2025-06-04 06:05:00
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: Is the Trump-Musk partnership over? It’s complicated — but after today, it’s looking more like yes.
What just happened? President Donald Trump has pinned his legislative hopes on one “big, beautiful bill,” which passed the House last month. Today, Elon Musk took aim at the bill as “massive, outrageous, pork-filled…a disgusting abomination” that would “massively increase” the budget deficit.
Does it matter what Musk thinks? Maybe not as much as it once did. This is a transitional moment for Musk, who is on his way out after the official end of his time as a government employee last week. Trump, in a farewell press conference, downplayed the departure, saying, “Elon’s really not leaving. He’s going to be back and forth.”
In private, Trump has reportedly expressed some skepticism about Musk, asking whether efforts by the Department of Government Efficiency were “all bullshit.” Despite that, reporting has so far suggested that the Trump-Musk relationship remains generally amicable — but Musk’s new broadside against Trump’s bill may be a sign of things fraying.
What did Musk actually accomplish? In some ways, relatively little — as my colleague Andrew Prokop has reported, Musk and DOGE failed to get anywhere close to cuts at the promised scale. At the same time, however, Musk had done a horrifying amount of damage — his decimation of US foreign aid alone may already have caused hundreds of thousands of deaths, by some estimates, and will continue to cause even more.
What will Musk do now? Allegedly, return to focusing on his long list of companies, Tesla and SpaceX chief among them, and spend less time on politics. Musk also said in May that he would do “a lot less” political spending going forward. At the very least, his comments Tuesday suggest he’s not all the way done with politics, though it remains to be seen how influential he can be.
We’re returning to a Logoff classic today, with my colleague Patrick Reis’s favorite livestream from a bald eagle’s nest. The nest, home to bald eagles Jackie and Shadow, is located in Big Bear Valley, California. I hope it’s a peaceful moment for your evening, and we’ll see you back here tomorrow.
2025-06-04 01:01:56
Traditionally, if perhaps erroneously, our idea of a midlife crisis has long involved an older man leaving behind his home and family life for a red sports car, a too-young girlfriend, and perhaps some kind of hair dye, if not a hairpiece. This midlife crisis means trading away the parts of one’s life for something newer and younger. The only thing this archetypal man can’t trade in, of course, are the years he’s already lived.
In reality, that kind of implosion fantasy doesn’t resonate with many people. No one wants to be the guy who can’t see his own desperation, flailing against his own mortality. If a guy is indeed that guy, he wouldn’t allow himself to realize it. And it especially doesn’t ring true to millennials, now entering their 40s, the time when issues of having lived half your life traditionally start to arise. This is a generation that often can’t afford the home or family life to throw away, never mind the new sports car; one that grew up hyperconscious about mental health and the benefits of therapy, encouraged self-expression and open discussion about relationships, and found value in experiences.
Millennial lives don’t look like boomer or even Gen X lives, and neither do their midlife crises.
While in years past the midlife crisis might have been fueled by a dawning reaction to one’s own mortality, for new 40-somethings, it’s more like a progress report. For one thing, the stability that previous generations found stifling can be hard to find. Many are looking for an opportunity — a fitness journey, a new career, a personal awakening that might involve tattoos — instead of something necessitating an intervention.
What remains, however, is that creeping reality that we only have one life to live. It can’t help but feel a little like dying.
Fully understanding the midlife crisis means deconstructing the ideas about what it looks like. Which is to say: The rug-wearing, skirt-chasing, Lamborghini jerk we all know and fear was always largely a myth.
“The thing about those stereotypes is that they’re not actually very common. People don’t actually abandon their spouses and buy red sports cars because of a midlife crisis,” says Hollen Reischer, a professor at the University at Buffalo who studies how people find meaning in their life experiences.
Though Reischer assures me that there are no historic statistics that show a spike in red sports car purchases with a direct relationship to divorce rates, she explains that the urban legend is important for a different reason. Midlife crisis stereotypes like that guy or, as Reischer points out, the fear-mongering myth of the menopausal woman condemned to a life waving off hot flashes in front of her fridge allow us to project and obliquely explore our fears of getting older. Those include fears about how we’re perceived and what we might lose along with our youth: beauty, value, potential, health.
We know how we don’t want to age, but aren’t totally sure how we do.
To some degree, that’s the problem Sam, 42, is facing. In the last four years, Sam — who Vox is referring to by a pseudonym so she can speak frankly about her experience — has come out as bisexual, changed careers, and gotten a bunch of tattoos.
But the changes in her life weren’t always welcome. During the pandemic lockdowns, her marriage ended, and she was laid off from her job, prompting these larger shifts.
Sam describes changes in her life — a new relationship with a woman, a more secure job that doesn’t make her feel “like garbage” the way her previous career did, an apartment where she lives alone, five tattoos in the last six months — as positive, but she has some uneasiness. “It’s just really hard to find a feeling of being settled,” she explains. She’s coming to terms with not just her age, but the political climate she’s living in, her parents getting older, the lingering fear that she didn’t hit the milestones she had envisioned for herself, and an uncertain future.
“Maybe that’s where the crisis comes in. … Sometimes it makes me feel kind of — bummed isn’t the right word, but just wistful.”
“I think I’m happier because I’m not hiding parts of myself anymore and I’m acknowledging who I am fully,” Sam tells me. “But I also can’t say that the stability of marriage, kids, and all of that stuff, isn’t appealing still, and maybe that’s where the crisis comes in. … Sometimes it makes me feel kind of — bummed isn’t the right word, but just wistful, I guess.”
Even if millennials like Sam see opportunity in midlife, that doesn’t mean it comes without doubts or longing for security. Being able to admit that is part of Sam’s process, as is being optimistic about the future.
“In 10 years, I think I’ll probably feel more satisfied with where I am than where I was like when I turned 40,” she tells me, explaining that the support from her circle of friends — some of whom are queer, some of whom don’t have kids, and some who are on a similar life path — has made navigating part of her life easier.
“It’s an ongoing journey, and even though I feel like I look back at the past a lot, I also am trying to keep an open mind about what’s coming,” Sam adds.
As Sam indicates, there are some outside factors impacting the millennial midlife crisis, including the economy. Most of the cohort entered the workforce in, around, or following the financial collapse of 2008, only to be hit again by the Covid 2020 recession, and now join the ranks of the middle-aged in whatever kind of economy we’re facing in 2025. That might be why, according to a 2024 study from the Thriving Center of Psychology, 81 percent of millennials polled said they couldn’t “afford” to have a midlife crisis. It may also explain why so many millennials don’t feel like they hit adulthood milestones, which often involve large purchases if not total financial stability.
Financially secure or not, though, at a certain time in our lives, knees and lower backs do begin to ache. Parents get older. So do children, for those who have them. Responsibilities and expectations pile up, and aspirations get more urgent or complicated. Perhaps the idea of making millions of dollars at a dream job seems more like an impossibility than it did 10 years ago. All of these factors make the transition to midlife real, frighteningly so. And shifts in everything from the economy to our lifestyle to our life expectancy mean that the experience has changed.
Chip Conley, an entrepreneur, author, and the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, which focuses on reimagining midlife as a positive transition, explained to me that the notion of the midlife crisis was born mainly out of fears of mortality. But as time has passed and people live longer, the “crisis” doesn’t feel so terrifying or set in stone. Millennials, he says, have benefited from that outlook.
“Millennials have taken a ‘path less traveled’ mentality to their lives,” Conley tells me.
Compared to generations before them, millennials have had more options to shape how their lives will unfold. Whether it’s taking a gap year, going to grad school, waiting to get married, taking more time to have children, or not having children at all, millennials have been less locked in than previous generations when it comes to what their adult lives should look like.
“Boomers and maybe even Gen X-ers, there was this sense that you’re supposed to live your life based upon this set of rules — your parents’ set of rules.” Conley says. “I don’t think that there’s this feeling where millennials are waking up one day and saying, Whose life is this?”
That isn’t to say that millennials haven’t been dealt some unfortunate hands, particularly when it comes to wealth (millennials’ retirement prospects compared to older generations look not so great), or that millennials are immune to expectations or material envy. But if they do wake up with that realization, millennials might be more equipped to handle it in a healthy way than previous generations.
For some, it’s literally fitness.
James McMillian has seen his fair share of millennial midlife crises turn into fitness journeys. McMillian is the chief innovation officer at Tone House, where he and his fellow coaches offer training for HyRox, an extreme fitness race that’s seemingly inspired by gulags.
McMillian says that though HyRox — which features eight ultra-challenging lifting events coupled with eight kilometers of running — is open to a wide age range (he’s seen participants in their 70s), one of the most popular age ranges is 35 to 39.
“We can’t control our careers. We can’t control our relationships. But when you’re training or when you’re doing fitness, that is something — one of the rare things — you can control,” McMillian says. So much of millennial life has been dictated by circumstance, and wellness is one thing that’s in their own hands.
“This is their chance to become an athlete,” McMillian adds.
Kate Lahey, a six-time HyRox participant in her 30s, is one of those athletes, and she confirms that she gets a sense of growth and control from the workout. “I mean, it’s definitely or at least a little bit of death — I die every time I do it,” Lahey tells me. “I see my body change. I see myself getting healthier and these competitions — my growth year over year, making new friends year over year, my daily workouts — that’s my journey.”
For many millennials, a midlife crisis involves reevaluating their careers. Being tethered to your job is perhaps one of the more old-fashioned things about the supposedly open-minded generation. But as Elise Hu, the co-host of the self-care Forever35 podcast tells me, it makes sense because millennials have been told, over and over, to work hard.
“Culturally, there was this real sense that you were supposed to just work harder — just work your way out of it,” Hu says, referring to graduating into the Great Recession of 2008. At the time, just having a paying job meant you should consider yourself lucky, and just a few years later, many millennial women were told to “lean in” and climb the ladder. Whatever hardship life contained, putting your head down and working was going to be the best way to conquer it.
It’s only natural that, after all these years of working hard and not having much to show for it, the question would arise: Where did all the years of labor go? Was it worth it? Did any of it make us happy?
“Covid was a real reckoning, right?” Hu asks. “Because it was like, Oh, wait, I don’t have to be doing things and hustling all the time.”
Julie Bogen, 33, a former audience editor (and, full disclosure, a former Vox employee) and now a freelance writer, thought so. She tells me that the compounding factors of the pandemic, having a child, and working from home full-time all culminated in her experiencing burnout around the 2024 election. “I was fucking drowning,” Bogen says.
Her job, in particular, had become a complication. “There’s a lot in my life that’s really, really important to me, and it got really hard for me to make myself prioritize things like analyzing the Instagram algorithm,” Bogen says, noting that The 19th, the news organization she worked for, gave her the grace and support she needed while making the decision to step away.
She explains that while she felt equipped and empowered to quit her job, she is still working to organize her life around the things in life that make her happy, including her children, learning how to cook, barre, and getting bylines at more publications.
“It doesn’t feel like I blew up my life — it feels like I took a really big risk,” Bogen says, acknowledging that her family is “really lucky.” “I think the hard part is like, getting from A to B for me, where it was like, I made this choice, I feel good about this choice, and now I have to make some decisions about what’s next.”
Looking at midlife and older adulthood as an opportunity rather than a “crisis” is something that can benefit anyone, Reischer, the professor at Buffalo, says. In her work, she studies how humans understand their own life experiences and how that shapes their connection to their own identity. Seeing life as an open-ended tale and ongoing narrative can help make us satisfied, more realized, more mentally healthy people, especially later in adulthood — even if something feels unsure or uncertain in the moment. It’s all part of our bigger life story.
“If you’re not acknowledging where you are, it’s very hard to get to the next place.”
“It allows you to say, this is where I am now and I know this is where I want to go,” Reischer says. “If you’re not acknowledging where you are, it’s very hard to get to the next place.”
That “next place” is where Patrick Drislane, a 39-year-old teacher, already has in his sights. Drislane talked to me about how the millennial midlife crisis has felt uniquely disorienting. From financial setbacks, to social media, to being governed by boomers, it all feels like we’re in a “generational waiting room,” Drislane says.
Even though Drislane followed the formula his and so many other parents taught their kids — school, then college, then a job, and then saving money — it never felt as though those things led him to the same milestones his parents achieved. That might be the defining trait of the millennial midlife crisis: learning to accept that our lives don’t look like the ones our parents had.
During his crisis, Drislane has been planning and mapping out his future. In 10 years, he thinks he’ll have saved enough to retire from teaching and pursue a different career on his own terms. He doesn’t know what that’ll be — but it’s the prospect of it being his decision that excites him. Ideally, he’d like to own a home, preferably a small place in the Catskills.
“I know what it feels like to live 40 years, and that’s what I have left,” Drislane tells me. “How can I figure out who I am without giving up my integrity, without giving up my values. How can I make the most of that? That’s the sports car I want.”
2025-06-04 00:01:24
In the months since Kamala Harris’s defeat, Democrats have debated the party’s political and policy mistakes. This argument has centered in part on (Vox co-founder) Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s bestselling book, Abundance. Those political columnists argue that Democrats have failed to deliver material plenty: Blue states don’t provide their residents with adequate housing, and federal Democrats have struggled to build anything on time and budget. Klein and Thompson attribute these failures partly to flawed zoning restrictions and environmental review laws.
In making this case, they echoed the analysis of many other commentators, policy wonks, and activist groups, while also lending their ideology tendency a name: abundance liberalism.
Some on the left distrust this movement, seeing it as a scheme for reducing progressive influence over the Democratic Party — and workers’ power in the American economy. In this view, Democrats must choose between pursuing abundance reforms and “populist” ones. The party can either take on red tape or corporate greed.
A new poll from Demand Progress, a progressive nonprofit, suggests that the party should opt for the latter.
The survey presented voters with a hypothetical Democratic candidate who argues that America’s “big problem is ‘bottlenecks’ that make it harder to produce housing, expand energy production, or build new roads and bridges.” The candidate goes on to note, “Frequently these bottlenecks take the form of well-intended regulations meant to give people a voice or to protect the environment — but these regulations are exploited by organized interest groups and community groups to slow things down.”
It then presented an alternative Democrat who contends that “The big problem is that big corporations have way too much power over our economy and our government.”
By a 42.8 to 29.2 percent margin, voters preferred the populist Democrat.
This is unsurprising on a couple levels. First, advocacy organizations rarely release polls that show voters disagreeing with their views. Demand Progress’s mission is to “fight corporate power” and “break up monopolies.” It did not set out to disinterestedly gauge public opinion, but to advance a factional project. And this is reflected in the survey’s wording. The poll embeds the mention of a trade-off in its “abundance” message (signaling that the candidate would give people less “voice” and the environment, less protection) but not in its anti-corporate one. Had the survey’s hypothetical populist promised to fight “well-intentioned, pro-business policies meant to create jobs and spur innovation,” their message might have fared less well.
This said, I think it’s almost certainly true that populist rhetoric is more politically resonant than technocratic arguments about supply-side “bottlenecks.” According to the Democratic data firm Blue Rose Research, Harris’s best testing ad in 2024 included a pledge to “crack down” on “price gougers” and “landlords who are charging too much.”
But that doesn’t have much bearing on whether Democrats should embrace abundance reforms for two reasons. First, the political case for those reforms rests on their material benefits, not their rhetorical appeal. And second, Democrats don’t actually need to choose between pursuing abundance liberalism and populism — if by “populism,” one means a politics focused on redistributing wealth and power from the few to the many.
The Demand Progress poll aims to refute an argument that Abundance does not make. Klein and Thompson do not claim that politicians who promise to combat regulatory “bottlenecks” will outperform those who vow to fight “corporations.” And I have not seen any other advocate of zoning liberalization or permitting reform say anything like that.
Rather, the political case for those policies primarily concerns their real-world consequences, rather than their oratorical verve.
The starting point for that case is a diagnosis of the Democratic Party’s governance failures. Klein and Thompson spotlight several:
Klein and Thompson attribute these results partly to zoning restrictions and environmental review laws. The former prohibit the construction of apartments on roughly 70 percent of America’s residential land, while the latter empower well-heeled interests to obstruct infrastructure projects through lawsuits.
Abundance argues that this is a political problem for Democrats in at least three ways: First, the party’s conspicuous failure to contain the cost-of-living in New York and California undermines its reputation for economic governance nationally. Second, the public sector’s inability to build anything efficiently abets conservative narratives about the follies of big government. Third, and most concretely, Americans are responding to high housing costs in blue states by moving to red ones — a migration pattern that’s about to make it much harder for Democrats to win the Electoral College. After the 2030 census, electoral votes will be reapportioned based on population shifts. If current trends persist, California, Illinois, and New York will lose Electoral College votes while Florida and Texas gain them. As a result, a Democrat could win every blue state in 2032 — along with Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — and still lose the presidency.
Klein and Thompson therefore reason that enacting their proposed reforms will aid Democrats politically by improving the party’s reputation for economic management, boosting confidence in the public sector’s efficacy, and increasing blue states’ populations (and thus, their representation in Congress and the Electoral College).
Therefore, you can’t refute the political argument for “abundance” policies with a messaging poll. Rather, to do so, you need to show 1) that “abundance” reforms will not actually make housing, energy, and infrastructure more plentiful, or 2) that making those goods more plentiful won’t actually increase support for the Democratic Party, or 3) that people will keep moving away from blue states and toward red ones, even if the former start building more housing.
For the record, I think the substantive case for the abundance agenda is stronger than the political one. I’m confident that legalizing the construction of apartment buildings in inner-ring suburbs will increase the supply of housing. I’m less sure that doing so will win the Democratic Party votes. A lot of Americans are homeowners who don’t want tall buildings (and/or, lots of nonaffluent people) in their municipalities. But that isn’t the argument that Demand Progress is making.
The Demand Progress survey is premised on the notion that Democrats must choose between an “abundance” agenda and a “populist” one. But this is mostly false.
There is no inherent tension between vigorously enforcing antitrust laws and relaxing restrictions on multifamily housing construction. To the contrary, there’s arguably a philosophical link between those two endeavors: Both entail promoting greater competition, so as to erode the pricing power of property holders. (When zoning laws preempt the construction of apartment buildings, renters have fewer options to choose from. That reduces competition between landlords, and enables them to charge higher prices.)
More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism.
More broadly, abundance is compatible with increasing working people’s living standards and economic power. The more housing that a city builds, the more property taxes that it can collect — and thus, the more social welfare benefits it can provide to ordinary people. And this basic principle applies more generally: If you increase economic growth through regulatory reforms, then you’ll have more wealth to redistribute, whether through union contracts or the welfare state.
This isn’t to say that there are no tradeoffs between “abundance” reforms and economic progressivism, as some understand that ideology. For example, individual labor unions sometimes support restricting the supply of socially useful goods — such as housing or hotels — for self-interested reasons. Some populists might counsel reflexive deference to the demands of such unions. Abundance liberals generally would not. But policies that make a tiny segment of workers better off — at the expense of a much larger group of working people — are not pro-labor in the best sense of that term.
More fundamentally, abundance liberalism is in direct conflict with traditional environmentalism. The first aims to make it easier to build green infrastructure, even at the cost of making it harder to obstruct fossil fuel extraction. Many environmental organizations have the opposite priority. Yet fighting to limit America’s supply of oil and gas — even if this means making infrastructure more expensive and scarce — is not an especially populist cause, even if one deems it a worthy one.
Ultimately, abundance liberalism is less about how Democrats should message than about how they should govern. It’s useful to know whether a particular analysis of the party’s governance failures is politically appealing. But it’s more important to know whether that analysis is accurate. Democrats can rail against corporate malfeasance on the campaign trail, no matter what positions they take on zoning or permitting. If they operate from a false understanding of why blue states struggle to build adequate housing and infrastructure, however, they will fail working people.
Critics of abundance liberalism should therefore focus on its substance. To their credit, many progressive skeptics have done this. I think their arguments are unconvincing (and plan to address them in the future). But they at least clarify the terms of the intra-left debate over abundance. Demand Progress’s poll, by contrast, only obscures them.
Correction, June 2, 12 pm ET: A previous version of this story misstated what happened with California’s high-speed rail system. Voters approved billions for the rail.
2025-06-03 20:00:00
A small but curious sign of the deepening gender divide in our politically fraught times: Male beauty standards are getting really weird.
In the latest salvo, young boys on TikTok are shaving off their eyelashes, ostensibly because long eyelashes are girly. This new phenomenon joins a number of other perplexing masculine trends from the last few years, including doing tongue exercises known as “mewing” in order to achieve the squarest jaw possible, and “going to Turkey” for hair transplants. Somewhat relatedly, a Republican congressman bragged recently that he refuses to drink out of straws because that’s “what women do” (not quite a beauty standard as much as a sort of inscrutable new gender norm).
To be clear, we don’t know how many people are actually participating in these practices: enough for a few viral TikToks and mystified trend stories, not enough for an academic study. But it does seem that male beauty standards, infected by the ethos of the newly ascendant manosphere and incel-adjacent spaces, are evolving to focus far more on being masculine for its own sake than to attract and appeal to women. The point, it seems, is to impress other men, and a certain amount of ambient misogyny is part of the package deal.
There’s long been a divide between what men consider admirable on another man and what women consider attractive on men. That’s why actors who show off rippling muscles on men’s magazine covers emphasize a charming smile in women’s media. A 2005 study found that men consistently overestimate the degree of muscularity that is attractive to women, while women, in turn, overestimate the degree of thinness that is attractive to men.
Manosphere spaces, which blend self-help and fitness advice with uncompromising messaging about traditional masculinity, have made that divide starker than ever. Just look at the recent dustup on X (which has increasingly become a right-wing echo chamber since Elon Musk’s takeover in 2022), when a researcher invited men and women to vote in an anonymous poll about which photo of British pop star Olly Murs they found more appealing. In a “before” photo, Murs’s muscles are prominent but undefined; in the “after” photo, he is shredded, with visible abs.
Not only did men and women diverge on which photo they preferred (men far more often chose the “after” photo), but a certain subset of men insisted that women were mistaken, or outright untruthful, about their own preferences. “Women in this poll are lying. I know from experience how women feel about 6 packs,” went one characteristic response. Another poster tried to dissect what was really going on: “What I’m getting from these replies is that men confuse their own sexuality for that of women.”
An emphasis on hypermasculinity is perhaps the natural end result of the sensibilities of the manosphere circulating and gaining traction for over a decade. Misogynist influencers like Andrew Tate believe so stridently in the dominance and supremacy of men that they will go to extreme lengths to eschew anything they consider feminine.
An emphasis on hypermasculinity is perhaps the natural end result of the sensibilities of the manosphere circulating and gaining traction for over a decade.
Which leads of course to trends like eyelash-shearing. Long, thick, heavily mascara’ed and false eyelashes are particularly trendy for women right now. Anecdotally, a lot of straight women like long eyelashes on a man. Perhaps perversely, that makes it more attractive now than ever for men to get rid of them.
It’s notable that one of the projects of feminism over the last 20 years has been to help girls create relationships with their bodies that don’t depend on men: to dress for themselves or for other women, and to exercise their bodies to become strong and healthy, rather than to reach for men’s approval.
Some of the decoupling of male physical ideals from what straight women like borrows the same rhetoric and suggests the same sense of working toward healthy self-love. A recent Daily Beast article on body-building as a ramp to the alt-right quotes a 26-year-old body-builder as saying, “People who lift a lot know that having a really just huge physique, or being super lean, is not that attractive to the average woman. But they’re doing it more for their own body image’s sake…or to impress other men. Most people would not understand a really defined back, but if you lift around other men, they would absolutely notice that.”
But the attitude of “do it for you” among certain communities of men online is never very far off from the denigration of women. Two clicks away from self-love body building on an algorithmic feed are the “gymcels,” an off-shoot of incels who obsessively go to the gym. They, in turn, are a subset of Men Going Their Own Way, a group of male separatists one member described as holding the view, “It’s not you, it’s women that are the problem. You do whatever YOU want to do to better yourself. Disregard those wenches.’”
Ironically, the pursuit of nonsensical and often contradictory beauty standards have led young men to the same place that young women have long found themselves: with crippling body dysmorphia. A 2019 study found that 22 percent of males displayed traits of disordered eating behaviors geared toward an obsessive desire to build muscle. Another study showed that looking at social media content that glorifies muscle-building is heavily correlated with muscle dysmorphia among young men.
It’s a self-sabotaging act, targeted at a bodily attribute vital for eye health, because of its alleged girliness.
The shaving off the eyelashes comes with a similar aggressive strain of contempt toward women as the gymcel self-conception. It’s a self-sabotaging act, targeted at a bodily attribute vital for eye health, because of its alleged girliness. In opposition to the layers of mascara and false lashes that beauty influencers pile on, some young men simply shave their eyelashes down to stumps, rejecting everything about their appearance that could be described as girly — especially if girls like it.
It’s an example of how confusing the body standards are for young men right now, as they begin to find, like their female peers, that it is increasingly impossible for them to either see their bodies clearly or make their bodies live up to the standards in their heads — a troubled form of equality that no one wanted.
2025-06-03 18:30:00
Hurricane season in the Atlantic has officially begun.
And while this year will likely be less extreme than in 2024 — one of the most destructive seasons ever, with the earliest Category 5 hurricane on record — it’s still shaping up to be a doozy.
Forecasters at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) predict “above-average” activity this season, with six to 10 hurricanes. The season runs from June 1 to November 30.
60 percent: Chance of an above-normal hurricane season.
6 to 10: Hurricanes expected this season, meaning tropical storms with wind speeds reaching at least 74 mph.
3 to 5: Major hurricanes, or storms with wind speeds reaching 111 mph or higher.
13 to 19: Named storms, referring to tropical systems with wind speeds of at least 39 mph.
NOAA says it will update its forecast in early August.
At least three of those storms will be Category 3 or higher, the forecasters project, meaning they will have gusts reaching at least 111 miles per hour. Other reputable forecasts predict a similarly active 2025 season with around nine hurricanes. Last year, there were 11 Atlantic hurricanes, whereas the average for 1991 to 2020 was just over seven, according to hurricane researchers at Colorado State University.
A highly active hurricane season is obviously never a good thing, especially for people living in places like Florida, Louisiana, and, apparently, North Carolina (see: Hurricane Helene, the deadliest inland hurricane on record). Even when government agencies that forecast and respond to severe storms — namely, NOAA and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) — are fully staffed and funded, big hurricanes inflict billions of dollars of damage, and they cost lives.
Under the Trump administration, however, these agencies are not well staffed and face steep budget cuts. Hundreds of government employees across these agencies have been fired or left, including those involved in hurricane forecasting. What could go wrong?
The primary reason is that Caribbean waters are unusually warm right now, Brian McNoldy, a hurricane expert at the University of Miami, told Vox. Warm water provides fuel for hurricanes, and waters in and around the Caribbean tend to be where hurricanes form early in the season.
If this sounds familiar, that’s because the Caribbean has been unusually warm for a while now. That was a key reason why the 2024 and 2023 hurricane seasons were so active. Warm ocean water, and its ability to help form and then intensify hurricanes, is one of the clearest signals — and consequences — of climate change. Data indicates that climate change has made current temperatures in parts of the Caribbean and near Florida several (and in some cases 30 to 60) times more likely.
The Atlantic has cooled some since hitting extremely high temperatures over the last two summers, yet “the overall long-term trend is to warm,” said McNoldy, a senior research associate at the Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science.
The other key reason why forecasters expect an ample number of hurricanes this year has to do with a complicated climate phenomenon known as the ENSO cycle. ENSO has three phases — El Niño, La Niña, and neutral — that are determined by ocean temperatures and wind patterns. And each phase means something slightly different for hurricane season.
Put simply, El Niño tends to suppress hurricanes because it causes an increase in wind shear — the abrupt changes in wind speed and direction. And wind shear can disrupt hurricanes. In La Niña years, meanwhile, there’s little wind shear, allowing hurricanes to form, and they’re often accompanied by higher sea surface temperatures in the Atlantic.
Right now the ENSO phase is, rather unexcitedly, neutral. That means there won’t be the high, hurricane-blocking wind shear of El Niño, but the conditions won’t be as favorable as they are in La Niña. This all leads to more unpredictability, according to climate scientists.
When publishing the NOAA hurricane forecast last month, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick, who oversees NOAA, said “we have never been more prepared for hurricane season.”
Climate scientists have challenged that claim.
They point out that, under the Trump administration, hundreds of workers at NOAA have been fired or otherwise pushed out, which threatens the accuracy of weather forecasts that can help save lives. FEMA has also lost employees, denied requests for hurricane relief, and is reportedly ending door-to-door canvassing in disaster regions designed to help survivors access government aid.
“Secretary Lutnick’s claim is the sort of lie that endangers the lives of people living along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts, and even those further inland unable to escape the extensive reach of associated torrential rains and flooding,” Marc Alessi, an atmospheric scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an environmental advocacy group, told Vox. “Notwithstanding the valiant efforts of dedicated career staff, this administration has taken to actively thwarting the vital scientific work at agencies including NOAA that communities rely on to stay safe throughout hurricane season.”
According to Alessi, a handful of National Weather Service offices along the Gulf Coast — which is often hit by hurricanes — currently lack lead meteorologists.
“Missing this sort of expertise in the face of a projected above-average hurricane season could lead to a breakdown in proper warning and evacuation in vulnerable communities should a storm strike, potentially leading to more deaths that could have otherwise been avoided,” Alessi said.
As my colleague Umair Irfan has reported, the National Weather Service is also launching weather balloons less frequently, due to staffing cuts. Those balloons measure temperature, humidity, and windspeed, providing data that feeds into forecasts.
“They’ve been short-staffed for a long time, but the recent spate of people retiring or being let go have led some stations now to the point where they do not have enough folks to go out and launch those balloons,” Pamela Knox, an agricultural climatologist at the University of Georgia extension and director of the UGA weather network, told Irfan in May. “We’re becoming more blind because we are not having access to that data anymore. A bigger issue is when you have extreme events, because extreme events have a tendency to happen very quickly. You have to have real-time data.”
The White House is also trying to dramatically shrink NOAA’s funding, proposing a budget cut of roughly $2 billion. In response to the proposed cuts, five former directors of the National Weather Service signed an open letter that raises alarm about what funding and staffing losses mean for all Americans.
“Our worst nightmare is that weather forecast offices will be so understaffed that there will be needless loss of life,” the former directors wrote in the letter. “We know that’s a nightmare shared by those on the forecasting front lines — and by the people who depend on their efforts.”
2025-06-03 02:00:00
Women weren’t allowed to officially serve in direct ground combat jobs when Emelie Vanasse started her ROTC program at George Washington University. Instead, she used her biology degree to serve as a medical officer — but it still bothered Vanasse to be shut out of something just because she was a woman.
“I always felt like, who really has the audacity to tell me that I can’t be in combat arms? I’m resilient, I am tough, I can make decisions in stressful environments,” Vanasse said.
By 2015, the Obama administration opened all combat jobs to women, despite a plea from senior leaders in the Marine Corps to keep certain frontline units male only. Then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter told reporters that, “We cannot afford to cut ourselves off from half the country’s talents and skills.”
The policy change meant that women could become Army Rangers, the elite special operations infantry unit. The training school for the Rangers officially opened to women three months earlier. When Capt. Kristen Griest and 1st Lt. Shaye Haver became the first women to graduate from the school in 2015, Vanasse taped their photos to her desk and swore she would be next, no matter what it took. She went on to become one of the first women to serve as an Army infantry officer and graduated from Ranger School in 2017.
After the Pentagon integrated women into combat jobs, the services developed specific fitness standards for jobs like infantry and armor with equal standards for men and women. Special operations and other highly specialized units require additional qualification courses that are also gender-neutral. To continue past the first day of Ranger School, candidates must pass the Ranger Physical Fitness test, for which there is only one standard. Only the semiannual fitness tests that service members take, which vary by branch, are scaled for age and gender.
Despite that, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has continued to insist that the standards were lowered for combat roles. In a podcast interview in November, Hegseth said, “We’ve changed the standards in putting [women in combat], which means you’ve changed the capability of that unit.” (Despite Hegseth’s remark, many women worked alongside male infantry units in Iraq and Afghanistan, facing the same dangerous conditions.)
In the same interview, Hegseth said that he didn’t believe women should serve in combat roles.
In March, Hegseth ordered the military services to make the basic fitness standards for all combat jobs gender-neutral. The Army is the first service to comply: Beginning June 1, most combat specialties will require women to meet the male standard for basic physical fitness, something most women serving in active-duty combat roles are already able to do.
Vanasse told Noel King on Today, Explained what it was like to attend Ranger School at a time when some men didn’t want to see a woman in the ranks.
What is Ranger School?
I went to Ranger School on January 1, 2017. I woke up at 3 am that day in Fort Benning, Georgia, shaved my head — a quarter-inch all the way around — just like the men. Took my last hot shower, choked down some French toast, and then I drove to Camp Rogers, and I remember being very acutely aware of the pain that the school would inflict, both physically and mentally. I was also very aware that there was kind of half of this population of objective graders that just kind of hated my guts for even showing up.
They hated you for showing up because you’re a woman?
Back in 2016 and 2017, it was so new to have women in Ranger School. I used to think, I don’t have to just be good, I have to be lucky. I have to get a grader who is willing to let a woman pass.
I had dark times at that school. I tasted real failure. I sat under a poncho in torrential rain and I shivered so hard my whole body cramped. I put on a ruck that weighed 130 pounds and I crawled up a mountain on my hands and knees. I hallucinated a donut shop in the middle of the Appalachian Mountains and I cried one morning when someone told me I had to get out of my sleeping bag.
But I think all of those experiences are quintessential Ranger School experiences. They’re what everyone goes through there. And I think the point of the school is that failure, that suffering, it’s not inherently bad, right? In a way, I like to think Ranger School was the most simplistic form of gender integration that ever could have happened because if I was contributing to the team, there was no individual out there that really had the luxury of disliking or excluding me.
When you wanted to give up, what did you tell yourself? What was going through your head?
I don’t think I ever considered quitting Ranger School. I just knew that it was something that I could get through and had the confidence to continue. I had a thought going in of, What could be so bad that would make me quit? and the answer that I found throughout the school was, Nothing.
Did you ever feel like they had lowered the standards for you compared to the men who were alongside you?
No. Never. I did the same thing that the men did. I did the same Ranger Physical Fitness test that all the men took. I ran five miles in 40 minutes. I did 49 push-ups, 59 sit-ups, six pull-ups. I rucked 12 miles in three hours with a 45-pound ruck. I climbed the same mountains. I carried the same stuff. I carried the same exact packing list they did, plus 250 tampons for some reason. At no point were the standards lowered for me.
Whose idea was it for you to carry 250 tampons?
It was not mine! It was a misguided effort to have everyone very prepared for the first women coming through Ranger School.
In Ranger School, there’s only one standard for the fitness test. Everybody has to meet it, and that allows you to get out of Ranger School and say, “Look, fellas, I took the same test as the men and I passed.”
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is saying that Army combat jobs should only have one standard of fitness for both men and women. And there’s part of me that thinks: Doesn’t that allow the women who meet the standards to be like, look, We met the same standards as the men. Nothing suspicious here, guys.
I think gender-neutral standards for combat arms are very important. It should not be discounted how important physical fitness is for combat arms. I think there’s nuance in determining what is a standard that is useful for combat arms, right? But it’s an important thing. And there have been gender-neutral standards for combat arms.
In things like Infantry Basic Officer Leader Course, which is the initial basic training for officers going into the infantry, there are gender-neutral standards that you have to meet: You have to run five miles in 40 minutes, you have to do a 12-mile ruck. All of those standards have remained the same. Pete Hegseth is specifically referring to the Army Combat Physical Fitness test, and to a certain extent I agree, it should be gender-neutral for combat arms. But I think there’s nuance in determining what exactly combat arms entails physically.
Secretary Hegseth has a lot to say about women, and sometimes he says it directly and sometimes he alludes to it. What he often does is he talks about lethality as something that is critically important for the military. He says the Army in particular needs more of it, but he never really defines what he means by lethality. What is the definition as you understand it?
There’s a component of lethality that is physical fitness and it should not be discounted. But lethality extends far beyond that, right? It’s tactical skills, it’s decision-making, it’s leadership, it’s grit, it’s the ability to build trust and instill purpose and a group of people. It’s how quick a fire team in my platoon can react to contact. How well my SAW [Squad Automatic Weapon] gunner can shoot, how quickly I can employ and integrate combat assets, how fast I can maneuver a squad. All of those things take physical fitness, but they certainly take more than just physical fitness. There’s more to lethality than just how fast you can run and how many pushups you can do.
To an average civilian like myself, I hear lethality and I think of the dictionary definition, the ability to kill. Does this definition of lethality involve the ability, physically and emotionally and psychologically, to kill another person?
Absolutely.
And so when Secretary Hegseth casts doubt on the ability of women to be as lethal as men, do you think there’s some stuff baked in there that maybe gets to his idea of what women are willing and able to do?
Yes, possibly. I think the [secretary’s] message is pretty clear. According to him, the women in combat arms achieved success because the standards were lowered for them. We were never accommodated and the standards were never lowered.
What’s your response, then, to hearing the secretary of defense say women don’t belong in combat?
It makes me irate, to be honest. Like, it’s just a complete discounting of all of the accomplishments of the women that came before us.
Do you think that if Secretary Hegseth could take a look at what you did in Ranger School, and he could hear from you that there were no second chances, there were no excuses, there was no babying, the men didn’t treat you nicer just because you were a woman, do you think he’d change his mind about women serving in combat?
I’d like to think he would, but I’ve met plenty of people whose minds couldn’t be changed by reality. I’d love it if he went to Ranger School. He has a lot of opinions about Ranger School for someone who does not have his Ranger tab.
What is a Ranger tab, for civilians?
A Ranger tab is what you receive upon graduating Ranger School, which means you have passed all three phases and you are now Ranger-qualified in the military.
You have that. And the secretary of defense doesn’t.
He does not, though he has a lot of opinions about Ranger School.
Clarification, June 2, 2 pm ET: This story was updated to include more details about the Ranger School policy change.