2024-12-26 20:45:00
When I was about 7, Los Angeles public schools shifted to a “year-round” schedule. The effect, for my elementary school, was a shorter summer break (boo), and an extra-long winter break (also, it turned out, boo).
That year, my parents enrolled me in “winter camp,” which was like summer camp but less fun. It was an El Niño year, and the constant rain turned the swimming pools into an unwholesome shade of green. I honestly don’t remember what we did with most of our days; probably we made a lot of lanyards and argued with one another.
In an effort to mix things up, the camp arranged a whale-watching trip for us (January is gray whale season in Southern California). But as soon as we got out to sea, an enormous storm kicked up, buffeting our boat to such a degree that every camper except for me threw up. Lest you think I was spared: My clothes became so waterlogged in the rain that my pants fell down in front of everyone. We did not see any whales.
All of this is to say that winter break can be weird for kids: There are often family visits and holiday celebrations, but it’s also a time when school is out, the weather is bad, and there’s not always much to do. In a lot of places, there’s no longer enough snow for the winter activities of yore — you really cannot build a snowman out of wintry mix. One year, I took my older kid on a desperate trudge to the dollar store in subfreezing temperatures just to get out of the house. Things can get rough.
I have no advice for the short, strange days at the end of the year other than to honor them in whatever way you can. We celebrate Christmas in my family, so my kids will be opening presents this week, and then probably strewing pieces of them liberally about the house. My 2-year-old keeps exclaiming, “It’s Halloween!” and then, when corrected, quietly lamenting, “Halloween all done.” I get it — I like Christmas fine, but I kind of prefer Halloween, too.
Whether you’re celebrating anything or not, remember that these are the darkest days of the calendar, and whatever happens with the weather or everything else, the days are already getting longer. Maybe get some sleep, if you can. Take your kids out to look at the night sky — Venus is really good this month and is not a drone. If they are reasonably quiet, take them birdwatching.
I’ll be skipping Thursday, January 2, but I’ll be back with you on January 9. A big thank you to everyone who’s been reading (and sending in questions, podcast recommendations, and stories about kids hibernating in nests of toys) these last few months, and I’ll see you in the new year!
School districts are preparing for potential immigration crackdowns from the Trump administration, by hosting seminars for families on their legal rights and training staff on how to respond if ICE agents show up at school.
The 74 has a roundup of charts that defined education in 2024, including data on pandemic learning loss and kids’ smartphone use.
Ulta Beauty has started selling mystery balls with toy versions of beauty products inside, possibly as a way of courting the coveted Sephora tween demographic.
We are contractually allowed to continue reading our Christmas books until December 31, at which point my husband will sequester them for the next 11 months. My little kid especially enjoys Pick a Pine Tree, a sweet rhyming story about tree decorating, and How Does Santa Go Down the Chimney?, which (spoiler) fails to answer that age-old question.
I’ve gotten a lot of questions about Australia’s move to ban kids from social media, and in the new year, I’ll be looking into the pros and cons of such bans. As I report on that, I’d love to hear from you: Have the kids in your life experienced any positive effects from social media? We hear so much about the negatives that I’m very curious about the flip side. Get in touch at [email protected].
2024-12-26 20:00:00
If you follow the news about gun violence in America, you know that there’s a lot to be pessimistic about.
Guns were already a major public health concern when the pandemic hit and the murder rate skyrocketed. The surge in homicide in 2020 and 2021, research has shown, was best understood as a surge in gun violence, with firearms-related deaths counting for the majority of the increase. Not all communities suffered equally: In 2020, 61 percent of victims of gun homicide were Black, with the largest increases among boys and men ages 10–44. The following year, according to the Gun Violence Archive, the number of mass shootings — shootings in which four or more people, not including the shooter, are shot and injured or killed — reached 689, up more than 50 percent from the number of mass shootings in 2018.
And then the Supreme Court issued a ruling that functionally allowed all Americans to carry weapons in public. Coming on the heels of an awful rise in gun violence, experts warned that it would almost certainly get worse.
But that hasn’t really happened. Some of the worst-case scenarios, based on the recent trends around gun violence, haven’t yet come to pass. To be clear, the United States still has exceptionally high levels of gun violence. The country has more guns per capita than any other nation on Earth, and a messy patchwork of laws that make regulation extremely difficult. For those reasons, the country is still incredibly vulnerable to seeing more gun-related deaths in the future.
But we’re so used to bad news about gun violence, and the fact that Republicans refuse to pass better gun regulations, it’s easy to feel like the issue is hopeless and tune out. So it’s important to acknowledge that in some key ways, this year was better than the last — and that 2024 was an important step in the right direction.
Murder likely fell at the fastest rate ever recorded this year, according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher — which is particularly impressive when you consider that murder fell at the fastest rate ever recorded last year, too. Those numbers will almost certainly be revised somewhat, but the overall picture is unlikely to change. Because the large majority of homicides in the United States are firearm-related, it’s safe to attribute the decline to a reduction in gun deaths. And it’s manifested as big, double-digit reductions of murders in cities that have long suffered from the epidemic of gun violence, including Baltimore, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and Washington, DC.
It’s hard to overstate just how meaningful that is. As Asher notes, “the rapid decline in murder has led to more than 5,000 fewer murder victims this year compared to the 2020 to 2022 years.”
The pandemic-era murder spike, in other words, appears to be over. What happened? Experts are careful not to attribute the rise and fall of murder to any single cause. But the return to work and school following pandemic disruptions and closures, and a renewed effort at gun violence reduction in many US cities, supported by federal funding, almost certainly helped. Whatever the reason, the outcome is thousands of lives saved.
One of the crucial concerns gun and political violence researchers had going into 2024 was whether we’d see an outbreak of unrest following the presidential election. The concern was not unfounded. Recent studies have shown that a small but worrying number of Americans increasingly believe that a more violent era of American life is coming. A smaller percentage of those people say that violence is justified for political reasons, and that they are willing to participate in political violence.
Then, in July, a gunman shot at President-elect Donald Trump during a campaign rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, and came hair-raisingly close to striking his head (instead, according to investigators, the bullet grazed Trump’s ear.) Two months later, another man attempted it again — though that time the Secret Service were able to respond before he opened fire.
“The set of circumstances most likely to produce political violence in this country in the next few months are a closely contested election, with momentum swinging to Democrats, and with high-profile instances of political violence having already occurred,” political violence researcher Garen J. Wintemute told Vox after the first assassination attempt.
The polls showed a close election, up until the very end. Trump repeatedly attacked the legitimacy of the electoral process. And the memory of January 6, 2021, when the then-president incited a mob to a violent, armed insurrection at the US Capitol to protest his election loss, was fresh in everyone’s mind.
But it didn’t happen — perhaps because the election wasn’t a long, drawn-out fight, and perhaps because Trump won. Whatever the reason, the US came back from what seemed like the brink of a dangerous moment. That’s not to say the country couldn’t find itself there again, and soon. The recent shooting of United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson, and the lionization of his alleged killer, Luigi Mangione, have revealed there may be more openness to political violence in the American public than previously realized. And research of mass shooters show that when a shooter receives lots of public attention, it tends to inspire copycats.
In 2024, though, the worst fears about election violence didn’t come to pass.
And it’s not just political violence. Though a student in Wisconsin killed a classmate and a teacher in December, overall, mass shootings also appear to have declined in 2024, from 656 incidents in 2023 to 491 in 2024. No one is exactly sure why — but it’s undeniably a good thing.
The assassination of Thompson in December was newsworthy for a number of reasons, one of them being that it appeared to be the first high-profile killing using a ghost gun — in this case, one that the alleged shooter 3D printed himself.
Ghost guns don’t have serial numbers, which make them difficult for law enforcement to track where they came from. For that reason, they’re especially appealing for people looking to commit crimes and not get caught.
They’ve become a huge problem in recent years, with the number of such weapons being recovered from crime scenes increasing a staggering 1,083 percent between 2017 and 2021. Many of these guns were not printed at home, like Mangione’s apparently was, but instead were sold as easy-to-assemble kits online. Just one ghost gun manufacturer was responsible for 88 percent of the guns recovered during that time.
The government moved quickly to address the problem. In 2022, the Biden administration said that the ghost gun kits and their receivers (or frames) were subject to the same federal regulations as regular guns — meaning, they needed a serial number. The rule was challenged in the courts, but it appears that the Supreme Court is likely to uphold the law, which the government says is necessary for cracking down on the untraceable guns. Meanwhile, the gunmaker responsible for most of the guns showing up at crime scenes was hit with lawsuits. It appears they have since shut down. According to an analysis by The Trace, the numbers of ghost guns being recovered from crime scenes are now falling in several cities.
Of course, the United States still has too many guns — and a regulatory system that resembles Swiss cheese. As long as that’s the case, the country will likely deal with elevated levels of gun deaths. But the developments this year show that the situation isn’t hopeless. Meaningful attempts to address gun violence and regulate firearms do work — and can save lives.
2024-12-26 19:42:00
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.
The pod looked like a tanning bed from another planet: a human-sized chamber, white and sparkly purple with a clear glass door, resting on an inclined platform. Previously, it had been on display in public exhibitions, but now it was in Schaffhausen, in a large park in northern Switzerland, near the border with Germany.
A woman stood in front of it, under a dense canopy of trees. She wore a white fleece jacket, dark pants, and flip-flops. It was late September 2024, and the air in this part of the country had become cool.
The woman, a 64-year-old American whose name has not been made public, had come to the Alpine country, to this place of vineyards and rolling meadows and mountain views, to end her life.
It was a private decision that, paradoxically, would have global implications for the debate over end-of-life care and whether people have a right to medically assisted suicide.
For more than 25 years, Switzerland has been a destination for people who want a medically assisted suicide, thanks to the country’s longstanding and liberal law regarding the practice. Each year, the number of people choosing assisted suicide in the country grows; in 2023, that number reached more than 1,200. Most people who end their lives in Switzerland are elderly or have an incurable illness, though a person can sometimes get approval for an assisted suicide under other circumstances. And though the majority who die this way are citizens, Switzerland is one of the few countries that also allows foreigners to travel there for the purpose, a practice critics have derided as “suicide tourism.”
The country’s largest assisted suicide nonprofit, Exit, takes only citizens and permanent residents. But other prominent organizations, including Dignitas and Pegasos, accept foreigners. People who are interested reach out to the groups online and apply for membership, which provides counseling and guidance around end-of-life care. Those seeking a medically assisted death are required to have consultations with a doctor associated with one of the organizations. After determining that the person is eligible, of sound mind, and, when applicable, has considered their full range of treatment options, the doctor writes a prescription for sodium pentobarbital, the same substance used for pet euthanasia and many lethal injection executions in the US, to be used at a later date chosen by the patient.
The doctor is not allowed to administer the medication themselves. That practice is known as euthanasia, which is not legal in the country because it is considered “deliberate killing.” Instead, they provide the medication to the patient, who, in the presence of the doctor or an aide for one of the organizations, either swallows it or takes it with a gastric tube or an intravenous infusion.
The entire process, for foreigners, costs about $11,000 and usually takes a couple of months.
Had the American woman chosen to end her life under the standard Swiss protocol, it probably wouldn’t have been controversial. She reportedly had skull base osteomyelitis, a rare and painful inflammatory condition that is often fatal if untreated. She told the group helping her that her adult children fully supported her decision.
But she wasn’t there to end her life the standard way. Instead, she was about to become the first person to try a controversial new method for suicide, using a technology that would roil public debate over assisted suicide in Switzerland and capture attention around the globe.
She would use the Sarco pod, an invention of Philip Nitschke, a strident right-to-die advocate. Nitschke hopes that the 3-D printed pod, with a name that’s short for sarcophagus, will revolutionize the practice of voluntary assisted death by taking doctors out of the picture.
The Sarco, he has said, doesn’t require a lengthy screening process or thousands of dollars. Rather than relying on sodium pentobarbital, a person who wanted to use the pod could buy nitrogen. They would lie down inside the pod, resting their head on a neck travel pillow. Then, they would close the door and push a button. The chamber would fill with nitrogen gas, and oxygen levels would quickly drop below levels humans need to survive.
As a method of execution in the US, nitrogen hypoxia has been highly controversial. Earlier this year, UN experts raised concerns that the execution of Alabama death row inmate Kenneth Eugene Smith using nitrogen gas could constitute “torture,” and the state is currently being sued by another inmate alleging the practice is cruel and unconstitutional. Right-to-die advocates, though, say that when administered properly, it’s a relatively painless death because people exposed to high levels of nitrogen quickly lose consciousness.
The American woman entered the chamber just before 4 pm, according to Dutch newspaper de Volkskrant, which had a photographer in the woods of Schaffhausen before and after the death to document the scene. To protect against the possibility that they might be accused of foul play, Nitschke and his colleagues also set up two video cameras to record. Then Nitschke went across the border to Germany, possibly to avoid the risk of arrest. The only person who remained with the woman at the scene the entire time was Florian Willet, a colleague of Nitschke’s who co-founded The Last Resort, an organization to promote the Sarco pod’s use in Switzerland.
Seconds after entering the pod, the woman pressed the button to release the gas. Willet waited with her, monitoring her vital signs on an iPad and relaying them to Nitschke over the phone. After confirming her death, Willet called the police — a standard practice after an assisted suicide in Switzerland.
Typically, police examine the scene to verify that there are no signs of foul play.
But this wasn’t a typical death. Police arrested Willet, his attorneys, and the de Volkskrant photographer nearby on suspicion of “inducing and aiding and abetting suicide,” according to Reuters.
More than eight weeks later, Willet remained in jail, with police investigating the woman’s death as a possible “intentional killing.”
And Switzerland, a country that has for decades maintained a public consensus in support of assisted suicide, has been confronted with a series of questions that have implications for one of the most significant moments of every person’s life: To what extent should people have the right to determine when and how they die? What are the moral and philosophical implications for a society that sanctions the practice of medically assisted suicide? How does a nation handle the need for the safety of vulnerable people while also protecting their dignity and individual rights?
Switzerland isn’t the only country that allows assisted suicide. Other nations, including the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Colombia, Spain, and Canada, also permit the practice, which some advocates call medical aid in dying (MAID) to differentiate it from the usual connotations of the word “suicide.” In late November, the British Parliament took the first step to pass a bill that would legalize assisted dying for some terminally ill patients.
In some countries, the law goes further than it does in Switzerland, allowing voluntary euthanasia, where doctors can administer lethal doses for patients who can’t or don’t want to do it themselves. Belgium and the Netherlands, for example, allow physician-assisted euthanasia for mental illnesses if a doctor determines that the condition creates unbearable suffering. What constitutes unbearable suffering, though, is inherently subjective and open to interpretation.
The number of deaths via euthanasia in both countries has grown considerably in recent years; the same is true of Canada, which recently passed some of the world’s most liberal euthanasia laws. Critics worry that the easy availability of assisted death creates incentives for people to see it as the only solution to their suffering, even when there might be effective treatments. They also worry about a “slippery slope” where doctor might approve assisted suicide for more and more reasons, ultimately resulting in suicides for non-medical reasons being enabled by law.
The United States does not permit euthanasia, but physician-assisted suicide is legal in 10 states, including California, Oregon, and Washington. According to a Gallup survey earlier this year, 71 percent of Americans believed that a doctor should be able to administer a euthanasia drug if requested by a patient or their family member, and nearly the same amount supported physician-assisted suicide for people with terminal illnesses.
Erika Preisig, a family physician and founder of the organization Lifecircle, which helps foreigners come to Switzerland for assisted suicide and advocates for other countries to legalize it, says the issue is going to become more important as more baby boomers reach the end of their lives.
“They will not let others decide how they have to die. They will decide themselves,” says Preisig, who is a member of that generation. “This will raise the percentage of assisted dying all over.”
But even with widespread support, the practice is still controversial in the US and elsewhere. The American public, despite supporting legalization, is more divided on the morality of doctor-assisted suicide. It’s opposed by the Catholic Church and other Christian organizations, which believe the practice goes against God’s will. Some disability rights advocates have argued fiercely against it, saying that it allows medical professionals to offer disabled people death rather than finding ways to improve their lives. The American College of Physicians (ACP) also opposes medically assisted dying on the grounds that the practice is incompatible with a doctor’s duty as a healer who takes the Hippocratic Oath, promising to do no harm.
“[T]he focus at the end of life should be on efforts to prevent or ease suffering,” the ACP’s president said in 2017. Partly as a result of those disagreements, Americans have different rights regarding assisted suicide depending on which state they live in. That’s led some Americans, including the woman who used the Sarco pod, to come to countries like Switzerland to end their lives.
The birthplace of Calvinism and an intellectual center of the Protestant Reformation, Switzerland has a long history of bucking the dogma of the Catholic Church and charting its own moral and philosophical path. Famously neutral during the World Wars, and now home to world governing bodies like the United Nations and the World Health Organization, the country can appear to be a tightly regulated place like many other Western European countries.
In reality, it’s a society built on compliance with social and cultural norms moreso than government regulations. Political scientists point to it as among the most libertarian societies on earth, and Switzerland is consistently ranked as the number one country in the Human Freedom Index report put out by the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank.
Assisted suicide is no exception. The practice has been permitted in Switzerland longer than in any other country. In 1942, the government put into effect a statute outlawing abetting assisted suicide for “selfish purposes,” like gaining access to an inheritance, but otherwise, it wasn’t explicitly banned — which meant that, by omission, assisting suicide for non-selfish purposes was technically legal. To this day, the 1942 statute is the only law explicitly referring to assisted suicide. In an email to Vox, the prosecutor in charge of the case confirmed that Willet was arrested under suspicion of breaking this law.
In place of those laws, requirements for obtaining a medically assisted suicide were developed by doctors and codified into guidelines maintained by Switzerland’s medical professional organizations. The regulations are nonbinding, but disobeying them can in theory lead to professional sanctions. In practice, this has meant that the doctors are regulating themselves.
“We have one of the most liberal systems in the world,” Yvonne Gilli, the president of the country’s professional association for doctors, told Vox in an email. For most of the medical community, the desire seems to be to keep it that way. “We would therefore do well to leave doctors in a central role in assisted suicide,” Gilli wrote.
In a small, relatively homogenous nation of just under 10 million people, assisted suicide has never been quite the culture war issue it was in the United States in the 1990s and early 2000s, when Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a right-to-die advocate nicknamed “Dr. Death” by the media, filmed himself performing a voluntary euthanasia and sent the video footage to 60 Minutes, intentionally triggering a trial that would result in his conviction for murder.
In 2011, a referendum that proposed a ban on assisted suicide in Zurich, the country’s most populous canton or state, was rejected with 85 percent of the vote. That high level of public support has allowed assisted suicide organizations to operate with relatively little friction and without much public debate, even as demand increases. According to a long-term study of assisted suicides in the country from 1999-2018, the total number of physician-assisted suicides doubled every five years.
“Suicide assistance has been quite calm. The Swiss assisted suicide organizations were under the radar; there wasn’t much discussion about them,” says Bernhard Rütsche, a professor at the University of Lucerne and an expert on assisted suicide in Switzerland. “They care for their reputation. The whole branch of suicide assistance has been shaken up with this new method, and they don’t like that, quite understandably.”
The intervention of Nitschke and his Sarco pod threatens to upend the status quo.
In 1996, Nitschke became the first doctor in the world to help a terminally ill patient die legally by assisted suicide in Australia. A decade later, he and his partner Fiona Stewart published The Peaceful Pill Handbook, a guide that provides information about methods of assisted suicide and describes the process of obtaining one in Switzerland.
Nitschke, according to Katie Engelhart’s book The Inevitable: Dispatches on the Right to Die, began his work believing that patients with terminal illnesses should have the right to choose an end to their suffering. But as his advocacy deepened, his thinking evolved. Why should doctors like him be the one to make the decisions? Why should doctors get to determine what counts as extraordinary suffering and what doesn’t?
Over time, Nitschke came to believe that the right to die should be entirely in the hands of individuals and not medical professionals. The deeper his advocacy became, the more he clashed with other members of the medical community. He burned his medical license in 2015 after a protracted battle with Australia’s medical board. He also became more critical of mainstream MAID groups that focus only on the sickest patients.
He takes issue with the Swiss system, which he has said is too deferential to doctors and too expensive. “We are convinced that no money should be charged for an assisted death. Especially when you realize that it is already very expensive for foreigners who wish to die to travel to Switzerland,” Nitschke said of his organization, Exit International, in a recent interview. (Exit International, which is not related to the Swiss group Exit, pointed to statements on their website and declined to be interviewed before deadline.)
Nitschke approaches end-of-life issues with the zeal of a libertarian techno-futurist. In interviews, he’s spoken about a future where the Sarco pod’s blueprints are posted online, allowing anyone to 3-D print one anywhere in the world. He has said that AI could replace doctors in assessing whether a person meets the criteria to end their life. “We really want to develop that part of the process so that a person can have their mental capacity assessed by the software, rather than … spending half an hour with a psychiatrist,” Nitschke told Wired.
Nitschke’s unapologetic belief that people should be able to choose how and when they die, combined with his confrontational style, has made him a lightning rod for controversy, leading some of the doctors who support assisted dying to think that he does more harm to their cause than good.
“Nitschke wants to give everybody, without thinking, the possibility to die. For me, this is unethical,” says Preisig, the founder of Lifecircle. “This is very bad for Switzerland. It’s a big problem for us.” Leaders of other assisted suicide organizations have also been critical.
The debate over the Sarco pod has even reached the Swiss government. Nina Fehr Düsel, a member of the Swiss National Council (which is similar to the US Congress), has made a motion for the National Council to discuss assisted suicide in the coming months. She’s also asking her colleagues to consider banning the Sarco pod explicitly.
“I don’t want to overregulate this,” Fehr Düsel, a member of the populist right-wing Swiss People’s Party, which controls the most seats in the federal assembly, tells Vox. She has concerns about the use of nitrogen, which is at this point cheap and easy to obtain in the country. In general, she says, the organizations that are already established in the country should be left alone. “We already have these two longstanding organizations and that is enough,” Fehr Düsel says.
For others, the Sarco pod case has merely exposed the extent to which assisted suicide is operating without clear legal guidelines. “We need some regulation that ensures that autonomy is safeguarded and capacity is properly assessed, and the means for suicide assistance — the instruments and the medications — are safe and comply with human dignity,” says Rütsche, the professor at the University of Lucerne.
According to Rütsche, the government should codify the existing standards doctors have established, with laws around the assessment of someone’s capacity, obligations to provide information and counseling to make sure the decision is well considered, requirements for how the process takes place (including what drugs and devices are allowed and what aren’t), and oversight for the assisted suicide organizations — with the ability to ban a group for flouting the guidelines.
Whether Switzerland moves forward with a new law remains to be seen. But the Sarco pod’s future seems more certain.
Police confiscated the pod at the scene of the woman’s death. In November, Schaffhausen prosecutor Peter Sticher confirmed to Vox in an email that one person remained in police custody regarding the investigation. Willet, according to The Last Resort’s website, has been held in jail for two months.
Holding someone that long on suspicion of abetting a suicide for selfish purposes is highly unusual. But in late October, de Volkskrant, the Dutch paper, reported another reason that may explain Willet’s long detention: According to court records, a forensic doctor told investigators the woman was found with injuries to her neck, raising the possibility that Willet was the subject of an “intentional killing” investigation.
“The allegation of a [killing] is simply not true, and I’d guess everyone involved knows this,” says Andrea Taormina, the lawyer for the photographer who was detained after the woman’s death. “There are no facts that would indicate differently. This is mainly an allegation brought forward simply to raise the stakes in this procedure.”
De Volkskrant, which had access to and reviewed the camera footage, said in their report that nothing on the recording showed Willet opening the pod or doing anything to disturb the woman.
Ultimately, after 70 days in detention, Willet was released in early December.
Exit International and The Last Resort, Nitschke’s organizations, celebrated Willet’s release. “The allegation of intentional homicide was, and remains, absurd,” it said in a statement.
But in response to an email, Sticher told Vox that both investigations remained open. “All persons are still under investigations, for aiding and abetting a suicide for selfish purposes and for intentional homicide,” Sticher wrote. “But we had no more reasons to keep this last person in custody.”
While the drama brought by the Sarco pod’s use is exceptional, the broader debate shouldn’t be.
According to a UN report from 2023, the world population of people over 65 is expected to double, from 761 million in 2021 to 1.6 billion in 2050. In 25 years, people over 65 will make up 1 in 6 people on Earth — part of a global trend toward aging. Thanks to legalization in several countries, many of these people now know that physician-assisted suicide is an option. Assisted suicide remains rare, both globally and in the US. But as more attention is paid to it, the moral, philosophical, and political questions that the case prompted will only become more urgent.
In Switzerland, where assisted suicides are still a relatively small percentage of overall deaths, supporters say it’s important to maintain that right. “Modern medicine is keeping people alive longer and longer. This is why there are more and more very old people, and therefore more and more medical problems towards the end of life,” Marion Schafroth, the president of Exit, said in an email. “Human support for suicide is certainly not morally wrong. It serves the dignity and self-determination and safety of those who wish to die.”
Even if they don’t ultimately choose assisted suicide, says Preisig, the founder of Lifecircle, it’s important for people who are seriously ill to know they have the option. “People are not afraid of death, they’re afraid of unbearable suffering,” she says. “When they know they could [die] if they wanted to, then they lose this fear of unbearable suffering. This is the most important point for me.”
Still, other countries, like Canada, are grappling with serious concerns about whether the criteria for approval is expanding too quickly, enabling or even encouraging people who aren’t suffering to end their lives.
Canada’s Medical Assistance in Dying (MAID) program is a primary example for critics of what can go wrong. When MAID was first legalized in 2016, Canada had strict criteria: It was only to be used to end unbearable suffering in patients whose conditions were advanced and whose impending death was reasonably foreseeable.
In 2021, following a court ruling, the government removed the criteria that a death be reasonably foreseeable. Stories emerged of people who had been approved for euthanasia who didn’t have terminal illnesses. Health care workers have said they’re struggling with the ethical implications arising from people requesting euthanasia not for incurable illnesses but because they’re on government subsidies, were recently widowed, or are dealing with chronic but nonfatal conditions like obesity. And in October, a Canadian committee found that people had received approval for euthanasia for reasons such as social isolation.
Some disability rights groups in Canada are challenging the country’s expanded MAID laws in court. “We are witnessing an alarming trend where people with disabilities are seeking assisted suicide due to social deprivation, poverty, and lack of essential supports,” a leader of the group, Inclusion Canada, said in a statement in September. “This law also sends a devastating message that life with a disability is a fate worse than death, undermining decades of work toward equity and inclusion.”
The controversies around these cases, like the Sarco case, are raising uncomfortable questions for which there might not be easy answers. A legalized assisted suicide program without strong guardrails runs the risk of creating opportunities for abuse. Among those who decide to die via assisted suicide will likely be complicated people with complicated motivations, some of which might not seem reasonable to others. On the other hand, in countries where assisted suicide is illegal, people often find other ways to end their lives. (The leading cause of suicide deaths in the United States is not a new technology like the Sarco pod but a much older one: guns.)
How governments balance the need to protect their citizens’ rights while also safeguarding the most vulnerable among them is a real conundrum. Switzerland found a balance, but the Sarco pod threatened to upset it. Restoring the balance is more than just a major imperative. It’s a matter of great moral significance — and of life and death.
2024-12-26 19:42:00
This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.
The sharp decline in child mortality rates is one of the great global success stories of the past several decades.
In 1990, nearly 13 million children died before their fifth birthday, primarily from infectious diseases or complications during birth. By 2022, that number had fallen by more than 50 percent, meaning that today, about 8 million fewer children are dying than were some 35 years ago.
Overall development improvements, alongside a handful of targeted public health interventions — ensuring that skilled health care workers are present during childbirth, improving access to clean water, providing postnatal care, and expanding vaccination, to name a few — have helped ensure far more children live to see their fifth birthday and beyond.
Yet despite that progress, around 5 million children younger than 5 years old still die prematurely each year, with about 80 percent of those deaths occurring in sub-Saharan Africa and southern Asia. And progress to reduce child mortality has slowed in recent years. Between 2015 and 2022, child mortality rates fell by only 2 percent, down from about 4 percent between 2000 and 2015.
But one surprising intervention — periodically distributing antibiotics prophylactically to young children en masse — could help further reduce child mortality rates in some of the worst-affected countries. A study published in August examined children in Niger, a country in West Africa with one of the highest child mortality rates in the world. Researchers found that twice-yearly mass distributions of an antibiotic to children between the ages of 1 and 5 reduced child mortality by 14 percent.
If this sounds too good to be true — significant reductions in child deaths simply by giving them basic drugs designed to fight bacterial infections — it may be. This intervention around one major health challenge — childhood mortality — is somewhat controversial because it seems to directly run against another major health challenge: the rise of drug-resistant infections. Such infections, which are caused by the overuse of antibiotics, claim an estimated 1 million lives every year, a number that could nearly double by 2050.
“If you increase the amount of antibiotic exposure in the population, you are guaranteed to increase the risk of having drug resistance,” said Gautam Dantas, a professor at Washington University’s School of Medicine who studies the human microbiome and antimicrobial resistance. These drug-resistant pathogens can spread around the world, creating a public health threat for everyone.
And there’s another question: While the positive results show promise, no one is exactly sure why giving antibiotics to children who have no overt sign of infection but still live in high-risk areas reduces overall child mortality in the community.
Given the unknowns and potential to contribute to global drug resistance, the World Health Organization in 2020 strongly recommended against mass antibiotic distribution as a universal intervention. Instead, the agency suggested that public health officials pursue the intervention only in places where under 5 mortality is greater than 80 children per 1,000 births. In 2022, only 10 countries recorded under 5 mortality rates higher than this threshold.
The scientists who study and advocate for the mass distribution of antibiotics are well aware of these issues. The essential question: How does one weigh saving children’s lives against fueling another deadly health threat?
The idea of mass distributing antibiotics to reduce child mortality has its origins in control programs for a specific disease: trachoma. Trachoma is a bacterial eye infection that can lead to visual impairment and irreversible blindness.
Though the disease has plagued humanity for at least 10,000 years, by the early 20th century it had become a serious scourge, infecting anyone from soldiers to boarding school students. But the disease was wiped out in most developed countries in the 1950s and 1960s following the invention and widespread use of antibiotics, especially azithromycin.
But trachoma has persisted in about 50 countries, mostly in poor, rural areas of Africa, Asia, the Middle East, as well as Central and South America. About 2 million people today have blindness or visual impairment caused by trachoma and another 103 million are considered at risk of contracting the disease.
In communities where trachoma is still a problem, the disease prevalence is high, ranging from 60 to 90 percent. Because trachoma became so widespread, the World Health Organization in the early 1990s recommended that health officials treat everyone in an affected community with the antibiotic azithromycin, whether or not they had been diagnosed with the disease. The thinking was that treating the entire community with an antibiotic would reduce the amount of bacteria circulating in the community, thus reducing transmission — much like mass vaccination is used to curtail viral outbreaks.
In the early 2000s, researchers started noticing that mass distribution of azithromycin not only reduced trachoma, but also seemed to reduce overall child mortality. Scientists running a trachoma control study in Ethiopia hypothesized that because azithromycin was effective against other infectious diseases, including respiratory and diarrheal diseases and malaria — all leading causes of childhood death in the country — mass distribution of the drug might help save children’s lives.
Other public health scientists probed this idea further by conducting mass antibiotic distribution trials in places where trachoma wasn’t found.
In one 2018 study known as the MORDOR trial (MORDOR stands for Macrolides Oraux pour Réduire les Décès avec un Oeil sur la Résistance, French for “Oral Macrolides to Reduce Deaths with an Eye on Resistance”), researchers randomly selected more than 1,000 villages across Malawi, Niger, and Tanzania to either receive the mass distribution of azithromycin or a placebo intervention. Children who were between one month and five years in the intervention villages received a small dose of azithromycin twice a year for two years.
At the end of the study, in communities where children had received the antibiotic, the overall annual mortality rate was lower — by about 3 percent in Tanzania, 6 percent in Malawi, and 18 percent in Niger — compared to the villages that received a placebo. The drop in mortality was even greater, about 25 percent, among the youngest children, those between 1 and 5 months old.
While the results are promising, researchers still do not fully understand how mass azithromycin distribution reduces child mortality. One explanation is that the intervention works in a similar way as it does in trachoma-endemic settings, but instead of providing communities a blanket of protection against merely the Chlamydia trachomatis bacterium that causes trachoma, it bestows protection against a wider range of bacteria, including the ones that cause the common respiratory diseases and diarrheal diseases that can kill young children in poor countries.
“It may not be just that you get lucky and you treat a kid that happens to be sick that week,” said Thomas Lietman, a professor at the Proctor Foundation at the University of California, San Francisco who has led studies on trachoma and was the senior author of the 2018 and 2024 child mortality studies.
“We think it’s that we’re reducing the pathogen load in the community. And one of the reasons we think this is because there appears to be an indirect effect. In other words, you receive benefit just by your community being treated.”
Even during these early trials, researchers were concerned about how giving antibiotics to kids might fuel another massive global challenge: antimicrobial resistance, the process by which bacteria evolve the ability to evade antibiotics. It’s simply a matter of evolution: the more that antimicrobials are used, the more opportunities pathogens have to develop resistance to them. If that process continues long enough, it will eventually render these critical, life-saving medicines ineffective.
At the same time, most major drug developers have turned away from making new antibiotics. That means our stores of effective antibiotics are dwindling. If left unchecked, researchers predict that some 2 million people might die from drug-resistant infections by 2050, making it a leading cause of death. But people won’t just die from drug-resistant infections. Life-saving surgeries and treatments such as chemotherapy, which massively damage the immune system, will become much riskier because it will be harder to prevent infections..
In its antibiotic stewardship guidelines, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that health care workers only prescribe antimicrobials if they know what pathogen is causing a patient’s illness. But the idea of mass distributing antibiotics to reduce childhood mortality runs entirely counter to that.
“We’re taught in every health care field not to give antibiotics non-specifically; yet that’s exactly what we’re doing here,” Lietman said. “We’re giving antibiotics to children whether or not they’re sick, whether or not they have a particular pathogen.”
However, it is unclear what impact mass distribution interventions have on drug resistance. After the MORDOR trial, researchers conducted follow-up studies where they collected swab samples from the children who received the antibiotic during the study and those who did not. Among children who participated in the study in Tanzania, researchers reported that there was no significant difference in the number of azithromycin-resistant strains of two types of bacteria between the two groups. Yet in Niger, researchers found that children who received the antibiotic harbored more drug-resistant strains.
Other studies, though not all, that have assessed drug resistance in the wake of mass distribution campaigns for trachoma control have documented measurable but short-lived increases in drug-resistant bacterial strains.
Regardless of whether and to what extent mass antibiotic distribution contributes to drug resistance, the intervention uses a small fraction of the total antibiotics consumed worldwide either by humans or livestock animals. In the 2018 MORDOR study, children received about 20 milligrams per kilogram of body weight which equates to about 360 milligrams for a 40-pound child or a total of, at most, 36 kilograms of antibiotics for the roughly 100,000 children that received the intervention across four distributions.
Compare that to, say, the 6.2 million kilograms of medically important antibiotics sold for use in livestock operations in the US in 2022. Perhaps it would be more effective to reduce antibiotic use in agriculture than target relatively miniscule antibiotic use during an intervention that saves children’s lives.
But there may be other consequences to mass antibiotic use. A series of studies conducted mostly in the US and Europe have linked antibiotic use in childhood with an increased risk of developing obesity, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, asthma, and other lifelong disorders.
Still, it is important to note here that these studies are looking at a very different population than children in Niger who face a high risk of dying before they turn 5. Some research suggests the link between antibiotic use and obesity and other disorders may be related to alterations in the gut microbiome, but it remains unclear exactly how antibiotics might cause poor health outcomes and what role other lifestyle factors might play. And those factors could be entirely different in a country like Niger or Tanzania than in the US.
“Right now, the benefit outweighs the harm,” Dantas said. “Yes, you may encode some burden elsewhere, but you’ll save the life of a child.”
It’s hard to argue that saving thousands — if not millions — of children’s lives doesn’t outweigh future threats of drug resistance or a possible heightened risk of developing chronic diseases. There are plenty of other ways to address the public health challenges posed by antibiotic resistance and chronic diseases that don’t put the lives of some of the poorest children in the world at risk.
And there is one conclusion that is undeniable: If millions of young children were dying every year in the US, parents would demand that every possible intervention be used — whatever the future consequences.
2024-12-26 19:00:00
The media does not give you an accurate picture of the world. This isn’t to say that we’re not reporting the truth or that we’re making facts up. Rather, our profession has a natural tendency to accentuate the negative because the negative is usually what we mean when we think of the news.
Reports of a strange new “disease X” in the Democratic Republic of the Congo is “news”; the fact that about 2.2 billion cases and 12.7 million deaths from malaria have been averted since 2000 isn’t. Estimates that 2024 will be the warmest year on record get a lot of attention; the chart-busting increase in renewable energy, less so. One-off violent crimes make the news; longer-term trends showing declines in violent crime overall, not so much.
2024 was far from perfect. There was continued war in Gaza and Sudan, new war in Lebanon, just more war, period. Donald Trump’s return to the Oval Office brings with it uncertainty and real danger, not least to public health through his nominated health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and his vaccine-questioning beliefs — just in time for a possible bird flu pandemic. And it may just be possible that humanity is knocking on the door of artificial general intelligence — which could be very good or very, very bad.
But there was genuine progress throughout the year, often beneath the headlines, in everything from animal welfare to technology to climate policy to geopolitics. Here are nine optimistic stories from 2024 that we hope will lay the groundwork for a better 2025.
Our World in Data’s Saloni Dattani is one of my favorite writers — which is why we put her on the Future Perfect 50 list in 2022. Few experts are better able to use data to help readers understand when progress in medicine and public health is actually being made, over both the long term and the short.
For an end-of-year post on her Substack, Dattani picked five notable medical breakthroughs in 2024. The one that stood out to me was the approval of Xanomeline-trospium, or Cobenfy, the first new schizophrenia drug to hit the market in decades.
Schizophrenia is a horrifying mental disease that afflicts more than 3.5 million Americans. While drugs do exist and the condition can be managed with treatment and support, disproportionate rates of people with schizophrenia experience homelessness and fall victim to suicide. They die 15 to 20 years earlier on average than the rest of the population. And despite decades of research, we’ve largely failed to find better, more effective treatments.
Cobenfy offers hope, however. It targets different receptors in the brain than existing treatments, and it seems to effectively attack symptoms while reducing debilitating side effects. That can make the difference between life and death.
It’s been nearly two decades since then-New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg suggested that drivers going into Manhattan — home to some of the most congested streets in all of America — should pay a charge. That plan was finally set to go into action this summer, when New York Gov. Kathy Hochul pulled a sudden about-face. The stated reason was that the $15 charge for most cars would hurt Manhattan’s economic recovery and put an undue burden on suburban and outer-borough drivers. The real reason was that Democrats feared that suburban voters would punish them in November.
Well … that still did kind of happen. But a little more than a week after the election, Hochul announced that she would bring back congestion pricing, albeit with a 40 percent cut in the toll, charging most passenger cars $9 to cross into the most crowded parts of Manhattan.
That was disappointing to many transit and environmental advocates, and the money won’t be enough to fix the New York subway’s massive fiscal deficit. So why am I counting this as a good thing for 2024? Because despite all the political shenanigans, congestion charging, a crucial policy for the climate, is (almost certainly) finally here, for the first time in the US. That was not an easy political lift, and my hope is that when we all realize the benefits of congestion pricing, maybe it will open the door to do it elsewhere.
Americans eat a lot of protein, considerably more than they need (for most people) and often more than dietary guidelines recommend. That’s largely because we eat a lot of animal meat. All that chicken and beef and turkey and pork has real health consequences, but it also contributes to America’s environmentally destructive and inhumane factory farming system.
Of course, protein is very important, especially for those actively building strength and for the elderly. If only there were a way to get protein without consuming animals. Hmm …
Oh right, there is. It’s called beans and legumes. As former Future Perfect fellow Julieta Cardenas wrote last year, “[B]eans are high in protein, efficient to grow, and can even improve soil health.” They’re cheap and they’re tasty if you know how to cook them, and if you’re the kind of person worried about processed foods, they’re largely unprocessed. How can we get protein without breaking the bank or hurting the environment or animals? Beans is how.
So I’m counting the news that beans and legumes got a starring role in the report of the 2025 US Dietary Advisory Committee, which advises the creation of the federal dietary guidelines, as a major piece of good news. Eat more beans. Please.
As my colleague Kelsey Piper wrote recently, it’s been a wild year for AI. From corporate shenanigans to models that can reason to ongoing copyright disputes, 2024 felt like the year when AI got real. Which, given how transformative and disruptive AI is proving to be, is enough to make me more than a little worried. Will AI steal our jobs? Our votes? Our lives? It’s all potentially on the table.
Amid the existential fear, we shouldn’t lose sight of the tremendous good that AI, properly harnessed, can bring about. This year, the Nobel Prize for Chemistry went in part to Google DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis and his colleague John Jumper for their work in creating AlphaFold 2, a machine-learning protein-structure predictor.
Proteins are the literal building blocks of nature, and being able to predict their three-dimensional structure is incredibly important to using them to design drugs or other materials. Before AlphaFold came around, it could take months or even years of lab experiments to identify the structure of a protein from its string of amino acids. AlphaFold 2 cut that time considerably, which promises to speed up the process of developing new medicines.
As I once wrote, AlphaFold might be the best example of AI for good. We can only hope we’ll see more such examples in the future.
The first piece I wrote this year was about how 2024 would be a record-breaking year of global elections. More than 60 countries representing roughly half the world’s population were set to go to the polls in 2024, more than any year in the past. India, Indonesia, the UK, Taiwan, and, of course, the US all held major elections. As many people put it, democracy was on the ballot in 2024.
Beyond concerns about how the elections themselves would play out and whether the forces of far-right populism would continue to seize power, there were more existential questions about the elections themselves. Above all else: At a moment when AI increasingly had the ability to turbocharge deepfakes and other forms of trust-eroding propaganda, could these elections actually be fought fairly?
For the most part, the answer was yes. While there were examples of mis- and disinformation, some of it aided by AI, on the whole elections avoided the worst fears of AI deepfakes. As one piece put it, it was the “apocalypse that wasn’t.”
How you feel about 2024’s elections will largely depend on how you feel about the results. But for the most part, even with the growth of AI tools, those results could be trusted. Which might be the best we can hope for now.
Malaria has been killing human beings for thousands of years, if not far longer. Its most famous victims are believed to include figures like Alexander the Great, Oliver Cromwell, and the poet Dante Alighieri. Today, though, we know the names of very few malaria victims. That’s not because the disease has been eradicated — nearly 600,000 people died of the disease in 2023 alone — but because its victims are now almost entirely very poor people living in some of the very poorest countries in sub-Saharan Africa.
But 2024 brought us several steps closer to doing in those poor countries what the rich world has already managed: ending malaria’s death toll. In January, Cameroon became the first country to start routine vaccinations against malaria, the first fruits of a multi-decade effort to create effective vaccines against the mass killer. In May, the Central African Republic became the first country to receive doses of an even more effective vaccine called R21. Altogether, vaccines reached children in 17 countries where the disease is endemic in 2024, with more to come.
This might be the single best piece of news all year. And if you’d like to play a part, you can even volunteer in a challenge trial for new malaria vaccines and treatments. If Future Perfect’s Dylan Matthews can do it, you can too.
It sounds like an honest-to-goodness miracle: children born with hereditary deafness, given the ability to hear. But that’s what happened to five children this year. Part of a study at Mass Eye and Ear, a specialty hospital in Boston, the children were born deaf because of mutations in the OTOF gene, which fails to produce a protein necessary for the transmission of sound signals from the ear to the brain. Fix the mutation, and perhaps hearing could be restored.
That’s precisely what researchers at the hospital did. In a study, a restored version of the OTOF gene was introduced to the children via an inactive virus, a process known as gene therapy. For five out of the six children in the study, hearing was restored to the point where they were able to engage in oral conversation. It was the first such example of using gene therapy to treat this form of deafness, but it almost certainly won’t be the last.
Indonesia often gets overlooked, but it shouldn’t. With 277 million people, it’s the fourth most populous country, and its islands, forests, and coral reefs make it one of the most important biodiversity hot spots in the world. It is also, quietly, one of the brightest stories in global development. Thirty years ago, it was in the grip of the dictator Suharto, and 25 years ago, it was struggling under the toll of the Asian financial crisis. Twenty years ago, 170,000 Indonesians died in the 2004 tsunami. Yet today it is vibrant and democratic — for the most part.
This summer marked another step forward for what is also the world’s largest Muslim country. Poverty fell to a record low of 9.5 percent. It’s the kind of fact that goes largely unreported in the global news — I had to search to find it. But for the people in Indonesia who experienced this change, very little could be more important.
Now, I’ll admit, this might only appear to be a “good thing” for a very specific part of the country that happens to root for a very specific team, so I suppose this qualifies more as an actually good thing for me. What can I say? Editorial prerogative and all that. But unless you’re a New York Giants fan, there can only be joy found in watching Barkley do things like this while aiming to set the single-season rushing record:
When your running back appears to operate according to the physics of the Matrix movies, you know it’s a good year. Here’s to a happy 2025.
2024-12-25 20:30:00
While he may be known for being an iconoclast, Bob Dylan has a public persona — aloof, remote, borderline misanthropic — that doesn’t exactly lend itself to the typical Hollywood treatment. That hasn’t stopped the new Dylan biopic, A Complete Unknown, from trying. Based on the book Dylan Goes Electric and starring Timothée Chalamet doing his own live singing and performing as Dylan, the film has picked up rave reviews for its performances. But some critics have had misgivings about the film’s many fictional liberties as well as the relatively little context we’re given for the beats of his life — not enough to either satisfy Dylanites or explain what’s happening for Dylan newbs.
Why exactly was it such a big deal when Dylan “went electric” — plugging in his guitar and moving away from the folk music he made when he started out? What does his musical and personal legacy mean, and why should audiences care?
Fortunately, I found a longtime Dylanhead who was able to fill in many of the gaps for me. Bill DeVille, a 40-year radio industry veteran, DJs near-nightly for Minneapolis public radio station The Current, in the city where Dylan first got his early start before traveling to New York. DeVille walked me through the context I was missing, and waxed rhapsodic about the experience of seeing the film as A Dylan Guy. I may be a Dylan fan now through sheer osmosis.
Aja Romano: One of the central tensions of the film is this supposed tension between folk and rock. I know that’s part of the longstanding narrative around Bob Dylan, but when you were watching the film, did you feel like it’s an authentic narrative?
Bill DeVille: I think it is. I think his musical love wasn’t necessarily folk music right out of the gate. I think it was blues and rock ‘n’ roll. I don’t want to say rock, because to me, rock is Journey. Rock ‘n’ roll is the real stuff. Fats Domino, Little Richard, Buddy Holly — I think that was the music that he really loved. He discovered Lead Belly and Woody Guthrie and stuff like that, and it took him toward folk. Plus, he didn’t have a band at the time, so it was easy to go out and just busk with your acoustic guitar at the coffee houses in New York.
So folk was more of a detour for him.
I get that impression. The first gigs he had were under the name Elston Gunn back in the latter ’50s. He was playing in Bobby Vee’s band — he was the piano player. He’s always talked about his love for Little Richard, too. That was his hero, more so or as much as Woody, I would imagine.
It sounds as though it was the culture of folk, more than the music itself, that took him on his way.
I think there’s some truth to that, but you’re constricted by this timeline. It’s a nifty timeframe, when he rolls out of Minneapolis in 1961 and immediately heads to the Big Apple. In the movie, they said he did it solo, but apparently he did it with a friend.
That gets into the tropes the movie’s playing with — a small-town boy goes to the big city, right? Can you set the stage for us in terms of what the actual New York scene was at the time?
Well, it was the coffee house scene. It was Dave Van Ronk and Pete Seeger. And Joan Baez was around in that scene, too, and Cisco Houston and some of the old folk guys and Dylan — in the film, it shows him just knocking ’em dead right out of the gate. And Joan Baez saw something — they saw something special in each other, which was pretty cool to see. It just seems like Bob had a handful of songs he was already working on at that point. Plus he was doing a lot of covers back then, too. The first album came out and it was pretty much all covers except for “Song to Woody.”
The first time I heard that Bob Dylan song, “Song to Woody,” it made me cry. And man, in that movie, when it’s performed by Timothée, believe it or not, when he sang the song, it was just like, oh my God, this is so good. It sounds so much like Bob. He was very believable.
I think people have been really surprised at the authenticity of that performance. I don’t think it’s something people would’ve expected from him.
He’s gone the extra mile. At the big rollout red carpet deal, he shows up as Bob Dylan incognito.
Yes! That was the New York premiere of A Complete Unknown, where Chalamet cosplayed Dylan’s notorious 2003 fashion at the Sundance premiere of his then-panned movie Masked and Anonymous.
He had bangs and a stocking cap on and a scarf and a leather jacket that was pulled straight from Dylan. It was hysterical.
He apparently had five and a half years to study the role, because of the pandemic and the strike. I don’t know that he was ever even any kind of a musician, but he sings with authenticity and plays the harmonica and the guitar. All the songs were performed live in the movie, which is pretty incredible too.
That’s the draw. Most people are not going to go to this film being like, “I want to know all about this Pete Seeger dynamic. I want to know all about the Newport Folk Festival.” Most people are going to come for the music, and for them to nail that really shows a level of respect.
Were there some moments that threw you? Too much fan service? I do feel like you have to approach this film with several layers of Dylan knowledge.
I saw it maybe as a bit too much of a fanboy. I was in love with the film. Some of the younger generation, I don’t think, got it. But so much of it is based on things that really did happen. Like Newport Folk, when Pete — they didn’t really get into the cutting of the power too much, but Pete really thought about doing it. He didn’t, obviously, but he considered it.
That moment — when Edward Norton as Pete Seeger looks pointedly at an axe during Dylan’s electric set at the Newport Folk Festival — did baffle people. And especially when you look at the commentary for the time, historians are divided on whether his decision to play electric at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival was actually the controversial thing. When you look at primary sources, some people said that they were booing because the sound was bad and they just couldn’t hear what was happening. That it was not actually about him playing electric.
I do think there was a pretty good round [of controversy]. That whole tour of ’65, it seemed in particular — like the person yelling, “Judas!” — that actually happened in [Manchester], England. And they put that in the film too, even though it happened across the pond, not Newport, Rhode Island.
But I think there was some truth to the idea that people wanted him to be this folk purist. I think for Dylan that whole thing was a little too precious. He just wanted to rock.
Why do you think the film ended on that particular note?
I don’t know, but I think it was important. It could have gone either way. I mean, think about it: Bob could have been this legendary folk musician, purist guy, and he could have been twice as popular as Pete Seeger, but he chose not to. I don’t think he wanted to be constrained by the folk thing. The folk canon is good enough, but Bob had all these songs. He wanted to do it his way. He didn’t want to be manipulated, and his way was to play rock ‘n’ roll, I think.
He wasn’t an old guy. He was in his really low 20s when he first started busking with his acoustic guitar. And the British invasion was just happening too. I think he saw that rock ‘n’ roll was what was going on, and he wanted to be a part of it. Nobody wants to be pigeonholed or typecast, and he was more than a folk traditionalist.
I think the fact people didn’t want him to do it made him want to [play rock music] even more. It spurred him on. And he still continued to play some folk songs, so it wasn’t as bad as it was made out to be. Maybe it was back then, but I never found it to be that big of a deal. It was, “there are two kinds of music, good and bad.”
The film positions Pete Seeger in this role of mentor-doppelgänger, almost. When the film opens, Seeger is appearing in court on contempt charges for his conduct before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Then we see Dylan meeting Guthrie and Seeger at Guthrie’s hospital bedside. Though he did meet both artists soon after his arrival in New York, neither of these details is true.
I guess it’s about setting Pete Seeger up as a kind of rebel in his own way. He was like the kingpin at the time. Woody was laid up with Huntington’s disease, so he wasn’t well. I think Woody was more of a mentor to him than Pete was, although the film doesn’t necessarily show it like that. Obviously he idolized Woody, but in the film, Pete took care of him, and he stayed at his house a few different nights.
Pete didn’t really write songs like Bob Dylan did — that wasn’t his thing. He maintained the folk canon. But I do think that Seeger had a huge admiration for and was sort of a hero to Dylan.
Folk was a vital form of resistance at that time, so it makes sense that, character-wise, Dylan would be drawn to that.
Yeah — and the [1963 March on] Washington with Joan Baez, that was huge. But you see in [Martin Scorsese’s Dylan documentary] No Direction Home that the press were questioning him like he was some sort of radical, and he really wasn’t very radical.
The film treated Johnny Cash as a giant Easter Egg, with Boyd Holbrook playing him as Dylan’s penpal. What did you make of their relationship?
[Cash] just spurred him on. He loved it. And that is kind of true, because he took [Dylan] under his wing when he had The Johnny Cash Show back in the late ’60s, after Dylan made the Nashville Skyline album. I think that Johnny Cash had a great, great respect for Bob, and it was mutual. They wrote letters back and forth over the years.
I do think that relationship contributed to the film’s commentary about the genre mixing. Especially to younger generations who are coming to see the film — they may not be as familiar with Dylan, but they’re definitely familiar with Johnny Cash’s many rock covers and other genre-mixing, and they’re bringing that context with them into the film.
If I’m coming into this film for the first time, what should I know about Dylan’s legacy and influence?
You should know that he’s one of the most important songwriters ever. I’d listen to The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and Highway 61 Revisited and Bringing It All Back Home. Those are the three albums that are focused on most in the movie.
I couldn’t believe how blown away I was when he sat down in the care center, in front of Woody and Pete, and he did “Song to Woody.” And you realize the importance and significance of him meeting his hero, and how important it was that he found him and was able to play a song for him.
I didn’t really expect that. I expected the big moments of the electrified stuff at the end of the film, but it was a touching sweet little moment. I was just so captivated after seeing that that I just loved the whole experience of seeing the film.
It didn’t strike you as cocky?
It probably was cocky. But I think it took everything he had to muster to do it. And he did it.