Editor’s note, June 7, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below originally published on November 3, 2024.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through 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. Stay tuned for more original Your Mileage May Vary columns coming in June. In the meantime, submit your own question here.

I’m at an age where I feel like I need to decide whether I want to have kids, but I’m very ambivalent about it and don’t know how to know whether I want them. I don’t dream of parenthood or filling my days with caregiving for a young child. But, does anyone?! That doesn’t seem like a good way to decide whether I truly want to be a parent. But then what is? The main place my mind goes is that I fear my life would be sad and depressing when my partner and I are 70 and childless. I like the thought of having well-adjusted adult children to spend time with when I’m old. That seems like a misguided and selfish reason to have kids. 

A better reason might be that I think my partner and I have good values, and I’d like to bring more people into the world who have those values, but that also seems selfish because there’s no guarantee that a child will embrace your values, and your duty as a parent is to let them flourish as whoever they want to be. I worry that I would be the kind of parent who struggles to support my kid if they rebel against everything I believe in. But I also feel like you just can’t know what you would be like in that situation until you’re in it. How do you decide that such a life-altering decision is right for you, let alone its ethical implications for a person who doesn’t exist yet? 

Dear Fencesitter,

Ah, parenthood ambivalence. So many of us can relate. And, like you, so many of us try to answer the question “Do I want to have kids?” by looking inward for the answer. We introspect, we ruminate, we dig through childhood traumas. We consider what makes us happy now in hopes of predicting whether kids would make us happier or more miserable later. We assume the answer is there within us, a buried treasure waiting to be unearthed.

That’s understandable: Most advice for people considering parenthood encourages us to do just that. Countless articles, books, and yes, advice columns are premised on the idea that the answer exists as a stable fact within us. So is the parenthood ambivalence coach Ann Davidman’s online class, the “Motherhood Clarity™ Course” which opens with a mantra: “The answers will come because they never left … It’s all within me.”  

But there are a few problems with that approach. For one, you could spend your entire adult life auditing your soul for the answer and still end up looking like the shrug emoji. That’s because introspection is an unbounded search process: You’ve got no way to know when you’ve searched enough. 

Another problem is that this approach centers you and your desires too much. As you pointed out, bringing a kid into the world can’t only be about its costs and benefits for you.

Finally, you’re just not well-positioned to predict whether kids will make you happier or more miserable! As the philosopher L.A. Paul notes, you can’t quite know what it’ll be like to have a kid until you have one, and besides, the “you” might become transformed in the process, so that the things that make you happy now are not the same as the things that will make you happy as a parent.

So, what I suggest is a radically different approach: If you want to arrive at a decision, you have to go beyond your own interiority. You have to turn your gaze outward and ask yourself: What is it that you find awesome, thrilling, and intrinsically valuable about being in the world? 

I’m not asking because I think the key is deciding which values you want to transmit to your kid. Like you said, there’s no guarantee that your kid will embrace your values. Instead, I’m asking because this is the basis on which you can make a choice — not “find the answer” but make a choice — about whether to have kids.

Up until now, you’ve been thinking of the kids question as an epistemic one — you say you “don’t know how to know” — but I would think of it as an existential one instead. The existentialist philosophers argued that life doesn’t come with predefined meaning or fixed answers. Instead, each human has to choose how to create their own meaning. As the Spanish existentialist Jose Ortega y Gasset put it, the central task of being human is “autofabrication,” which literally means self-making. You come up with your own answer, and in so doing, you make yourself. 

A decade ago, just for fun, my friend Emily sat me down in a park and had me do an exercise that would turn out to be extremely impactful: It was, believe it or not, an online quiz. It listed dozens and dozens of different values — friendship, creativity, growth, and so on — and instructed me to select my top 10. Then it made me narrow it down to my top five. I found that brutally hard, but it was revealing. My number one value turned out to be what the quiz called, somewhat idiosyncratically, “delight of being, joy.”    

I return to that again and again (my mind preserves the punctuation, so I regularly find myself talking to people about “delight-of-being-comma-joy!”) when I have to make tough decisions. It captures a core fact about me: I love being alive in this world! Whenever I snorkel with impossibly colorful fish, or experience deep connection with another human being, or stare up at all the galaxies we’ve barely begun to understand, I feel so grateful that I get to participate in the grand mystery of being.

And that’s what made me decide I want to be a mom one day. Choosing to have a child feels like one of the biggest ways I can say YES to life, at a time when many doubt the worthiness of perpetuating human life on this planet. It’s a way to affirm that being alive in this world is a gift, one I want to pass along to others. 

So allow me to be your Emily. Let me present you with an inventory of values (one of many similar inventories available online) and urge you to select your top five. Then ask yourself: Would having a kid be a good way to enact my values — or is there another way to enact my values that feels more compelling to me? Which path is the best fit for you personally, given your specific talents and your physical and psychological needs?

This depends a lot on the individual. Imagine three women who all rank “personal growth” as their top value. They might still arrive at totally different conclusions about kids. For one woman, that value may feel like a great reason to have a kid, because she believes childrearing will help her grow as a person and that she’ll get to guide a new person in their development. The second woman might say her primary mode of growth is art-making, so she wants to focus on that while being an active auntie to her friends’ kids on the side. A third woman might feel that, for her, the most promising path is to become a nun. All three are completely valid!  

A lot of people struggling with parenthood ambivalence say they’re scared that if they don’t have a kid, they’ll miss out on something sui generis — a completely unique experience, a sort of love to which nothing else compares. It sounds like this FOMO is playing a role for you, too; you mentioned that you fear your life would be sad and depressing when you and your partner are 70 and childless. 

But there are plenty of parents who will tell you that, while they adore their kids, the kid-parent relationship is not magically more meaningful than anything else in their life. In the excellent new book What Are Children For? by Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman, the former writes: 

While the relationship between a parent and child is doubtless unique, what if I told you that, phenomenologically speaking, it is not really grand and tremendous? That it’s not even particularly extraordinary? … To love your child isn’t like nothing you’ve ever known. It isn’t unimaginable. If you have known love, you have also known it, or something like it … What is so special about this love isn’t how exotic, mysterious, or astounding it is but how simple and familiar.

So, if you just like the thought of having children because you want lovely people to spend time with when you’re old, try first experimenting with other ways to get that same need met. You might find that it’s not something that only a child can provide. As the author (and my friend) Rhaina Cohen documents beautifully in The Other Significant Others, some people find that deep friendships meet their need for connection perfectly well, with no child-shaped hole or partner-shaped hole left over. 

But even if you believe having a child is a sui generis experience, the point I would make is: Other things are too! An artist might tell you there’s nothing that compares to the creative thrill of painting. Someone involved in political work may tell you there’s nothing quite like the feeling of fighting for justice and winning. Lots of things in the world are unique and incommensurably good. 

So don’t be pushed around by societal narratives of what the ultimate good looks like. Let your choice flow from your own sense of what’s most valuable about human life. Whereas what makes you feel happy or miserable can change a lot over time, core values are relatively stable, so they form a more enduring basis for making major decisions. Yes, it’s conceivable that even those values might shift a little over the decades, but making a choice that flows from your values means you will at least be confident that you had a very solid reason for doing what you did — no matter how you end up feeling about it in the future. 

And as for the future? You really can’t control it. So, your goal is not to control every possible outcome. Your goal is to live in line with your values.

Bonus: What I’m reading

• Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, often called the “father of existentialism,” proposed the idea that life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. This week’s question prompted me to revisit that idea. 

• As I wrote this column, I went back and reread a great New Yorker article by Joshua Rothman about how we make major decisions. It discusses philosopher Agnes Callard’s idea that “we ‘aspire’ to self-transformation by trying on the values that we hope one day to possess.” In other words, you don’t decide you want to be a parent — you decide you want to be the sort of person who’d want to be a parent, and lean into that. I found the idea interesting but too complicated by half: Why would I ground this decision in values I hope to one day possess instead of grounding it in the values I already hold dear?

• Lots of people bring up climate change as a reason not to have kids. I think that’s misguided. Having a kid is one of the things that can push you to take heroic action on climate change — so I was interested in this piece in Noema Magazine, which argues that we need to evoke heroism, not hope, with regard to the climate — and finds a prime example of that in … JRR Tolkien.  

Chandana Witharanage posted a photo:

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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. 

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

For more than a century, the world has run on coal.

When Thomas Edison’s Pearl Street electrical station in Lower Manhattan fired up in 1882, it ran on coal. Coal survived the oil era, the nuclear era, the dash for natural gas, and decades of back-and-forth climate policy. From the 1970s through the mid-2010s, coal supplied somewhere between 35 and 40 percent of the planet’s electricity, a steady if sooty presence powering modern life.

Then last year, it lost the lead. According to Ember’s Global Electricity Review 2026, recently released in time for Earth Day, renewable sources produced 33.8 percent of the world’s electricity last year, compared to 33 percent for coal. It was the first time those two lines had crossed since 1919, when the global grid was still small enough to run mostly on hydropower.

As coal has declined — at least on a relative basis — the sun has risen. When the Paris climate agreement was signed in 2015, solar produced just 256 terawatt hours of electricity globally. Nuclear power plants, at the time, were pumping out about 10 times that, while wind was responsible for three times as much electricity as solar. 

A decade later, solar is producing 10 times more power: 2,778 TWh, roughly what the entire European Union consumes in a year. Its production has doubled in the past three years alone. For 21 years running, solar has been the fastest-growing source of electricity on the planet. In 2025 it surpassed wind for the first time, and is now on pace to pass nuclear this year.

While the world still burns a huge amount of coal — some 8.8 billion tonnes in 2024, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA) — solar alone covered 75 percent of the rise in global electricity demand. Put wind and solar together, and you’ve met 99 percent of it. Fossil fuel power generation — coal, oil, and gas combined — fell 0.2 percent in 2025, the first decline since the pandemic and only the fifth year this century that fossil generation didn’t rise. 

Clean sources are now growing fast enough, on their own, to absorb just about everything the world is adding to its grid. And there’s a decent chance that, thanks in part to what’s happening right now in the Middle East, that transition may speed up.

Why solar is no fluke

It all starts with cost.

Solar module prices have fallen roughly 75 percent every decade for more than 40 years, a pattern so durable it has its own name, Swanson’s law, the observation that the price tends to drop by 20 percent every time the total number of solar panels ever built doubles. This rule has held through supply gluts, trade wars, and pandemics. In the mid-1970s, a solar module cost more than $100 per watt. In late 2025, one panel cost about 10 cents per watt. No other major energy source in modern history has gotten that cheaper, that fast.

The oldest objection to solar — that it goes dark when the sun goes down — is becoming obsolete because we can increasingly store the daytime electricity solar units generate. Battery costs dropped 20 percent in 2024 and another 45 percent in 2025. Global battery deployment grew 46 percent last year, to 250 gigawatt-hours. Solar plants built with enough batteries to deliver power round the clock now sell electricity in the US for around $76 per megawatt hour, cheaper than building new natural gas capacity.

The China story

The world’s long-time manufacturing powerhouse — China — has made this shift possible. Chinese factories now make around 80 percent of the world’s solar panels and an even larger share of the polysilicon, wafers, and cells that feed into them, a dominance built over two decades of state-backed investment, enormous scale, and ferocious price competition. The result is the cheapest energy technology in human history, produced at a pace the rest of the world has not matched. 

Chinese dominance has also made clean power a geopolitical story: tariffs, trade disputes, arguments in Washington and Brussels about whether to build parallel supply chains. For the climate, though, the math is simple. Cheap panels built anywhere cut emissions everywhere.

The demand side has moved too. For most of the last two decades, the global coal story has been a Chinese story. When China’s electricity demand surged, so did coal. When it slackened, so did coal. That relationship cracked in 2025: China’s fossil generation fell 0.9 percent, its first decline since 2015, even as the country’s electricity demand rose 5 percent. India’s fossil fuel generation fell as well, by 3.3 percent, while its renewables grew 24 percent year over year. In both cases, new clean energy capacity outran new demand. Ember found that renewables in China now produce more electricity than every household and service-sector business in the country, combined.

Don’t get carried away — yet

A flat year for coal is not the same as a falling one. Power-sector emissions in 2025 were still close — within a rounding error — of 2024’s levels, which set a record high. In its report, Ember calls this moment “the era of clean growth,” which should be understood as the start of real decarbonization, rather than a final state of decarbonization.

Coal’s share is shrinking — from a peak of 41 percent of global generation in 2013 to 33 percent today — but the fleet itself isn’t going away. China approved more than 40 gigawatts of new coal capacity in just the first three quarters of 2025. Thanks to growth in renewables, these plants are increasingly becoming a backup source, rather than a primary one. But those plants exist, they burn coal when they run, and they’ll burn coal for years.

Then there is the US. The Trump administration’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act ended the residential solar tax credit in December and tightened eligibility for commercial projects. Rhodium Group, a research institute, projects the law will cut US clean-capacity additions through 2035 by more than half. America is in danger of getting left behind.

That sounds bad, and in the short run it is. But policy can slow a market; it has a harder time stopping one when the economics have already shifted. BloombergNEF reported that global energy-transition investment hit a record $2.3 trillion in 2025, up 8 percent from 2024. China alone put roughly $800 billion into clean energy last year; India’s clean-energy spending climbed 15 percent to about $68 billion; the EU has been accelerating renewables spending ever since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine cut its pipeline gas. Even if Washington slows down, the rest of the world is building solar farms and battery plants as fast as the supply chains allow. The US is trying to run against a market it no longer controls.

There is, however, the AI wild card. The IEA estimates global data-center electricity use rose 17 percent in 2025, with AI-specific demand growing faster. In the US, gas is currently the biggest single source of new data-center supply. Artificial intelligence is the one uncontrolled variable that could swamp clean-power gains in the back half of this decade.

Strait talk

The last big oil shock rewrote the global energy system. After the 1973 OPEC embargo, President Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House, founded the Solar Energy Research Institute in Golden, Colorado, and signed the country’s first appliance efficiency standards into law. Ronald Reagan undid much of that work, but the seed technologies — photovoltaic R&D, efficiency standards, CAFE rules for cars — kept developing in the background for decades.

This time, the shock is being felt by a system where clean alternatives are already the cheapest option in most places. The US-Iran war has led to the effective closure of the Strait of Hormuz, through which roughly a quarter of seaborne oil and a fifth of global LNG normally flow. The IEA called it the largest supply disruption in the history of the global oil market.

The response has been exactly what cheap clean power makes possible. In March, global solar generation grew 14 percent year over year and wind grew 8 percent; solar alone saved European buyers some $3.5 billion in gas costs for the month. Countries that might have responded to an oil crisis in 2006 by drilling faster are instead moving up construction for solar farms, offshore wind, and grid-scale storage. Where the 1970s planted seeds that took 40 years to sprout, 2026’s shock is meeting an industry already at commercial scale.

The climate case for clean power has always rested on a simple bet: that the technologies would keep getting cheaper faster than the politics got worse. Today, solar is the fastest-growing source of electricity in the history of electricity, while coal looks to be on a terminal decline. Batteries are starting to make it a 24-hour fuel. What comes next is a question of speed — and speed, mostly, is a question of choice.

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

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.

There are few animals humans fear more than sharks. This is understandable: Sharks are big, dramatic creatures that have been permanently lodged in our culture as underwater killers since Jaws.

They also kill about six people in a given year. Snakes, on the other hand, kill roughly 100,000. After mosquitoes, which spread diseases like malaria, and humans, who just murder each other, snakes are the deadliest animals on Earth.

The surprise isn’t just that snakes kill so many people, but that the scale of this death and suffering has only recently become clearer. In India, where roughly half of the world’s snakebite deaths happen, official reports had long recorded only about 1,000 snakebite deaths a year. But many victims die in villages, on farms, or on their way to hospitals, and until recently, India did not require snakebite cases or deaths to be systematically reported through its public health system. Researchers using household death surveys and verbal autopsies have more recently estimated that the real number is close to 60,000 a year in India alone.

That gap in data is a big part of the reason why snakebites are so deadly in the first place. Antivenoms exist, and modern antivenoms can work well when given in time. But snake venom differs from one snake species to the next. Different species carry different mixes of toxins that can attack the nervous system, muscles, or tissue in different ways. That means antivenoms often have to be matched to the various snakes found in a given region; an antivenom made for one set of snakes may do little against another. Antivenoms are also expensive to produce and buy, and hard to keep reliably stocked in the rural clinics where they’re needed most.

But medicine is only half the problem. Once a person gets bitten, they have to recognize the danger, reach a hospital or clinic in time, and that clinic has to have an appropriate antivenom in stock, often without anyone knowing exactly which snake bit them. The patient also has to be able to afford the treatment. In poor, rural communities, any of those steps can and often do fail.

And because the people most at risk are also among the least able to pay, there has never been much of a market for better snakebite treatments. In fact, in the last two decades, the market has gotten worse with some manufacturers leaving the field altogether.

But things are beginning to change. Scientists are now running human trials on snakebite treatments other than antivenom, including drugs that may not require cold storage or precise species matching. In February, the World Health Organization issued its first formal blueprint for what next-generation snakebite drugs should look like, including treatments that could be given to victims before they reach a hospital. And in 2024, after years of severe undercounting, India’s health ministry moved to make snakebite a notifiable disease, meaning every case and death has to be reported to public health authorities, and launched a national plan to bring those deaths down.

The field is “witnessing important developments (not sufficient, but important) on various fronts,” José María Gutiérrez, one of the field’s leading authorities on antivenom at the University of Costa Rica, wrote in an email. But whether any of this reaches the villages where most snakebite deaths happen is a separate question.

How the field got stuck

The basic technology behind antivenoms is more than a century old. In the 1890s, scientists figured out they could inject small amounts of snake venom into animals, usually horses and sheep, wait for their immune systems to produce antibodies, and then harvest those antibodies as treatments.

The manufacturing has gotten a lot more sophisticated since then. The basic animal-based method is still widely used, but modern antivenoms are more carefully purified, processed, and quality-controlled, making them far safer and more effective than earlier versions. But the underlying challenge is still the same. Antibodies have to be matched to specific toxins they are meant to neutralize, and making them at scale is still expensive.

This economic challenge of producing antivenom became most visible in 2014, when Sanofi, a French pharmaceutical company, stopped producing Fav-Afrique, a vital antivenom for sub-Saharan Africa that neutralizes venom from 10 of the most dangerous snakes in the region, because it wasn’t profitable enough. That breakdown was a clear illustration of the underlying problem: snakebite kills at an enormous scale, but mostly among people who have little purchasing power.

But things are beginning to look up. In 2019 the Wellcome Trust, a UK-based philanthropy, announced a roughly $100 million, seven-year program to bring snakebite treatment into the 21st century. A review commissioned by Wellcome found that global funding for snakebite research totaled just $57 million from 2007 to 2018, averaging less than $5 million a year.

The new commitment was the largest infusion of funding the field had ever seen, supporting both the search for new kinds of snakebite treatment and efforts to shore up existing antivenom supply. Some of that money went to Wales-based MicroPharm to restart production of Fav-Afrique, the antivenom Sanofi had abandoned.

The big shift now is that researchers are no longer just trying to make better antivenoms. They’re also trying to develop treatments that could get around some of  antivenom’s biggest limitations. And the WHO blueprint gives that shift a more concrete shape. It calls for two kinds of next-gen treatments: drugs that could help in hospitals, alongside or instead of antivenom, and simpler drugs that could be given soon after a bite.

The most advanced new candidate is called varespladib, a drug that can be given as a pill that blocks one of the most damaging families of enzymes in snake venom. In a phase 2 trial, it appeared safe but did not clearly outperform standard care. Researchers now see it more as a field aid. 

There are also efforts to repurpose other existing drugs and test them against snakebites, such as marimastat, a cancer drug, and DMPS, a drug used to treat heavy metal poisoning. Gutiérrez says these repurposed drugs are the most promising near-term options because researchers don’t have to start from zero. They have already been tested for other diseases, which means they can move into snakebite trials much faster than brand new drugs. Clinical trials of some of these repurposed drugs are now underway in the US, India, and Kenya. Further out, researchers are also working on new antibody therapies and AI-designed proteins targeted at specific snake toxins.

These drugs are not meant to replace antivenom, which remains quite effective when given in time. But they could finally move the field beyond where it has been stuck for decades.

The hard part

But the new excitement has yet to pay off. Tim Reed, who runs the Amsterdam-based NGO Health Action International, has long argued that snakebite researchers and funders have chased expensive scientific solutions while community needs go unmet. The pipeline looks promising, he said, but it has yet to bring anything to market. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of people have died from snakebite in recent years, and many more have been left with life-changing injuries, “with a disproportionate representation of children,” Reed said.

The new drugs may eventually arrive, but Reed worries that when they do, they may still be priced out of reach for rural patients. Even varespladib, which is cheaper to develop than antibody-based treatments, is being brought forward by a small biotech company that will eventually need to recoup its investment. Whether it will be affordable for a farmer in Bihar or western Kenya is separate from whether it works in trials, yet just as important.

Reed argues that the global snakebite world still underfunds the work that can help people now: prevention, first response, and community education. His organization has kept a small snakebite program going with its own funds, supporting school-based prevention work in Kenya and research in Rwanda. Its Women Champions of Snakebite network is still active, and it has helped launch a Snakebite Community Engagement Network run by people in the Global South. These programs are small, but they are built around the communities where snakebite actually happens.

A better snakebite response would have to do both things at once: Develop better drugs while also funding the community work that can prevent snakebites and deaths now. There’s been real progress, more so in some areas of concern than others, but, as Gutiérrez put it, “there is still a long road to go to give this problem the attention it deserves.” 

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!

Of all the hot-button social issues in America, there’s one that often flies under the radar but can unleash a torrent of strong feelings — swirling with apparent contradictions — when it surfaces: meat. 

Case in point: Last month, the popstar Billie Eilish argued that you can’t say you love animals and eat them. Her comments made sense, though they set off a heated, weeks-long debate among X and Instagram users, who responded with a flood of strange justifications for eating meat, despite the terrible treatment of farmed animals. 

The spat vividly illustrated a psychological phenomenon called the “meat paradox”: the cognitive dissonance and deep discomfort people feel when their behavior of eating meat and other animal products clashes with their fondness for animals.

This paradox has proved an exceedingly difficult hurdle to overcome in encouraging people to change how they eat — and even for having productive conversations about meat without things quickly getting heated (as they did for Eilish). But some research also suggests there are ways out of the meat paradox, which could help relieve the psychological strain for people, as well as the suffering of animals in factory farms. 

How we really feel about eating animals: It’s complicated

Two recent polls reveal just how confusing American attitudes about animal products are.    

The first of those polls asked close to 1,000 US adults for their views on several near-universal practices in animal farming, including stunning pigs unconscious in Co2 gas chambers before slaughter, grinding up newborn male chicks, separating calves on dairy farms from their mothers, and searing off the ends of hens’ beaks without pain relief. 

The vast majority of respondents to this survey, which was conducted by the animal welfare research group Faunalytics, consider these practices “somewhat unacceptable” or “very unacceptable.” 

A separate poll of more than 12,000 US adults, conducted by the Pew Research Center, asked respondents about whether they find a range of behaviors immoral. Those issues covered adultery, gambling, having an abortion, and eating meat. More than almost any other issue in the survey, respondents considered eating meat “not a moral issue.” It ranked as close to the most “morally acceptable” behavior offered, on par with using IVF.

These numbers seem to show just how deep in the meat paradox we are. And that doesn’t surprise Hank Rothgerber one bit. He’s a professor at Bellarmine University who studies the psychology of meat consumption. Rothgerber and other psychologists have conducted dozens of studies that have uncovered the cognitive dissonance people feel when confronted with the fact that their behavior — like eating meat — clashes with their beliefs, such as that animals shouldn’t be harmed.

One possible explanation for this disconnect, he told me, is simple ignorance.  

Most people, it seems, truly don’t know that the cruel practices asked about in these surveys are quite standard on US factory farms — and that nearly all animal products come from factory farms. And so, when people are asked if eating meat is morally wrong, “what’s being done to the animals is not coming to their mind,” Rothgerber said. 

But chalking it up to mere ignorance suggests that “if you just inform people, enlighten them, then everything will be okay, right?” he said. Not quite. “I think the deeper issue with it is that the ignorance is motivated — basically, willful ignorance. People don’t want to know.” 

Rothgerber and other psychology researchers consider willful ignorance, or avoidance, a strategy some people deploy to resolve their feelings of cognitive dissonance.

In a 2017 study, one-third of respondents chose to look at a blank screen instead of a picture showing pregnant pigs housed in tiny crates (a pervasive practice in factory farming), with some participants explaining their choice as wanting to avoid feelings of guilt. In another study, some people said that learning about pig farming could contradict their views on animal welfare or force them to change their meat consumption.

There are several other strategies people use to alleviate the discomfort of living with the meat paradox. One is lowering the moral status of animals. In a clever 2010 study, participants were randomly given either cashews or beef jerky to snack on while filling out a short questionnaire about what they thought of the snacks. Then, the researchers asked a number of follow-up questions, including how much moral consideration cows deserve.

Participants who had been randomly assigned to eat the beef jerky, “viewed the cow as significantly less deserving of moral concern” and with a lower capacity to suffer than did participants who ate the cashews, the researchers reported. This experiment suggested that rather than people’s thoughts and values driving their actions, it might often be reversed.

Researchers have also found that some people work to dissociate meat from its animal origins, or actively try not to think of animals when eating meat. Others try to neutralize their discomfort via ideas that either avoid the problem of animal suffering or absolve them of their complicity, for example, asserting that eating meat is their right, that they only eat free-range meat, or that they hardly eat any meat at all.

The meat paradox puts animal advocates in an extremely difficult position. No one seems to like the cruelty involved in meat, milk, and egg production, yet they like what it produces: cheap animal products. A lot of people feel guilty about what it takes to produce those items, but respond with defensiveness, evasion, or arguments that don’t stand up to scrutiny when asked to consider not consuming them.

This has led some academics to consider the problem of factory farming and animal welfare a “wicked problem,” what’s been defined as “a complex, multifaceted issue that lacks a single, definitive solution due to the interconnectedness of its components.” Other such wicked problems include climate change, economic inequality, and global health. And many, many tactics to reduce global meat consumption have failed to move the needle. But a few, backed by new research and results, could work.

How to escape the meat paradox

One way to address the meat paradox is to accept its durability and try to work around it by changing conditions on farms, rather than trying to persuade people to eat less meat. 

For example, a lot of anti-factory farming activists work to make meat and eggs less cruel by lobbying for corporations and governments to ban the very worst farming practices. This has proven quite effective. For example, almost half of the US egg supply now comes from cage-free farms as a result of a number of state laws and corporate animal welfare policies.

Such bans don’t result in humane conditions, but they’re certainly an improvement. And the fact that most people support these measures when they can vote on them shows how we’re much more open to changes in animal welfare when we’re acting as voters instead of consumers.

This approach has its limits, though, because there are dozens of cruel practices to potentially ban in meat, milk, and egg production, and the companies that make up these industries lobby aggressively against such measures, making them difficult to change.  

But outside of avoiding the meat paradox altogether, there are two promising approaches to helping people change their behaviors and are far less likely to cause them to put up defenses. The first involves changing people’s food environments, such as making plant-based meals the default main dish at university and hospital cafeterias (as opposed to merely an option off to the side), making plant-based milk the default milk at coffee shops (so you have to request cow’s milk if you want it), or working to make plant-based meat and milk products taste better and cost less. 

Some research suggests that gently confronting people about animal welfare as they decide what to eat can also be effective. For example, a 2022 study conducted at a Dutch zoo’s cafeteria found that posting the question “Do you consider animal welfare to be important?” above a veggie burger menu item doubled its sales.

In a new study conducted at a university cafeteria in the UK, researchers put a photo of an animal next to a menu item that used their meat — pigs, chickens, fish, and cows — and the odds of diners instead choosing a vegetarian meal increased. 

“Linking meat to its animal source can produce measurable behavioral changes,” the researchers wrote. In other words, this short circuits the meat paradox by making it all but impossible to dissociate meat from animals. Small nudges like this may seem to produce small results. The group that was exposed to menus with pictures of animals ate 3.2 percent less meat. A modest effect, but scaled up by cafeteria directors and restaurant owners across the globe, that one change alone could prevent billions of animals from being factory-farmed for meat. 

The second approach involves deeply engaging with people on the issue. Three interventions that have proven effective in getting people to reduce their meat consumption, at least in the short term, include watching a segment from the animal rights documentary Dominion, wearing a VR headset that puts people inside a pig factory farm, and taking a course on the ethics of eating meat. But such involved interventions would be difficult to roll out on a mass scale. 

Many animal advocates have also written about how to better approach these charged issues so as to have more productive and healthy conversations. One of them is Björn Ólafsson, who recently wrote about the Billie Eilish dustup and included a counterintuitive recommendation: When all else fails, change what you’re asking of people. For example, instead of trying to persuade someone to eat less meat who really doesn’t want to, that person could help instead by making a donation to the very underfunded anti-factory farming movement. 

It’ll take a lot more clever interventions and tactics like these — and people willing to implement them — as well as more robust government and corporate policies to make factory farming a thing of the past. But, along the way, more of us might find our way out of the uncomfortable meat paradox — for good. 

The first observance of what came to be known as Memorial Day was on May 30, 1868, when a Civil War general called on Americans to commemorate the sacrifices of Union soldiers. It was initially called Decoration Day, for the practice of decorating graves with wreaths and flags. And there were so many graves — more than 300,000 men had died on the Union side, and nearly as many for the Confederacy. In total, more died on both sides of the Civil War than in every other US conflict through the Korean War, combined.  

It wasn’t long, though, before remembrance began to be overshadowed by celebration. Within a year, the New York Times opined the holiday would no longer be “sacred” if parades and speeches became more central than the act of memorializing the dead. Which is precisely what happened, especially after Congress in 1971 fixed Memorial Day as the last Monday in May, making it the perfect launchpad for summer, with an increasingly perfunctory nod to the holiday’s original purpose.

The gap between those for whom Memorial Day is a moment of remembrance versus three days of hot dogs and hamburgers will likely only grow in the future, as veterans of previous wars pass away and the divide between America’s all-volunteer military and its civilians deepens. Fewer than 1 percent of the US adult population serves in the military, and those still signing up increasingly come from a small handful of regions and families with a history of military service. (You can include my own family in that ever rarer number: My brother is a retired Army captain who served in Iraq.)

With ever-inflating military spending — just over $1 trillion, according to one estimate — the footprint of the US military is hardly shrinking, but the number of those who will potentially be called on to give what Abraham Lincoln called the “last full measure of devotion” is.

Yet there’s a greater gap embedded in Memorial Day: It’s between those who died as warfighters (to use one of the Pentagon’s terms), and the far greater number around the world who have died not as war’s participants, but as its victims. 

And this year, the gap hits differently. Memorial Day 2026 falls even as the United States is still enmeshed in a war it helped start. The conflict with Iran has killed thousands of people across the region in less than two months of fighting. The Human Rights Activists News Agency documented at least 1,701 Iranian civilian deaths, the majority of them caused by US and Israeli airstrikes.

On the war’s first day, a US Tomahawk missile strike on the Shajareh Tayyebeh elementary school in Iran’s Hormozgan province killed 156 people, including 120 students and 26 teachers, according to the preliminary findings of an investigation. More than 3,000 civilians died in neighboring Lebanon over the same period. Among the casualties across the Gulf were migrant delivery workers killed by debris from intercepted Iranian missiles.

At least 13 American service members have been killed so far during the war. They will be remembered this Memorial Day. The Iranian schoolchildren will not.

When civilians die in war

The past is not just a foreign country to us, but a bloody one. From the interpersonal to the international, conflict was a constant throughout much of human history. Between 1500 and 1800, there was hardly a year when great powers weren’t enmeshed in some kind of war. 

Though war became somewhat less common as we entered the 1900s, it did not become less deadly. Far from it — while the death toll of war in the past was more chiefly concentrated among combatants, the 20th century saw the awful blossoming of total war, where little to no distinction was made between those fighting the war and the civilians on the sidelines, and new weapons enabled mass, indiscriminate killing.

Go back to the Civil War, which sits at the junction between battle as it had long been practiced and the greater horror it would become. Over 600,000 soldiers were killed in the conflict, against at least 50,000 civilians, ranging from those killed directly to the many who died in the wake of war, from starvation and disease. 

That number was terrible, yet in the wars to come, it would only grow.

In the First World War, a roughly equal number of combatants and civilians were killed globally — approximately 10 million on each side. In the Second World War, more combatants were killed than in any other conflict in human history, a toll nearing 15 million. Yet for every soldier, sailor, or airman who was killed, nearly one and a half civilians would die, totaling, by one count, almost 40 million. 

The last of the dead would come in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when as many as 210,000 people — nearly all of them Japanese civilians — died in the first and so far only atomic bombings. Not only were these new weapons capable of murdering at a vastly larger scale than ever before, but they existed chiefly to threaten the lives of noncombatants. 

Thankfully, given the weapons militaries now had at their disposal, World War II was the high mark for war deaths. In the decades that followed, deaths in battle for both combatants and civilians sharply declined, minus the occasional spike in conflicts like the Korean and Vietnam wars. Even with the recent resurgence of conflict, people around the world today are much less likely to die in war than their ancestors, which is one of the most undeniable — if tenuous — markers of our species’ under-appreciated progress.

Yet even in this era of comparative peace, civilians still bear the brunt of war when it comes, including when it is fought by the United States. According to Brown University’s Costs of War project, more civilians were likely directly killed in post-9/11 conflicts than fighters on either side — and when the number of indirect deaths from starvation and destruction are included, that gulf only widens. 

In Ukraine, at least 12,910 civilians have been killed in the war as of March 31, including nearly 700 children, while nearly 31,000 civilians have been injured. In a single large-scale Russian missile attack on April 24, at least nine civilians were killed and 90 were injured, including 12 children.

In Ukraine, the UN has now verified at least 15,850 civilian deaths, including 791 children, since Russia’s 2022 invasion. The first four months of 2026 saw more civilians killed in Ukraine than the same period in any of the past three years, and April alone recorded the highest monthly toll since July 2025: 238 killed and 1,404 injured, with Russian missiles and drones doing most of the damage in cities far from the front.

In Gaza, the documented death toll has climbed past 72,000 according to the Gaza Health Ministry, with more than 172,000 wounded. A population-representative survey published in The Lancet earlier this year validated the ministry’s methodology and estimated that 3 to 4 percent of Gaza’s prewar population has now been killed violently. Add in indirect deaths from starvation, disease, and the collapse of medical infrastructure, and some estimates exceed 100,000. Of course, Israel itself has lost over 1,000 civilians in the October 7 attacks and in the fighting that has followed.

And the ongoing war in Sudan — which has received only a fraction of the global attention of Ukraine and Gaza — has led to horrifying levels of civilian death. Last year Tom Perriello, then the US envoy for Sudan, estimated that at least 150,000 people had died of war-related causes, while 13 million people have been forced to flee their homes.

And the war in Sudan, which has received only a fraction of the global attention of Ukraine and Gaza, has now entered its fourth year, with around 9 million Sudanese still displaced from their homes. Estimates of war-related deaths range from 150,000 to 400,000, and the UN now reports that drone strikes have become the leading cause of civilian death in the conflict, accounting for more than 80 percent of civilian fatalities in the first four months of 2026.

A new kind of Memorial Day

The United States has its Memorial Day to honor fallen soldiers, while other countries have their Remembrance Day, their Victory Day. Yet there are only a handful of monuments to honor the countlessly greater number of civilians killed in war.

It’s not hard to imagine why. As the shift in perception around the Vietnam Veterans Memorial has shown — from unpatriotic atrocity to a celebrated work of national mourning — we can honor the sacrifice of service members who died in a war, even if we don’t believe in the war. But the death of those who died without a rifle in hand, who died in childhood and infancy, who died because they could not fight and could not be protected, shows war for what it ultimately is: a waste. And we can’t begin to know how to mark the unmarked.

America has been a historical exception in many ways, but perhaps no more so than that its civilian citizens have largely escaped the scourge of war. (Though the same, of course, can hardly be said for its Indigenous populations, so long treated as enemy combatants in their own land.) Americans have fought and Americans have died, but at an ever-increasing remove, a distance that grows with each Memorial Day. 

The general decline of war is one of our great accomplishments as humans, something to be unequivocally celebrated. Perhaps we would feel that more if we gave the deaths of civilians the same honor as that of soldiers — a new kind of Memorial Day that can begin here.

 A version of this story was initially published in the Future Perfect newsletter. Sign up here to subscribe!

Update, May 25, 2026, 8 am ET: This story was originally published on May 31, 2023, has been updated to include new data on civilian deaths in Gaza, Iran, Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, and Ukraine, among other countries.

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!

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. Here’s this week’s question from a reader, condensed and edited for clarity:

Spring is here, which means the pests are back. My parents’ house has an ant problem. I found weevils in my pantry, and I know people with wasp infestations in their places. Tick season has begun, and last year’s bedbug scare was legitimately traumatic. I don’t like killing insects, but if they’re in my space uninvited and I can’t just take them outside and easily prevent them from coming back, I’ll do it.

But I do feel bad about doing it, even sparingly. I think it’s plausible that insects feel pain, so I try to make it quick, yet I’m still making the choice to kill them and it’s not one I’m proud of. I think that pests, like all living things, have some moral weight — but there’s not room enough for the two of us. Is it bad to kill them? Is there a more ethical way to approach this?

Dear Bugging Out,

I love that you’re sensitive to the potential suffering of Earth’s teeny-tiny, creepy-crawly creatures. I hope you never lose that. But I do hope you lose the guilt you’re feeling.

You’re right to think it’s plausible that insects feel pain. We don’t know for sure yet, but in recent years, scientists have been accumulating evidence that suggests at least some insects possess sentience — the capacity to have conscious experiences that are valenced, meaning they feel bad (pain) or good (pleasure). 

Bees, for example, appear to play — just for fun. They also actively seek out mind-altering drugs like nicotine and caffeine, which suggests there may be a mind there to alter. Plus, bees seem to experience pain consciously, not merely flinch from it by reflex. In a 2022 study, bees approached a sugary snack even though it meant facing uncomfortable heat, weighing costs against benefits in what scientists call a “motivational trade-off.” A pure automaton couldn’t do that; it would flee heat in every situation. The capacity to weigh competing drives is one of the markers of sentience.

Meanwhile, fruit flies have shown signs of anhedonia — the loss of interest in previously pleasurable things (like food) that we know as a symptom of depression in humans. Treat the flies with a human antidepressant and it’ll suppress the depression-like state in the insects, too. 

One of my colleagues confessed to me recently that evidence like this makes her feel super guilty: When she goes around killing these insects in her kitchen, she asks herself whether she’s “a fruit-fly Nazi.”

But the key thing to realize is this: Bugs may have some kind of sentience, and sentience may confer some moral status, but that doesn’t mean that provides the last word on how we should act toward them. 

Just because another creature might have moral weight, that doesn’t necessarily tell you how to treat that creature when its welfare conflicts with the welfare of a creature you know has moral weight: you.  

So, how can you know if or when it’s okay to kill a bug? 

I think the most compelling response comes from Elizabeth Anderson, a contemporary philosopher who subscribes to the school of thought known as pragmatism, which sees moral truths as socially embedded and historically contingent, not fixed and objective.

Anderson points out that for most of human history, we couldn’t have survived and thrived without killing or exploiting animals for food, transportation, and their energy. The social conditions for granting animals moral rights didn’t really exist on a mass scale until recently (although some non-Western societies have long ascribed moral worth to animals).

“The possibility of moralizing our relations to animals,” she writes, “has come to us only lately, and even then not to us all, and not with respect to all animal species.”

Anderson has noted that we feel different levels of moral obligation to different species, and that has to do not only with their intrinsic capacities like intelligence or sentience, but also with their relationships to us. It matters whether we’ve made them dependent on us by domesticating them, or whether they live in the wild. It also matters whether they’re fundamentally hostile to us.

Thinking about pests is a great (if gross) way to bring this point home. If you find bedbugs in your house, nobody expects you to say, “Well, they’re maybe sentient and definitely alive, so they have moral value. I’ll just live and let live!” It is absolutely expected that you will exterminate the shit out of them.

Why? Because with pests, Anderson writes, “there is no possibility of communication, much less compromise. We are in a permanent state of war with them, without possibility of negotiating for peace…Indeed, we have an obligation to our fellow members of society (whether human or animal) to drive them out, whenever this is necessary to protect ourselves.”

Anderson’s point is not that sentience doesn’t matter. It’s that lots of other things matter, too, including our own ability to thrive.

Embracing this value pluralism makes things tricky. It suggests that the best we can do is look at creatures’ intelligence and sentience and relationships to us as clues about how we should negotiate life with (or without) them. But it doesn’t tell us how to weigh those clues — and what to do when they conflict with the interests of other animals, including us.

“There’s no simple formula,” Anderson once told me. “I think that’s a hopeless quest.”

That is, for my money, the most intellectually honest position. The absence of a fixed formula doesn’t mean you should exist in a state of guilty indecision or paralysis. Instead, the best thing you can do is have the integrity to recognize that sometimes life presents you with trade-offs where you have to make a choice. And when it comes to insects, you’re making that choice from a position of considerable power. 

This is the conclusion Robin Wall Kimmerer reaches in her book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants. The scientist describes how she had an algae-filled pond in her yard that she wanted to clear out so her daughters could swim in it. As a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, though, she believes that all life has moral worth. So as she raked out the muck and found that it was full of tadpoles, she plucked them all out so they could go on living. Then she inspected the pond water under her microscope and saw a ton of teensy organisms, each one a moral dilemma. She writes:

As I raked and plucked, it challenged my conviction that all lives are valuable, protozoan or not. As a theoretical matter, I hold this to be true, but on a practical level it gets murky, the spiritual and the pragmatic bumping heads. With every rake I knew that I was prioritizing. Short, single-cell lives were ended because I wanted a clear pond. I’m bigger, I have a rake, so I win. That’s not a worldview I readily endorse.

But it didn’t keep me awake at night, or halt my efforts; I simply acknowledged the choices I was making. The best I could do was to be respectful and not let the small lives go to waste. I plucked out whatever wee beasties I could and the rest went into the compost pile, to start the cycle again as soil.

In a way, it’s an unsatisfying solution — a lot of us would probably sleep easier if nature came inscribed with clear bright lines and moral instructions. But there you have it. Like Kimmerer, I think you should practice a kind of harm reduction. To the extent that you can “live and let live” with insects, that’s ideal. Try to minimize how many you kill. But when you do make the choice to kill them, try to do it in a way that reduces the risk of suffering (think: quick and painless crushing rather than long and drawn-out poisoning).

That’s not only for the bug’s benefit, but for yours, too. Harming any animal can harm our character if we do it mindlessly or callously, because it desensitizes us to life. But when we let ourselves be touched by life, we can maintain our reverence for it. The reverence — not the guilt — is the thing you want to hold onto. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• This piece on “What It’s Like To Be a Worm” taught me that Darwin was obsessed with…worm sentience! He even argued that earthworms are capable of motivational trade-offs: “Their sexual passion is strong enough to overcome for a time their dread of light…and we have seen that when their attention is engaged, they neglect impressions to which they would otherwise have attended; and attention indicates the presence of a mind of some kind.”
  
• This Aeon essay about the history of eugenics is absolutely fascinating. It reveals that some disabled people actually supported eugenics in the 1930s, seeking out sterilization for themselves. I think internalized ableist logic had a whole lot to do with this.
  
• I loved psychologist David DeSteno’s recent piece, “Anthropic Wants Claude to Be Moral. Is Religion Really the Answer?” If you ask me, we keep making the Enlightenment-era mistake of thinking morality is primarily undergirded by rationality. But if it’s undergirded by emotion, it’s a fundamentally embodied human pursuit and the desire to mathematize it is itself irrational.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get access to member-exclusive stories every month, become a Vox Member today.

The story of global health over the last few centuries has generally been one of great progress — vastly longer lifespans, far fewer women dying in childbirth, many fewer children dying from miserable diseases like measles and smallpox. But there is one often overlooked feature of modernity that has brought a new and enormous degree of mortality and injury to everyday life, a risk that falls most heavily on the world’s poorest people. It kills about as many people as the world’s deadliest infectious disease — tuberculosis — and it’s the leading cause of death globally for people in the prime of their lives, aged 5 to 29. It is one of the defining technologies of modern life, one of the 20th century’s most dangerous gifts: the car. 

Around 1.19 million people globally are killed by road crashes every year, according to estimates from the World Health Organization (some estimates put the number higher), and many times more — likely between 20 and 50 million — are injured, sometimes leaving them with life-altering disabilities. More than 90 percent of those deaths occur in low- and middle-income nations, although these countries contain only around 60 percent of the world’s cars. 

This century, humanity has halved the mortality rate for children under five and reduced AIDS-related deaths from their peak by 70 percent. But the number of people killed by cars has remained roughly the same for the last 20 years. As motor vehicles spread around the world — the total fleet has doubled over the past 20 years — the burden of those deaths has shifted increasingly to lower-income countries. Despite all the progress we’ve made against ancient natural killers, we’re making little against a killer we engineered ourselves. 

That’s not for a lack of known solutions, but rather because there’s been comparatively little attention paid to car crash deaths as a real global health issue until relatively recently. Unlike deadly maladies that are purely bad, cars do add value to society. Perhaps as a result, even though wealthy countries have brought down per capita road fatalities over the course of decades, deaths by car have still often tended to be discounted by policymakers and the general public as the price of progress and economic growth. It’s “one of the few public health problems where society and decision makers still accept death and disability on such a large scale as inevitable,” the late Dinesh Mohan of the Indian Institute of Technology wrote in 2019. 

“You can become very depressed,” James Leather, director of transport at the Asian Development Bank, told me in a recent conversation at the International Transport Forum summit (an event sometimes called the Davos of transportation). “Why is no one taking this seriously?” 

Of course, it’s not that literally no one is taking it seriously, but rather that cars have long been an underrated threat to human well-being. But that is, perhaps, slowly beginning to change. 

Why cars kill so many people in countries with so few of them

I am sometimes known as a bit of a car hater, devoting a lot of my consciousness to thinking about how the United States got locked into car dependence. Our car-oriented development pattern is part of the reason the US has one of the highest road fatality rates of any wealthy country. (But, listen, I own a car too, and benefit greatly from it! I am American, after all.) 

US car fatality rates may be an outlier by wealthy-country standards, but most low- and middle-income nations face far greater risk. Haitians and Ethiopians are more than three times more likely to be killed by a car than an American; Kenyans, Bolivians, and Thais are more than twice as likely. 

That alone is worth dwelling on. If you live in the US, consider that you probably know at least several people who’ve been killed in a car crash or who have loved ones who have, and that this proximity to sudden, violent loss is felt even more acutely in most of the world. Road deaths account for around 1 percent of all deaths in the US; globally, that figure is about 2 percent, and in a typical middle-income country like Vietnam, it is more than 3 percent. 

That might sound a bit surprising — and feels all the more unfair — in light of the fact that poorer nations do not have anywhere close to as many cars as wealthy ones do, and their residents travel fewer miles by car than people in rich countries do. If cars kill so many Americans because we simply drive so much, in the developing world, the problem is almost the inverse: A minority of people who can afford it ride in private cars, while everyone else walks, bikes, or rides a motorcycle, scooter, or three-wheeled vehicle like an auto rickshaw. And those outside of an automobile — known as “vulnerable road users” — often share space in the road with cars and are at high risk of being hit. 

Cars themselves in developing nations are often more dangerous for their occupants than vehicles in rich countries are, too. Weaker car safety standards and a reliance on imported old cars mean that people sometimes travel in vehicles that lack safety features long taken for granted in rich countries, including airbags and frames designed to absorb the force from a crash. 

Amid all this, cars and other motorized vehicles are spreading rapidly in the Global South — much more quickly than that transition took place in North America and Europe — and doing so before governments have built safer roads, vehicle standards, adequate trauma care, or robust traffic regulations. Many nations lack comprehensive laws governing what the WHO considers the five key behaviors that shape road fatalities: high speeds, drunk driving, seatbelt use, helmet use for motorcyclists, and child restraints in cars.  

In Southeast Asian countries, which have seen a massive proliferation of motorized vehicles since 2010, “maybe the infrastructure was designed when you didn’t have so many cars, and now all of a sudden you have twice the number of cars that you did before,” Nhan Tran, the WHO’s head of violence and injury prevention, told me. Road crashes are a major burden on the medical systems of these countries and exact staggering economic costs, amounting to about 5 percent of national GDP in Vietnam, for example. 

Meanwhile, as the total number of global road fatalities has stayed roughly constant for the last few decades, the gap between poor and rich countries has widened. Between 2010 and 2021, high-income countries, particularly those in Europe, saw dramatic decreases in car crash deaths, while deaths in the vast majority of low-income nations (which are predominantly in sub-Saharan Africa) increased, according to the WHO’s most recent report on global road safety. Across lower-middle-income nations, like India, the aggregate number of deaths and the per capita fatality rate stayed roughly flat. 

I asked Leather whether there was an easy, no-brainer intervention that could make a big dent in these deaths. He pointed, among other things, to helmets — in the Philippines, where he lives, national law now requires that helmets be made available with every new motorcycle purchase, though for that to work, people of course actually have to use them.

“If you go to New Delhi today, nearly every motorcycle rider wears a certified full-faced helmet. This was achieved through strong enforcement,” Kavi Bhalla, a professor at the University of Chicago’s Department of Public Health Sciences and an expert on global road safety, told me in an email. “In contrast, most other cities in India don’t enforce the helmet law, have very low helmet use, and this leads to many unnecessary deaths.”  

Poor countries don’t need to wait their turn for safer roads

Twenty years ago, two US economists published what became one of the most influential papers in the field of global road safety, on the relationship between a nation’s wealth and its traffic fatality rate. As countries get richer, they argued, motor vehicle ownership rises, and per capita car deaths rise in tandem. Eventually, as countries become wealthier — and as safer roads, vehicles, and traffic policies catch up with motorization — fatality rates start to fall, as they did across much of the industrialized world beginning in the early 1970s. That tipping point, the authors found, comes at around $8,600 (in 1985 international dollars) of per capita GDP. 

But this “economic determinism,” as Bhalla has described it, might be the wrong way of looking at the problem. It contributes to a sense that traffic carnage is inevitable until a nation becomes rich. But we would never argue that maternal mortality or malaria deaths can’t be significantly mitigated in low-income countries; in fact, we already know they have been. Although Europe, the US, and other high-income nations have steadily reduced car death rates over the last 60 years, Bhalla told me “it is a mistake to think that this has much to do with these countries being rich.”

Instead, “safety improved in these countries once they established national road safety agencies, gave them the authority to regulate what happens on the roads, and gave them a dedicated funding stream,” he wrote to me. “These agencies did what you would expect agencies to do. They identified the most common traffic safety risks in the countries, undertook investigations on how best to address these, and then made investments for large scale interventions focused on safer designs of cars and roads, coordinated enforcement programs, and emergency medical systems. Low and middle income countries can and should do this now.”

The WHO and other global organizations, along with some philanthropies, have been working to speed along such work over the last few decades, but the results have so far been somewhat underwhelming. The United Nations had aimed to halve global road deaths from the baseline of roughly 1.2 million by 2020, a goal we didn’t come anywhere close to reaching. On the other hand, world population has greatly increased in the last few decades, so holding the absolute number of traffic deaths constant is still a meaningful achievement: From 2010 to 2021, the global per capita road fatality rate decreased by about 16 percent. And in that period, Tran said, road safety has at least gained a lot more visibility among political leaders and civil society as a badly neglected public health crisis. 

Having missed the 2020 target, the UN now aims to halve road deaths by 2030. But we will “definitely not” meet that goal either, Bhalla told me. 

A core reason the global road fatality crisis has been so maddeningly obstinate is that the root of the problem is complicated, contested, and depends on one’s perspective. “It’s not the same as when you’re talking about Covid or HIV, where there is a virus” that we want to eradicate, said Tran. “When you talk about road safety, what is the virus?” Is it dangerous individual behaviors — speeding, drunk driving, refusing to wear a seatbelt? Is it deteriorating roads or a lack of sidewalks? Is it humanity’s growing dependence on cars themselves? 

Tran, like many road safety advocates today, calls for an approach that focuses on the most upstream cause of car fatalities — the proliferation of cars — and champions good urban planning designed to prioritize transit, walking, and cycling over the movement of cars. That would make safety an inherent feature of the transportation network and obviate the need for what Tran calls “quick fixes” to poorly designed systems.

WHO director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus echoed that message in the agency’s 2023 road safety report: “As motor vehicles proliferate, countries are doubling down on transport systems built for cars, not people, and not with safety at their core,” he wrote. 

There’s a lot of wisdom to this, as the American experience over the last century well shows. The US experiment in car dependence has burdened us with a road fatality rate that rivals nations much poorer than us. Urban planners now widely agree that that car-dependent paradigm was a mistake, but now that it’s built out, it’s hard to claw our way out of.

But that lesson also requires some humility: Even a car hater like me can acknowledge that for many people in poorer nations, automobility offers a measure of freedom that rich countries have taken for granted for many years. And it would be a mistake to see simple interventions that can save tens of thousands of lives, and that were instrumental in bringing down car fatalities in rich countries, as mere Band-Aids. We need both approaches. Just as humans did with once-devastating infectious diseases, we will have to learn to see a person killed for simply trying to get somewhere not as a tragic act of God, but as the result of forces within our control.