently — even if no explicit or intentional discrimination is proven.
For instance: Everyone knows it would be illegal for an employer to say they won’t hire people of a certain race. But what if an employer screens out applicants who’d previously been arrested? Under disparate impact analysis, if doing that ends up disproportionately hurting applicants of one demographic, it could be an illegal violation of civil rights law.
Disparate impact is a cornerstone of civil rights enforcement, but activists on the right have pushed back against it, arguing progressives have taken the idea too far, and that standards that affect different demographics differently should not necessarily be presumed illegal.
What did Trump do? Trump’s order declares it US policy “to eliminate the use of disparate-impact liability in all contexts to the maximum degree possible.” It starts the rollback of some regulations, while deprioritizing the enforcement of others.
Pending federal actions that rely on disparate impact analysis, such as civil rights lawsuits or investigations, must be assessed for compliance with this order, Trump says. He also broaches the possibility that state laws or policies relying on disparate impact could be illegal.
Can he do this? Trump can try to roll back enforcement, but disparate impact was codified in a 1971 Supreme Court ruling that he can’t get rid of on his own. But activists on the right are hoping that the Court’s conservative majority is ready to throw out that long-held precedent.
Bonobos are one of the rare mammal species with female-dominated societies. How do they pull it off? A new study explores their strategy — and, one researcher told the New York Times, it suggests that male dominance isn’t inevitable for humans either.
2025-04-25 05:00:00
Almost immediately after he began his second term, President Donald Trump ordered the military to ban transgender people from serving in the US military. Under the Defense Department’s policy implementing this order, the military was supposed to start firing trans service members on March 26, although those firings were halted by a court order.
That court order, in a case known as United States v. Shilling, is now before the Supreme Court. The Trump administration’s primary argument — that it’s not banning trans military personnel, but merely banning service by people with gender dysphoria — is nonsensical, and the Court has repeatedly rejected similar arguments in the past.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, gender dysphoria refers to the “psychological distress that results from an incongruence between one’s sex assigned at birth and one’s gender identity” that is commonly experienced by transgender people. The government may no more recharacterize a ban on trans service as a ban on gender dysphoria than it could defend Jim Crow by recharacterizing it as a series of laws targeting people with high levels of melanin.
Nevertheless, so long as the Court follows its long history of showing extreme deference to the military, it seems exceedingly likely that the Trump administration will prevail in this case.
It is well-established that the government cannot evade a ban on discrimination by claiming that it is merely discriminating based on a trait that closely correlates with a particular identity. As the Supreme Court said in Bray v. Alexandria Women’s Health Clinic (1993), “a tax on wearing yarmulkes is a tax on Jews.”
Yet, while the Trump administration’s brief in the Shilling case is poorly argued, the Court is almost certain to reinstate the trans military ban, in part because the case is little more than a sequel to a fight that already played out in the first Trump administration.
During his first term, Trump’s government issued a similar ban on transgender military service — although the first-term ban did contain some exceptions that are not part of the second-term ban. Lower courts halted the first-term ban, but the Supreme Court voted 5-4, along party lines, to reinstate that ban in 2019. The Court has only moved further to the right since 2019, and Republicans now have a 6-3 supermajority among the justices.
It’s not clear that the first-term decisions reinstating the ban were wrongly decided under the Supreme Court’s precedents. The Court has long permitted the military to engage in activity that would clearly violate the Constitution in a civilian context.
As Judge Benjamin Settle, the district judge who blocked Trump’s second-term ban, explained in his opinion, this ban is likely to do considerable harm to the United States.
In Goldman v. Weinberger (1986), for example, the Court held that the military could ban Jewish service members from wearing yarmulkes while in uniform. As the Court explained, its “review of military regulations challenged on First Amendment grounds is far more deferential than constitutional review of similar laws or regulations designed for civilian society.” The military, Goldman reasoned, “must foster instinctive obedience, unity, commitment, and esprit de corps,” and that justifies imposing restrictions on service members that would normally violate the Constitution.
The Court has even held that the military may engage in explicit sex discrimination — a fact that is highly relevant to the Shilling case because the Court held in Bostock v. Clayton County (2020) that discrimination against transgender workers is a form of illegal sex discrimination.
In Rostker v. Goldberg (1981), the Court upheld the federal law that requires men, but not women, to register for the draft. While this kind of explicit sex discrimination would be unconstitutional in virtually any other context, Rostker explained that the courts owe extraordinary deference to Congress in matters of “national defense and military affairs.”
Given these precedents, the plaintiffs challenging Trump’s transgender service ban always faced an uphill climb. And that’s doubly true because the Court’s current majority has not been particularly sympathetic to constitutional claims brought by trans litigants.
As Judge Benjamin Settle, the district judge who blocked Trump’s second-term ban, explained in his opinion, this ban is likely to do considerable harm to the United States. The named plaintiff in the Shilling case is Commander Emily Shilling, a pilot with 19 years of military service who has flown 60 combat missions. Shilling alleges, without any contradiction from the government, that the Navy spent $20 million to train her. All of that expertise will now be lost to the US military.
But the Constitution does not forbid the government from self-harm. And the Supreme Court’s precedents permit the military to discriminate in ways that other institutions cannot, which is bad news for people targeted by Trump’s transgender service ban.
2025-04-25 02:38:00
A version of this story originally appeared in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here!
Right now, OpenAI is something unique in the landscape of not just AI companies but huge companies in general.
OpenAI’s board of directors is bound not to the mission of providing value for shareholders, like most companies, but to the mission of ensuring that “artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity,” as the company’s website says. (Still private, OpenAI is currently valued at more than $300 billion after completing a record $40 billion funding round earlier this year.)
That situation is a bit unusual, to put it mildly, and one that is increasingly buckling under the weight of its own contradictions.
For a long time, investors were happy enough to pour money into OpenAI despite a structure that didn’t put their interests first, but in 2023, the board of the nonprofit that controls the company — yep, that’s how confusing it is — fired Sam Altman for lying to them. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that has signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent. One of Anthropic’s early investors is James McClave, whose BEMC Foundation helps fund Future Perfect.)
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It was a move that definitely didn’t maximize shareholder value, was at best very clumsily handled, and made it clear that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit could potentially have huge implications — especially for its partner Microsoft, which has poured billions into OpenAI.
Altman’s firing didn’t stick — he returned a week later after an outcry, with much of the board resigning. But ever since the firing, OpenAI has been considering a restructuring into, well, more of a normal company.
Under this plan, the nonprofit entity that controls OpenAI would sell its control of the company and the assets that it owns. OpenAI would then become a for-profit company — specifically a public benefit corporation, like its rivals Anthropic and X.ai — and the nonprofit would walk away with a hotly disputed but definitely large sum of money in the tens of billions, presumably to spend on improving the world with AI.
There’s just one problem, argues a new open letter by legal scholars, several Nobel Prize winners, and a number of former OpenAI employees: The whole thing is illegal (and a terrible idea).
Their argument is simple: The thing the nonprofit board currently controls — governance of the world’s leading AI lab — makes no sense for the nonprofit to sell at any price. The nonprofit is supposed to act in pursuit of a highly specific mission: making AI go well for all of humanity. But having the power to make rules for OpenAI is worth more than even a mind-bogglingly large sum of money for that mission.
“Nonprofit control over how AGI is developed and governed is so important to OpenAI’s mission that removing control would violate the special fiduciary duty owed to the nonprofit’s beneficiaries,” the letter argues. Those beneficiaries are all of us, and the argument is that a big foundation has nothing on “a role guiding OpenAI.”
And it’s not just saying that the move is a bad thing. It’s saying that the board would be illegally breaching their duties if they went forward with it and the attorneys general of California and Delaware — to whom the letter is addressed because OpenAI is incorporated in Delaware and operates in California — should step in to stop it.
I’ve previously covered the wrangling over OpenAI’s potential change of structure. I wrote about the challenge of pricing the assets owned by the nonprofit, and we reported on Elon Musk’s claim that his own donations early in OpenAI’s history were misappropriated to make the for-profit.
This is a different argument. It’s not a claim that the nonprofit’s control of the for-profit ought to produce a higher sale price. It’s an argument that OpenAI, and what it may create, is literally priceless.
OpenAI’s mission “is to ensure that artificial general intelligence is safe and benefits all of humanity,” Tyler Whitmer, a nonprofit lawyer and one of the letter’s authors, told me. “Talking about the value of that in dollars and cents doesn’t make sense.”
Are they right on the merits? Will it matter? That’s substantially up to two people: California Attorney General Robert Bonta and Delaware Attorney General Kathleen Jennings. But it’s a serious argument that deserves a serious hearing. Here’s my attempt to digest it.
When OpenAI was founded in 2015, its mission sounded absurd: to work toward the safe development of artificial general intelligence — which, it clarifies now, means artificial intelligence that can do nearly all economically valuable work — and ensure that it benefited all of humanity.
Many people thought such a future was a hundred years away or more. But many of the few people who wanted to start planning for it were at OpenAI.
They founded it as a nonprofit, saying that was the only way to ensure that all of humanity maintained a claim to humanity’s future. “We don’t ever want to be making decisions to benefit shareholders,” Altman promised in 2017. “The only people we want to be accountable to is humanity as a whole.”
Worries about existential risk, too, loomed large. If it was going to be possible to build extremely intelligent AIs, it was going to be possible — even if it were accidental — to build ones that had no interest in cooperating with human goals and laws. “Development of superhuman machine intelligence (SMI) is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity,” Altman said in 2015.
Thus the nonprofit. The idea was that OpenAI would be shielded from the relentless incentive to make more money for shareholders — the kind of incentive that could drive it to underplay AI safety — and that it would have a governance structure that left it positioned to do the right thing. That would be true even if that meant shutting down the company, merging with a competitor, or taking a major (dangerous) product off the market.
“A for-profit company’s obligation is to make money for shareholders,” Michael Dorff, a professor of business law at the University of California Los Angeles, told me. “For a nonprofit, those same fiduciary duties run to a different purpose, whatever their charitable purpose is. And in this case, the charitable purpose of the nonprofit is twofold: One is to develop artificial intelligence safely, and two is to make sure that artificial intelligence is developed for the benefit of all humanity.”
“OpenAI’s founders believed the public would be harmed if AGI was developed by a commercial entity with proprietary profit motives,” the letter argues. In fact, the letter documents that OpenAI was founded precisely because many people were worried that AI would otherwise be developed within Google, which was and is a massive commercial entity with a profit motive.
Even in 2019, when OpenAI created a “capped for-profit” structure that would let them raise money from investors and pay the investors back up to a 100x return, they emphasized that the nonprofit was still in control. The mission was still not to build AGI and get rich but to ensure its development benefited all of humanity.
“We’ve designed OpenAI LP to put our overall mission — ensuring the creation and adoption of safe and beneficial AGI — ahead of generating returns for investors. … Regardless of how the world evolves, we are committed — legally and personally — to our mission,” the company declared in an announcement adopting the new structure.
OpenAI made further commitments: To avoid an AI “arms race” where two companies cut corners on safety to beat each other to the finish line, they built into their governing documents a “merge and assist” clause where they’d instead join the other lab and work together to make the AI safe. And thanks to the cap, if OpenAI did become unfathomably wealthy, all of the wealth above the 100x cap for investors would be distributed to humanity. The nonprofit board — meant to be composed of a majority of members who had no financial stake in the company — would have ultimate control.
In many ways the company was deliberately restraining its future self, trying to ensure that as the siren call of enormous profits grew louder and louder, OpenAI was tied to the mast of its original mission. And when the original board made the decision to fire Altman, they were acting to carry out that mission as they saw it.
Now, argues the new open letter, OpenAI wants to be unleashed. But the company’s own arguments over the last 10 years are pretty convincing: The mission that they set forth is not one that a fully commercial company is likely to pursue. Therefore, the attorneys general should tell them no and instead work to ensure the board is resourced to do what 2019-era OpenAI intended the board to be resourced to do.
OpenAI, of course, doesn’t intend to become a fully commercial company. The proposal I’ve seen floated is to become a public benefit corporation.
“Public benefit corporations are what we call hybrid entities,” Dorff told me. “In a traditional for-profit, the board’s primary duty is to make money for shareholders. In a public benefit corporation, their job is to balance making money with public duties: They have to take into account the impact of the company’s activities on everyone who is affected by them.”
The problem is that the obligations of public benefit corporations are, for all practical purposes, unenforceable. In theory, if a public benefit corporation isn’t benefiting the public, you — a member of the public — are being wronged. But you have no right to challenge it in court.
“Only shareholders can launch those suits,” Dorff told me. Take a public benefit corporation with a mission to help end homelessness. “If a homeless advocacy organization says they’re not benefiting the homeless, they have no grounds to sue.”
Only OpenAI’s shareholders could try to hold it accountable if it weren’t benefiting humanity. And “it’s very hard for shareholders to win a duty-of-care suit unless the directors acted in bad faith or were engaging in some kind of conflict of interest,” Dorff said. “Courts understandably are very deferential to the board in terms of how they choose to run the business.”
That means, in theory, a public benefit corporation is still a way to balance profit and the good of humanity. In practice, it’s one with the thumb hard on the scales of profit, which is probably a significant part of why OpenAI didn’t choose to restructure to a public benefit corporation back in 2019.
“Now they’re saying we didn’t foresee that,” Sunny Gandhi of Encode Justice, one of the letter’s signatories, told me. “And that is a deliberate lie to avoid the truth of — they originally were founded in this way because they were worried about this happening.”
But, I challenged Gandhi, OpenAI’s major competitors Anthropic and X.ai are both public benefit corporations. Shouldn’t that make a difference?
“That’s kind of asking why a conservation nonprofit can’t convert to being a logging company just because there are other logging companies out there,” he told me. In this view, yes, Anthropic and X both have inadequate governance that can’t and won’t hold them accountable for ensuring humanity benefits from their AI work. That might be a reason to shun them, protest them or demand reforms from them, but why is it a reason to let OpenAI abandon its mission?
Reading through the letter — and speaking to its authors and other nonprofit law and corporate law experts — I couldn’t help but feel badly for OpenAI’s board. (I have reached out to OpenAI board members for comment several times over the last few months as I’ve reported on the nonprofit transition. They have not returned any of those requests for comment.)
The very impressive suite of people responsible for OpenAI’s governance have all the usual challenges of being on the board of a fast-growing tech company with enormous potential and very serious risks, and then they have a whole bunch of puzzles unique to OpenAI’s situation. Their fiduciary duty, as Altman has testified before Congress, is to the mission of ensuring AGI is developed safely and to the benefit of all humanity.
But most of them were selected after Altman’s brief firing with, I would argue, another implicit assignment: Don’t screw it up. Don’t fire Sam Altman. Don’t terrify investors. Don’t get in the way of some of the most exciting research happening anywhere on Earth.
What, I asked Dorff, are the people on the board supposed to do, if they have a fiduciary duty to humanity that is very hard to live up to? Do they have the nerve to vote against Altman? He was less impressed than me with the difficulty of this plight. “That’s still their duty,” he said. “And sometimes duty is hard.”
That’s where the letter lands, too. OpenAI’s nonprofit has no right to cede its control over OpenAI. Its obligation is to humanity. Humanity deserves a say in how AGI goes. Therefore, it shouldn’t sell that control at any price.
It shouldn’t sell that control even if it makes fundraising much more convenient. It shouldn’t sell that control even though its current structure is kludgy, awkward, and not meant for handling a challenge of this scale. Because it’s much, much better suited to the challenge than becoming yet another public benefit corporation would be. OpenAI has come further than anyone imagined toward the epic destiny it envisioned for itself in 2015.
But if we want the development of AGI to benefit humanity, the nonprofit will have to stick to its guns, even in the face of overwhelming incentive not to. Or the state attorneys general will have to step in.
Update, April 24, 3:25 pm ET: This story has been updated to include disclosures about Vox Media’s relationship to OpenAI and Anthropic.
2025-04-25 01:53:53
This story originally appeared in Kids Today, Vox’s newsletter about kids, for everyone. Sign up here for future editions.
It’s a stressful time to be a kid.
Young people are watching environmental disasters, school shootings, and economic and political uncertainty, all with a level of media (or at least social media) coverage that would have been unimaginable for previous generations. Against this backdrop, they’re also expected to have their lives figured out by an early age, and rack up a laundry list of achievements to cite in an increasingly lengthy and comparison-filled college application process. “You almost have to start working on your college career in middle school,” Jennifer Rothman, director of youth and young adult initiatives at the National Alliance on Mental Illness, told me.
Given all this, it’s perhaps no surprise that kids need a break. Mental health days — a day off to deal with depression or anxiety, or simply to tend to mental well-being, gained currency among adults during the early part of the Covid-19 pandemic — and they’ve taken off among young people as well, with at least 12 states passing laws allowing excused absences for mental health reasons.
But as chronic absenteeism remains a problem around the country, some school officials are worried that giving kids mental health days could encourage an attitude that school attendance is optional. “There’s a lot of misconceptions about how important it is to be in school — if I didn’t come to school at all in the pandemic, why do I urgently have to keep coming to school now?” Kent Pekel, superintendent of Rochester Public Schools in Minnesota, said during a webinar last year, according to EdWeek.
While concerns about mental health are far from gone, they’re also being joined by fears of learning loss and the acknowledgement that missing even a few days of school can be detrimental to kids’ education. There’s also a widespread worry that students are reaching college, the job market, and the ballot box without basic skills like reading.
Some experts also caution that taking a day off for the wrong reasons could actually make matters worse. “When you get yourself in the trap or downward slide of school avoidance, that’s really hard, and it happens really quick,” Sarah Cain Spannagel, a clinical psychologist in Cleveland who works with children and families, told me.
How can kids, families, and educators navigate all this? How do we support kids through a time that’s often scary even for adults, while also making sure they get an education? I posed these questions to experts this week, and the answers I got suggested that while a day off won’t cure a kid’s depression or anxiety (sadly, that doesn’t work for grown-ups, either), time for reset and recovery can help protect kids from getting to a crisis point in the first place. A day off could even show families and schools what’s missing from a kid’s life, leading to less stress and pressure in the future.
Doctors and teens alike have been especially concerned with young people’s mental health in the last five years, with Vivek Murthy, the US surgeon general under President Joe Biden, warning in 2021 of a mental health crisis among adolescents. More recent surveys have shown some improvement in the prevalence of teen sadness and depression, but clinicians are still seeing “alarming rates” of anxiety and depression, as well as suicidality and self-harm, Amber Childs, a psychiatry professor at Yale School of Medicine who works on youth mental health, told me.
Allowing mental health days can also help destigmatize mental illness, and encourage young people to be open about any struggles they’re going through, rather than hiding them, kids and experts say.
Among teens, mental health days have emerged as a popular coping strategy. Students began advocating for them even before Covid hit, and lawmakers in states from Oregon to Utah have agreed, giving kids a designated number of mental health days per year, or simply changing the definition of an excused absence to include psychological reasons.
While hard numbers on how many days kids are actually taking are hard to come by, the practice seems to be increasing, perhaps driven by a growing awareness that psychological well-being is as important as physical health, Spannagel said.
The concept of a mental health day might sound pretty foreign to previous generations. Growing up, “I never got any days off,” Rothman of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, who has three teenagers, told me. “Your parents were kind of like, you either have to have a fever or you’re throwing up, that’s the only way you’re staying home.”
But adults today need to understand “how different the world is now for our kids than it was for us,” Rothman said.
Because of social media, young people today don’t have much downtime from social interaction, news, or, well, anything really, Childs told me. Being able to unplug “not only from our digitally enabled lives, but also from the routine things that happen in the social and academic space” can be positive, “whether or not something bad is happening.”
Allowing mental health days can also help destigmatize mental illness, and encourage young people to be open about any struggles they’re going through, rather than hiding them, kids and experts say.
However, the way we often think about mental health days might not be the most helpful for kids. Rather than using them when a child is already in crisis — “taking the release valve off of the pressure cooker,” as Childs put it — families and schools should use them as “a preventative tool” to keep that pressure from building up in the first place.
Ideally, parents can look ahead to a time when kids might have a lot of stressful events coming up, like big exams or performances, then schedule a day off ahead of time. They should also plan how to use the day well. “A mental health day doesn’t equate to chilling on a couch for eight hours straight binging TikTok and television,” Childs said.
Instead, Rothman suggests getting outside, reading, drawing, or playing card games — “whatever is calming and helps them feel more like themselves.” For teenagers especially, a day off could be a time to just catch up on sleep, something they’re often lacking due to early high school start times.
What kids feel the need to do on a mental health day can also give adults “clues about what might be crowded out during a typical school day or week,” and help build those activities back in on ordinary days so kids don’t get as stressed out and depleted, Childs said. (If kids keep taking days off to sleep, it might be time for the school to consider a later start time.)
Taking a day off shouldn’t be a way for kids to avoid something they’re anxious about, like a class, a difficult friendship, or school in general, experts say. Childs suggests that parents look for patterns — if kids keep asking for a mental health day on a Monday, it’s an opportunity to delve deeper into what’s happening at school on Mondays that might be stressing them out.
If requests for a day off are very frequent, or if feelings around them are intense, it could be a sign that “you’re getting avoidance of a problem that most likely is going to be there in two days” when the kid goes back to school, Spannagel said.
Meanwhile, if symptoms like stress or sadness are going on for more than two weeks, or parents see major changes to behavior like eating or sleeping, it could be time to reach out to a child’s primary care doctor to have them evaluated for mental health conditions, Rothman said.
Kids with ADHD, autism, or learning differences might need the reset of a mental health day more than the average kid, to help them recover from sensory overload or fatigue, Spannagel said. At the same time, a kid frequently feeling too exhausted or overwhelmed to go to school could mean they need additional help with executive functioning or social skills, or that the accommodations they have at school aren’t meeting their needs.
When it comes to concerns about absenteeism and academics, families and teachers can have a conversation about making up any work a child misses on an occasional day out, Spannagel said.
And while some fear that allowing mental health days could encourage kids to skip school, that concern is “giving me like, if we talk about sex with them, they’re going to want to have more sex,” Childs said. “I think the question is more complex, which is: What about the current environment has lent itself to kids not feeling engaged in school?”
A few mental health days aren’t going to fix problems with the school environment, not least because giving a kid a day off in the middle of the school year just isn’t possible for every family. Experts don’t recommend leaving kids home alone if they’re struggling mentally, and many parents don’t have the job flexibility to take extra time off with their kids. But schools can help by building aspects of a mental health day into the school week, adding time to shift the focus “away from academics and performance into exploration of self,” Childs said.
Having resources in the classroom, like a quiet corner where kids can take a moment to themselves, can also help support kids’ mental health day-to-day, Rothman said. (My older kid’s teacher brought this calming dog stuffie to their classroom in the fall, and I honestly would like one for myself.)
Talking about mental health in school is also crucial, whether that’s part of a formal program or just a teacher “being open about the things that they’re feeling,” Rothman said. “It fights the stigma around it.”
Seventy-four percent of teens say social media helps them feel more connected to their friends, but 48 percent also say the platforms harm people their age, according to a new Pew Research Center survey.
The Trump administration is reportedly seeking to eliminate Head Start, the federal program that provides early education to more than half a million kids from low-income families. One graduate calls the program “one of the few times in my early life where I felt truly loved, seen and supported in a place of learning.”
Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s remarks about children with autism who “will never pay taxes” recall the dark history of eugenics, writes Jessica Grose at the New York Times.
My older kid and I are reading the Aster series of graphic novels, about a little girl who moves to the countryside so her mom can pursue her career as a robot-bird scientist, leading to friendships with an 800-year-old woman, a sheep wearing a tie, and three chestnuts who are also knights, among other colorful characters.
Two weeks ago, I wrote about how tariffs could drive up the cost of items like strollers and car seats, making it harder to have a kid in America. Reader Diana Braley responded, “As a mom in 2025, I’ve realized raising kids doesn’t have to be as expensive as society makes it seem.”
“Raising children has always required commitment, support, and resilience — not consumerism,” Braley wrote. “Big companies sell us the idea that spending more makes us better parents. But the truth is, our instincts and community matter more than any fancy product.”
Thanks to Braley, and a reminder that you can always reach me at [email protected]!
2025-04-25 01:30:00
Growing up in rural Tennessee, power outages were frequent and sometimes fun. With no TV or lights, we played boardgames by candlelight or played outside if the storm stopped. But because my family also ran a restaurant out of our house, sometimes the food in the fridges spoiled, leading to thousands of dollars worth of lost groceries. It never occurred to me so many years ago that a big battery could one day solve this problem.
As extreme weather worsens due to climate change, leading millions more to experience debilitating blackouts, the home battery industry is booming. Home batteries are not like the AAA batteries that go in your TV remote control. They’re big, high-capacity lithium-ion workhorses designed to power multiple devices and appliances in the event of a power outage. The amount of energy that can be stored in residential batteries, which is measured in gigawatt hours (GWh), grew by a record 54 percent from 2023 to 2024, according to a new report on energy storage in the United States. It’s now enough to power up to 1 million homes. Growth is even bigger in Europe.
Many home batteries are being used to store energy from solar panels, but there’s a burgeoning market for backup batteries that can keep essential appliances, like refrigerators, running during a power outage. Some of these batteries are also smart enough to charge up when energy is cheap and then discharge when it’s expensive to save on utility bills. We’re also starting to see appliances with built-in batteries that make them more efficient and effective.
Solving the lost groceries problem is only the beginning. As more people add battery capacity to their homes, the power grid can become more resilient to spikes in energy usage and bring down costs for everyone. While the number of battery-powered houses still make up a minority of all the homes in the US, home batteries are becoming more affordable and accessible, giving the average American household the chance to take advantage of what an electrified future has to offer.
One of the more interesting home batteries I’ve come across is made by BioLite, a Brooklyn, New York-based company that got its start building camp stoves that can charge your phone. Backup by BioLite is a home battery specifically designed for the dead fridge problem, or any other dead appliances. The primary unit is a slim battery pack that can fit behind your refrigerator or sit on top of it. It plugs into a standard wall outlet and doesn’t require a contractor or any rewiring to install. Just plug your fridge and any other devices into the Backup’s power strip, and it’s ready to take over in the event of an outage. One $2,000 Backup battery gets you 15 to 30 hours of power, and if you daisy-chain several batteries together, you can get a few days worth of power.
“This is not meant to be a niche product for the bleeding-edge solar battery storage expert,” Erica Rosen, BioLite’s vice president of marketing told me when I visited BioLite’s headquarters in March. “This is for folks who are, like, ‘I just threw out $400 worth of groceries. I can never do this again.’”
That example hit home for me. But it’s not actually what I think is most useful about the capabilities of home batteries. For people who pay attention to their power bills, Backup and other home batteries make it easier to take advantage of the time-of-use pricing some utilities offer, which makes electricity cheaper during low demand hours and higher when demand is high. Backup, for example, works with an app that lets you schedule the battery to kick in during high demand hours; BioLite is planning to eventually update the app so that this feature works automatically.
Plugging solar panels into these batteries gives you even more autonomy over your energy sources. Once you’re actually generating electricity, you can fill up your home batteries without drawing from the grid at all. If there’s an outage, the panels can keep those batteries charged when the sun’s out. If your utility offers it, you can also take advantage of something called net metering, which enables you to sell some of that stored energy back to the grid during peak demand.
If battery-powered living sounds appealing to you, there are now even more creative ways to ease into it. A company called Copper started selling its battery-equipped stoves this year. The $6,000 Copper Charlie is an electric induction range with a rechargeable lithium-ion battery inside that’s programmed to charge when electricity is cheapest. The range plugs into a regular wall outlet — other inductions require a 240-volt outlet that not all homes have — and the battery supplies enough power for everyday cooking. It also kicks in during power outages so that you can keep cooking if the lights go out. The battery also gives the oven a boost, so that preheating is faster.
There is, nevertheless, something unstoppable about the home battery revolution.
This is just the first of many battery-assisted appliances that Copper plans to make, according to Weldon Kennedy, the company’s co-founder and chief marketing officer. It’s not hard to imagine how the same basic backup features of the Charlie stove could work in a hot water heater or a washer-dryer. These kinds of appliances require a large amount of energy all at once and then sit idle for hours at a time. It makes great sense to charge them up when energy is cheap and then discharge that stored energy later.
“Because you don’t have these giant spikes in energy use across the electrical grid at, say, six o’clock when everyone turns on their electric stove,” Kennedy told me. “It just makes the whole system better.”
None of this comes cheap. The Copper Charlie range and Backup by BioLite are four-figure investments. There are other companies in the space, too, but they’re just as expensive. Impulse makes a battery-equipped stovetop that also costs $6,000, and Jackery sells a home backup battery for $3,500 and up. You can find even more expensive and extensive home battery systems from companies like Tesla, Anker, and Bluetti. There are some government subsidy programs available to offset those high costs, but on a federal level at least, it’s not clear if the Trump administration will keep them in place.
There is, nevertheless, something unstoppable about the home battery revolution. As certain solutions get cheaper and easier to use, like Biolite’s Backup, other options are becoming more appealing. Electric vehicles, after all, are basically big batteries on wheels, and a growing number of automakers are enabling bidirectional charging, which lets your vehicle power your home or send power back to the grid. GM is even working with some utility companies to help its car owners buy the equipment necessary to turn their EVs into home batteries.
Still, with the Trump administration downright hostile to clean energy, the US is lagging behind Europe and China in adopting more battery power. But the cost of battery production is falling fast, and we should expect to see batteries show up in more home appliances in the near future. After all, just one big battery could save you a fridge-full of groceries in the next power outage, and that outage is definitely coming. Climate change is making weather more extreme and unpredictable, which means it’s more essential than ever to be prepared for anything.
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2025-04-24 23:15:00
Since being deported to El Salvador last month, Kilmar Abrego Garcia has had very little contact with the outside world — something that Democratic Maryland Sen. Chris Van Hollen tried to change.
Last week, Van Hollen flew to El Salvador to meet with Abrego Garcia, an undocumented immigrant who the Trump administration has admitted was deported from Maryland in error. But the White House has since doubled down on claims that he is a member of the MS-13 gang, with Stephen Miller, a top Trump domestic policy adviser, saying, “This was the right person sent to the right place.”
Van Hollen was initially denied access to Abrego Garcia. But officials in El Salvador eventually relented, and arranged a meeting at the senator’s hotel. Abrego Garcia told Van Hollen about his experience at El Salvador’s notorious Center for the Confinement of Terrorism (CECOT), a massive prison, and his traumatic isolation from the outside world.
Abrego Garcia’s detention has pushed the United States to the brink of a constitutional showdown. The Supreme Court upheld a lower court ruling that the administration must “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return to the US — an order that the White House has shown little intention of heeding.
“This goes to the heart of protecting people’s rights and what bullies do and what authoritarian leaders do,” Van Hollen told Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram. “And what Donald Trump is doing is beginning by picking on the most vulnerable and refusing to bring his case in the courts, and when the courts rule, ignoring them.”
Van Hollen talked to Today, Explained about what he heard from Abrego Garcia, and why he believes this case has pushed the United States into a constitutional crisis. Below is a transcript of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. Make sure to listen to the whole thing.
Why was it so important to you to go down to El Salvador to meet with this one man?
I wanted to let him know, number one, that I was bringing greetings from his family who haven’t heard from him since he disappeared. He was locked away. No one was able to reach him — not his wife, not his mom, not his lawyers. In fact, until this moment, I’m the only one who’s communicated with him before or since. So I wanted to, number one, see if he was alive.
But I also wanted him to know that his case was something that was meaningful to every American who cares about the Constitution. And I wanted to ask the government of El Salvador to stop being complicit with the Trump administration in this illegal scheme. So it was to defend the rights of this person because if we don’t defend the right of this individual, we do threaten rights for everybody who lives here.
The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, has allied himself with President Donald Trump, has called Abrego Garcia a terrorist, and said he would never return him. How hard did that make it for you to actually sit down with him?
My view is this: The courts of the United States have said that he was illegally taken away. When I met with the vice president of El Salvador, I asked him if they had any evidence that he had committed any criminal acts. And his answer was, “No. We’ve got him in our jail” — and he was originally at CECOT, which is one of the most notorious prisons in Latin America — “we’ve got him there because the United States is paying us to do it.” That was his answer.
And I said, “Do you really want to be part of this illegal scheme with Donald Trump in violation of constitutional rights in the United States?” His answer was, “We got to deal with them, they’re paying us and if the Trump administration tells us, we’ll let them go. But we’re being paid, we got a contract. And so we’re gonna keep them locked up.”
And so how did you end up getting to meet him?
Well, I asked the vice president. He said no. I said, “If I come back next week, can I meet with him?” No. “Well, maybe I could get him on the phone?” No.
So the next day, I decided not to give up. I drove towards CECOT prison, about three kilometers out, and I was waved to the side of the road by soldiers. I said, “Why are you stopping me?” They said, “You can’t go to see Abrego Garcia.” And I said, “Do you know how he’s doing?” They said no. And I say, “Why can’t I go?” They said, “We have orders.”
So then we had some events in El Salvador with local press. And they did relent. And I think that even Bukele recognized that it was a bad look for El Salvador to not allow anybody to meet or talk with this guy, to even know whether he was alive. As I was sort of getting ready to go to the airport on the way home, we got a call and I ended up meeting with him.
What did he tell you?
First and foremost, he told me he missed his family and I told him how much his family missed him. And he said that thinking of them is what gave him strength every day. He said he had had a traumatic experience — that was his word, “traumatic.”
He said he tried to make a phone call from the Baltimore Detention Center. They wouldn’t let him do it. And then of course he landed in this really awful CECOT prison. So he was traumatized. He said he hurt, he felt he was in pain, and said he hadn’t committed any crimes.
And he asked me to pass his message of love back to his family. I informed him — because he’d been in a total news blackout — his case was now representative of the fight for constitutional rights and due process for everybody who lives in America, and that a lot of people were working to get him out of prison in accordance with the Supreme Court order to facilitate his return.
What was the prison like?
The first place he went was CECOT and he said he was not in fear for safety from the prisoners in his cell. He said, if I recall right, there were about 25 prisoners in his cell. He said he was scared and traumatized by other prisoners in other cells, and these cells are packed. I mean, they sometimes have more than 100 prisoners, and he says that they would call out to him and taunt him and that did make him feel very much at risk.
He told me that he’d been moved to this other prison and detention center in Santa Ana. He told me he’d been there about eight days. This is when I met with them, which were sort of better conditions, but still, and I wanna stress this, still no ability to communicate with anybody in the outside world and to learn anything about what’s happening. That’s a violation of international law to deny somebody the ability to talk to their lawyer or family. So that’s where he is sitting as we speak.
When you guys met up, there were some photos released and it looks like you had margarita glasses or something in front of you. Where did that come from? Where exactly was this meeting?
They brought him to my hotel. At first they wanted to stage the meeting by the pool, to create this impression, to deceive people, thinking that he was in some tropical paradise when he’d been in one of the worst prisons in El Salvador.
During our conversation, the government folks from Bukele instructed the waiters to set two taller-looking glasses on our table, making it look like margaritas. I have no idea what’s in them because neither of us touched them, but they had a little cherry on top and they had either salt or sugar on the rim.
I think it shows the lengths that Bukele and Trump will go to deceive the American people about what’s happening, right? Here’s a guy, illegally abducted, ends up in the worst prison — and they want to create this impression that, “Hey, he’s just in paradise.”
Republicans are leaning into this message that Garcia is a member of the MS-13 gang. What do you make of that?
You know, my point on all of this, Sean, is that they should bring those facts before the court and Trump should not just be spending all his time on social media. Put up or shut up in federal court. And I wanna quote the federal judge in this case: She said that the Trump administration had presented, quote, “no evidence linking Abrego Garcia to MS-13 or to any terrorist activity.” Period. Put up or shut up in court. I’m not vouching for the man. I’m standing up for his rights because all of our rights are at risk if we don’t.
You’re not only saying we have to focus on constitutional rights. You’re saying this situation with Abrego Garcia is a constitutional crisis. You say constitutional crisis, [California Gov.] Gavin Newsom says distraction. How do we reconcile those two assessments of this very serious situation?
This is a fundamental constitutional issue, and it is a crisis because the Supreme Court has ruled that the Trump administration has to help facilitate his return to the United States.
I also do just want to briefly quote what the Fourth Circuit said. This is a three-judge panel, and the chief judge who wrote it is a guy called Judge Wilkinson — he was appointed by Reagan. Here’s what he says: “It is difficult in some cases to get to the heart of the matter. But in this case, it’s not hard at all. The government is asserting a right to stash away residents of this country in foreign prisons without the semblance of due process that is the foundation of our constitutional order.”
So this is not a distraction. This goes to the heart of protecting people’s rights and what bullies do and what authoritarian leaders do. And what Donald Trump is doing is beginning by picking on the most vulnerable and refusing to bring his case in the courts, and when the courts rule, ignoring them. So this is a very important moment to protect everyone’s constitutional rights. It’s not about one person. It’s about all of us.