“Elon Musk, Ryan Seacrest, and Chris Anderson of TED, consider yourself challenged,” Bill Gates bellowed from his garden. Beaming, he tugged on a candy cane-colored rope that dumped a barrel of icy cold water over his head. “You have 24 hours. Good luck.”

It was the scorching hot summer of 2014, and the ice bucket challenge — a viral social media trend to raise money for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) research that involved soaking yourself with ice water and pressuring others to do the same — was in full swing. Gates had been challenged by Mark Zuckerberg, who’d been challenged by then-New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, with whom Zuckerberg had appeared on Oprah a few years prior to announce a $100 million donation to Newark schools. 

By the time Musk tweeted out a video of his kids drenching him with their own makeshift ice bucket gizmo a day after Gates, the challenge had already reached tens of millions of people worldwide. Among the participants were Jeff Bezos, Justin Bieber, David Lynch — and Donald Trump.

As if under an icy spell, the world came together in a way it never would again. Today, the ice bucket challenge and the litany of surreal, grainy videos it spawned are a time capsule of a bygone era, or at the very least, a bygone internet. 

In the early 2010s, platforms like Facebook “actually had the potential to be this century’s agora, a marketplace of ideas,” said Asha Curran, who co-founded GivingTuesday, a philanthropic counterweight to Black Friday, in 2012. “The social media environment wasn’t this sort of existential threat to our mental health and our democracy and our isolation that it is now.”

But it wasn’t just a different era for social media. Back then, generosity was trendy for the one percent and 99 percent alike, and Bill Gates — alongside both his then-wife Melinda French Gates and Warren Buffett — was influencer number one. In 2010, the Gateses and Buffett launched the Giving Pledge, a campaign to convince the ultra-wealthy to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. At the campaign’s peak, about one in seven American billionaires — including Musk, Zuckerberg, and a broad swath of the country’s rising tech billionaire class — pledged to donate at least half of their fortunes to charity. Together, they promised to usher in a new golden age of philanthropy.

They also aimed to inspire giving from Americans of more modest means, who flocked to viral clicktivism campaigns while sporting TOMS shoes and (PRODUCT)RED iPod nanos. The idea was seductive: You too could help save the world while making a show of your generosity. 

Today’s billionaires appear more cynical than they used to be, and the rest of us seem to be, too. Gone are the days when tech overlords challenged one another to charity stunts rather than cage matches. If social media once seemed poised to save the world one hashtag at a time — think #Movember, #Kony2012, and #BringBackOurGirls — then today, it feels considerably more likely to tear us all apart. 

For much of the past decade, fewer Americans have chosen to give to charity each year, while most billionaires appear to be giving away a diminishing share of their ballooning fortunes. The Giving Pledge, which held so much promise in 2010, has lost much of its steam and even come under direct attack from techno-cynics like Peter Thiel. The vibes have turned very bad.

It’s no wonder today’s youths yearn for the hopecore, the millennial optimism, of the early 2010s, that mediascape of messy buns, post-recession electropop, and sincere posting about causes everyone cared about for a week or two. The internet’s Earnest Era propelled a culture of giving even among billionaires, who shared a fear of missing out on the next hashtag cause. But today’s more fractured internet has kneecapped that positivity. To some degree, it made even the idea of trying to save the world cringe. The problem is not so much a giving crisis, as it is an attention crisis, one that’s been exacerbated by rising inequality and the decline of generosity as a collective cultural value, the kind of virtue worth signaling. 

“For a while, you almost needed to pick a charity as part of your online persona,” said Scott Harrison, a nightclub promoter turned founder of Charity: Water, a celebrity darling back when “it was really cool” to give in the early 2010s. He has struggled to fundraise in recent years. “It’s not on trend. It’s not what people are doing. It phased out. The cycle ended.”

I wanna be a billionaire so freaking bad

2010 was a transformative year for generosity for two important reasons: The economy had passed through the very worst of the Great Recession, and for the very first time, more Americans were about to be on social media than off of it. 

Surveys of young people in the early 2010s showed that they were stubbornly, discordantly optimistic despite graduating into underemployment.

One of those millennials was Mark Zuckerberg, who in 2010 was named Time’s person of the year at 26 years old for building a platform “fundamentally changing the way the Internet works and, more importantly, the way it feels.”

Social media made the world feel smaller. When a devastating 7.0 magnitude earthquake struck Haiti in January of that year, it became the first major live-tweeted natural disaster. Lindsay Lohan, Lady Gaga, and Haitian rapper Wyclef Jean were among those soliciting their followers for donations in the aftermath of the quake. Within a week, Jean’s own charity raised $2 million and the Red Cross raised $8 million. Celebrities released a “We Are the World” charity cover, and Americans ultimately gave about 15.3 percent more to international aid that year than they did the year prior. 

People who donated told their friends about it — publicly, online — and they told their friends about it in turn, in a charitable daisy chain that thrived under newly digitized social pressures. If you told the internet about your good deed, you’d look cool. If you were the only one of your friends who didn’t, well, you’d look like a bit of a jerk, in a much more visible way than in the past. 

Then, on June 16, 2010, news broke of Bill Gates, Melinda French Gates, and Warren Buffett’s plan to ask the nation’s billionaires to commit to giving away half of their fortunes. One week later, the Travie McCoy and Bruno Mars song “Billionaire” peaked at No. 4 on the Billboard Hot 100. It was an ode to getting rich not just to get rich, but to give it all away: “Not a single tummy around me would know what hungry was, eatin’ good, sleepin’ soundly.” 

By 2014, the Giving Pledge had 130 signatories, amounting to one in seven of the country’s billionaires, the majority of whom shared their motivations for joining in public letters online.

“People signed it because it was the cool thing to do,” said Aaron Dorfman, CEO of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, a watchdog that advocates for progressive practices in the philanthropic sector.

The Giving Pledge was perhaps the single biggest manifestation of philanthro-capitalism, or the idea that “rich people can save the world” by applying their business acumen to charitable causes, was “all the rage” at the time, he said. While the pledge was not legally binding — and came with few expectations — most signatories “honestly believed they were going to live up to the terms.”

While the rest of the world heaped praise on the Pledgers, Dorfman wrote a series of articles in the Huffington Post critiquing the Giving Pledge when it was first announced. “I remember thinking this is insane. Everybody thinks this is going to be the best thing since sliced bread and it’s just not,” he told me recently. At the time, he believed that the way billionaires gave was too slow and self-serving to actually make a dent in serious global problems. “There’s no way it can possibly make that much of a difference.”

How to #SaveTheWorld, one hashtag at a time

Zuckerberg wasn’t the only millennial to believe he could save the world. 

Facebook, and other platforms like it, helped inspire a boom in viral kindness and giving campaigns in the early 2010s. While celebrities often acted as superspreaders — some, like Justin Bieber, signed a “Hollywood Pledge” modeled after the Giving Pledge in 2011— social media was not the influencer-dominated, algorithmized cesspool it is today.

When Curran helped launch GivingTuesday in 2012, “it immediately crossed what today we would think of as algorithmic bubbles,” she said. The White House blogged about it, and #GivingTuesday quickly became a top trending topic on Twitter. That first year, the hashtag raised at least $10 million for charity in 24 hours, a 53 percent spike from the year prior. 

“We were catching a wave,” Curran said. “The collective nature of social media and the collective nature of generosity were forming this perfect explosion.”

That same year, over 1 million men grew mustaches — and raised over $100 million — for Movember’s annual men’s health awareness campaign, driven in part by a PSA starring the mustachioed actor Nick Offerman. The charity Invisible Children went viral for its 30-minute YouTube video about the Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony, kindling the #Kony2012 craze, a campaign now chiefly remembered for being offensive and ineffective. 

Few charities mastered social media quite as successfully as Charity: Water, which gained a huge following in part by flying tech entrepreneurs to Ethiopia and convincing celebrities to share their birthday fundraisers. Jada Pinkett Smith and Will Smith kicked off the trend in 2010, and a year later Justin Bieber asked his Beliebers to donate $17 each for his 17th birthday. By 2013, Charity: Water had raised over $100 million from thousands of people online, enough to build over 8,000 wells and other clean water projects. 

“The beauty was the average birthday fundraiser brought in 10 of their friends and family,” Harrison said. “It almost had an implied virality, and it cost us nothing.” 

By the time a majority of Americans had smartphones in 2013, the internet was being flooded with selfies and short video trends. (Rest in six seconds of peace, Vine.) The Norwegian Army danced to the Harlem Shake in the snow. And golfers were drenching themselves with cold water as a way to bring attention to their favorite charities online. 

In July 2014, one of those golfers, a man named Chris Kennedy, poured a bucket of ice water on his head for the ALS Association, and then challenged his cousin, whose husband had the disease. She accepted, and the videos began pulsating through her social networks until they reached Pat Quinn and Pete Frates, both young ALS advocates.

From there, “it just continued to snowball,” said Brian Frederick, who the ALS Association brought on to help manage the trend. Over 17 million people participated that summer. “There was a period in August where for eight straight days, we were raising over $10 million a day.” The association had to reserve an entire office in its headquarters just to store all of the checks that people were sending in. 

The association raised about $115 million in just eight weeks, money that helped fund 130 research projects in 12 different countries. But while social media moves at light speed, medical research is a bit slower. Only in recent years have ALS patients begun to see breakthroughs in treatment from that enormous infusion of funding for a rare disease that most Americans had never heard of before 2014. By the time their donations started to pay off, most of them had likely forgotten whatever they’d once known about the disease.

“It dramatically accelerated the fight against ALS. It led to new genes being discovered, new research collaborations, new treatments in the pipeline,” said Frederick, but for most people who soaked themselves with icy water that summer, “that was just a one-time thing for them. They’ll never know that they really did make a difference.”

When generosity became cringe

The ice bucket challenge was the last real do-gooder social media trend of its kind. 

A week after it started coursing through the internet, a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, shot and killed 18-year-old Michael Brown, drawing an outpouring of grief and outrage on social media. Both the #IceBucketChallenge and #IfTheyGunnedMeDown, the hashtag most associated with the protests that followed Brown’s killing, proliferated explosively and “almost simultaneously” across the internet, the writer Jia Tolentino noted at the time, yet they spread “entirely discreetly: twinned channels of wildfire blazing through quadrants of your attention that barely touch.”

Cracks were beginning to show in an internet that would soon become irrevocably siloed, one where digital attention, which felt so boundless and empowering earlier that decade, would come to feel like a precious commodity, monetized and increasingly stretched thin. With the Ferguson protests, that shift coincided with a massive political awakening and major domestic unrest and anger. To some corners of the internet, the performance of mass apolitical acts of generosity began to feel like an irreconcilable distraction in a competition for finite attention. 

As a result, the viral monoculture of the early 2010s fractured, giving way to an internet driven less by personal connections and more by hyper-targeted algorithms designed to keep you scrolling. “I don’t think people feel empowered by these tools anymore,” Ethan Zuckerman, a digital media scholar and professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, told me. “They feel trapped by them. They feel like they want to escape these tools.” 

The vibe shifted, and the internet’s new feeds rarely rewarded the kind of mass earnestness that drove engagement on early social media platforms.

“I wish that I had known that it was the last time so that I could have marked it in my mind,” Curran said. “I’m not sure that a Giving Tuesday could work if it were launched today.” 

That’s not to say that people aren’t generous anymore. But they are significantly less likely to give to charity than they used to: Fewer than half of American households donate at all these days, down from 66 percent in 2000. Those who do give give an average of 1.2 percent of their income, down from nearly 2 percent in 2017. 

America’s richest families have given more to charity in total dollars over the past decade — enough, in fact, to make up for the decline in everyday donors and then some. But as a percentage of their ballooning wealth, most billionaires — including those who signed the Giving Pledge — appear to be giving less to charity than they used to. 

Rising inequality — and the belief that the wealthier should donate instead — explains part of this decline for everyday Americans, among other factors. But it also reflects a broader pattern in which Americans have largely moved away from performing their giving, or earnestness more broadly, at least online. It’s just not swaggy anymore; it doesn’t give you the insane aura that it used to. 

“It’s not in my feed. You’re not getting hit up for charities from your friends the same way you were,” Harrison said. “I can’t tell you the last celebrity that was in my feed asking me to give to their favorite charity, it’s been years. They are selling lipstick. They are selling protein powders. These platforms were really used as a force for good, and now are used as a force to sell more stuff.”

GivingTuesday is actually a much bigger movement today than it was in 2012, raising about $4 billion last year, but it’s no longer primarily a social media phenomenon. “Neighbor-to-neighbor generosity is more important than ever because that’s the way you escape the algorithmic bubble,” Curran said. “You almost have to get offline entirely.” Americans who do give online increasingly do so through ever more individualized channels like GoFundMe, which got its start in 2010, but has exploded in popularity in recent years. More than three-quarters of Americans say they believe that political polarization has made people more reluctant to give, and 60 percent said they’ve personally shied away from charitable activities that may involve people with opposing political views. In the absence of a shared civic culture, deeply siloed — and often distrusted — platforms like GoFundMe have become many Americans’ chosen way to give.

And where have the billionaires been? For the most part, accumulating wealth far faster than they gave it away. Zuckerberg, who once critiqued philanthropists for waiting until old age to fork up their fortunes, has seen his wealth increase by over 4,000 percent since signing the Giving Pledge, according to a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. That $100 million for Newark schools that he announced on Oprah to such fanfare in 2010? It’s now widely regarded as a colossal failure built on a foundation of philanthro-capitalist buzzwords instead of actual community needs. A few weeks after attending Donald Trump’s inauguration and appearing on Joe Rogan’s podcast, Zuckerberg’s philanthropic initiative announced that it would stop funding causes like education reform and social justice last year. While Zuckerberg gives much more in total charity today than he did 15 years ago, he gives far less as a percentage of his wealth. Zuckerberg pledged $100 million to Newark in 2010, equivalent to about 1.4 percent of his net worth at the time. Last year, he and his wife donated $608 million, but it amounted to just 0.3 percent of his now gargantuan fortune.

In recent years, a cadre of right-wing billionaires led by venture capitalist Peter Thiel has also begun to actively denigrate the Pledge for what they see as a left-wing bias, despite the fact that it has always been intentionally apolitical. “I’ve strongly discouraged people from signing it, and then I have gently encouraged them to unsign it,” Thiel, who accused the Pledge of being an “Epstein-adjacent, fake Boomer club,” told the New York Times. “I don’t know if the branding is outright negative, but it feels way less important for people to join,” he said, claiming that some Pledgers feel “blackmailed” to stay on the list once they sign.

As the rest of America has stratified and become more partisan, so too have the nation’s billionaires. And apolitical promises, like sheer generosity itself, just don’t hold the same allure that they used to. 

“Peter Thiel used to be an outlier, but now many tech billionaires are coming together around this radical anti-social” worldview, said Chuck Collins, program director at the Institute for Policy Studies and author of Burned by Billionaires. “They’re opting out of the social institutions that the rest of us depend on.”

You say performative like it’s a bad thing

Craig Newmark is not like those other tech billionaires. The founder of Craigslist is not and has never been a billionaire at all, he says, despite what Forbes might have to say about it. 

“I am a peasant at heart,” he told me, a few days after publishing an op-ed in the New York Times defending the Pledge against its partisan detractors. “My favorite luxury at my age is a walk-in shower with grab bars.” 

Newmark is a new recruit, having only signed the Giving Pledge himself last December. He was already a prolific philanthropist, having donated hundreds of millions of dollars to military families, cybersecurity, pigeon rescue, and my alma mater. So why add his name now? 

“It seemed to me that signing up for it would be funny,” he said, referring to the “absurd” idea that a “nerd patient zero” like himself could rub shoulders in an elite philanthropy club. “Funny is highly motivating for me. I know I’m not as funny as I think I am, but given the toxicity of our culture these days, anything funny is highly welcome.”

When I pressed him, Newmark conceded that signing the Pledge was also his way of “putting a stake in the ground.” Seeing other billionaires pull away from giving now is “disappointing,” he said, “because the world needs people who have too much money to pitch in” to help improve people’s lives at a time of vast inequality. “There are Americans who are going hungry,” he said, and “that kind of pisses me off.”

But primarily, he insists, he’s just trying to be funny. “We all need positive entertainment these days.”

And maybe that’s the point, because the Giving Pledge, like the ice bucket challenge and #Movember, was built on performance. Newmark is now engaging in that performance with the kind of wry, ironic humor befitting of today’s internet culture, rather than the gravitas and sincerity of the Pledge’s early years. But it was always, to some extent, a performative spectacle. While some signatories have turned out to be extraordinarily generous — MacKenzie Scott and Laura and John Arnold come to mind — there’s little evidence that the Pledge has accelerated their giving or made the ultra-wealthy more charitable as a cohort. 

Having skimmed through dozens of early Pledger letters, I’ve found that many claimed to have already been well on their way to giving it all away prior to making a public commitment. “Until now, I have done this giving quietly,” wrote Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison in 2010. “So why am I going public now? Warren Buffett personally asked me to,” he wrote, for the purpose of “‘setting an example’ and ‘influencing others’ to give. I hope he’s right.”

The Pledge’s original 2010 signatories — including Gates and Zuckerberg —  have donated about $206 billion as of last year, according to the Institute for Policy Studies, most of which went into their private foundations and DAFs, which slowly dole out grants to charity. The Arnolds are the only living original signatories to have given away enough to fulfil their Pledge, and of the 22 Pledgers who have died since 2010, only eight fulfilled their promise to give away at least half of their wealth during their respective lifetimes or in their wills. At the rate that Musk and Ellison are going — they’ve given away 0.06 percent and 0.03 percent of their wealth, respectively, according to Forbes — it seems unlikely that today’s living Pledgers will fare much better. And they’re in good company. Four in five of the wealthiest 400 Americans have given away less than 5 percent of their fortunes as of last year, most under 1 percent.  

Likewise, only about one-fifth of those who participated in the ice bucket challenge actually donated to the fight against ALS. The one in five who did donate gave about $220 million to ALS worldwide, and $115 million to the ALS Association, which raised about $2.8 million in the same period the year prior. While there was a genuine desire to help people through the trend, at the same time, Frederick said, the majority of people were “just doing what their friends were doing.” 

They were virtue signaling, but that’s not such a bad thing — philanthropy, after all, can do good no matter the intention behind the giving. An internet where people feel the need to do charity stunts for clout en masse is still better than one that rewards you for trying to hammer yourself a better jawline. On the rare occasion that earnestness does go viral today, as it did during the Artemis II launch or after Alysa Liu’s ebullient free skate routine, “it just makes me long for a time when communal awe was more prevalent than it is now,” said Curran. But while today’s social media tends to reinforce the idea that Americans “hopelessly hate each other,” she said, “if you get down to the community level, you actually see all these really beautiful things happening.”

Last year, a group of undergraduates at the University of South Carolina decided to revive the ice bucket challenge as a fundraiser for youth mental health. They hoped to raise $100, maybe $200, Alison Malmon, founder and executive director of the charity Active Minds, told me. 

Most of the students were barely out of preschool when the first ice bucket challenge went viral. But suddenly, college kids, beauty influencers, and celebrities were once again racking up views by drenching themselves in frigid water online. The revived ice bucket challenge raised over $500,000 for Active Minds. It never came close to its predecessor’s stratospheric levels of popularity — things just don’t go viral like they used to anymore — but it did, for a moment, revive a sense of earnest do-gooderism that, for over a decade, felt increasingly relegated to the internet’s far fringes. 

The phrase millennial optimism was born a few months later, driven by nostalgia for a bygone and vaguely naive internet culture that most young adults today are old enough to remember, but young enough to romanticize. So far, there’s no indication that Gen Z’s rediscovery of indie sleaze portends a sustained, serious resurgence of viral earnestness culture, from billionaires or from the rest of us. But as MGMT would put it, maybe now it really is time to pretend.

You’ve probably never heard of the term “RCP 8.5” — the highest-emission scenario used by climate scientists to project the planet’s future. But if you’ve read about climate change, you’ve seen the numbers and nightmarish outcomes it produced: 4°C of warming by 2100, sometimes 5°C, sea level rising multiple feet, parts of the planet too hot for humans.

Those numbers shaped a decade and a half of climate journalism, including a lot of my own when I covered climate change at Time magazine. I didn’t always know — and didn’t always communicate — that the scenario behind the most apocalyptic, attention-getting findings was largely an attempt to imagine how bad things could get, not a true forecast. But I wasn’t alone. RCP 8.5 was a frequent background presence in climate journalism.

Last month, though, the scientists who built that scenario formally retired it. In a paper published in Geoscientific Model Development, Detlef van Vuuren and more than 40 co-authors eliminated RCP 8.5 from the scenarios that will feed into the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Seventh Assessment Report, which is due in 2029. Based on falling clean-energy costs, climate policy, and recent emissions trends, the highest-emissions pathway had become, in their words, “implausible.”

I can understand if your eyes began glazing over as soon as you read “seventh assessment report,” but this shift represents real progress and hope. It means that the apocalyptic climate change future that we’ve been describing for 15 years is officially no longer on the table. Instead, a merely bad climate future — about 2.8°C by 2100 — is now the central scientific estimate. Given how hopeless our climate future has appeared at times, that really does qualify as good news.  

Counting to 8.5

Climate models can’t tell you the future on their own, because how much the planet will warm depends in large part on what humans do. So scientists build scenarios: structured guesses about how the next century might unfold under different assumptions about energy use, growth, and climate policy.

Four such scenarios were introduced in 2011 as the standard set for the IPCC, the international body of scientists that periodically takes stock of global climate research and translates it into reports for governments worldwide. Three of the four were called “mitigation” pathways — futures where the world worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. One, the infamous and now obsolete RCP 8.5, was the “no-policy” baseline, a future with continued fossil fuel expansion, coal use roughly five times higher by 2100, and a global population pushing 12 billion. Think of it like Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Future, a vision of just how bad things could get if we did nothing to change our ways. 

And just like any dystopia, RCP 8.5 guaranteed attention. Between 2011 and 2020, more than 2,000 climate impact studies used RCP 8.5 as their default future. Almost every dramatic projection of crop failure, mass displacement, killing heat, and coastline retreat that any general reader ever encountered in climate change coverage depended on it.

All of those projections were plausible enough under the numbers set by RCP 8.5, but by the mid-2010s, researchers, journalists, and even official government reports were routinely calling the scenario “business as usual,” a phrase that transformed a stress test into something that sounded like a forecast. It wasn’t, and it was never meant to be. Somewhere along the way, though, that distinction got lost.

How the worst case got walked back

The world that RCP 8.5 assumed will never arrive. Global coal use isn’t on a path to quintuple; consumption has largely plateaued after decades of growth. Instead of the global population ballooning to 12 billion people, the UN’s current median forecast projects about 10.2 billion by 2100, with other reputable forecasts putting the number even lower. (All things being equal, fewer people means less emissions.)  

At the same time, the clean energy transition moved faster than almost anyone in 2011 anticipated. The cost of solar power has fallen by about 85 percent since the RCPs were published, and annual global investment in the energy transition is now over $2 trillion. Actual global emissions have tracked far more closely to what you’d expect from a world trying to reduce them than from one doing nothing at all. By 2026, Climate Action Tracker estimated that current policies put the world on course for about 2.6 degrees of warming by 2100 — still serious, but a long way from 4 or 5.

Was RCP 8.5 ever realistic? One camp of experts, led by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather and energy modeler Glen Peters, argues that RCP 8.5 was plausible in 2011, but was taken off the table by genuine policy and technology progress. The other camp, led by Roger Pielke Jr., argues that the rate of global decarbonization has been roughly linear for decades. That would mean we didn’t actively avoid RCP 8.5; it was just never realistic to begin with. Both camps agree on what counts, though: RCP 8.5 should be gone, and the planet is still on track to warm between 2.5° and 3° by 2100. 

RCP 8.5 was as much a climate journalism story as it was a climate science one. In 2017, the writer David Wallace-Wells published “The Uninhabitable Earth” in New York magazine. It was probably the most widely read piece of climate journalism of the last decade, and it was built almost entirely on RCP 8.5 projections. 

Wallace-Wells revised his view in 2022, though there has been relatively little coverage of this year’s retirement of RCP 8.5. And researchers need to catch up: Pielke Jr. estimated that as late as early 2026, 30 new RCP 8.5 studies were coming out each day on average, generating more grist for the climate ultra-doom narrative. We’ll see whether last month’s announcement finally puts it to rest.

The future is in our hands 

But even if we’ve averted doom, there is a lot of work to do to secure a safer future.

The new “medium” climate pathway — the one that reflects current policies — estimates 2.8°C of warming on average by 2100, with the likely range running from 2.1°C to 3.7°C. That would still mean drastic declines in coral reefs and accelerated species extinction, worsening water scarcity, and further sea level rise. And while we’ve taken the worst of the worst-case scenarios off the table, we’ve run out of time to keep warming below 1.5°C, and 2°C — the upper limit that the 2015 Paris Accords sought to prevent. 

And as with anything to do with climate change, this scientific shift was quickly politicized. The day before Hausfather and his co-authors published their analysis of RCP 8.5’s retirement, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social: “GOOD RIDDANCE!”, and described the change as proof that climate science was “WRONG! WRONG! WRONG!.” Not surprisingly, Trump is the one who is wrong here, as Carbon Brief explained in detail, but his mistake shows how easy it is to take the wrong lesson from the end of RCP 8.5. We shouldn’t fall for it.

The entire point of climate scenarios like RCP 8.5 was that there was no one certain future for climate change — only multiple possible futures. Whether or not RCP 8.5 was ever possible, the enormous advances in clean energy over the past 15 years are what made its retirement certain. Now we have new futures before us, waiting for what we do next.  

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

There are many ways to bomb a college commencement speech. 

You can tell everyone you composed the talk while high on ayahuasca, like Chris Pan at Ohio State. You can deliver the entirety of your speech in the voices of your incredibly annoying cartoon characters, like Tom Kenny and Bill Fagerbakke at the University of Vermont. You can even, like my graduation speaker in 2001, admonish the graduating class for depending too much on their parents and generally being an ungrateful lot, before later being convicted of multiple counts of sexual assault and undergoing a dramatic fall from grace. (Yes, that was none other than Bill Cosby, whose convictions were later overturned.) 

But the surest way to turn your graduate audience hostile in 2026 is to refer positively to AI, as speakers ranging from former Google CEO Eric Schmidt at the University of Arizona to real estate executive Gloria Caulfield at the University of Central Florida to record label honcho Scott Borchetta at Middle Tennessee State University discovered. And that’s because AI has — not unreasonably — become the symbol of growing fears that a college degree is no longer as valuable as it once was, and that today’s college grads are uniquely screwed. (The only speaker I could find whose comments on AI were well received was The Daily Show’s Ronny Chieng at Harvard, probably because they included the line: “fuck AI, fuck AI, fuck AI.”)

In a late-2025 NBC News poll, 63 percent of voters said a college degree isn’t worth it, against just 33 percent who said it was. A Gallup poll found that the share of Americans who say college is “very important” had fallen to 35 percent in 2025, a huge drop from 75 percent in 2010. And that pessimism has real grounding. Recent graduates ages 22 to 27 had an unemployment rate of about 5.7 percent in early 2026, above the national average of 4.3 percent. Hiring has slowed to the lowest rate outside the pandemic since 2014, while entry-level postings have fallen roughly 35 percent over the past 18 months. 

So there’s no doubt that 2026 will be a rough launch for new college grads. But a rough launch doesn’t mean a rough life, and while the longer-term impact of AI is unknowable, it’s far from the worst time even in recent memory to graduate into the workforce. The data still says, for most graduates, a college degree is more than worth the investment.

The vibes out there for college grads are not good. But when the bad vibes are outpacing the actual reality, that qualifies as qualified good news. 

One of the best investments you can make

Let’s start with the number the college panic ignores. In 2025, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York asked the question “Is college still worth it?” and came back with a very specific answer: Yes — to the tune of 12.5 percent. 

That was the median return on investment in a college degree, after accounting for the cost of tuition and the amount lost by not spending those years working. College graduates in recent years have earned a median of around $80,000 a year, compared to around $47,000 a year for high school graduates. Government data in 2024 put median weekly earnings for workers with a bachelor’s degree at $1,543, compared with $930 for workers with only a high school diploma — about 66 percent more. And while it’s true that the growth of this premium has largely flattened over the past two decades, after roughly doubling between 1980 and 2000, it hasn’t disappeared. Graduating from college, even in 2026, still puts you on a better path than skipping it.

It’s telling that when you shift from the abstract idea of college to the value of individual degrees, the vibes change. Asked about their own degree, according to a 2026 Gallup poll, about 80 percent of bachelor’s graduates call it critical or important to their careers, while 71 percent say they landed a good job within six months. It’s a bit like the perennial attitude toward Congress: People hate the institution and yet tend to rate their own representatives highly. Abstract views are influenced by the deluge of content about the crisis of college, while individual views are influenced by what is actually happening to people. 

It’s the timing, not the degree

Speaking as a proud member of the college class of 2001, I can tell you that 2026 is far from the first year when it was tough to graduate into the workforce. My friends one year above me in college entered an economy that had an astoundingly low unemployment rate of 1.4 to 1.7 percent for college grads ages 25 to 34, while real hourly wages for young college graduates had grown at 3 percent a year between 1995 and 2000. My classmates assumed we were headed for the same golden outcome.

“Psych!”, as we used to say back then. By the spring of 2001, the dot-com crash was in full effect, wiping out startups and jobs. More than a few people I knew had lined up lucrative starting jobs at investment banks and consulting businesses, only to have those gigs rescinded as they were preparing to receive their diplomas. (I cleverly avoided this by never getting those offers in the first place and instead entering the thriving field of journalism.) By December 2001, in the aftermath of 9/11, the unemployment rate for college grads ages 25 to 34 had jumped to 4 percent.

The class of 2010 had it even worse — recent college grads had a 7 percent unemployment rate. But though both the classes of 2001 and 2010 experienced what economists call “recession scarring” that had lasting effects on their income, those scars largely, though not completely, faded as time passed and the economy improved. The lesson? You can’t control when you graduate college, but you can largely control whether you graduate college at all — and finishing school is likely to still benefit you over the long term.

It’s true that the class of 2026 is facing an extra layer of uncertainty: the fear that AI is eating away at the bottom rung of the career ladder before graduates can reach it. Goldman Sachs finds unemployment among 20- to 30-year-olds in tech-exposed roles is up nearly 3 percentage points since early 2025, while research from Stanford has counted a roughly 20 percent drop in employment for young software developers in highly automatable jobs. 

But every time you think the case has been made that AI is causing a jobpocalypse, new data complicates the picture. Vanguard reports that employment in highly AI-exposed occupations rose 1.7 percent between 2023 and 2025, while a Federal Reserve study this year of more than a million firms found no clear connection between adopting AI and posting fewer jobs so far. At the moment, hiring problems have more to do with a cautious, high-interest-rate economy. And employer hiring plans for the class of 2026 are actually being revised upward — not the move you make while deleting the entry level.  

“To you, the class of 2026, I say…”

None of this data means that college bet is a sure thing for everyone. Tracking by the Burning Glass Institute and Strada finds that 52 percent of graduates are underemployed a year out, and 45 percent are underemployed a decade later. A college grad who takes a first job that doesn’t require a degree is 3.5 times more likely to be underemployed 10 years on. For that group, the earnings premium over a high school grad shrinks to about 25 percent — roughly the same as a college dropout.

Outcomes are also influenced by what a graduate chooses to study: Underemployment runs under 10 percent for nursing graduates and above 65 percent for criminal justice majors. (I realize telling someone who just claimed their diploma that maybe they should have picked a different major is not exactly actionable advice.) And the financing has gotten tougher — for Gen Z, it cost 32 percent of the typical American family’s annual income to pay for one year at a state university in 2021, compared to mid-20s for Gen X in the 1990s and 15 percent for Boomers in 1975. 

But generational comparisons obscure as well. When people say college doesn’t pay like it used to, they may not realize they’re comparing against a past when a far smaller and more homogenous slice of Americans got their degree: Among 25- to 29-year-olds, the share holding a bachelor’s has roughly doubled between 1980 and 2021, from about a fifth to nearly two in five. That much larger and more varied pool of graduates skews the individual outcomes, even if the average largely holds up. 

So what would I tell the class of 2026 if someone were misguided enough to put me on the dais? Mustering my best commencement-grade metaphors, I’d tell them that, yes, they are graduating into a sea of troubles, but that they are far from the first academic sailors to make such a voyage, and that the diploma they hold is still the most oceanworthy raft they can find. (Can you tell I was an English major?) And if I were so bold as to mention AI, I’d lean more Ronny Chieng than Eric Schmidt.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

The housing abundance movement has won more of the intellectual argument than anyone might have predicted a decade ago. Across much of American politics, even in Zohran Mamdani’s New York (listen, I love the guy), it is now at least possible to say out loud that we have too many pointless rules making it impossible to build enough housing. But that doesn’t settle the politically harder questions of…where exactly should the housing go, and what should it look like?  

There has often been disagreement among housing reformers on that point — or at least a difference in emphasis. Should advocates try to add homes in already vibrant urban and suburban areas, which would add density but run into a buzzsaw of zoning codes and angry neighbors? Or should the focus be building at the urban fringe, in the form of sprawl, where land is cheap and plentiful and obstacles to building are fewer? 

These approaches, known respectively as infill and greenfield development, aren’t necessarily opposed; with America millions of homes short, most housing experts would say that we need both. But there are many reasons to prefer building in over building out. Building on top of or in between existing development reduces the toll on the environment and wildlife, minimizes commute times, and better supports compact, walkable, livable communities. And a recent report from the Pew Charitable Trusts’ housing policy initiative, the World Resources Institute, and the research firm ECOnorthwest advances another, less appreciated reason to favor infill: It could help keep your city solvent and maybe even keep your property taxes down. 

How? The researchers simulated different future housing construction scenarios across 10 diverse states, including fast-growing ones like Arizona and Texas and slower-growing states like Pennsylvania. They then compared the public costs of essential services like roads and sewer lines for homes built within existing communities versus those built at the edge of cities. 

Each home developed near jobs, shops, and transit, according to the report, would require upfront infrastructure expenses about $21,000 less on average than those added at the urban fringe, amounting to a one-third reduction in the cost of that infrastructure. (The categories used in the report are more complex than just an infill-versus-greenfield split, but for simplicity, I’ll use these terms as shorthand.)

The ongoing maintenance for all that infrastructure, meanwhile, added up to about 50 percent less on average for homes built within established communities, while communities developed this way would raise about 13 percent more in property taxes per acre on average because they have more households concentrated in the same land area. 

Urban analysts have made variations of this observation many times before, and the logic is mostly basic geometry: Compact housing development allows cities to spend less per person on physical infrastructure like roads, and to spread the costs of that infrastructure across more households. Yet American land-use policy is set up to discourage precisely that kind of growth. As a result, we build many more single-family homes than apartments or condos, and increasingly in low-density areas outside of major population centers. 

Meanwhile, the US is fast hitting fiscal limits — higher interest rates, an aging population, and amid it all, a nationwide revolt over property taxes. Fiscally efficient growth matters more than it has in a long time, and that might be the invitation we need to rethink America’s abiding instinct to grow ever outward.

Sprawl costs cities more, but it’s not everything

To understand how this works, it helps to picture it through real-world examples: Take the largely middle-class suburb of University Park, Illinois, which is home to about 681 people per square mile, and compare it to nearby Chicago, which is nearly 18 times as dense. That means University Park serves many fewer people per mile of road or foot of piping, providing a thinner tax base to pay for the infrastructure on which the community depends. 

As Pew’s report notes: “Home construction in established areas relies primarily on existing infrastructure and often includes apartment buildings, duplexes, townhomes, and accessory dwelling units (ADUs), all of which require less infrastructure per unit than detached single-family homes.” While the report relies on modeling, its findings comport with more empirically grounded research on the question.

Cheaper infrastructure, however, does not mean lower costs across the board. Arpit Gupta, an associate professor of finance at New York University Stern School of Business, has pointed out that physical infrastructure like roads, bridges, sewers, and water services makes up only a small share of local governments’ costs in the US. Social spending, on things like healthcare and education, are much more fiscally important. That’s one reason why even though the governments of blue cities like Chicago benefit from the economics of density, they are often costlier to build and live in, thanks to factors like higher public sector wages and more onerous environmental review and permitting processes. 

Nevertheless, while a sprawling community may be able to shoulder the burdens of more extended infrastructure so long as it continues growing, should growth begin to stagnate, the costs of years of greenfield development can really start to hit. And in the US, one need not even venture outside the suburbs to see it. Earlier this year, I spoke with John Zeanah, the chief of development and infrastructure for Memphis, Tennessee, about what this pattern has meant for the city. “Memphis lived it firsthand,” he said. “There are significant costs associated with sprawl that ultimately are unsustainable.” 

Many sprawling American cities — Houston, Dallas, Phoenix — are growing quickly in population, but there are also many others whose populations have stagnated or declined in recent decades and that are now burdened with figuring out what to do with an overly large geographic footprint. In the late 20th century, Memphis grew by literally annexing nearby unincorporated developments, but in recent years its population has been declining.

By 2015, compared to about 50 years prior, “the city’s land area grew by over 50 percent with virtually no population growth. This meant 50 percent more infrastructure to service and maintain,” Zeanah told me in an email. The costs of this go well beyond just hard physical infrastructure, Zeanah explained, extending to services like police, fire, and transit, all of which must serve a larger area than they would otherwise and need to be supported by a stagnant tax base.

Memphis is now trying to undo these mistakes. Its latest comprehensive plan, Zeanah wrote to me, recognizes that “the city’s most viable path was to concentrate investment in existing neighborhoods and corridors where land and infrastructure capacity was available, relative costs are lowest, and the return on public investment is highest.” In other words, exactly what Pew’s research points to.     

Can we overcome the barriers to density?

The challenge is that American cities and suburbs hoping to make that philosophical change in how they grow — adding infill to already thriving neighborhoods rather than sprawling outward — face a gauntlet of regulatory and cultural barriers. 

There are, of course, local zoning codes and parking minimums that bar dense home construction and have become a political albatross for cities trying to reform their approach to housing. There are NIMBYs who don’t want sudden changes to their proverbial neighborhood character and wish to push any development further afield. And municipalities also have structural incentives to grow outward, because it can be easier to find money for new infrastructure than for maintaining existing infrastructure. “Local jurisdictions can access funding for upfront infrastructure costs (from federal, state, and private sources) relatively easily but face limited options for paying for long-term maintenance, making greenfield development appear fiscally attractive in the short term,” Tushar Kansal, a senior officer for Pew’s housing policy initiative, said in an email. 

Ultimately, fiscal sustainability may be a relatively minor argument in favor of building homes as infill in established neighborhoods, albeit one with particular salience at the moment, given the American cost of living crisis and anger about taxes. But the US remains a very rich country that can afford the material costs of sprawl and exclusionary zoning if we really want it. 

The stronger case for infill is based not on fiscal thrift, but rather on human freedom, quality of life, and the bigger benefits to our economy of allowing population growth in our most prosperous cities. We should legalize more housing in places where people already live, because more people want to live there — and that alone should be enough. 

Eudaemonius posted a photo:

Your Mileage May Vary is an advice column offering you a unique framework for thinking through your moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism — the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. To submit a question, fill out this anonymous form. 

The questions I tackle in this column usually come from strangers. But this time, the call is coming from inside the house. 

My partner is due to give birth to our first baby any day now. And as parenthood approaches, she’s started grappling with a nagging question. I decided to tackle her dilemma in my last column before beginning my parental leave because, as you’ll see, it’s not only relevant to parents. It’s relevant to anyone who worries about failing someone or making lasting mistakes, and who wonders how they’d deal with the guilt they might feel afterward. 

We’re about to have our first baby. I’m so excited! But I’m also a bit overwhelmed by all the actions and choices that go into trying to raise a kid who’s happy and healthy. I feel like the modern world’s never-ending desire to optimize everything has crept into parenting. Yet the world is so unpredictable. And there are so many opportunities to mess up and harm a kid in ways both big and small.

The questions swirling through my mind range from “How soon after birth should we take the baby into crowded indoor places, knowing their immune system isn’t fully formed?” to “When should we introduce our kid to sugar?” to “How much unsupervised play time should we let them have as they get older?”

There’s not a lot of definitive data about certain things. And a lot of kid stuff involves situations where the risk of something bad happening is very low, but if it does happen, then it’s really terrible. For example, I’ve heard some parents aren’t letting their kids go to sleepovers anymore because they’re worried someone will touch them inappropriately. The likelihood is that sleepovers are going to be positive experiences for most kids, but there’s always a small chance of something negative happening. Trying to think through these situations feels like a little bit of torture. If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?

Dear Parent-to-Be,

Can I confess something? When you voiced this question, I actually felt relieved, because the same question has been secretly hammering at me for months. 

I haven’t talked about it much because I thought maybe it was just a function of my own anxiety. But I’m starting to think it’s more common than I realized. So I’m going to share the idea that has helped me the most with it. It doesn’t come from a parenting book or even the mental health field, but from that philosopher I’m always yammering on about, Bernard Williams. 

In 1976, Williams coined the term “moral luck.” It’s a surprising term, because what does morality have to do with luck, right? Surely what matters for my moral status is “what I did” and not “what the world did”! But Williams’s point is that life does seem to present us with situations where our goodness or badness depends a lot on factors that are out of our control — on whether we get lucky or unlucky. 

How can that be?

To illustrate, Williams invites us to imagine a truck driver who accidentally runs over a kid. The driver isn’t drunk or careless or negligent. He’s just driving along when suddenly a child darts out into the road. The kid gets hit and dies.

Clearly, a terrible harm has occurred. But has the driver done anything wrong?

Now let’s imagine another truck driver. He sets out that same day on that same road. But this guy is drunk. He careens down the road carelessly. He could easily hit somebody. But guess what? It just so happens that no kid darts into the road. The driver makes it home without incident.

In this scenario, no one’s been harmed. Yet the driver has obviously done something wrong. But for fortune, he would forever be branded a killer. He just got morally lucky.

What’s useful about this thought experiment is the way it clarifies that harm and wrongdoing are two separate things. We usually clump them together in our minds, because it’s often the case that a harm results from someone doing something wrong. But they can occur separately.

And when they do, how guilty should a person feel? Take the first driver, who wasn’t drunk or careless and yet ended up killing a child. It wouldn’t make rational sense to feel remorse, per se, because it’s not like he voluntarily did a bad thing. It’s more like the bad thing happened to him. At the same time, he certainly won’t feel nothing. He’ll probably feel pained in some nebulous, hard-to-name way. 

Well, Williams came up with a name for that: “agent-regret.” It’s the feeling you might experience if you inadvertently do a bad thing through bad luck.  

What’s the upshot for you, me, and everyone who fears failing or accidentally harming someone they love? 

Your goal is not to control every possible outcome. The reality of luck makes that impossible: You could do everything right and something terrible could still happen. Plus, trying to prevent every possible harm often leads to exhaustion and paralysis — you’ll feel like you can’t make any decision or take any action, because, as you said, everything has some small chance of a bad outcome.

Instead, your goal is to live in line with your values as best you can. The trick here is recognizing that you have values, plural. Sometimes, two values will be in tension with each other — keeping a kid safe from possible harm, say, and allowing a kid unsupervised time to play, grow, and form social bonds with other kids. In those cases, you have to weigh all the different factors and make a decision that seems best on balance.

Could something bad still happen? Yes, and that’s gutting. But remember that even if harm occurs, that doesn’t mean you were guilty of any wrongdoing. It doesn’t mean you deserve blame. It means you deliberated as well as anyone could have expected of you and something terrible happened anyway. That’s not your fault. 

Risk of tragedy is just the cost of living in our world. 

And I do think you should live in it. Fully. Bravely. Without endlessly second-guessing every move you make.

That brings me to the contemporary philosopher Susan Wolf, one of Williams’s best interpreters. In her essay “The Moral of Moral Luck,” she questions what we should take away from his concept.

“Morality is deeply and disquietingly subject to luck,” Williams wrote. But, Wolf asks, is that just the result of our own irrational judgments?

Wolf considers a slightly different truck driver thought experiment. In her version, two equally negligent truck drivers set out on the road. One has good luck: No child darts into the road, so no one gets hurt. But the other has bad luck: A child darts in front of the truck and is instantly killed. 

If humans were purely rational beings, surely we’d judge both drivers just as harshly, even though one killed a kid and the other didn’t. That’s because they’re both equally guilty of wrongdoing. But Wolf observes that, in reality, the driver who strikes the child is probably going to feel a lot more guilt. And members of society are likely to direct a lot more blame at him — after all, he actually killed someone, and they’re going to feel angry about that (while they won’t even know the other guy was ever driving negligently).

It’s tempting to say that this condemnation doesn’t tell us anything real about the unlucky driver’s moral status — it’s just an artifact of human irrationality, and we should toss it out. But Wolf doesn’t want to go that far. She thinks it’d be “positively eerie” if the driver who struck a child saw himself as being in the exact same moral position as the driver who didn’t. He’d be revealing a sense of himself “as one who is, at least in principle, distinct from his effects on the world.” 

Wolf suggests that there’s a better way to see ourselves: 

We are beings who are thoroughly in-the-world, in interaction with others whose movements and thoughts we cannot fully control, and whom we affect and are affected by accidentally as well as intentionally, involuntarily, unwittingly, inescapably, as well as voluntarily and deliberately. 

To form one’s attitudes and judgments of oneself and others solely on the basis of their wills and intentions, to draw sharp lines between what one is responsible for and what is up to the rest of the world, to try in this way, to extricate oneself and others from the messiness, and the irrational contingencies of the world, would be to remove oneself from the only ground on which it is possible for beings like ourselves to meet. 

This is a beautiful passage that describes a beautiful virtue: the ability to recognize that none of us is a separate and independent self. Wolf says this virtue has lived without a name, so she calls it “the nameless virtue.”

But I think it’s only nameless in Western philosophy. In Buddhism, it’s a foundational principle known as “dependent co-arising” or “interbeing.” The idea is that nothing has its own fixed, boundaried essence. Everything is always changing, because everything is subject to different causes and conditions, which act upon it all the time. That includes us human beings. We are constantly remaking each other — through the kind or unkind things we say to each other, through the ideas we expose each other to, through the actions we do or don’t perform. 

We are all each other’s causes and conditions. 

This undercuts the traditional Western understanding of agency. According to that view, I’m a discrete agent and when I decide to take a certain action, that decision starts in my own mind. My intent is what sets a causal chain in motion. Therefore, if I decide to do a bad action and harm results, I’m blameworthy.

But from the Buddhist perspective, we can’t say that my decision “started” with me. The “I” that decides isn’t a self-contained originator of action — it’s a node in a web that runs in every direction. That means the clean line between “what I did” and “what the world did” was always a kind of fiction. All my decisions have been conditioned by everything and everyone that ever influenced me in life. Which means blame, in the clean Western sense, doesn’t really hold up.

Williams found moral luck disquieting because it seemed to undermine the self-originating agent at the heart of Western ethics. But in the Buddhist view, there was never such an agent. That means that when something bad happens, it’s appropriate to recognize that you’re part of the causal web that yielded harm — but not to blame yourself as an individual.

You asked me: “If I make a certain parenting decision and something bad happens, am I always going to blame myself?”

No, I don’t think you always will. Although you’ll probably feel pained if some decision of yours leads to harm, eventually, your pain will not take the form of “I’m a terrible person.” It’ll take the form of “I was doing the best I could with the information and awareness I had at the time — with the conditions I was given. I wish that the conditions could have been different.” 

We’re all so used to the Western understanding of agency that our brains default to it in situations of crisis or panic, making us prone to self-blame. But I’ll be there to remind you of this other understanding. And I feel lucky knowing you’ll do the same for me.  

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Speaking of the world being so unpredictable…I’m excitedly digging into Prophecy: Prediction, Power, and the Fight for the Future, from Ancient Oracles to AI, by the philosopher Carissa Véliz. She argues that predictions are often power plays in disguise.
  
• On a new episode of the podcast Philosophy Bites, a professor of Buddhist philosophy tackles the question: Without an enduring self, can there be moral responsibility?
  
• I’m loving the illustrated book Good Moms Have Scary Thoughts. It shows just how normal it is for new parents to have an inner monologue that runs something like: “What if I drop him? What if I snap and hurt my baby? Mothering is so hard. I don’t know if I really want to do this anymore. Gosh, I’m so terrible for thinking that!”

On a cool April morning at the height of Washington, DC’s always brief spring, the science fiction novelist Ray Nayler and I found ourselves in a staring contest with the world’s heaviest flying bird. We were standing at the fenceline of the Kori bustard exhibit at Washington’s National Zoo when the largest of the already enormous omnivores broke away from its flock at the rear of the enclosure and began stalking toward us. 

Gray and black and white with a parrying dagger for a beak, the Kori bustard resembled a heron that had taken up powerlifting. Approaching us and turning to the left, it stopped and grew still for a moment. Abruptly, it exploded. The thin salt-and-pepper feathers in its long neck puffed outward all at once, even as a wave seemed to run through the plumage of the wings folded across its back. Then it was still again. Without a sound it turned once more to the left and strode back to its fellows. 

Though we didn’t fully understand what we had seen, we still got the message, which was, at minimum, that the bird had a message for us. “It was engaging with us,” Nayler suggested later. We took the hint that it was probably telling us to go away and walked on. There were other birds to see.

Nayler and I had come to the National Zoo’s recently remodeled Bird House to talk about talking to animals. Or, more accurately, we had come to discuss his fiction, which often explores how humans can be good to one another by meditating on what we might learn about ourselves from our contact and communication with animals. 

In Nayler’s first novel, The Mountain in the Sea (2022), researchers in the near future struggle to parse the language of a species of especially intelligent octopuses that communicate in part through messages effectively written on the water in their own ink. He won a Hugo Award for his follow-up, The Tusks of Extinction (2024), in which an elephant researcher’s mind is uploaded into the brain of a genetically recreated wooly mammoth, so that she can help a herd of these resurrected animals learn to live together in an utterly transformed near future. 

Both books are characteristic of one of Nayler’s central preoccupations: the way that an organism’s biology shapes its approach to communication and social life. Now in his new novel Palaces of the Crow, Nayler has turned for the first time to historical fiction. In it, he tells the story of a group of resourceful teenagers attempting to survive in the woods beyond Vilnius during the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the early 1940s. They are assisted by a flock of very special crows who protect and form relationships with the children, and who are, in turn, protected by them in a second narrative thread that takes place decades later. The crows guide the children through the woods, warning them of danger and helping them find shelter and food. 

Nayler draws extensively on research into crow behavior and cognition, ably capturing how, among other things, they raise their young and the way they grow almost completely still when thinking through a problem. Notably he does so without anthropomorphizing the birds; this is not the chatty, enchanted flock of some  Disney film. In one scene, a bird keeps a young woman on the right path not through grammatical cawing but by flying at her face and clawing at her skin when she goes astray. Despite their pronounced intelligence, they remain defiantly crow-like, never turning into little humans with wings in the way that science fiction aliens are sometimes indistinguishable from earthlings, except for their pastel skin.

This insistence that what makes animals fascinating is their distinctness is crucial to Nayler, whose books reflect a consistent belief that any true rapport begins in the recognition of shared difference, whether we are divided by language and culture or by the more intractable facts of biology. It’s a perspective that is all the more important at a time when the very technologies he writes about in his novels threaten to cut us off from the natural world.  “That’s enough to build empathy,” he told me of the way that animals like the Kori bustard attempt to address us. “Mutual attempts at understanding are enough. It doesn’t have to be understanding. It just has to be the desire to understand.”

Mutual aid and collective care

That belief in the value of merely trying to understand runs deep for Nayler. When he was in his early teens, his mother insisted that he volunteer at a Californian animal shelter, hoping it would help him cultivate compassion. This was, he said, “a terrible idea, because the animal shelters back then were all kill shelters” He was confronted every day, as many shelter workers still are, by the cruelty of humans who would abandon companions they no longer wanted to care for, leaving them to be euthanized by others. “But maybe that also made me interested in animals as beings, because you could really see them and their personalities in those cages,” he told me. 

As he was describing his experiences at the shelter, we came to another outdoor enclosure, a circular pen inhabited by two barred owls, still active in the morning light. One was efficiently demolishing the small body of a mouse — dinner, I suppose, on its night-shift schedule. As Nayler spoke, the owl craned back its head and swallowed the rest of the rodent’s body in a single go, letting the creature’s tail hang from its mouth for a moment before that, too, disappeared down its esophagus.

I was transfixed, but Nayler seemed less captivated by the feasting raptor than he was by many of the other birds we encountered over the course of the morning. Birds, he told me, citing the behavioral ecologist Antone Martinho-Truswell’s book The Parrot in the Mirror: How Evolving to be Like Birds Makes Us Human, tend to be much more peaceful with other birds than nonhuman primates are with one another. “They learned a long time before mammals did to live in these big, very peaceful groups and, and that’s that’s one of the things that they do that is a lot like us,” Nayler said. Crows may gather in murders, and they are not shy about eating other animals, but for the most part they look after each other.

Nayler is an admirer of the 19th- and 20th-century anarchist political philosopher and scientist Peter Kropotkin, whose 1902 book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution, which comes up regularly in Palaces of the Crow, clearly informs Nayler’s thinking about interspecies collaboration. For Kropotkin — a committed opponent of the view of nature as a brutal arena of individual competition — what mattered most was collaboration, which he took to be the real engine of evolution. The early chapters of Mutual Aid are populated with examples of animals helping one another, even in Siberia where Kropotkin conducted scientific surveys in his youth. In Kropotkin’s axiomatic phrase: “Life in societies is the most powerful weapon in the struggle for life.” It is a formulation that resonates implicitly through all of Nayler’s fiction. 

Thinking of Kropotkin, I found my attention shifting to the other owl in the cage, which kept its unflinching gaze on us as its companion ate, more placid than the Kori bustard had been but no less assured. I recalled something Nayler had said earlier about how, despite not growing up with any animals, he came to love them as a child when he began to get the impression that they were observing him. It’s a sentiment he lends to one character in Palaces of the Crow: “Every time I watch [the crows], trying to understand what they are doing, I find them watching me, trying to understand what I am doing.” For Nayler it is the shared struggle to understand others in their irreducible otherness that forms the basis of empathy — and the possibility of connection.

As the owl demonstrated to that mouse, interspecies communication isn’t always about mutual aid, of course, though even when relations are tenser, it can still benefit both parties. Nayler cited an example drawn from Jesper Hoffmeyer’s book Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs of what happens when a brown hare notices that it’s being stalked by a fox. Under ordinary circumstances, foxes are not fast enough to catch an alert hare, so when the latter notices that the former is approaching, it “will turn, stand up erect, and look at the fox and make eye contact with it,” Nayler said. Knowing that they will never catch their now-alert quarry, the foxes simply depart instead of attempting to give chase. Both animals save the energy they would have otherwise expended, while also avoiding the risk of unnecessary injury. As Nayler put it, “That’s a great example of cooperation in a competitive situation. It’s a little like a Christmas truce.”

Cities are for the crows

Nayler has had his own encounters with foxes. Not long ago, he told me, he and his 6-year-old daughter spotted one of them while they were walking in the woods. 

“I’m probably smarter than a fox, right?” his daughter suggested. 

“Let me ask you: Who is smarter in the forest?” he responded.

She thought about this for a moment. “Well, the fox is smarter in the forest, because I couldn’t live in a forest by myself for very long.”

“And who’s smarter in lots of different situations?” Nayler asked.

“That must be me,” she responded. “Because if the fox was out of the forest, it wouldn’t do very well.”

She had, as Nayler put it to me, stumbled across one of the things that makes humans special, our capacity for abstraction and hence for adaptation to diverse circumstances. That is also, as he discovered in his research for Palaces of the Crow, a defining characteristic of crows and their kin, who have proven able at adapting to us. “The edges of our societies are full of opportunities for them,” he told me. 

Not long ago, Nayler was exploring tide pools in California when a class of elementary school students mobbed the beach. After the children left, a flock of crows descended on the pools and began hungrily hunting along their edges. Knowing that crows normally keep their distance from the beaches, Nayler asked a ranger what the birds were up to. The crows, she said, know that “children aren’t very careful with their feet, and they step on snails. And so after the children leave, there’ll be a feast of snails. So they wait.” And then they dine, fed by the chaos we make.

This tension between human destruction and certain kinds of animal thriving resonates throughout Palaces of the Crow. Nayler’s curious and inventive crows engage in forms of sociality and even tool use that outstrip the already impressive capabilities of corvids as we know them today, but they are still the descendants of the carrion birds who make a “banquet” from Achilles’s fury in the Iliad’s opening lines. Palaces’ especially clever birds similarly thrive on the human debris of WWII’s especially brutal Eastern Front battlefields, even as they build and fortify their own homes on the outer edges of the conflict. “So much of what crows associate themselves with is damage that humans do to the animal environment,” Nayler told me. 

And yet where much of Palaces unfolds against a background of conflict and desperation, it is at its most fantastical and most hopeful when it strives to imagine something more like an economy of care that might arise between human and nonhuman animals. Nayler makes explicit the lessons that we can take from such engagements, lovingly imagining how humans might extend our capacities through the encounter with beings who see the world differently. As we were leaving the Bird House, he brought up the philosopher Thomas Nagel’s famous essay “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” observing that it is too often misread as an argument that “we cannot know anything about how the world is perceived by someone with a different sensory apparatus.” On the contrary, he noted, Nagel concludes “that it is possible to approach this problem and not get there all the way, but to get part of the way with it.”

Likewise, in Nayler’s books as surely as in our conversation, telling stories about animals also seems to be a way to imagine a fragile path toward the thing we can approach but only asymptotically — their biologically bound lifeworlds. If his latest novel has a thesis, it can only be that caring for others — humans and nonhuman animals alike — in their specificity and their peculiarity is the purest font of strength. 

Palaces of the Crow is unflinching in its depiction of wartime brutality, antisemitism, and the arbitrariness of violence, but so, too, does it celebrate everything that is possible in spite of our own monstrosity. Late in the story, a few of the characters, now adults, reflect on why the crows who watched them so attentively also helped them survive. “There has never been a deeper reason necessary for cruelty,” one of them posits. “Why would a deeper reason be necessary for kindness?”

Captivity and captive attention

Zoos are strange places to contemplate kindness, of course. At their most valuable, they can be refuges for species that — unlike crows — can no longer thrive in the world that we’ve remade for our own comfort. But the reality of confinement is unavoidable; the Kori bustard we meet commands a vastly smaller range than the one it should call home, while the owl gazes down at us from a single tree when it should be free to hunt through an entire forest.

But as Nayler put it to me while we stood in a room that resounded with the calls of tropical birds, zoos are also spaces that give us the opportunity to spend time looking at animals for longer than we otherwise might — and often at animals we would never otherwise see. In the act of observing them, we should all become still and slow as crows trying to solve a puzzle, considering what we might have in common with them and recognizing that these strangers here are “worthy of our care and of our attention.”

Days after our visit to the Bird House, Nayler sent me an email. “One thing I keep remembering from our morning at the zoo is the little spoonbill watching us with its wise, gray, old-man face,” he wrote of one of the first birds that had caught our attention. In its quiet dignity, he explained, he saw “an acknowledgement that animals were our first teachers, helping us learn how to be in the world.” 

Nayler’s novels, too, aspire to convey something similar. A recognition, perhaps, that nature still has something to teach us, a lesson not just in morality, but also in generosity, a generosity that we must always be prepared to offer in kind.

Friendship breakups are never easy, but few are as messy and expensive as the collapse of Elon Musk and Sam Altman’s once thriving tech bromance, which has — for now — reached a legal end.

On Monday, a jury ruled against Musk in his lawsuit against OpenAI, which contended that Altman and other executives “stole a charity” (as one of Musk’s lawyers put it) by turning much of what was once a nonprofit research lab into a corporate behemoth. (Disclosure: Vox Media is one of several publishers that have signed partnership agreements with OpenAI. Our reporting remains editorially independent.) For three weeks, lawyers on both sides deployed an increasingly unhinged body of evidence in an attempt to discredit both men and prove they’re untrustworthy and power-hungry. 

Musk claimed he was duped into donating roughly $38 million to OpenAI under false pretenses, and was suing for $150 billion in financial restitution alongside major changes to OpenAI’s leadership and governance structure. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers accepted the jury’s decision that Musk failed to bring his lawsuit within the three-year statute of limitations, given that OpenAI first added its for-profit arm in 2018. However, it’s possible that the evidence put forth at trial will still be enough to convince state regulators to revisit the agreements that allowed OpenAI to restructure into a for-profit enterprise to begin with.

Lawyers tell me that Musk will likely choose to appeal the ruling, meaning the catfight might not be over yet. But even beyond the outcome, the trial shone an often uncomfortable spotlight on the inner workings of Silicon Valley and the AI industry. Here are five major revelations from the trial.

OpenAI’s board members questioned Sam Altman’s honesty

Musk’s legal team sought to paint Altman as a deeply untrustworthy person, prone to lying to his co-founders, employees, and board members if it meant advancing his interests.

Multiple former OpenAI employees and board members testified as much in the courtroom. Altman’s “pattern of behavior related to his honesty and candor” led directly to his temporary ouster as CEO in 2023, said Helen Toner, a former board member, in a video deposition. He had a tendency of “saying one thing to one person and completely the opposite to another person,” Mira Murati, OpenAI’s former chief technology officer, testified. In one instance, she said, Altman explicitly lied to her about the safety review required to vet a new AI model.

Greg Brockman kept a diary — and he probably wishes he hadn’t

Some of the more salacious evidence entered into trial came from a personal diary kept by OpenAI president Greg Brockman, who chronicled his “stream of consciousness” as he weighed whether it would be “morally bankrupt” to pivot OpenAI into a for-profit enterprise.

“Can’t see us turning this into a for-profit without a very nasty fight,” he wrote in one 2017 entry. “It’d be wrong to steal the nonprofit from him,” meaning Musk, who co-founded OpenAI and provided most of its start-up funding. “He’s really not an idiot,” Brockman later wrote. “His story will correctly be that we weren’t honest with him in the end.”

Brockman was also candid about his personal ambitions; “It would be nice to be making the billions,” he wrote. He later received a stake in OpenAI now estimated to be worth about $30 billion.

Surprise, surprise: Elon Musk is difficult to collaborate with 

OpenAI built a bot in 2017 that was so advanced, it could beat top professional players at strategic multiplayer battle game Dota 2, a major milestone for the budding lab. “Time to make the next step for OpenAI. This is the triggering event,” Musk emailed Brockman. 

Musk gave Brockman and cofounder Ilya Sutskever new Tesla Model 3 cars, presumably to “butter us up,” Brockman testified. The Tesla CEO then summoned them to his self-described “haunted mansion” for discussions of a possible OpenAI for-profit arm, where whiskey was served by Musk’s then-girlfriend Amber Heard. 

At one point, Musk became so irate at his guests’ insistence that they share control of OpenAI — rather than cede absolute control to Musk — that “I actually thought he was going to hit me, physically attack me,” Brockman testified. In the following months, Musk repeatedly pitched having Tesla absorb OpenAI, Altman testified. And, in one “particularly hair-raising moment,” he mused that OpenAI should pass on to his children. 

Musk ultimately left OpenAI in 2018 to begin building his own competitor. During an all-hands meeting, Musk got into another tense verbal tussle with Josh Achiam, now OpenAI’s chief futurist, over the race to develop artificial general intelligence. “He snapped and called me a jackass,” Achiam testified. For Achiam’s valor, two OpenAI employees — including Dario Amodei, who later departed to form Anthropic — awarded him a small golden statue of a donkey’s rear end, inscribed with the message, “Never stop being a jackass for safety.”

Microsoft cozied up to OpenAI to avoid being left behind in the AI race

Musk first funded OpenAI because of another friendship breakup, this one with Google cofounder Larry Page, who Musk says mocked him at his own birthday party for preferring humans over computers. Microsoft — which is named in Musk’s lawsuit for aiding and abetting OpenAI’s abandonment of its nonprofit mission — later became OpenAI’s first major corporate investor in 2019, because it, too, wanted to compete with Google as the AI race heated up. 

“I don’t want to be IBM,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella wrote to executives, referring to that company’s decline in the personal computing race, according to emails revealed at trial. “It was becoming even more core and important that we had real agency at every layer of the stack,” Nadella testified.

That meant ingratiating itself in every corner of OpenAI’s world. Microsoft played a crucial role in bringing Altman back to power after the failed board coup in 2023, which Nadella referred to as “amateur city, as far as I was concerned.” In a text thread revealed at trial, Altman asked Microsoft executives to vet various members of OpenAI’s reconstituted board of directors, who now control both the for-profit company and the original nonprofit. 

By this summer, Microsoft will have invested over $100 billion in OpenAI, one of the company’s executives testified. The company was awarded a 27 percent stake in OpenAI last fall. 

Everybody wants to rule the world (of artificial general intelligence)

Microsoft. Musk. Altman. Brockman. Almost everyone who testified at trial pointed fingers at a different boogeyman whose motives were too impure and whose character was too corruptible, to be trusted with control of what all agreed would be an extremely consequential technology. By contrast, their own introspection mostly took a back seat to ambition.

“We don’t want to have a Terminator outcome,” Musk testified, to apparent eyerolls from Judge Gonzalez Rogers, who tried and sometimes failed to steer the trial away from discussions of AI’s existential risks. “If you have someone who is not trustworthy in charge of AI,” Musk said, “I think that’s a very big danger for the whole world.”

Over a decade ago, Musk came together with OpenAI’s cofounders to build a charity equipped to take on a different threat then poised to lead the AI race: Google, which had recently acquired Demis Hassabis’ DeepMind. Now, like Altman and Brockman, who testified that they resisted Musk’s dictatorial attempts to secure absolute control of artificial general intelligence, Musk portrayed himself as someone selfless and transparent enough to be put in charge. 

“It is ironic that your client, despite these risks, is creating a company that is in the exact space,” Gonzalez Rogers at one point told Musk’s lawyer, in reference to xAI, which has come under fire this year for facilitating the mass creation of nonconsensual deepfakes. “I suspect there are plenty of people who wouldn’t like to put the future of humanity in Mr. Musk’s hands.”

Update, May 18, 2026, 2 pm ET: This story has been updated to reflect the conclusion of the trial.

In a darkened convention hall in Chicago on May 31, a Harvard oncologist named Brian Wolpin stood at a podium and in a voice that sounded as if he was reading from the phone book, recited a set of numbers that brought a roomful of cancer doctors to their feet for 42 seconds. Adam Feuerstein, a biotech correspondent for the health news site Stat who has covered cancer conferences like this for two decades, said he had never witnessed anything like it. The applause lasted so long that Wolpin, caught off-guard, ad-libbed: “That time was not built into my talk.” 

What Wolpin had just shown attendees at the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s (ASCO) annual meeting was a simple line graph: a drug called daraxonrasib had nearly doubled median overall survival in a 500-patient trial of a form of previously treated advanced pancreatic cancer. ASCO’s chief medical officer Julie Gralow termed the result not a home run but a “grand slam.” Toronto oncologist Jennifer Knox called it a “game changer.”

Wolpin received such a rapturous response at ASCO because pancreatic cancer is among the most pernicious and treatment-resistant cancers in existence, killing more than 50,000 Americans a year, among them Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsburg. The cancer has a five-year survival rate in the low teens. 

Wolpin, who began his career in the mid-2000s at the world-class Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, told The Bulwark: “I think I saw several patients that first year of fellowship who had pancreatic cancer, and they all died in like three months. It’s not supposed to happen here, right? You’re supposed to have figured this out.” For decades after President Richard Nixon declared a “war on cancer,” deaths continued to mount and medical progress on many cancers remained all too limited. 

But a change is well underway. The US death rate from cancer has fallen 34 percent from its 1991 peak through 2023, and the five-year relative survival for all cancers combined reached 70 percent for people diagnosed between 2015 tto 2021, up from 50 percent in the 1970s. And while daraxonrasib got the standing ovation, it was only the loudest moment in a week — and a decade — of steady, compounding victories over cancer.

The immune system, turned up

One major driver of the shift is immunotherapy. Rather than attacking a tumor directly as conventional chemotherapy does, these treatments use a patient’s own immune system to hunt and kill cancer cells. You can see immunotherapy’s powerful effects through the story of former President Jimmy Carter, who was diagnosed in 2015 at age 90 with metastatic melanoma that had spread to his liver and brain. That should have been a sign for newspaper editors to update their planned obituaries immediately; yet after being treated with the immunotherapy drug pembrolizumab, as well as surgery and radiation, Carter watched his tumors vanish and managed to live another decade. 

And scientists keep pushing the frontier further. Moderna and Merck reported that the combination of a personalized mRNA vaccine — the technology behind the Covid shots, retrained on each patient’s own tumor — and an immuontherapy drug (pembrolizumab) reduced the risk of recurrence or death for high-risk melanoma by 49 percent after five years. In a small, early Memorial Sloan Kettering trial of a similar vaccine appeared to help some pancreatic cancer patients stay cancer-free longer after surgery. Seven of the eight patients who responded to the vaccine were still alive four to six years later, with a larger trial now underway.

A Memorial Sloan Kettering trial of a similar vaccine in 2024 kept pancreatic cancer at bay in patients whose immune systems responded to it. And for blood cancers, a single infusion of reengineered immune cells — called CAR T-cell therapy — has begun producing something that looks close to a cure: Emily Whitehead, the first child with cancer ever treated with CAR T, is now more than a decade cancer-free and attending college. (I wrote in more detail about immunotherapy and CAR T last year.) 

From treatment to prevention

And scientists’ ambitions are growing, from treating cancer to stopping it before it starts. Last week, a team led by the Francis Crick Institute’s Charles Swanton reported that a blood test measuring 14 proteins, combined with basic risk factors like age, smoking, and lung disease, could help identify people likely to develop lung cancer years before diagnosis. They also found an intriguing clue from an older drug trial: An anti-inflammatory drug seemed to cut lung cancer risk nearly in half among people with the highest inflammation levels. 

This is still early evidence — not yet a blood test and prevention treatment doctors can offer patients — but Swanton compared it to how statins work for heart disease. Just as cholesterol tests can predict a person’s risk of heart disease, and then statins can be given to lower cholesterol, the protein test identifies lung cancer risk and the anti-inflammatory drug reduces it. 

And no story on modern medical miracles would be complete without an appearance from GLP-1 drugs, which truly do seem to do everything. A University of Pennsylvania study of more than 110,000 women, also reported at the ASCO meeting this week, found that taking GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic was associated with about 30 percent lower breast cancer incidence.

Both findings are early, so we shouldn’t expect major changes overnight. It took decades between the development of a test for LDL cholesterol levels, the introduction of statins, and the undeniable proof of heart disease prevention. But oncology is clearly moving toward catching cancer before it takes hold, just as we have with heart attacks. 

Beyond the numbers

Medical advances come with a literal cost. The new medicines are brutally expensive, with the average monthly price of a new cancer drug more than doubling between 2009 and 2019, while about half of surveyed American cancer patients and survivors have to take on debt to pay for treatment. 

Many of those high prices will eventually fall, once patents run out and generic versions emerge. But a greater worry is that the scientific engine driving these advances is being throttled. Almost every advance I’ve mentioned can be traced back to federally funded basic research, which the Trump administration has been attacking relentlessly.

In 2025, the administration froze or canceled thousands of National Institutes of Health (NIH) and National Science Foundation (NSF) grants, while new NIH awards fell by billions of dollars. Congress later rejected the deepest proposed NIH cuts, but the damage was already real: Hundreds of NIH-funded clinical trials were disrupted, and early-career scientists became much less likely to win major grants. In saving dollars with those cuts, we risk losing discoveries that would save lives, at the very moment when cancer research is paying off.

The cost of those lives was made visceral at the ASCO meeting. In the opening address, ASCO’s outgoing president Eric Small spoke about his partner, Amy Lin, a University of San Francisco San Francisco oncologist. Lin had died in December of metastatic clear cell ovarian cancer, a deadly disease that still has few treatment options. He brought on the grief expert and author David Kessler to give a talk on compassionate end-of-life care.   

Perhaps more than any other medical specialty, grief and loss have always been an inseparable, if rarely discussed, part of oncology. Brian Wolpin started his career watching pancreatic patients die within months and feeling certain it wasn’t supposed to happen at a place like Dana-Farber. The ovation he got was the sound of a room realizing he might be right — that the disease that once seemed untreatable is starting to lose its terrible power.

A version of this story originally appeared in the Good News newsletter. Sign up here!

In 2019, Erin Wing worked for nearly three months at a salmon hatchery in Maine that’s owned and operated by Cooke Aquaculture, the world’s largest privately held seafood company. As a hatchery technician, she helped to raise millions of delicate salmon eggs into salmon juveniles. From there, they were transported to Cooke’s fish farms off the coast of Maine, where they were fattened up to be slaughtered and sold under the brand name True North Seafood at grocery stores across the Northeastern US.

But Wing had a secret: She was there undercover, wearing a hidden camera on behalf of the animal protection nonprofit Animal Outlook. During her time at Cooke’s hatchery, she documented:

• Workers culling diseased fish by repeatedly striking them against the sides of tanks and stomping on their heads
• Live fish left in buckets to suffocate or be crushed to death by other fish
• Fish overcrowded into tanks, some of them born with spinal deformities or dying from painful fungal diseases that ate at their faces

Shortly after Animal Outlook released a video of the investigation, Cooke Aquaculture CEO Glenn Cooke apologized. 

“As a family company, we place animal welfare high in our operating standards and endeavor to raise our animals with optimal care and consideration of best practice,” he wrote in a statement. “I am very sorry that this has happened.”

Maine’s department of agriculture investigated the hatchery but didn’t file any charges because Cooke had committed to retraining its employees and updating its facility management plan, among other measures. 

But it appears that its promised reforms didn’t stick. In 2025, Animal Outlook sent a second investigator into the same hatchery and recently released a second exposé, this time finding similar behavior and welfare issues. 

To Animal Outlook, it didn’t come as a surprise. 

“I would’ve been more surprised had we seen the conditions improved demonstrably for these animals,” Ben Williamson, executive director of Animal Outlook, told me. “We know that fundamentally crowding this many animals in these kinds of tanks is going to lead to welfare problems. Treating these animals as commodities is going to lead to cruelty.”

That cynicism is the product of hard-won experience. Animal protection groups have conducted nearly 200 investigations into US farms raising chickens, pigs, cows, turkeys, and fish, gathering a staggering amount of evidence on standard, yet inhumane, practices and living conditions and often documenting malicious cruelty along the way. 

In some instances, investigations have led to companies making substantive changes, such as phasing out small cages for pigs and chickens. But like with Cooke Aquaculture, most farms and companies promise to make reforms after they’ve been exposed, only for follow-up investigations to reveal continued abuse and miserable living conditions. This pattern highlights the limitations of such investigations, which have proven essential to building our understanding of conditions on factory farms but insufficient to significantly improve them. 

Though, they reveal that, for much of the livestock industry, cruelty is the norm. What that means is that, in the absence of government oversight and federal animal welfare laws for farms, there’s little reason for consumers to take meat companies at their word when they promise to do better. 

What happened when an investigator returned to Cooke’s fish hatchery 7 years later

Animal Outlook’s second investigator worked at Cooke’s Maine hatchery in late 2025 (the investigator isn’t named due to the covert nature of their work). Like Wing, the second investigator documented numerous severe welfare issues, including workers:

• Culling fish by repeatedly beating them with metal rods on more than a dozen occasions, despite the availability of stunning equipment on-site (hitting fish like this is a common method to stun them, but it should be done in such a way that rapidly renders them unconscious)
• Leaving some bludgeoned fish to thrash on the ground out of water for as long as 90 seconds to suffocate, and two instances of employees dropping live fish into buckets to suffocate 
• Shooting and bleeding out fish that were not fully anesthetized, causing “some of the worst suffering documented at the facility,” according to the organization

In one scene, a worker is shown cutting into a fish while the fish’s heart is still beating.

All told, Animal Outlook documented 133 instances of what appeared to be improper killing, throwing, and rough handling, along with fungal and bacterial infections (which indicate poor water quality), deformities, overcrowding, and other animal welfare problems. 

“It looks to me like they have a systemic welfare issue at this farm,” Culum Brown, a professor and prominent researcher on fish welfare at Macquarie University in Australia, told Vox over email. 

There were also multiple unexplained mass fish mortalities of hundreds or even tens of thousands of fish dying.

Cooke Aquaculture did not respond to an interview request for this story and declined to respond to detailed questions about the investigation. “Cooke USA takes animal welfare very seriously,” a spokesperson wrote in a statement to Vox in which the company acknowledged the hidden camera investigation and said it’s reviewing the footage. “Appropriate disciplinary measures will be taken with respect to employees who have not followed company policy.”

The company is certified by Best Aquaculture Practices, a program that promises “safe, responsible and ethical farm-raised seafood.” Best Aquaculture Practices declined an interview request for this story and said an investigation into Cooke Aquaculture is currently underway.

The advocacy group Aquatic Life Institute rates Best Aquaculture Practices as having the lowest animal welfare standards among nine aquaculture certification programs it reviews because of how it compares to other certifiers on key issues, such as overcrowding, environmental enrichment, transport, and stunning and slaughtering. Best Aquaculture Practices, which is among the largest of the nine, said in an emailed statement to Vox that it is “actively engaged with ALI [Aquatic Life Institute] and has integrated several of their recommendations.” 

The Maine Department of Agriculture, Conservation and Forestry confirmed to Vox that it is conducting an animal welfare investigation in response to Animal Outlook’s investigation.

Animal Outlook also documented problems that went beyond animal welfare at the hatchery. 

When farmed salmon escape into rivers and streams, they compete with wild salmon for resources. They also mate with them, contributing to what researchers call “genetic pollution,” which has created a hybrid breed of salmon that can have lower survivability rates. 

In the investigation video, a worker said that the company had failed to follow one of its escape prevention protocols of putting a screen on the waste discharge pipes, from which fish can escape, that release into the Kennebec River. “They have screens that are supposed to be down,” a worker said, “but there’s so much shit in there that… we pretty much just keep them up all the time.”

This alarmed Neville Crabbe of the conservation nonprofit Atlantic Salmon Federation, because the Kennebec River is home to endangered Atlantic salmon and the site of a $300 million project to restore their populations.

“The escape of farmed fish…is a significant contributor to population collapse and loss,” for wild Atlantic salmon, Crabbe told me, and “Cooke is basically intentionally allowing” their release. 

Some employees also suggested that a general culture of callousness pervades the company. “Unfortunately, I don’t think the company is in it for the fish health side, they just want fish production,” a manager told the Animal Outlook investigator. “Kinda why our vet[erinarian] left too.” Speaking about the veterinarian, one employee said “they just disregard her shit all the time.”

In one part of the investigation, a manager who Animal Outlook alleges worked at the hatchery in 2019 when Wing investigated it and was still employed there in 2025 said of Wing: “I hunted her down and I found her on Instagram… I was gonna send like a horse tongue or something to her mail… I was gonna send like a deer tongue or something, or like some brains. Cause she’s like an animal activist… Bitch.”

I asked Wing what she felt when she heard this recording. She expressed concern for her family’s safety and also that she believes this shows how those at the company are “not sorry that they did what they did — they’re sorry that they got caught.” But she also expressed empathy for the employees who have little control over how the company operates. 

Why we can’t take animal agriculture companies at their word

The juxtaposition between the CEO of Cooke Aquaculture’s heartfelt apology in 2019 and the grisly findings of Animal Outlook’s follow-up investigation is unsettling, but it isn’t unique. It’s a pattern that animal protection groups have witnessed for decades: They investigate farms that supply meat, milk, and egg companies and find that some employees maliciously abuse animals. The farm or company apologizes and promises to change, sometimes firing a handful of workers. Then, the advocacy organization investigates another of the company’s supplier farms, only to find the same problems. 

This includes many of the largest animal protein companies, such as Foster Farms (six investigations), Butterball (four investigations), Cal-Maine (two investigations), Smithfield Foods (around nine investigations), Tyson Foods (10 investigations), and Fairlife (around five investigations, though Fairlife has denied sourcing from some of the investigated farms).

The companies’ initial responses often give the illusion that justice has been served — that the bad employees will be punished and the bad farm will be improved. The responses lead many consumers and regulators to believe that these are cases of rogue actors rather than a fundamentally cruel system.

But that system is cruel, as its many relapses and false pieties reveal. And while instances of malicious abuse are hard to stomach, standard practices and conditions on farms — including intensive breeding, overcrowding, and pervasive disease — cause even more suffering than the occasional beatings caught on camera.

The companies that make up this system have an unbelievably immense responsibility: the welfare of billions upon billions of animals. And yet, they are accountable to no one. Undercover investigations make this reality plain to see. Maine officials didn’t hold Cooke accountable after the first investigation. Lawmakers didn’t pass new animal welfare standards. Regulators didn’t commit to meaningful oversight. 

Meat, dairy, and egg companies reveal who they are when they think no one’s watching, and we should listen. Everything else — the statements, the apologies, the promises to reform — is just noise. 

Chandana Witharanage posted a photo:

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Small section of a Vintage Fossilized Brain Coral

This is a natural white brain coral skeleton often used for nautical or coastal home decor. It is composed of a hard calcium carbonate skeleton secreted by marine polyps. These specimens are frequently found washed ashore on beaches or sourced from shallow tropical reefs. You might consider using it as a decorative element in a book case or display cabinet.

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