Science | The Atlantic

When Anesthesia Goes Wrong

2026-10-05T07:30:00-04:00

Photographs by Julia Sellmann

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When Freddy Marquez was 12, he was hit by a motorcycle while biking and smashed his face into the pavement. He healed fast, but as adolescence reshaped his boyish features, the scar started to tug on his upper lip, leaving his mouth ajar. “Mom,” he said, “I’m going to high school. I don’t want to look like this.” So in September 2024, his parents found a surgeon in central Florida, where they live, to do a scar revision.

On the morning of his surgery, Freddy went into the operating room around 9. His mom, Joana Jardin, settled into a waiting-room chair, expecting to drive him home in a few hours. Noon came, then 1 o’clock, then 2, then 3. “Where is my son?” Joana began to ask. “Where is my son?” The staff couldn’t tell her anything, except that she had to wait. She watched as other parents picked up their kids from surgery and left. At 4 o’clock, she realized she was the only one in the waiting room.

When Joana finally got to see Freddy, around 5, he was barely conscious. His eyes were closed, his breaths shallow. He was just sleepy, a nurse reassured her, because he’d gotten Benadryl after a hive-like rash broke out—but not to worry, the monitors tracking his vitals showed nothing else awry. Eventually, Freddy managed to slump into a wheelchair, his eyes still closed. He was sent home.

The next day, Freddy woke up. Then he threw up. He was still drowsy and now irritable. His head hurt. Joana took him to urgent care and later to the ER, where doctors who evaluated him figured he was just recovering from surgery. But in the coming days, his symptoms became stranger and more disturbing. Freddy started losing control of the muscles in his face. He developed tremors. He choked on his saliva. He lost his balance. He felt what he could only describe as electricity coursing through his brain. “Please, Dad, pray for me,” he would cry when the “electricity” struck.

At the hospital where Freddy was finally admitted, doctors ordered two separate MRIs of his brain, and, to keep him still during the scans, they put him under anesthesia. Both times, he took hours to regain consciousness. Both times, he emerged worse than before.

Freddy lost the ability to walk. His body spasmed and twitched as his muscles took on a life of their own. When Joana saw her son in the hospital bed—eyes staring at the ceiling, limbs flailing wildly—she remembers thinking this is how people once believed you could be “possessed by a demon.”

The scans found spots of white in Freddy’s brain—signs of dying and dead neurons—but no explanation as to what had caused them. In the coming weeks, he got better and then worse, worse enough that doctors ordered yet another MRI. His parents begged the hospital not to use anesthesia again. Don’t worry, Joana remembers being told; the doctors can do it safely. They do it all the time. Joana felt that she had no choice but to trust them. As Freddy slid into unconsciousness, she once again started ticking off the hours waiting for him to wake up: 1 p.m., 2, 3, 4. “Where is my son?”

Freddy never woke up. His body went into cardiac arrest, then respiratory failure. He died on December 29, 2024, at age 14.

Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic

Photographs of Freddy Marquez, who died at 14, shortly after routine surgery under anesthesia

Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic

Freddy’s mother, Joana Jardin

Before that final MRI, in one of their last conversations, Freddy had blurted in a half plea, half accusation, “You don’t understand what is happening to me, Mommy.” He was old enough, by then, to have lost faith in his parents’ omniscience but young enough to still yearn for it. His ordeal had revealed to him that the adult world is riddled with unknowns; that the assurances of even doctors in white coats can mean very little. “I promise that I’m going to understand. Until my last breath,” his mother told him. “I’m going to understand.”

And she would, eventually. Joana did not know it then, but Freddy’s death would be linked to dozens of cases of unexplained catastrophic brain damage after routine anesthesia, all in children or young adults. Several, like Freddy, died. Others became permanently disabled.

The mystery of why Freddy died would ultimately collide with one of the greatest unsolved mysteries of medicine: How does anesthesia work in the first place? How is it that anesthesiologists can induce a state that some have called “functionally equivalent to brainstem death”—only to reverse it? This process happens 60,000 times a day in operating rooms across the United States. Yet it remains poorly understood. What happened inside Freddy’s brain, some researchers now think, may be an extreme version of what happens inside any of our brains when we slip into unconsciousness under anesthesia.

This past May, in Germany, I watched a doctor give a talk to her colleagues about two eerily similar cases almost two decades apart. One was Freddy’s. The other was that of a boy in Germany who went under anesthesia for a broken arm in 2006. Like Freddy, Ulrich “Uli” Gabriel Gobin Hernández was 14. Like Freddy, he took hours to wake up and then gradually lost control of his muscles. But unlike Freddy, Uli survived. The woman giving the talk was not Uli’s doctor. She was his mother.

Yaremy Hernández Castillo, who is soft-spoken and modest to a fault, wore a white coat with sensible sneakers as she flicked through slides of her son’s brain scans. Most of her colleagues at the cardiac-rehab hospital where she worked had no idea that she’d spent the past 20 years—outside her job as an internist—trying to decipher his condition. Early on, she had intuited that what happened to her son could be explained only by something still unknown to medical science. “Uli Gabriel, patient zero,” she came to think of him. But in the initial lonely years of her investigation, his doctors doubted her. Her own medical colleagues did too. “Everyone told me it was absurd,” she recalled to me, even as they could muster no better explanation.

These were the facts of Uli’s case: On Saturday, January 14, 2006—a beautiful day to hit the slopes—he went snowboarding near his family’s home in the Bavarian Alps. Uli took a jump way too fast and landed on his right arm; the humerus bone did not withstand the force of impact. He ended up at the local clinic, where Yaremy worked at the time, and where she trusted he was in capable hands. On weekends, the alpine-village clinic treated an influx of skiers with mangled bones.

But as the hours passed and Uli did not wake up from surgery, Yaremy began to worry. When he finally did rouse—confused, vomiting, and talking “like a drunk man”—her instincts both as a mother and as a doctor screamed that something was wrong.

The trauma surgeon came to check on Uli’s arm and declared it perfect—his own job was done. No one else seemed to share Yaremy’s growing alarm at her son’s mysterious neurological symptoms. The word she kept using to describe this period was alone. To get an MRI of Uli’s brain, Yaremy personally arranged for an ambulance to take him to a larger hospital. On the MRI, two ghostly white spots appeared in his basal ganglia.

The death of brain cells in the basal ganglia, which coordinates movements of the body, explained Uli’s symptoms, which progressed to erratic twisting, painful muscle spasms, and involuntary protrusion of the tongue. But what had caused the damage? No one knew. Uli could still walk and talk, albeit with some difficulty, and he remembered everything: the confusion, the pain, the seven dwarfs from Snow White plastered all over his pediatric hospital room, which, as a 14-year-old, he found tragically uncool. He was impatient to get better and to get out; he had tickets to a Foo Fighters show less than two weeks later. But the day of the concert came and went, and Uli remained stuck in the hospital, his symptoms unresolved, their underlying cause still unknown. The tests that doctors ran all came back negative.

Had his anesthesiologist made a mistake? Yaremy couldn’t dismiss the possibility. How does a perfectly healthy kid become so sick from routine anesthesia, other than because of a terrible mistake? Malpractice could give grief a direction and a shape, suggesting a person to blame (a doctor) and a means of redress (a lawsuit). Friends kept telling Yaremy to sue. In the end, she did, filing a lawsuit against Uli’s anesthesiologist, Ludwig Düthorn, a senior colleague whom she regularly passed in the hallways of their clinic. At the very least, she figured, the lawsuit could help uncover what had really happened.

At the clinic, Yaremy began to avoid the ICU, where Düthorn worked, unsure of what to say about the tragedy that had rattled both of their lives. Düthorn, too, was haunted by the case. He replayed the surgery in his mind, searching for any hint of the debacle to come. Uli’s blood pressure had dipped briefly—but that wasn’t uncommon during anesthesia, and would not have been enough to cause this level of brain damage. Düthorn had counteracted the drop with a routine dose of noradrenaline, and that had worked as intended. All of Uli’s other vitals were unremarkable. All of the dosages had been double-checked by a nurse.

Afterward, whenever Düthorn had to anesthetize a healthy young boy, he would think of Uli. “I was personally devastated,” he told me. “I thought, I did the anesthesia. It is my fault. But on the other hand, I could find no mistake.”

Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic

Uli was an active kid, skiing at 3 years old and playing soccer in elementary school.

The death or serious injury of a healthy child from anesthesia is so unusual as to be universally shocking to doctors these days. Anesthesia is known to pose risks to the elderly or ill, but even then it is far safer than it once was.

In the 19th century, as many as one out of 2,500 patients died under chloroform, then a popular anesthetic. But patients were willing to take the risk, because the alternative was pure, visceral horror: During the pre-anesthesia era, hospitals would put their operating rooms in towers, so as to spare other patients from all the screaming.

Like many medical breakthroughs, the discovery of anesthesia was something of an accident. Doctors became aware that ether, a popular party drug at the time, made giddy revelers insensitive to pain. They decided to give it a try in the operating theater: The first public demonstration was carried out on October 16, 1846, when a 21-year-old man under ether had a malformation removed from his neck at Massachusetts General Hospital. (The name anaesthesia, from the Greek for “without sensation,” was suggested by Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., the eminent doctor and essayist who also gave this magazine its name, in 1857.) At the time, doctors did not understand why ether worked; that it did was good enough.

General anesthesia today is often likened, colloquially, to sleep. But what it does to the brain is stranger and frankly spookier: A patient who is merely asleep would not lie still and take a bone saw to the chest. To render someone so deeply unconscious, anesthesia shuts down multiple distinct functions in the nervous system, making a patient insensate, paralyzed, and unable to form memories. The brain under anesthesia is suppressed to such an extent that Emery Brown, an anesthesiologist at Harvard and MIT, has compared it to coma or brain-stem death.

“The key thing is that it’s reversible,” Brown told me. When anesthetics stop being administered, the patient starts to rouse within minutes. Their consciousness flips back on. The spell breaks. This total reversal has happened millions of times in millions of people, the magic of it now mundane. But Uli had needed hours to find his way back to consciousness, his brain adrift someplace too deep and too dark to return from unscathed.

In the months after his accident, Uli’s symptoms became manageable enough for him to return to school. Still, he could be unsteady on his feet. On a walk with friends and their dog one day in 2007, he took a tumble and fractured his collarbone. His mother hoped the bone would heal without surgery, but his erratic limb movements from the damage to his brain kept jostling the broken bone. Surgery became inevitable.

Wary of anesthesia, Yaremy asked his doctor to avoid the type Uli had received for his arm surgery. She had no scientific evidence to cite, but she hoped he would listen to her, as a worried mother and as a fellow doctor. He did not.

This time, Uli did not wake up for days. Yaremy thought he was going to die. She would open his eyelids to check his reflexes. Nothing. When his eyes finally stayed open on their own, Uli was delirious. He screamed whenever an unfamiliar nurse entered his room. He had trouble following conversations. His skin became hypersensitive to touch. He lost more control over his limbs. He would never again be able to play guitar in his band or impress girls with snowboarding tricks. He would never even walk or talk on his own.

Yaremy struggled to care for him at home, and she began to contemplate her life in small-town Germany. She had grown up an ocean away, in the boisterous city of Caracas. At 21, she met a German man at a disco in Venezuela, who became her husband and then Uli’s father, and who persuaded her to move to this tiny ski town, where her new in-laws ran a hotel. When she arrived—with 1-year-old Uli in her arms—she spoke little German. For a long time, she was the only foreigner in town. She missed the warmth of the Venezuelan sun and she missed her large family, who she knew would rally to help her back home.

And so, soon after the disastrous second surgery, Yaremy boarded a plane with Uli, now 17, to Caracas. Her younger child decided to stay in Germany with their father. They all planned to reunite in Venezuela later, but Yaremy knew her marriage was already over, its existing cracks widened by the new challenges of caring for their son.

The move proved, in one way, fortuitous. A few years into living in Caracas, Yaremy encountered the first hint that what had happened to her son had also happened to someone else. When picking up medication for Uli—Botox to relax his clenched muscles—she met another mother doing the same for her own son. The facts of his case sounded awfully familiar: anesthesia, delayed awakening, brain damage, loss of muscle control. The mother told Yaremy about a spate of anesthesia complications in the Venezuelan state of Carabobo in the early 2000s, which were blamed on a contaminated batch of sevoflurane, then a fairly new anesthesia drug in the country. Her son, this mother said, was one such case.

Uli, too, had gotten sevoflurane during both surgeries. The colorless and faintly sweet gas has since become one of the most widely used anesthetics worldwide. But Uli’s surgeries were two years apart and 5,000 miles away in Germany, which had had no reports of contaminated sevoflurane. Yaremy couldn’t see how the incidents in Carabobo could be connected to her son’s. Still, she filed them away in her mind.

Not long after, Yaremy began chasing down a second clue, which emerged as Uli’s malpractice case wound its way through the German legal system. The lawsuit itself was unlikely to succeed, now that Uli had suffered the same complications under a different anesthesiologist, but an expert examining the facts of the case made a crucial observation: The two symmetrical white spots in Uli’s basal ganglia, he said, looked much like the brain damage found in people with inherited mitochondrial disease.

Mitochondria are the tiny structures inside our cells that act as power generators. When they become dysfunctional, cells are first starved of energy; then they die. The most vulnerable cells are the most energy-hungry ones; neurons are particularly susceptible, especially those in the basal ganglia. In children with mitochondrial disease, neuron death can be triggered by physiological stress of any kind: fasting, illness, dehydration, and, yes, anesthesia. Perhaps the fault lay with Uli’s mitochondria too.

In 2013, Yaremy managed to secure an appointment at a leading genetic-disease lab in Houston. She boarded the plane with Uli, convinced that the answer awaited them at their destination. There, specialists ran a series of blood tests on Uli and searched his DNA for mutations that cause mitochondrial disease. “I felt like I was going to see the light,” Yaremy told me over breakfast in May. “But nothing happened.” She sighed, her shoulders tense with disappointment.

The tests found no mutations known to cause mitochondrial disease. Moreover, Uli had never exhibited other symptoms; mitochondrial dysfunction affects numerous parts of the body, including the heart and muscles, and symptoms frequently manifest in childhood. Uli had been a healthy and energetic boy: walking before age 1, skiing at 3. Yaremy wondered if her son’s reaction to sevoflurane could be caused by a novel mitochondrial mutation. Uli remembers hearing the doctor, who did not know he understood English, mention her belief dismissively to his medical students.

Yaremy and Uli returned home to Caracas, where they had been building a new life. Uli enrolled at Venezuela’s largest university; using an eye-tracking device to communicate, he graduated with a degree in modern languages. Yaremy worked her way up to professor of medicine at the same university.

Then, in the mid-2010s, Venezuela’s petroleum-dependent economy cratered. Public hospitals lacked equipment as basic as disposable gloves; inflation soared to more than 1 million percent. Even with her connections, Yaremy began to struggle to obtain Uli’s medications. She decided in 2018 to uproot their lives once again, taking Uli back to Germany, where he could receive more reliable care.

By then, Yaremy was closer to finding the explanation for Uli’s condition than she knew. She already held key pieces of the puzzle. But it would take a second tragedy in her family for her to realize how they fit together.

In June 2020, Yaremy got a call from her younger cousin—and Uli’s godmother—María Fernanda Pozo Castillo, or Mafer. They are close, having grown up together in Caracas. Because Yaremy is the doctor in the family, Mafer told me, everyone bugs her with their ailments. (“Yaremy, I have a headache,” she said, slipping into an imitation.) But she was calling about something much more serious. Her 13-year-old son, Matías, had just had knee surgery after a bike accident in Austin, Texas, and he’d struggled to wake up. He had gotten sevoflurane.

“Mafer, no!” Yaremy said.

Even as she began to relive the cold dread of waiting for Uli to wake up, Yaremy pulled herself into problem-solving mode. “Don’t leave the hospital without an MRI, okay?” she told her cousin. “If the doctor says it’s not necessary, it doesn’t matter. You demand an MRI.”

Mafer remembers that the doctors were reluctant to order a brain scan for her son—he’ll be kicking a ball again in three weeks, they told her. But she kept asking and asking until they acceded. Sure enough, the MRI—which was done without further anesthesia—showed two white lesions in the basal ganglia. “Same places,” Yaremy immediately said when she heard this. “Same places as Uli Gabriel.”

In the coming days, Matías started experiencing involuntary limb movement. He developed muscle contractions, even more severe than his older cousin’s, that left him screaming in pain. The contractions have persisted, even with high doses of muscle relaxant delivered straight to his spinal cord. This past summer, Matías’s pain became so excruciating that he had to be hospitalized in the ICU. His mother cares for him full-time. Before we spoke on the phone, she kept apologizing that she might need to leave at any minute to tend to him.

Yaremy was devastated for her family; so was Uli. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” he told me when we met in the spring, tapping the sentence out letter by letter on a board that he uses to communicate.

Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic

Uli has been unable to walk or talk on his own since his second surgery. He uses eye-tracking devices and letter boards to communicate.

Yet amid her grief, Yaremy’s scientific mind got to work: One kid in her family? Okay, a fluke. But two? It had to be genetic. She thought of Uli’s mitochondrial-DNA test from seven years earlier. The sequencing had found no mutations known to cause disease. But the report did note some “variants of unknown significance,” including one called m.11232T>C, meaning that the 11,232nd letter of his mitochondrial genome had been altered from a T to a C. No one made much of the finding; all of us have variants of unknown significance in our genomes, most of which are of little consequence, like minor typos that do not obscure the meaning of a sentence. But maybe this mutation was, in fact, significant.

Mitochondria carry their own loop of DNA, separate from the chromosomes that make up the rest of our genome, and are inherited through the maternal line. Yaremy’s mother and Mafer’s mother are sisters, so they and their children share the same mitochondrial line.

Could a single typo in their mitochondrial DNA be responsible for all of the catastrophic brain damage in the family? And what was the connection to sevoflurane?

Yaremy now began searching for a scientist to study her family. She suspected that Uli and Matías carried the same mutation, as might other relatives. Two of her mother’s sisters, she realized, had also suffered complications after surgery that now seemed to trace back to anesthesia. Were others at risk too?

She found Julio Montoya, an expert in mitochondrial disease at the University of Zaragoza, in Spain, who saw her email in a waiting room as he was about to undergo emergency surgery for a detached retina. With his one good eye, he read it and replied immediately. He was keen to investigate.

Montoya and his colleague Eduardo Ruiz-Pesini had, it turned out, seen the m.11232T>C mutation before. In 2018, they had found it in a Venezuelan boy at a Barcelona hospital. This patient had become severely ill after surgery to remove his tonsils and adenoids—and deteriorated even further with subsequent rounds of anesthesia in later years. The Spanish team decided, along with Yaremy, to put together a formal research proposal. The boy from the Barcelona hospital would become patient one in their study; Uli became patient two, and Matías patient three.

Over the years, Yaremy had talked with colleagues in Venezuela about Uli so relentlessly that word sometimes came back to her of similar cases: nearly always kids, nearly always after routine surgery. An introvert by nature, Yaremy had to learn to badger anyone and everyone for a useful crumb of information.

She began running down some of these rumors: The wife of the son of a friend knew a neurologist who knew an anesthesiologist who knew of a boy who had fallen ill after surgery on a broken forearm. He became patient four. Patient five was the boy whose mother she’d met picking up Botox in Caracas. A physical therapist told her about a boy who’d had cleft-lip surgery—patient six. An old friend from medical school, an anesthesiologist, had examined a boy who developed symptoms after surgery for a cochlear implant. The friend had once been skeptical of Yaremy’s theory, but now he helped her gather data. This boy became the seventh and final patient in the study.

All of the patients who ended up in the study were boys, but Yaremy heard of girls affected, too. For every patient she managed to track down, she followed other trails that ran cold. Families who’d filed lawsuits were reluctant to talk; others were lacking complete medical records. The allegedly contaminated sevoflurane in Carabobo, Yaremy learned, had been widely discussed among doctors at the time, but news coverage of the events 20 years ago had disappeared from the internet as a result of the regime’s media crackdowns and poor digital recordkeeping. She managed to get hold of one newspaper article—a printout saved by the mother picking up Botox in Caracas. But she was not able to find any other families whose children had died or become disabled in Carabobo.

A haunting pattern appeared in the cases she was able to pull together. All seven patients in the study had received sevoflurane. Most of them could trace their maternal relatives to Carabobo; Yaremy’s own maternal grandmother was from the state. And all seven had the same T-to-C mutation. This mutation is extremely rare, even in Venezuela, but it is an estimated 15 times more prevalent in Carabobo, where it is believed to have originated many, many generations ago. The Spanish researchers hypothesized that this old mutation had taken on new, potentially fatal importance in the era of modern anesthesia.

General anesthesia today is usually achieved through a cocktail of drugs, both inhaled and intravenous. Of these, sevoflurane is one of the most popular, particularly for children. It is easy to administer, quick to work, and not irritating to the airways. But sevoflurane seemed to behave differently—and dangerously—in the presence of the T-to-C mutation.

To prove this, the Spanish researchers would need to collect cells with the mutation and subject them to sevoflurane in a lab. Yaremy volunteered her own. In the fall of 2024, she found a colleague to draw her blood and a lab to biopsy a ribbon of her skin. Her cells soon made it to Spain, where the team got to work.

As the lab experiments were ongoing last summer, tragic news came out of Chile. Five children there had suffered terrible outcomes after routine anesthesia; four were dead, according to an alert from the Chilean Society of Anesthesiology. All five children were Venezuelan.

The news spread within the Venezuelan diaspora. In the past decade, more than half a million Venezuelans have moved to Chile, where they have not always found themselves welcome. Now some of the parents alleged that poor medical care and discrimination had killed their children. They filed lawsuits and demanded justice on social media. In videos the parents shared of their children on Instagram and on TV, they are all bouncy and bright: a 4-year-old girl swinging in gymnastics class, a 2-year-old boy in a Messi jersey kicking a soccer ball.

Chilean investigators were able to collect genetic samples from only three cases—out of what had grown to a total of seven in the country—but all three patients had the same T-to-C mutation. One of the children who died in Chile, Yaremy later learned, was the cousin of a patient in her study. As word of the mutation spread around the world, doctors started reporting cases in the United States, Canada, Colombia, Peru, and Guyana.

“I suffered with each kid, each mother,” Yaremy told me. Even when a child survived, she saw ahead to their “lifetime of complications.” She often thinks about the boy with the cleft lip from her study, who, abandoned by his mother, lives in a poor village in Venezuela with his grandmother. His family can’t afford Botox or other treatments. In videos she has seen, his muscles are always clenched, his limbs unusable.

Back in Spain, the researchers raced to finish the experiments. They ultimately found that cells carrying the mutation were indeed hypersensitive to sevoflurane. This mutation could explain why Uli—and Matías and all the other children—had stayed unconscious for so long after surgery. The study, with Yaremy as a co-author, was the cover story of the June 2026 issue of Anesthesiology, the official journal of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. Accompanying it was an editorial written by two physician-scientists in the U.S., Richard Levy, at Stanford, and Philip Morgan, at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

I had first spoken with Levy a few months earlier, after the ASA issued an alert—following up on the one in Chile—about terrible complications from anesthesia, primarily sevoflurane, in people with maternal Venezuelan ancestry. In our conversation, I asked what seemed like a basic question: How does sevoflurane work? “If you can figure that out, you have a Nobel Prize,” Levy told me. “The reality is, we don’t know.” We don’t know how any inhaled anesthetics work. But this novel mutation out of Venezuela, he and Morgan thought, might hold a clue.

Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic

More than a decade after his injury, Uli became a case study in a scientific paper, co-authored by his mother, about how anesthesia interacts with a rare mitochondrial mutation.

Anesthesia likely taps into something evolutionarily ancient in the body. A one-cell protozoan, a Venus flytrap, and a human are all susceptible to anesthesia—and two of those things don’t even have a brain.

For most of the 20th century, scientists clung to the idea that these drugs perturb the fatty membrane of living cells—a hypothesis based on how the gases behave in olive oil. But by the 1980s, a new dogma began to take hold: Anesthetics bind to proteins on the surface of brain cells, which interrupts their signaling. This is best understood in a drug called propofol, which is a common anesthetic but not an inhaled one; the milky-white liquid is delivered via IV. In an elegant set of experiments in the 2000s, scientists identified propofol’s primary target as a protein called the GABA receptor. Yet the same experiment, when repeated with a common inhaled anesthetic, failed to find an analogous target. Decades later, it remains elusive. Maybe it doesn’t exist.

Today, the general consensus regarding the mechanism of inhaled anesthesia is that the gases bind weakly to many proteins in the brain, which together add up to complete loss of consciousness. Most practicing anesthesiologists don’t think much about this. Sevoflurane works. The proof is in the operating room every day. What more do you need?

But a group of researchers dissatisfied with the conventional wisdom on proteins, including Levy and Morgan, has been slowly building the case for an alternative hypothesis: Actually, it’s the mitochondria.

When these researchers heard about children with a mitochondrial mutation dying from anesthesia, they immediately saw the implications. Scientists have long relied on rare mutations to probe the mysteries of biology. In another Venezuelan state called Zulia, for example, families with a shared mutation for Huntington’s disease have been crucial to our understanding of the condition. Rare mutations are a kind of natural experiment.

Morgan, along with his wife and scientific collaborator, Margaret Sedensky, had once run lab experiments looking for mutations that altered sensitivity to anesthesia—though only in a tiny, transparent worm called Caenorhabditis elegans. When they induced random mutations in the worm, they found that the relevant ones were clustered in the mitochondria. Their findings didn’t make much of an impact among their fellow anesthesiologists, though. “We’re like the comic relief at our big national meeting of 15,000 anesthesiologists,” Sedensky told me. “ ‘Here come the worm doctors.’ ”

But Morgan and Sedensky kept working out the details of their theory. Inhaled anesthetics such as sevoflurane, they now argue, work by inhibiting the mitochondria, inducing a kind of temporary brownout in the brain. The bubbles used to transport brain chemicals become frozen in place, like cars that have run out of gas. They restart as soon as anesthesia is discontinued. But in some hypersensitive patients, the mitochondria could become so impaired that their brain cells die. Morgan had found some of these hypersensitive patients before, but he believes Uli’s mutation could help pinpoint more precisely how anesthesia works on mitochondria. This past summer, cells with the mutation—derived from Yaremy’s blood sample—arrived in the couple’s lab in Seattle.

Understanding how anesthesia works, Levy told me, could enable scientists to design better drugs that precisely target the brain, without lingering side effects. Though modern anesthesia drugs are generally quite safe, they are imperfect. They affect the cardiovascular system; they affect ostensibly unrelated areas of the brain, such as the region that controls nausea. And they have been linked to cognitive decline in the elderly after surgery—though the degree to which the drugs are responsible, as opposed to other factors such as the physical effects of surgery, is still being debated. How much of that can be avoided?

Before her study was published, Yaremy had someone she needed to call: Ludwig Düthorn, Uli’s anesthesiologist after the snowboarding accident. She had not seen Düthorn since testifying against him at the malpractice trial years earlier. She’d lost the suit; legally, he had already been absolved. Personally, she felt she had to apologize.

Düthorn was gratified to know what Yaremy had found, but even now, he told me, he feels a doubt gnawing at him in the operating room. Uli had a silent and novel mutation in his DNA. Could his next 14-year-old patient have a different one?

Cases like Uli’s unsettle everyone they touch. In the 2000s, Rafael Legórburu, then an anesthesiologist in Caracas, treated a young boy who would not wake up after sevoflurane—a case he now suspects was connected to this mutation. The boy suffered profound brain damage. Legórburu still finds it difficult to talk about 20 years later. “I have a scar,” he told me, “for the rest of my life.” Today he lives in Spain, where he practices aesthetic medicine, administering Botox and fillers; he says he’ll never touch sevoflurane again.

Doctors are now revisiting a number of old malpractice cases—some of which resulted in large settlements—that might be explained by the T-to-C mutation. An anesthesiologist whose hospital had settled one such case involving their patient told me they felt relieved, and vindicated. (They spoke with me on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized by the hospital to speak publicly.) At the same time, they could not entirely shake their sense of responsibility. “It was the worst experience of my life,” they kept telling me.

A group of Venezuelan anesthesiologists—largely based in the U.S.—recently formed the Venezuelan Anesthesia Perioperative Risk society, or VAPOR, to raise awareness of the mutation among health-care workers, and to promote guidelines for screening and treating patients with maternal Venezuelan ancestry. A quarter of Venezuela’s population—8 million people—has left the country in recent years, meaning the mutation is scattered more widely than ever. Yet within Venezuela, no lab is testing for it, and anesthesiologists do not routinely have access to the specialized equipment needed to administer anesthesia without inhaled gases.

Yaremy is working with scientists to continue studying the mutation, about which many questions remain: Do other anesthetic drugs, inhaled or administered via IV, pose a danger? Are children more vulnerable, or have we simply not looked hard enough yet in adults? The oldest known patient to be affected was 31 years old.

In her own life, Yaremy has finally found a measure of stability. She and Uli live in Radolfzell, a bucolic lakeside town in southern Germany, where she works at the cardiac-rehab hospital. It’s calmer than the ICUs where she’s worked in the past. “B-O-R-I-N-G,” Uli joked, tapping out the letters in English. But the calm is welcome after years of upheaval. Uli has his own apartment and a rotating cast of full-time assistants; he works as a translator for medical records. (He is fluent in English, Spanish, and German.) He is a doting uncle to his niece and nephew, the children of his younger sibling, Levi.

The mutation still lurks in their lives. Both times after giving birth, Levi, who uses they/them pronouns, developed an infection in the uterus and needed surgery. Yaremy made sure that they did not get sevoflurane. But what about Levi’s kids, who also have the mutation? What if they’re rushed into emergency surgery on their own? Levi had closely followed the news of the children who died in Chile. “They could have been my kids,” Levi remarked as we parted ways after a family lunch by the lake. The water was a brilliant clear blue that day; so was the sky.

A few days after I left Germany, Yaremy learned about a new suspected case: a 12-year-old boy who’d had trouble waking up after surgery in Caracas. “How can this still be happening?” Uli wrote to me. “I mean what the ****!?”

Julia Sellmann for The Atlantic

Uli and Yaremy now live in the lakeside town of Radolfzell, Germany. Uli works as a translator for medical records.

Joana, Freddy Marquez’s mom, first caught wind of the suspected mutation in the summer of 2025, when she heard on social media about the children who’d died in Chile. She, too, is originally from Venezuela. And she made the connection instantly. Months earlier, when Freddy had been hospitalized, his doctors had ordered a genetic test that turned up a variant of unknown significance. Freddy had the m.11232T>C mutation as well. This information never made it into his chart for the same reason Uli’s mutation wasn’t initially taken seriously: No one understood its importance at the time.

Joana began commenting about Freddy on every related post she could find. One by one, she linked up with others who told similar stories: another mother in Florida, the family of a girl who died in Houston, Yaremy’s cousin Mafer in Austin, and so on. Joana got added to a WhatsApp group for the parents in Chile, which has since evolved into a de facto global support group for parents of children with this rare mutation. Through the group, Joana also learned of Yaremy. They spoke for the first time in February, and recognized in each other a maternal instinct that is both steely and tender. “She was in tears,” Joana told me, “and I was in tears.”

In February, Joana appeared on Instagram Live in a zebra-print shirt to talk about Freddy, alongside other affected mothers. The zebra print was a reference to the old medical adage “When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras”—meaning: think of the common explanation, not the exotic one. But sometimes, it is zebras. Freddy died because what happened to him lay just outside medical knowledge. His particular mutation is rare, but encounters with the unknown in medicine are not. Joana was asking for some humility, some openness to the possibility of zebras. Since Freddy’s death, she has made advocating for people with rare mitochondrial conditions her life’s mission.

Joana can still picture him: swimming, playing basketball, riding “like crazy” on his bike as Gordito, his Alaskan malamute, raced alongside him. “His flipping dog is now chasing me wherever I go,” she said. And Joana continues to propel herself forward. She’s cold-calling researchers. She’s going to medical conferences. She’s offering up her own cells to study. She is keeping the promise she made to Freddy before he died.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “Going Under.”

AI’s Real Gift to Science

2026-10-04T11:56:28-04:00

Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic, has often said that AI will cure most diseases in the next 10 years. Late last month, he claimed that his company had taken a first step toward that future: Claude had, in less than 24 hours, discovered a new “enzyme system” that the company says resembles CRISPR, a gene-editing tool currently curing people of diseases. While announcing the discovery, Anthropic hinted that this was the type of finding that revolutionizes medicine and quoted a gene-editing pioneer who called it “genuinely intriguing.”

The company was open about not knowing what exactly it had spotted or whether the finding—the first released from a biology lab that the company established this spring—was really that significant. Still, many academics, along with the CEO of Eli Lilly, pointed out that the company had dressed up a very incremental finding as a major discovery. Fyodor Urnov, a scientist who coined the term genome editing and is working on a CRISPR project with Anthropic, told me that “the jury is out” on whether what Claude found is even an enzyme at all. Multiple researchers told The New York Times that, in fact, they had been aware of the supposedly new enzyme system for years, including a team at the University of Copenhagen that alleged Anthropic’s new results might have been stolen from their lab’s interactions with Claude. The company, in response, said that Claude isn’t trained using user transcripts. (Anthropic did not respond to a comment request for this article.)

In other words, Anthropic made a big deal about a finding that—although achieved in a novel, Claude-led way—may not lead to any biomedical advances, and that the company knew may not lead to any biomedical advances. Ironically, in making such grandiose statements, the company and other AI boosters obscured what Claude does appear to have accomplished: It sorted through reams of biological data that would have taken scientists much longer to analyze, if they could have at all. This capacity might not be a miracle, but for scientists facing mountains of data that have surpassed their capacity for analysis, it’s still meaningful.

Around the turn of the 21st century, researchers sequenced for the first time all 3 billion letters that make up human DNA. This effort, called the Human Genome Project, took 13 years and cost $2.7 billion. Today, sequencing a person’s full genome takes just over a day and costs as little as $200. Accordingly, the total amount of publicly available genomic data has become so large as to be unmanageable. In other fields, such as protein science, technological advances have led to a similar boom in the sheer amount of data being collected.

Trying to pull anything useful from all that data has become its own long-term project. In 2012, a committee of bioinformatics experts found that the “bottleneck in scientific productivity” had moved from data production to data analysis, but early efforts at the National Institutes of Health to deal with that bottleneck quickly sputtered out. If researchers could efficiently store, send, and examine all of the information they generated, they would likely be able to, for example, develop new drugs by identifying better genes or cellular parts to target. But it’s simply too massive for them to comprehensively attack.

The biological corpus is not, however, too large for AI agents. Bo Wang, an assistant professor at the University of Toronto and the chief AI scientist at a drug-discovery company, recently wrote that AI’s biggest impact in biology will come from its help “scaling scientific attention”: Setting agents loose on the enormous data sets can surface the outliers that warrant further human inspection. Agents can propose and test hypotheses for what might cause the unusual patterns they find, and predictive modeling can help scientists choose what experiments to carry out on their actual lab benches. Eventually, automated labs might even carry out those chosen experiments—a few already exist in the United States, and the Trump administration is spending hundreds of millions to establish more. Meanwhile, scientists remain divided over whether AI models actually steer them toward potentially paradigm-shifting experiments, or safer, less exploratory ones.

AI is already changing medicine: Models that use people’s medical history to predict their health risks, including their likelihood of developing certain kinds of cancer, are now used in most U.S. hospitals. At the same time, not every field of biology generates enough data for this approach to work. AI might be less useful in some domains that rely on less abundant microscopy data, such as the study of how cells and tissues communicate; such data tend to be harder to come by than genetic sequences, Stirling Churchman, a professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School, told me. Organelle biology and the science of cellular transport similarly require painstaking, time-consuming experiments.

Still, Churchman said, “there will be magic where there’s data.” She spent the summer at OpenAI working on a specially trained model for life-science researchers. She anticipates that by allowing scientists who can’t code to examine their data themselves, AI will enable researchers to “analyze data at least 10 times faster, freeing us to spend more time on the biological questions and experiments.”

The recent Anthropic finding is an example of how AI can identify outliers that might otherwise have gone unnoticed. Existing tools can comb through heaps of genomic data (and have already been used to identify bona fide new gene-editing systems). What AI can do is run those kinds of analyses at a much larger scale, while also evaluating intermediary results, Kendell Clement, who runs a computational-biology lab at the University of Utah, told me. Of course, that scale requires dumping in correspondingly huge resources: Anthropic directed about 950 Claude bots to simultaneously pore over a database that contained nearly 2 billion DNA entries.

AI companies have every incentive to keep evangelizing about the medical miracles they say their models will unlock, especially as backlash against them mounts. Amodei has an idea for how to quiet AI skeptics: “The thing that will work is actually curing cancer,” he recently wrote on X. That would certainly be a coup. But helping scientists work more quickly is, too, even if it doesn’t sound quite so revolutionary.

Bait and Switch

2026-10-03T09:00:00-04:00

Earlier this year, one of my fishing partners sent a 1 a.m. message to our group chat. It was a link to an Instagram post of an angler holding a sizable striped bass. Dappled gold and silver with a dozen distinct black lines that stretched from gills to tail, it would have been a gorgeous fish if not for two problems: Striped bass usually have seven stripes, not 12, and men usually have five fingers, not six. The photo, it seemed, was AI-generated. To say we were dismayed would be an understatement.

From May to November each year, I spend most of my nights doing an extreme version of surf fishing for striped bass called “wetsuiting,” which involves wading or swimming out to distant ocean rocks and sandbars after dark. This kind of surf casting is a niche activity, and like many niche activities, the community for it is small. Wetsuiters can be found in a smattering of local fishing clubs throughout the Northeast—the typical range of the striped bass—but are primarily connected through Instagram, where some people, mostly for bragging rights, post images of fish they’ve caught.

[From the October 2024 issue: Inside the dangerous, secretive world of extreme fishing]

In our group chat, my fishing partners and I spend too much time scrutinizing photos of bass that other anglers have posted. People who fish are habitual liars (I say this fondly), and most of our conversations take the form of debates about whether a fish is really as big as someone claims. Lately, though, we’ve been asking a different question: Is that fish even real?

In recent months, the small corner of Fishing Instagram devoted to surf casting has been plagued by a slow drip of AI-generated or AI-enhanced fish. Sometimes, the fraud is egregious—one of my friends, a fishing photographer, discovered that another angler had stolen one of his photos and crudely replaced my friend’s face with her own. More often, the distortions are subtle. Typically, a fish or fisherman looks ever so slightly off, usually in ways that a casual observer might not notice: A bass’s fins aren’t quite right, or the lure in its mouth looks oddly distorted, or the angler’s arms are a bit too long. In my favorite example, a man lifts a large striped bass just as he is getting pummeled by a wave. The scene looks daunting—until you realize that the ocean behind him is peaceful. Where did this rogue wave come from? One suspects that the enterprising angler, wanting to look more hard-core to his Instagram followers, prompted a bot to dial up the intensity. ChatGPT, make me look badass.

Fishing magazines report growing concern about AI-generated fish in freelance photo submissions. I have written occasionally for the small online magazine Surfcaster’s Journal. Over the summer, the Journal announced that it would now run all manuscripts and photographs through AI-detection software. “For some reason, I naively assumed that fishermen wouldn’t stoop to the ‘core of the earth’ lows required to use AI to prop oneself up as a fisherman worthy of clicking the follow icon,” Dave Anderson, a well-respected wetsuiter and an editor at The Fisherman, wrote in an article lamenting the scourge of artificially generated fish on social media. “I was very wrong about this.”

Angling, even extreme angling, is just a hobby, but although the stakes may be low, the anger about artificial fish is real. Partly, I think this is because of the work that being even remotely good at the sport demands. Striped bass move and feed in locally specific patterns that can take months or years to crack. There is a risk of drowning, and the mounting reports of bull sharks, tiger sharks, and great whites in the Northeast call attention to another layer of danger: We smell like fish, swim in dark water, and look like clumsy seals in our black neoprene. Wetsuiting does not change the world, but it is an activity that is hard and honest and, in that way, human.

[Read: The year great white sharks took over Maine]

Even taking a picture of a fish is demanding, requiring salt-water-proof cameras and often wading or swimming a bass back to shallow water, where it can safely be photographed and then released. The Photoshopping of fish pictures—and of the natural world in general—has been an issue for years, but AI, with its ability to conjure a simulacrum of reality out of nothing at all, is another matter. It automates away the need not only to photograph a fish, but to even catch one in the first place.

The problem extends to other sports and hobbies, many of which are now defined by what Stuart Franklin—who took one of the celebrated “Tank Man” photos at Tiananmen Square—calls the “documentary impulse.” Social media has turbo-charged that impulse into an imperative. A good local skateboarder’s or surfer’s reputation would once have been built through word of mouth. Today, posted photographs and short-form videos may constitute the primary proof of ability. Concerns about AI slop are already being raised in cycling, skiing, and other activities. Climbing Magazine recently called out an AI-saturated YouTube channel purporting to chronicle climbing disasters that in fact never happened.

As AI-generated fish have appeared more frequently in my social-media feed, I’ve been reminded of a scene in the bird-watching documentary Listers, where a highly competitive birder is asked whether he would keep bird-watching if the photo-logging website eBird disappeared. His answer—“No”—was unsettling, not least because one suspects that this sentiment is widespread in hobbies besides birding. I have often wondered if, for some of the wetsuiters who populate surf-casting Instagram, the dopamine hit from the likes and fire emoji is sweeter than the hit from catching the fish itself. Now that posted images are being looked upon with an ever greater degree of suspicion, I also wonder how much longer the dopamine hits will come for them at all.

This is hardly the greatest challenge posed to humanity by the advent of AI. But hobbies, particularly those that require some measure of skill and endurance, have an influence that extends beyond those who directly participate in them. Free Solo, the Oscar-winning 2018 documentary about the death-defying rock climber Alex Honnold, found a wide audience outside the narrow world of climbing because people are invested in seeing other people do difficult things. I love videos of big-wave surfing even though I never plan to climb onto a surfboard. If AI makes it impossible to trust what we see, even something as simple as a surfing video, then we have lost more than the integrity of any one sport. We have lost the ability to believe in the accomplishments of others.

This article appears in the November 2026 print edition with the headline “The Fish Are Getting Bigger.”

AI Could Worsen a Common Cognitive Trap

2026-10-03T09:00:00-04:00

One of humanity’s most remarkable cultural achievements is the division of explanatory labor. When my daughter came down with a fever, I solved the problem by consulting a pediatrician, who shared a likely diagnosis of the flu. Unlike the doctor, I wasn’t able to tell my daughter much about the mechanism by which the flu leads to fever, or exactly why it was so important for her to keep drinking fluids. But the explanation I acquired—roughly “fever because flu”—was what was needed to treat her.

Society runs on this efficient type of information sharing. Just as coordinating specialized skills can streamline the fabrication of products—be it pins or cars or newspapers—coordinating specialized knowledge can facilitate the answering of questions. You can drive a car even if you don’t have the expertise to manufacture one yourself, and I benefited from the pediatrician’s explanation even though his understanding far exceeded my own.

We can thank this divide-and-conquer method for many advancements in medicine and science, engineering and commerce; in fact, it has helped drive the accumulation of human knowledge across communities and over time. But it also leaves us susceptible to illusions of understanding: cases in which we mistake the understanding of others for our own.

Humans’ sense of whom to ask for what is fine-tuned by evolution, culture, and personal experience. Even 3-to-5-year-olds are more likely to say that you should ask a doctor rather than a mechanic about fixing a broken arm, and a mechanic rather than a doctor about fixing a flat tire. As kids mature, they develop an even deeper understanding of expertise. In a 2004 study published in Child Development, for example, 11- and 12-year-olds tasked with finding out why tennis balls bounce better on the sidewalk than on grass were more likely to suggest asking someone who knows why bubble wrap keeps glass things from breaking (which is also relevant to physics) than someone who knows why tennis balls come in cans of three (which just happens to also involve tennis balls). Their choice of whom to ask was based on fundamental principles—not just superficial similarities.

With plenty of time and care, years of education, and a healthy appetite for learning, most of us transition from children who know little about science or other expert domains to … adults who know little about science or other expert domains. Even those of us who acquire expertise in one area are unlikely to do so in many others. So the ability to track outside expertise is no less important for adults than it is for children. We need to know who can explain a child’s fever, a wilting plant, a clause in a will, or an imperfect soufflé—and research finds that adults seem to do this pretty well. (As a population, of course, we do not do this perfectly: Plenty of people trust in bad advice from their friends, influencers, and self-proclaimed experts.) A study from Germany found that even college students who aren’t science majors do a good job of guessing which kinds of scientific expertise are relevant to different scientific topics.

So far, so good. The trouble arises when our connections to other minds become a little too seamless, and we start to lose track of where our own understanding ends and another’s begins. When we receive an explanation from an expert—such as “fever because flu”—we might mistakenly conclude that we’ve learned more than we really have.

In fact, research finds that merely having access to expert answers can lead to illusions of understanding. In one set of studies, participants read about various fictional scientific discoveries and reported how well they understood the phenomenon described in each one. For instance, some participants received the following short passage:

A May 19, 2014, study in the journal Geology reported the discovery of a new rock that scientists have thoroughly explained. The rock is similar to calcite, yet it glows in the absence of a light source. The authors of the study, Rittenour, Clark, and Xu, fully understand how it works; they provided a description of the remarkable appearance of the mineral and outlined future experiments.

The passage didn’t actually include any explanations about why the rock glows. And yet, after reading the passage, participants thought they had some comprehension: what the authors call “a contagious sense of understanding,” because they seem to have caught it from the scientists described in the passage. When participants instead read that scientists “have not yet explained” the glowing rock, and that they “do not yet understand” how it works, there was no contagious sense of understanding; participant ratings of their own understanding nearly hit the bottom of the scale.

More recent work has shown that a contagious sense of understanding can even infect our interactions with technology. In one study, participants learned about a bank’s “robo-adviser,” which could provide investment recommendations. Participants also learned that an explanation of how the robo-adviser works had been published in a scientific journal. But half were told that the explanation was available to them on the journal’s website, and half were told that the journal had a subscription paywall. Those who thought the explanation was available to them reported a better understanding of how the robo-adviser works. They also reported a greater likelihood of using the robo-adviser themselves.

These results raise a pressing question. As information becomes more accessible through AI assistants, chatbots, and other technology, will these illusions of understanding become even more pronounced? Some early evidence suggests that the answer is yes. Several studies have now found that when people have information available to them through the internet, they overestimate how much they themselves know.

For example, in one study, participants were asked to explain how something works, such as a zipper, and half were given access to the internet to “confirm the details of the explanation.” All participants were then asked how well they could offer detailed answers to unrelated questions, such as why cloudy nights are warm. Those who had access to the internet in the first part of the study rated themselves significantly more capable of explaining in the second part—suggesting that the experience of having more knowledge at their fingertips supported the illusion that the knowledge was in their own heads.

Interactions with fast and informative chatbots will only heighten such illusions, but with a worrisome twist: The evidence so far suggests that humans aren’t great at tracking who knows what when it comes to large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude. For instance, when people in a study learned about an LLM that could correctly answer a question about economics, they expected it to correctly solve a basic algebra problem—but they were wrong. And when they learned that an LLM could answer a question about moral philosophy, they thought it could identify which character in a scenario had done something immoral—but they were wrong again. Participants almost certainly applied assumptions about how knowledge clusters in human minds to the AI system, and in both cases, this led them astray.

The kinds of errors that AI systems make are likely to change as AI develops, and human intuition about AI will probably evolve alongside these changes. As we expand our community of explainers beyond human experts to chatbots and other forms of AI, we create new opportunities for human understanding. But we also introduce an increased potential for illusion and error.

This article was adapted from Tania Lombrozo’s new book, Why We Ask Why: The Science of Explanation and the Human Drive to Understand.

The Edge of California Is Falling Into the Ocean

2026-09-28T07:00:00-04:00

This season, El Niño is offering a glimpse of what the future has in store for California. Engorged with warm water, its waves powered by a frenzy of hurricanes, the Pacific Ocean has been clawing away huge chunks of the coast. Waves overtopped defensive sand berms and tore up the boardwalk on the Long Beach Peninsula, in Los Angeles County. Beaches in places such as Carlsbad, to the south, got wiped clean of sand. Train service to San Diego was interrupted. In Malibu, an access road to Point Dume, a promontory popular with hikers and surfers, partially collapsed from erosion. And on Labor Day weekend, in the driveway of Nicolas Cage’s beachfront home, a small sinkhole opened up.

Francois Navarre, who once ran a paparazzi agency, had moved into the Malibu neighborhood just a few weeks before and discovered the hole while strolling down Sea Level Drive, the private street that runs behind a row of $8 million–to–$10 million homes, perched on pilings, that have an unimpeded view of the Pacific. The Palisades Fire had damaged Navarre’s home in Los Angeles last year, so he’d been living in Colorado. Now he could peer down through the pavement of his new neighborhood to the seawater coursing more than 20 feet below.

The hole grew fast, expanding more every hour, Navarre told me. Gas and water lines soon ruptured. The ocean dislodged the home’s septic tank, which slammed into a neighbor’s home, a security guard for the community told me. Nearly 40 years ago, a coastal engineer had sized up this exact lot and written that the Pacific Ocean posed no threat of washing away the building or its septic system.

Over the next week, the chasm beneath the street stretched below at least four waterfront houses and impeded emergency access to the area, forcing the city of Malibu to red-tag some 30 homes as uninhabitable. Cage did not respond to a request for comment. As an actor, he has infiltrated Alcatraz, navigated underground tunnels, and been pinned under rubble. During this real-life disaster, he was away. Not all of the homeowners in this gated community—a former mayor; the proprietor of a local Ford dealership; the president of the Miami Heat, Pat Riley—live there year-round. The security guard, Cesar Quintanilla, said that among the houses deemed unsafe, only four have full-time residents. When the Red Cross opened an emergency shelter at a nearby high school, nobody showed up.

California’s shoreline faced considerable risk even before this year’s El Niño intensified, when a mass of abnormally warm water in the Pacific Ocean began moving east along the equator. When it hit South America, it cleaved in two, heading south and north. This pulse of warmer water, known as a Kelvin wave, at times this past summer added nearly a foot to tides in Southern California, Jonathan Warrick, a coastal scientist at the U.S. Geological Survey, told me. These conditions also tend to drum up storm activity in the Pacific, and earlier this month, three hurricanes were spinning simultaneously in the ocean. The one closest to California, Hurricane Marie, pushed the swell that hammered the coast over Labor Day weekend.

Sea-level rise from global warming, too, is slowly adding inches of water that are raising the whole system, Warrick said. Malibu’s coastal-vulnerability report, published earlier this year, estimated that 1,410 of the city’s residential buildings—20 percent—plus more than half of the city’s commercial buildings could be affected this century by flooding, seawater intrusion, erosion, or other manifestations of rising seas. Malibu Mayor Bruce Silverstein expects that almost all waterfront structures will be in danger in the decades to come. “Nobody should be buying a home like that unless they can afford to lose it,” he told me.

The victims in this situation don’t always get much sympathy, partly because many people assume that they can afford to swallow the costs. South of Los Angeles, in the city of Dana Point, nearly 20 waterfront homes got damaged or destroyed by high seas, and “we’re getting a lot of hate,” Natalie Driessen, a plastic surgeon whose home in a gated community along Beach Road has been damaged by the waves, told me. “A lot of people are saying, ‘Oh, let the rich homes fall in.’” Buying a home here costs $5 million or much more, but many people live in these houses year-round. Driessen, the daughter of a mechanic and a stay-at-home mom, said that she’d gotten to this neighborhood only after putting herself through medical school and working more than 100 hours a week while she had young kids at home. She said that dismissing the community’s plight is unfair. Even more galling to her and other homeowners is the feeling that authorities have abandoned them to the onrushing waves.

When I visited Driessen’s home earlier this month, several neighbors and their contractors huddled among sandbags on what remained of her mangled patio. Every so often, a wave would thunder against a newly built pile of boulders in front of her house, dousing the group with mist and spray. For years, residents in this community of more than 180 homes on Beach Road have sought permission, in and out of court, from the California Coastal Commission to erect such defenses; many have built barriers without permits. The commission, a powerful state agency, rarely approves such projects: Seawalls can accelerate erosion and prevent the “natural inland migration of the beach,” the agency wrote in a letter to residents two years ago. It warned of potential fines, up to $11,250 a day, for unpermitted barriers. When the waves began ripping into homes in earnest earlier this month, the commission approved some emergency permits for 18-foot-high seawalls. The permits themselves cost $1,600 each, and homeowners rushed to pay the fee, then scrambled to find anyone who could throw down beach boulders in the narrow window between tides.

The coastal commission has warned residents for years about the extreme risk they face living in a FEMA flood zone, one where the beach is eroding by about five feet a year. It “provided immediate and ongoing assistance” to homeowners, including issuing 24 emergency permits for barriers, an agency spokesperson, Joshua Smith, told me in a statement. “While seawalls can provide temporary relief for homes, they can also increase erosion and destroy the public beaches that help protect those same structures,” he noted.

In front of Driessen’s home, contractors had started some of that work before nailing down the price, which, they told the group, could amount to more than $100,000 a home. Driessen didn’t see any alternative. “Just build the wall,” she told the contractors. “Build the wall.” In the longer term, Driessen and her neighbors want regular injections of fresh sand and a revetment—a sturdier, continuous barrier down the coast—but they have little guarantee that anything will change. In fact, the commission told homeowners that they’d have to remove within 120 days the boulders they’d already put down—again at their own expense—if the commission did not approve permits for a more permanent solution. The deck, kitchen, living room, and game room of Chris Rogers’s beachfront home got consumed by the waves before the contractors he’d hired could pour out concrete to defend the house. To save the rest of it, he told me, “we need immediate help.” Among the last homes to fall into the sea earlier this month, he said, was one whose owners had been in years-long talks with the coastal commission for protection.

The most intense months are likely still to come. El Nino’s supercharged storms could soak parts of the state with heavy rains. Los Angeles is clearing storm drains and mountain reservoirs to try to prevent flooding. Up and down the coast, bulldozers and heavy machinery are moving rocks and building berms. In areas burned by wildfires, heavy rains can trigger landslides. The extreme weather is already clearing away the coastline. Driving down the Pacific Coast Highway in Malibu, I passed mile after mile of empty lots and the ruins of waterfront properties that burned in last year’s Palisades Fire. Of the roughly 300 homes along the beach that burned, none has been rebuilt. (The mayor told me that only 31 of them were owned by people who used them as their primary residence.)

The people with multimillion-dollar homes on the beach may be making the most obvious sacrifices to El Niño, but all Californians are paying for damages. The residents on El Niño’s front lines have been peppering their elected officials with pleas for help; a bipartisan group of state legislators wrote to Governor Gavin Newsom asking him to declare a state emergency, which he did last week. Disaster in even the wealthiest enclaves can demand government resources. Taxpayers bear the brunt of repairs to infrastructure and public roads. Although many people want regular infusions of new sand and barriers, such solutions can overwhelm city and county budgets and cause unintended consequences elsewhere. Yet if the coast erodes away, everyone loses. Sandy beaches are an economic engine for Southern California, and denuding them drives away visitors.

Few Californians want to face the prospect that beachfront homes may simply no longer be viable along stretches of the coast. Of the more than 180 homes on Beach Road in Dana Point, “I wouldn’t say all of them are vulnerable, but most of them would be,” John Gabbard, the city’s mayor, told me. “There’s going to be a very difficult long-term discussion about how do we protect—if we protect at all—homes that are built on the beach.”

On two occasions in recent years, State Senator Ben Allen, a Democrat who represents Los Angeles County, has put forth legislation to create a loan program for local governments that want to buy beachfront homes and then rent them out to cover the cost of the program until the time comes to demolish them. Newsom vetoed it both times. “We have these beautiful coastal homes that are a part of California life. And we’ve all gotten used to this idea that people can live right up against the water and have these spectacular sunsets and have dinner with your toes in the sand,” Allen told me. But to him, how much society should pay to battle the sea is an open question. At some point, surely the price of building doomed houses is too high.

For the moment, the reality of California’s coasts is that Francois Navarre, in one of the most desirable seaside enclaves in the world, is schlepping five-gallon jugs of water under the Malibu sun; he has no running water amid ongoing sinkhole repairs. He and his neighbors cannot rest easy. Another Kelvin wave, the largest and warmest one of the year, is making its way up the coast of Mexico and is expected to hit Los Angeles early next month. The king tides, the highest of the year, are landing around Thanksgiving and Christmas, and they happen to be the highest in an 18-year cycle. If more El Niño–juiced winter storms arrive, the ocean will almost certainly claim more homes. “They say that this is barely starting,” Quintanilla, the security guard, said. His job is to protect Sea Level Drive, but he cannot protect it from everything.

The Pacific Is a Mess of Hurricanes

2026-09-26T16:37:35-04:00

If you could look down at the Pacific Ocean right now, you’d see three hurricanes spinning in a row, between 15 and 20 degrees north. Furthest east is Polo, an unusually strong hurricane that has been churning off the southern coast of Mexico for nearly a week. To its west, Odalys, once a Category 4 hurricane, is slowly weakening in the open ocean. In the central Pacific, Hurricane Nolo has reached Category 2 status and has crept about 145 miles off the coast of Hawaii’s Big Island, where it’s expected to bring up to 25 inches of rain, potentially causing flooding and landslides. The ocean is a mess of hurricanes, and it’s not the first time this season.

Just last month, four storms formed across the Pacific over a 12-day period. Two of them, Hurricane Lala and Tropical Storm Moke, came dangerously close to Hawaii. Driven by an exceptional El Niño event, these tropical storms have increased in frequency compared with an average year. Typically, at this point in the season, 12 tropical storms would have formed in the eastern Pacific, Michael Brennan, the director of the National Hurricane Center, told me. This year, there have already been 17.

Of the storms in the Pacific now, Polo, which has wobbled between Category 4 and 5, is the monster, and it will likely bring catastrophic damage when it makes landfall on Monday. The warm water temperatures associated with El Niño increase the likelihood of stronger storms, and this year’s event is shaping up to be one of the most dramatic on record. “El Niño is the ‘great nudger’ of weather systems around the planet,” Michelle L’Heureux, who leads the El Niño–Southern Oscillation team at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center, wrote in an email. “Very strong El Niños are often able to nudge more.”

Warmer waters also mean that the area where a storm can form expands. Storms tend to show up in the region where Polo is lingering, Brennan said, and generally, by the time they reach the central part of the ocean, near Hawaii, they weaken. But this year, waters in the central Pacific are more than 3 degrees Celsius warmer than usual, allowing hurricanes such as Nolo to form south of the islands and much closer to them. When I asked Brennan how abnormal this was—I’d seen others calling this a historic hurricane season—he said that a season like this comes around every decade or so. Still, it’s a big one.

Nolo is only the latest in a string of disasters that the island of Hawaii has endured this year. In January, the Kilauea volcano erupted for eight hours, and blanketed communities on the island with rocks and ash. Then, back-to-back Kona lows, a type of seasonal cyclone, brought historic flooding in March. Two months later, a 6.0-magnitude earthquake shook the island and damaged nearly 150 homes. In mid-August, Hurricane Lala, a Category 1 storm, dumped some 30 inches of rain on parts of the Big Island without making landfall.

David Ho, a professor of oceanography at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, was at home in Honolulu when Lala hit. His neighborhood flooded, and he was one of 200,000 electricity customers across the state who lost power. More than 200 homes and an estimated $67 million worth of public infrastructure were damaged, according to the Hawaii Emergency Management Agency. “We have a lot of houses that were built before the building codes were modernized,” Ho told me. “So once in a while, you have roofs that just fly away.”

Weeks later, many people, especially those in rural areas with limited access to groceries, are still feeling Lala’s lingering effects. “We always talk about the importance of being prepared, and you want to have three weeks of food supply and everything,” Janice Ikeda, the CEO of the nonprofit Vibrant Hawaii, told me. “Well, we don’t have that anymore, because it got wiped out.” (The state reissued Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program benefits to more than 65,000 households after the storm.) The damage and losses the island suffered from Lala only make lives and infrastructure more vulnerable in the face of Nolo.

For even one storm to skirt that close to Hawaii would have been an event: The Pacific Ocean is big enough, and the Hawaiian Islands are small enough, that most hurricanes roll by at a much greater distance. But earlier this month, another storm, Lowell, approached the western part of the state, near Kauai and Niihau, pushing hurricane-strength winds and waves ashore. More than 90 percent of utility customers in Kauai lost power.

Nolo likely won’t be a repeat of Lala or Lowell, because it is farther out and should remain 100 miles from the coast, Brennan said. Even so, the island could see more than two feet of rain, coastal flooding, and high surf. The hurricane season doesn’t end for another two months, and the effect of El Niño is likely to only get stronger, according to NOAA’s current predictions. Before the year is through, the “great nudger” will likely hurl more hurricanes Hawaii’s way.

In the Atlantic, the nudge is working in the opposite direction: El Niño generates strong wind shears, which make it hard for hurricanes to form. September should mark the peak of the Atlantic hurricane season, Allison Wing, an associate professor of atmospheric science at Florida State University, told me. Nearly four months into hurricane season, no hurricanes have appeared, and none are on the horizon.

What Does the Climate Movement Do Now?

2026-09-25T10:04:15-04:00

The day the Biden administration celebrated the first major piece of climate legislation in U.S. history, the weather happened to be sublime. The White House’s South Lawn, a billiard-table green, stretched out beneath a cerulean sky. Ben Beachy, who served as a special assistant to President Biden and would help oversee the law’s implementation, told me that “it felt like the dawn of a new era.” The Inflation Reduction Act of 2022 was set to deliver hundreds of billions of dollars in federal investments to clean-energy programs, and to those partying in Washington, the law was a major step toward a long-sought goal: a plan for America’s future that addressed the realities of climate change.

Four years on, the Republican Congress has mostly dismantled the IRA, electric-vehicle sales are in a slump, and the Trump administration is accelerating oil and gas development while axing environmental protections. The U.S. climate movement, Beachy said, “is currently experiencing a bout of dysphoria.” That’s putting it lightly. Longtime allies in the Democratic Party seem to be losing interest. Corporate America has all but ghosted climate advocates after making big pledges to go greener. Philanthropic support has gone squishy. Meanwhile, the planet is on track to speed past a 1.5-degree-Celsius increase in average global temperatures, the threshold that has been considered the bright line of danger since the Paris Agreement.

Climate leaders have sought to project a keep-calm-and-carry-on attitude. “I would characterize this moment in time as just a moment in time,” Michael Brune, the former head of the Sierra Club and the CEO of the Clean Break Fund, told me. This is just an ebb tide, advocates insist, not all that different from past periods when climate slipped to the margins of the political conversation.

There’s no doubt, however, that the dysphoria is real. I spoke with more than a dozen climate leaders spanning the academic, advocacy, and philanthropic sectors who told me, in different ways, that the American climate movement is unsure where to go from here. Having sunk to such lows so soon after climbing to such great heights, climate activists are scrambling to find the movement’s next big idea—some path that will lead them back out of the political wilderness. But right now they’re lost.

If the Inflation Reduction Act managed to be one of the most tepidly—and confusingly—titled laws in American history, it also represented a genuine breakthrough for climate action, an opportunity to begin reorganizing the U.S. economy around climate goals.

Previously, the climate movement had two strategic strands, broadly speaking. The first focused on policy: pushing for international agreements (such as the Kyoto Protocol, which was never ratified) and national laws that would limit greenhouse-gas emissions (such as the Obama-era cap-and-trade bill that died in the Senate). Advocates scored their clearest win in 2015 with the signing of the Paris Agreement—though the signatories have failed to meet the accord’s lofty goals.

The second strategy was to attack fossil fuels directly, along with the financial institutions underwriting them. The movement had some victories: The Keystone XL pipeline died; hundreds of U.S. colleges and churches divested from fossil-fuel companies; coal plants across the country were scheduled for closure.

Then came the Green New Deal and its vision of an American manufacturing renaissance. After the neoliberal consensus that markets could manage carbon emissions fell apart, advocates and their allies in the Democratic Party got behind the idea that the best way to ratchet down emissions would be to build things: solar farms, electric-vehicle factories, high-speed rail. It was technocratic, sure, but also bold, a callback to the FDR era. Under industrial policy, the invisible hand of the market would be enclosed in a tight glove of federal priority-setting. The now-deflated Inflation Reduction Act was the wonky and somewhat less bold version of this ambition.

Today, the overriding theory of change remains the same as ever: Back fossil fuels into the grave and drive a transition to renewable energy marked by speed and scale. But within the movement, there’s little consensus on how to do that. The climate movement does not lack for clever proposals—state-level cap-and-invest programs, grid modernization, make-polluters-pay laws, greater investments in climate-change adaptation. What it lacks is support that’s as resolute as it is broad.

This has always been the climate movement’s Achilles’ heel, even at the high-water mark of the Greta Thunberg–inspired school strikes and mass marches in the years leading up to the pandemic. Climate change doesn’t score well on what public-opinion pollsters call “salience.” A majority of Americans are worried about climate change; in fact, the number of people who say they are concerned is near an all-time high. But when asked to rank climate change among other issues such as the cost of living, immigration, and health care, it turns out that most Americans aren’t very worried.

This is a structural hurdle. For decades, climate advocates have anchored their efforts in grand ideals of generational responsibility, international solidarity, and care for other species. Although inspiring, those ideals might also sound—how to put this?—abstract. So, desperate for a way to connect with Americans and their immediate concerns, climate-movement leaders are searching for some political wave to surf.

The most talked-about notion for a climate-action banner is the same issue everyone seems to be talking about: affordability. In this, the climate movement has a new ally—economics. As recently as a decade ago, “wind and solar were not cheaper. Period. Full stop,” Pete Maysmith, the president of the League of Conservation Voters, told me. “There were a bunch of reasons to do it, but it wasn’t affordability.” Now solar-plus-battery storage has become the cheapest form of new energy generation, as well as the quickest to build. Despite President Trump’s attacks on wind power, more than 90 percent of new electricity capacity that came online in the U.S. in 2025 was from renewables.

That technological and market reality means that advocates can argue, for really the first time, that a clean-energy transition is good, not just for the planet, but also for pocketbooks. This is especially true as Trump’s war against Iran spikes household energy costs. The hope among advocates is that solar, batteries, and wind can go from being coded as liberal to being coded simply as cheap—the Costco of energy as opposed to the Whole Foods of energy, as Bill McKibben likes to say.

This emphasis on cheap, clean energy is mostly a messaging strategy, but it does have real potential as policy. Environmental groups have used the clean-as-cheap argument to push public utilities commissions to approve renewable-energy projects, and Democrats in Congress have floated legislation, such as the Energy Bills Relief Act, that seeks to use the affordability argument to revive portions of the doomed IRA.

But some climate advocates caution, usually off the record, that crowing about how cheap clean energy is risks overpromising. Even a full utility-sector embrace of renewables is unlikely to cut most Americans’ monthly bills in the short run, and will merely slow the projected increase in costs. “Cost plateau” is a tough political sell, and recent polling suggests that the clean-as-cheap message isn’t breaking through.

So many climate advocates are looking to hitch the clean-energy future to populist concerns about AI, which is driving U.S. energy-demand growth and, in case you missed it, is strikingly unpopular.

Some climate leaders think the AI boom could be a way to underwrite the transition to renewables. “We’re going to make the hyperscalers pay for it, and that’s what I think is going to likely catch on with Democratic presidential candidates,” John Podesta, a consigliere to the last three Democratic presidents and a longtime climate-action champion, told me. BeYONCE is the cringeworthy acronym for this idea—bring your own clean energy. A parallel notion is to force the AI giants to offset their electricity guzzling by paying for household energy upgrades—putting heat pumps in every home in exchange for being allowed to build data centers

But that would ultimately ally the climate movement to one of the least popular industries in America. A community that is organizing to stop an AI data center because of its impact on local landscapes or the area’s rural character is unlikely to change positions because the AI facility comes with a giant solar farm. And for more radical climate activists, the notion of getting cozy with the AI bros raises major red flags.

Aru Shiney-Ajay, the executive director of the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led climate group that helped popularize the Green New Deal, floated the idea that challenging AI build-out could be a political bank shot. She’s less interested in using the AI boom to also build renewable energy—à la Podesta—than she is in exploring whether antipathy to the tech giants can be married to antipathy to oil giants. “It’s basically a question of whether or not corporations get to control the land and the air and water around us, or whether ordinary people get to,” she told me.

Leah Stokes, a professor of political science at UC Santa Barbara and the author of the new book The Carbon Wave, also proposed a political bank shot—connecting high energy costs and the data-center blowback to anger with Trump-administration corruption. Frustration with elites and “throw the bums out” populism could, in theory, lead some people to focus on the profiteering, and the massive political influence, of oil and gas companies.

“People don’t like fossil-fuel companies,” Stokes told me. “It’s quite intuitive for a normal person to understand that those people are profiting and making billions while the rest of America can’t even pay their energy bills.”

The climate leaders I talked with believe that Americans are thinking about climate change differently these days. They have a clearer understanding that it is contributing to painful increases in grocery costs and beginning to directly weigh on some families’ most valuable asset—their home; as homeowners in disaster-prone areas of California, Florida, and Louisiana are finding it more difficult to get insurance. It is time, some climate advocates believe, for a wholesale pivot from a morally centered movement to one centered on people’s material conditions—to reframe climate change as a kitchen-table issue for the first time. “You’ve never had more people who are experiencing climate change as a reality, not as a future problem,” Abigail Dillen, the president of Earthjustice, an environmental-law nonprofit, told me. “Real people at actual kitchen tables are talking about extreme heat, extreme weather, the insurance crisis.”

Real talk among real people is, no doubt, essential for any political movement. It’s also insufficient. If a climate message begins with energy affordability or the simmering insurance crisis or the health impacts of wildfire smoke, it then needs to build to the ultimate goal of limiting carbon pollution, whether through the supply-side strategy of stopping future oil and gas projects or through the demand-side tactic of installing more solar panels that are hooked up to EVs. Perhaps that’s a bridge too far?

The climate movement’s best ideas these days are little more than communication plays. The movement has a pile of white papers big enough to practically fuel a power plant’s boiler. But nearly 40 years after the NASA scientist James Hansen warned Congress of the dangers of global warming, a brutal mismatch exists between the number of Americans for whom climate change is priority No. 1 and the scale of the task at hand.

All political movements go through times of boom and bust, and even the bust moments can be a fertile time for experimentation and visioning. On that point, Beachy, the former Biden-administration official, likes to quote (with no small amount of ironic self-knowing) the advice of the arch free-market fundamentalist Milton Friedman, to keep developing alternatives to favorite policies, “until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.”

Inevitable, though, can take an awfully long while to arrive, and addressing climate change is, infamously, a timed test. Despite its many bright ideas, the one thing the climate movement doesn’t have is time.

An Existential Threat to the Oil Industry

2026-09-23T07:00:00-04:00

In late June 2021, the ghost of summertime future visited the Pacific Northwest. For three days, a heat dome hovered over Multnomah County, Oregon, broiling Portland’s drizzly landscape of evergreens and ferns with temperatures of 116 degrees Fahrenheit—much hotter than any resident, even the centenarians, had ever experienced there. Along the rocky ocean shore, sea stars and clams cooked alive in the tide pools. The heat buckled highway lanes and melted the cables that route power to the light-rail network. Not everyone had air-conditioning, and as the days wore on, getting an ambulance or a hospital bed became more and more difficult. Sixty-nine locals died.

At the county’s administrative headquarters, in East Portland, the board of commissioners got to thinking that someone should pay for all of this damage and loss of human life. Until recently, it would have been absurd to hold a person or company financially responsible for a sweltering spell of summer weather. Heat waves were like storms or fires: acts of God or products of chance, depending on your metaphysics. But climate scientists’ understanding of Earth’s atmosphere is getting only more sophisticated, and a growing number of them have come to believe that specific local weather events are traceable to human actions. They say that, with state-of-the-art computer models, they can now link a stifling heat dome like the one that settled over Multnomah County all the way back to the derricks, refineries, and glass office towers of specific oil companies thousands of miles away.

The scientists who launched this field knew that it could have legal ramifications, and hoped that it would. Now their work—still new, and not without its challenges—is being put to the test. During the past five years, dozens of American cities, counties, and states have used it in claims filed against ExxonMobil, Chevron, and scores of other companies, demanding not only payment for disasters that have already happened, but also mitigation funds for those that are bound to strike in the future. At a Multnomah County board meeting in June 2023, the commissioners voted to join them. Only a few hours later, the county filed a claim for more than $51.5 billion against 17 defendants: 14 fossil-fuel producers and sellers, two industry trade associations, and one management consultancy, McKinsey & Co. No such case has yet made it to trial in the United States, but legal experts told me that the Multnomah suit is among the most promising of its kind.

These lawsuits represent a new front for the climate-change movement, and they’ve arrived at a time when the movement is desperate for one. President Trump has withdrawn the United States from the Paris Agreement, dashing all hopes of a near-term global effort to limit emissions. His administration has not only refused to regulate atmospheric carbon, but actively encouraged Americans to vent more of it into the sky. Trump’s appointees have reversed fuel-efficiency standards, slashed investments into solar and wind, and, just last week, proposed the removal of all greenhouse-gas emissions limits on the nation’s power plants.

Meanwhile, summers keep getting hotter. A new environmental nihilism is setting in among Americans: Although a record number of us now see global warming as a “serious threat,” more than 60 percent tell pollsters that humanity won’t do what’s necessary to prevent the planet from careening toward a once-in-an-eon catastrophe. Against this backdrop of despair, the cases brought by Multnomah County and other plaintiffs like it could seem like a godsend for those who are desperate for some kind—any kind—of action. They sidestep Congress and the president and take the fight directly to the prime polluters. With jury awards that might conceivably run into the tens of billions of dollars each, a successful run of these lawsuits could function like a carbon tax on steroids. They could force energy companies to make more urgent investments in renewable energy, if only to limit their own liability. The more extreme climate-change scenarios would become less likely.

But that’s only if the science holds up.

When Noah Diffenbaugh was first starting graduate school in Earth sciences, in the year 2000, everybody already knew that human beings were heating up the planet. Climate scientists had discovered a smoking gun of sorts in the vertical layers of Earth’s atmosphere: The warming was distributed through them in exactly the way that you’d expect if our carbon emissions were the culprit. But no one dreamed of finding human fingerprints on a single weather event, such as a heat wave. “The posture was just: That’s not something we do,” Diffenbaugh told me.

A few years later, in 2003, that posture would change. In an editorial for Nature called “Liability for Climate Change,” Myles Allen, an atmospheric scientist at Oxford, argued that the attribution of extreme events to global warming was not only scientifically possible, but an urgent priority for the field. He urged his colleagues to pursue the idea precisely because it could be useful to future litigants. Epidemiologists had already shown the way. They’d long ago stopped asking whether smoking caused a person’s cancer; instead, they asked by what fraction it raised a person’s risk of getting the disease. Allen argued that climate scientists should do something similar by asking how smokestacks and other sources of atmospheric carbon had raised the planet’s risk of experiencing a flood or heat wave.

As if on cue, within months of Allen’s editorial, a singularly lethal week of extreme heat struck Europe. In France and Italy, tens of thousands of people died. In the aftermath, Allen joined up with Peter Stott, a climate scientist with the United Kingdom’s national weather service, and a young Oxford researcher named Dáithí Stone to analyze the heat wave’s potential link to climate change. The team looked at European temperature records for every June, July, and August going back to 1851, and found that 2003 had indeed been an outlier. For a large swath of the continent, the mean summer temperature had been 4 degrees Fahrenheit higher than normal. The team used a computer model to calculate the probability of that kind of spike in two different worlds: one with human carbon emissions and one without. By simulating summers in both worlds, the researchers determined that in ours—the one with emissions—the risk of Europe’s brutally hot summer was at least twice as high.

[Read: Climate change is moving mountains]

With that paper, a new science was born. “It’s now a recognized subfield with dozens of research groups and hundreds of papers,” said Diffenbaugh, who is currently a professor and senior fellow in Stanford’s Doerr School of Sustainability. In July, the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine published a report on the state of climate-attribution research, after more than 20 years of scientific work. Efforts to link extreme weather events to climate change had markedly improved, it said, thanks to more sophisticated models. Some extreme weather events are still difficult to attribute: Wildfires and hurricanes are tricky because they involve lots of different factors beyond just heat. But the report made clear that for heat waves, such as the one that hit Multnomah County, climate-attribution science is now on solid ground.

Indeed, if all the county had to do was prove that its brutal summer weather in 2021 was attributable to human-caused climate change, that would be a cinch. But the county’s lawsuit wasn’t filed against the whole of humankind; it names specific energy companies. To succeed in court, the plaintiffs will need to prove not one but two connections: first, between the heat wave’s death and destruction and industrial activity writ large, and second, between that industrial activity and individual polluters.

Proving the second link requires input from a different line of research—a tedious accounting project that unfolded over the very same period in which climate-attribution science went mainstream. In 2003, the same year that Allen published his Nature editorial, a geographer named Richard Heede was asked to prepare an unusual report. An environmental lawyer, Peter Roderick, wanted Heede to quantify every ton of CO₂ that Standard Oil had put into the atmosphere, beginning in 1882 and continuing through the company’s merger-enabled transformation into ExxonMobil. By then, humanity’s total carbon contribution to the atmosphere had already been estimated at about 400 billion tons. Heede’s work was meant to show what percentage of that mind-bending total could be traced back to the operations of a single large company.

Heede was able to retrieve most of the data that he needed from Exxon’s own records. After the Securities Exchange Act of 1934 was passed, publicly traded firms began to report their annual production of oil, gas, and coal to shareholders. To get the remaining pre-1934 records, Heede tracked down early histories of Standard Oil in dusty library collections in different parts of the country. Some of the early years remain a mystery. “I don’t think even the company itself has that full record,” he told me. But fossil-fuel production was relatively minuscule during those decades anyway, so omitting that had little effect on the final total.

[Read: What climate change will do to America by mid-century]

After adding up the numbers for Exxon, Heede told Roderick that the company had likely contributed about 5 percent of all the carbon that humans have ever pumped into Earth’s atmosphere. Roderick had commissioned Heede’s study because he’d had a hunch that it would be useful in a lawsuit against the company, but that end result seemed too small to get traction in court. So Heede set out to run the same analysis on other companies too.

In 2013, he submitted his results—a database completed with the help of volunteers and colleagues around the world who visited libraries on his behalf—to a scientific journal called Climatic Change. His manuscript reported that a full 63 percent of the world’s industrial CO₂ and methane emissions could be traced to just 90 entities. When Multnomah County filed suit for heat-wave damages in 2023, its attorneys cited this research; almost all of the named defendants appear on Heede’s list.

Climate scientists had achieved a remarkable bit of planetary detective work. They’d found the human hand in global warming, traced its effects all the way to specific weather events, and then apportioned blame for those events among the Exxons and Chevrons of the world. But not all of those links are straightforward—and in a courtroom, reasonable jurors may find them to be abstract or otherwise unconvincing.

For one thing, whatever advances that climate-attribution scientists have made, their work will never be definitive. They can’t run randomized controlled trials on extreme weather events: No one has access to a second Earth, identical to ours in every respect except for the extra carbon in its atmosphere. So instead, they give us probabilistic analyses that compare the weather that we see today with what we would have expected to see without human emissions, based on records from the time before we pumped so much carbon into the sky. The problem is, scientists have at most a century’s worth of good weather data, and that’s only for North America and Europe. That may not be enough to capture the whole range of natural variation, and even if it were, the data would still describe only one of many possible ways that Earth’s atmosphere might have behaved in an emissions-free universe.

To get around these limitations, scientists try to simulate a host of possible scenarios. They use climate models to generate thousands of ways the weather could have unfolded over time, either with or without human-generated carbon emissions in the mix. Then they count how often an event like the one they’re trying to attribute—a historic heat wave in the Pacific Northwest, for example—appears in each pile of simulated worlds, and analyze the difference.

But a lot depends on how the researchers define what they’re looking for in those piles. To complete their studies, scientists must set parameters for the heat wave that they’re trying to attribute—an exact peak temperature, a number of days, a geographical area—and then search for these across existing data, or in their pile of simulations. They take steps to control the risk of bias in the ensuing analysis, but by defining the event in a certain way, researchers could, in theory, make it look more unusual—and thus more attributable to human emissions.

Even setting that aside, an attribution analysis can say only that climate change makes a certain kind of heat wave more likely to occur. It can’t say whether climate change actually caused each and every such event. Roger Pielke Jr., a climate-policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that to slide from one to the other is like saying that a high batting average caused a home run.

Ted Shepherd, a climate scientist at the University of Reading, in England, who has been critical of this mode of attribution, has been pushing the field toward what he calls “storyline” attribution. In this method, scientists re-create a specific weather event by doing their best to put the details of its atmospheric mechanics into a model. Then they watch how it plays out, with and without human greenhouse gases in the mix. These storyline attributions avoid some of the issues that plague the other type, but they have their own simplifications and potential biases.

In the Multnomah County case and others like it, judges will have to evaluate whether attribution science, however it’s done, is admissible in court. Robin Craig, an environmental-law professor at the University of Kansas, told me that she’s not sure whether every one of them will reach the same conclusion. Even some of the researchers who are working in this field are wary of its use inside a courtroom. Park Williams, a hydroclimatologist at UCLA who has done important work on attributing wildfires and droughts to climate change, told me that studies of this kind are impossible to verify. In a sense, the research methods themselves will be on trial in these cases.

Climate science is already politically contested. For most of its history, researchers have been able to argue, accurately, that when they describe the need to reduce carbon emissions, they’re just following what the data indicate—and offering neutral counsel as to how a planetary disaster can be avoided. But from the very start, extreme-weather attribution has been pitched as a tool for activist lawsuits: Allen’s editorial from 2003 began by asking, “Will it ever be possible to sue anyone for damaging the climate?” This intermingling of research work and legal practice has been a driving force for the whole endeavor.

One of the original members of the committee that reviewed the state of climate-attribution science for the National Academies was the lead scientist at the Union of Concerned Scientists’ Science Hub for Climate Litigation. (After Pielke pointed this out in a Substack post, she was removed from the review panel.) Oil-funded advocacy groups have besieged the remaining committee members with public-records requests, presumably to ferret out any other conflicts of interest or embarrassing exchanges. Organizations connected to major oil companies have similarly criticized Heede’s database of individual polluters as having been specifically created to enable litigation. They also point out that even going by Heede’s own data, the carbon emissions of individual American companies are dwarfed by those from nationalized oil producers, including those in the former Soviet Union and in China.

When I asked Ryan Meyers, general counsel for the American Petroleum Institute, the largest U.S. trade association for the oil industry, about the attribution-science litigation, he responded with an emailed statement calling it an “ongoing, coordinated campaign to wage meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry.” He added: “Climate policymaking belongs in Congress, not in a patchwork of courts.”

What if it works? What if U.S. courts accept the science of climate attribution, with all of its tortured counterfactuals? What if some jury somewhere is inclined to see the oil companies as villains and wants them brought low? A single successful claim could inflict astronomical liability; in a warming world, almost every town and county in America might eventually be eligible to file one, and each would have the prospect of producing an enormous verdict.

As satisfying as that outcome would be for the beleaguered climate movement, it may not represent justice in full. By suing companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron, Multnomah County and the other plaintiffs are blaming climate change and extreme weather on the companies at the very top of the energy supply chain. This makes a certain kind of sense; the companies that extract and sell fossil fuels have certainly enriched themselves while Earth has warmed, and they can afford to pay a lot of damages out of their extraordinary profits. The plaintiffs will argue—as climate activists have for more than a decade now—that these companies understood the damage they were doing and deceived the public about it. This was the strategy that worked against the tobacco companies. When those companies were sued, the discovery process shook loose internal documents showing that they had long known that nicotine was addictive and cigarettes caused cancer, and had concealed this knowledge.

But if energy giants did understand global warming’s risks and hide them from the public—and some evidence that this is true has already been made public—would that let the rest of us off the hook? For decades now, we’ve all had good reason to believe that carbon emissions are heating Earth, and very few of us have renounced the use of fossil fuels, no matter how much we profess to care about climate change. We fill up our gas tanks, heat our homes in winter, and board cross-country flights to see family. The construction of our built environment would not have been possible without fossil fuels, nor would the functioning of our agricultural system. The lesson of attribution science might be that climate change is attributable to all of us.

Oil companies don’t want to pay for their share of it, but neither do most people. Degrowth arguments that call for humans to consume less or embrace a future with fewer people are woefully unpopular, and so are policies that would require Americans to pay more to burn carbon or compensate developing countries for the carbon that we have already burned.

Even supposing that energy companies are not just responsible for climate change, but uniquely so, that doesn’t necessarily mean that they should be held liable for all the harms that flow from it. “Disasters are never just weather,” Greg Lusk, a philosopher at Durham University, in England, who has written extensively about the epistemology of climate models, told me. They’re also a function of human choices about infrastructure and emergency response. During the ultra-lethal European heat wave of 2003 that killed nearly 15,000 people in France alone (and went on to be the test case for the first climate-attribution paper), many health workers happened to be away on holiday, which reduced France’s capacity for dealing with the crisis. Similarly, if more of Multnomah County’s residents had owned air conditioners in 2021, its heat dome would have had a much lower human cost. Our global conversation about who precisely ought to be held accountable for events like these, and to what extent, is likely only just beginning.

Either way, in the here and now, the energy companies are fighting these cases as if their survival depends on it. “There is a view that if you can get one to trial, you can make the fossil-fuel companies look bad and sway a jury,” Jonathan Adler, a law professor at William and Mary, told me. But whether Multnomah County’s lawsuit, or any other like it, ever gets to trial is an open question. Next month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments as to whether federal law preempts a claim that Boulder, Colorado, filed against several oil giants in state court for the costs of adapting to wildfires and drought. The plaintiffs in Portland will be watching closely. “A broad ruling from the court in the Boulder case could make a lot of the others go away,” Adler said.

Oil-and-gas companies may be able to weather a few losses. They could end up shelling out billions in damages, and still make enough profit to allow fossil-fuel production to survive and thrive. Whatever happens, this wave of climate lawsuits likely won’t be the last of its kind. The legal context for these cases will evolve. Company records will keep piling up, and courts may come to recognize new harms. Scientists will get better at measuring all the ways that Earth is changing. The weather will very likely worsen: People will experience more lethal heat domes hovering over cities that were once known for their mildness; more floods that wash away homes; more wildfires that orange the sky and fill it with lung-damaging smoke. More people are going to want someone to pay.

City Rats Are Going on Birth Control

2026-09-18T11:14:15-04:00

A city can have one of two levels of rat. There are cities where rats are glimpsed at night, furtively scurrying into a dark corner or among the train tracks. Then there are cities where the rats are so numerous and so brazen that they work out private disputes by brawling midday on a train platform, or they lounge on your front porch, eating fallen fruit. When rats reach that second level, city officials need some answer, any answer, to their rat problem. Washington, D.C., has reached that level, and Mayor Muriel Bowser’s answer involves rat birth control.

Contraception for rodents has become more popular over the past few years because the most commonly used rodenticides kill painfully, as the poisoned rodent internally bleeds to death over a period of days. Not a lot of people love rats or mice, but people don’t love causing that much suffering, either. Many are fond, too, of cats, owls, and hawks, which can be poisoned when they eat poisoned rats. New York City’s Flaco, the beloved Eurasian eagle-owl sprung from a cage in the Central Park Zoo, was found to have high levels of this kind of poison in his system when he died. And to top it off, some rodents are evolving resistance to poisons.

D.C. hopes that rats will lap up a liquid contraceptive called ContraPest from plastic bait stations. It is not the only city to try the approach: Chicago is having luck with rat birth control in Wicker Park; Boston had mixed results in Jamaica Plain. Most of the available research on ContraPest has been done by the staff of the company that makes it, SenesTech, sometimes in collaboration with external researchers. One study at a poultry farm found that a year of continuous baiting with ContraPest led to a 94 percent reduction in rat activity as measured by camera traps. The company says that if the rats continuously eat the bait, they stop having pups, a finding confirmed in a laboratory setting.

But that’s a big if. A prior attempt to use ContraPest in D.C. was inconclusive, according to Andre Pitman, the program manager for the city’s Rodent and Vector Control Division. In rat hot spots such as Adams Morgan, where evening revelers have been known to throw greasy pizza plates on the ground, rats simply had too much other food around for the birth-control liquid to hold much appeal. “We couldn’t get the rats to drink it,” Pitman told me.

So this time, Pitman said, D.C. is making what, to his knowledge, is the most aggressive push against rats in a very long time. First, the city is going to try to kill rats by heaving poison directly down their burrows, which will then be filled in. City workers will return multiple times, looking for burrows that the rats have reopened, adding more poison, then filling them again. The next week, the same procedure will be followed with a different poison, which clings to rat fur and is ingested as they attempt to lick themselves clean. Finally, starting in week three, the city will put out ContraPest for 15 days. All the while, city workers will clean alleys and encourage residents to remove ground cover, containerize trash, and generally boost hygiene levels so that rats are more likely to take the bait. Post-bar snackers are requested to keep things tidy too.

It is understandable that the nation’s capital, facing a high number of resident complaints, has chosen to throw everything it’s got at the rats. But the downside to the guns-blazing approach, from a scientific standpoint, is that if it succeeds, no one will have any idea why. If burrow numbers are down by the new year, no one can say that birth control works—only that the combination of two poisons, ContraPest, hygiene, and other measures works. And Pitman acknowledges as much. “It is not a fertility pilot,” he said. “It is a rodent blitz.”

Fertility control of wildlife, which is used in elephants, wild horses, kangaroos, and pigeons, among other species, does work sometimes, and advocates for this method worry that premature deployment of oral contraceptives for rodents risks making the entire field look bad. Ultimately, no real independent studies show that SenesTech’s products are safe or effective, Lawrence Green, the interim managing director for the Botstiber Institute for Wildlife Fertility Control, told me. (SenesTech CEO Michael Edell responded, “We have been doing this a long time and have case studies and data to back up our claims.”) Assuming ContraPest can work in cities, rats would likely have to take it for longer than 15 days to see lasting results. As people who take birth control generally know, if you miss a dose, it’s less effective, and you have to keep taking it for as long as you want to not have babies. ContraPest is really meant to be used indefinitely: SenesTech even offers a “Subscribe & save” option.

And that familiar e-commerce option points to a larger truth that everyone I spoke with agreed on: There is no end to this war. The quest to control rats is not about winning. It is about nobly devoting oneself to an unwinnable fight. Because rats spread disease, we must struggle against them, clear-eyed in the knowledge that, unless we are dealing with a small island, eradication is not possible.

The reason that rats will never be conquered, at least not in our lifetime, either with poison or with birth control, is easily explained by two facts of rat biology: They have many babies, and they love to explore. You can nuke rats with poison or slowly usher them into a population crash with contraceptives, but all you will have done is create unoccupied territories for young, exploratory rats to come occupy. D.C.’s current blitz is focused on Adams Morgan, Chinatown, and Eastern Market, but rats live in other places in Washington. They will be happy to move in once those neighborhoods have space.

Niamh Quinn, a human-wildlife-interactions adviser at the University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources, puts it this way: “We live in an infinite sea of rats.” Just beyond the boundaries of any rat-control project lie more rats, waiting to move in. Pitman, a longtime rat expert since before he joined the city, knows this too. “Rodents were here long before humans,” he said. All we can hope is to control them.

Why a Sea-Lion Epidemic Is a Bad Sign for Humans

2026-09-18T11:06:00-04:00

You have likely never heard of synanthropes, though you surely know them. And they know you. Synanthropes, whose name is derived from the Greek for “together with man,” are not our pets or our herds of domesticated animals but something like our oldest frenemies: beings from which we have long sought and failed to decouple ourselves, that now reside within our communities, and that have become an ineluctable part of our lives. They include insects like bedbugs, which have evolved within urban environments to become uncommonly dependent on humans for their survival, as well as house sparrows, seagulls, blackbirds, and pigeons, all of which have adapted themselves to take advantage of cities while evading their dangers. In Singapore, synanthropic river otters have begun rampaging through local markets and aggressively pursuing tourists for food. Black bears are bathing in backyard swimming pools in California.

All of these creatures straddle the human world and the wild. And that can make them uniquely perilous to human health.

In Chile, which has a 4,000-mile-long coastline, the most conspicuous synanthrope is the South American sea lion. About 130,000 of these pinnipeds, which can weigh 660 pounds and resemble giant waterlogged chocolate Labrador retrievers, live in raucous colonies on the water’s edge. On account of their ubiquity, pretty much everyone in Chile has had some kind of run-in with the barking beasts.

“As a Chilean, you can easily see sea lions,” Victor Neira, a veterinary scientist and virologist, told me from his lab at the University of Chile in Santiago. Sea lions have long been habituated to human handouts in Chile, and many of the urban colonies they’ve established are located near fish-processing plants, where the animals gorge on fish guts, bycatch, and other detritus dumped back into the ocean. “They’re not aggressive by nature,” Neira said. “They see people all the time, so they generally just move out of the way for you.” He thought for a second and seemed to change his mind. “That being said, if you mingle with them, they will try to bite you. So usually you have to kind of run or you have to scream.”

Neira has had more than his fair share of sea-lion encounters, because he’s spent the past decade tracking novel viruses in wild and domesticated animal populations across South America to sound the alarm about potential threats to humans. The more blood and fecal samples he and his team collect from seabirds and marine mammals, the more likely they are to detect novel pathogens or viral variants that have just appeared in the region. This sort of epidemiological research is undertaken in countries across the world because scientists now recognize that synanthropes are among the most important vectors transmitting novel pathogens to human populations. The hope is that a network of scientific early-warning systems, like the one Neira and his team have designed, can give humanity a head start in identifying new pathogens and stamping them out before they explode into the next pandemic.

In December 2022, Neira discovered a disturbing anomaly in blood samples he had been routinely collecting from migratory birds in Chile. H5N1—an influenza virus that causes acute respiratory symptoms and death in birds—appeared to be circulating among pelicans, cormorants, and terns. All three species regularly cross paths with other birds and sea creatures, and the viruses they harbor, along their migration routes. Neira was terrified. In the preceding 20-plus years, H5N1 had killed tens of millions of wild birds around the world, and hundreds of millions of poultry had been culled to contain its spread. He girded himself for a devastating avian outbreak. When the viral wave arrived, though, the casualties went much further.

Neira told me that in early January 2023, clusters of dead seabirds began washing up on shore. Later that month, Neira’s team witnessed the first cases of H5N1 among Chile’s sea-lion colonies. After years during which the monthly number of sea lions stranded on land (a measure that marine biologists use to assess disease severity and death counts) never surpassed 100, January 2023 saw a sudden spike to about 250. One month later, that number had doubled, and in June, more than 4,500 stranded sea lions were observed by scientific authorities. Overall, somewhere between 10 and 25 percent of the sea-lion population in the country died in the six months after the first H5N1 case was detected among Chilean seabirds, though Neira estimates that the proportion could be double that. It was a sudden and deeply frightening mass-mortality event, caused by a virus that had gained the ability to infect and kill mammalian hosts as well as avian ones. The corpses were piling up on shore, attracting flies and other scavengers—and risking further spread of the virus. Eventually, Neira said, the Chilean government built halls to house the remains, a sign of the scale of the crisis and its lasting impacts on Chile’s ecosystem.

More epidemics were caused by novel viruses in the past two decades than in all of the 20th century, suggesting that human vulnerability to opportunistic pathogens has shifted dramatically. The H5N1-fueled mass-mortality event among Chilean sea lions is an unsettling illustration of how synanthropes are ratcheting up this risk by bringing novel viruses carried by wild and migratory animals close to humans. H5N1 is still spreading through animals worldwide, including in the United States. More than 1,000 American dairy herds have tested positive for H5N1 over the past two years; cases among poultry and cattle alike may tick up this fall during the seasonal migration of wild birds.

So far, that hasn’t translated into a major human outbreak. Since 2024, only 71 human cases of H5N1 have been reported in the U.S. Two people have died. No evidence indicates that the virus currently infecting cattle can spread between people. It’s a lucky break, given how ubiquitous H5N1 is among hundreds of wild bird species that regularly come in contact with poultry and cattle herds, which are perfectly positioned to infect human populations with opportunistic pathogens. That luck might not hold forever, though. A recent report from the World Health Organization suggests that H5N1 viruses are continuing to mix and match genetic material, and a 2024 study from Scripps Research Institute in San Diego found that the H5N1 variant circulating in U.S. cattle is only a single amino-acid mutation away from being able to efficiently infect humans.

As animal populations continue to come into closer proximity with humans, the threat posed by synanthropic viruses will only grow. Viral pathogens can now be efficiently borne from the most remote places on Earth into the heart of human metropolises. It just takes an animal to bring it from there to here.

This article has been adapted from Dan Werb’s new book, Our Wild Familiars: How Animals Are Adapting to Cities and Reshaping the Natural World.

The AI Pandemic Isn’t On Its Way

2026-09-11T13:12:58-04:00

Last month, a team of scientists published a high-profile paper describing how they’d taught an AI model to help produce brand-new, deadly viruses. The AI—a “genome-language model” trained on DNA sequences—had designed multiple new genomes that scientists then synthesized into functional viruses. And some of those viruses were capable of killing bacteria in a dish.

News of AI-made viruses went over poorly. The loudest reaction to the study (which had been released as a preprint about a year ago) was fear. Now that AI can design viruses that go after bacteria, perhaps someone could use the technology to manufacture pathogens that harm people—sparking a major outbreak, even a devastating pandemic. This potential threat evoked some of the same concerns that politicians, researchers, and tech leaders (including Bill Gates) have raised. And these fears are only gaining traction: On Thursday, Anthropic released a report that sparked a round of doom-laden headlines, detailing several instances in which the company banned accounts that were using its LLM, Claude, for what could have been reputable research efforts—or efforts to develop biological weapons.

AI, which has repeatedly proved itself capable of exceeding user expectations and bypassing guardrails, is a formidable force; many fears about its potential biological threat stem from its relentless pace of development and the possibility that it could make independent breakthroughs, exceeding researchers’ own understanding, especially if AIs eventually achieve recursive self-improvement—that is, models designing newer and smarter models. Kevin Esvelt, a biologist at MIT and a co-founder of Secure Bio, a biosecurity nonprofit, told me that although he thinks the probability of an AI-driven pandemic remains quite low, the consequences of such a catastrophe would be so large that “it’s very important that we drive that probability down as low as we can.”

But many other biologists, especially infectious-disease experts and virologists, told me that the threat of a pandemic need not loom particularly large on the list of AI-made threats. To the scientists most familiar with the minutiae of growing, modifying, and testing viruses in a lab, and the havoc they can wreak in the real world, the viruses that have already arisen through evolution, or will soon enough, still present much more immediate perils. In other words, humans should be investing aggressively in pandemic preparation, but not because of AI.

To be clear, viruses made with the help of AI could pose some threat. The experts I spoke with agreed that, in the wrong hands, AI could be used to speed infectious destruction, to a degree. To create the bacterium-killing virus, scientists led by a group at Stanford University and the Arc Institute fed the AI model, called Evo, only viral genomes that attack bacteria. Those genomes are much simpler and smaller than ones coding for viruses that go after humans. In theory, though, with a similar technique, researchers could train AI on the genomes of viruses that infect humans, with the aim of manufacturing novel pathogens. Or perhaps—as some people worry is likelier, easier, and more dangerous—users could ask AI to adjust specific traits of viruses known to cause disease, until those pathogens can skirt available vaccines.

Scientists have long been able to manipulate viral genetics without AI. This kind of “gain of function” research has stirred its own political and scientific controversy—especially in discussions about the origins of COVID-19—and the Trump administration has restricted federal funding for it. But current AI models have the capacity to “put a supreme battery in the back of the things that people were already doing,” Brandon Ogbunu, an evolutionary biologist and infectious-diseases modeler at Yale University, told me. Tom Inglesby, the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, worries about bad actors using AI to surmount some of the limits of their own technical expertise. Ideally, models powerful enough to suggest new viral genomes should be subject to strict, formal review, Inglesby said; perhaps they could even be limited to training on only certain types of benign data. (For instance, the team that built Evo trained it only on viruses that kill bacteria, and withheld any data about viruses that can harm more complex life forms, including humans.) Esvelt advocates for restricting access to certain models entirely.

Other researchers, however, including the virologists I spoke with, pointed out that another set of safeguards is already in place: how little we humans—the creators and users of AI—understand about pathogenic viruses. For AI to map out more effective pathogens, people must be able to feed it data on what makes viruses highly transmissible, dangerous, and able to circumvent immune safeguards.

But these concepts are complex and murky enough that the chasm AI would need to cross is wide; researchers lack much of the basic knowledge they’d need to train an AI properly on such topics. “Right now, the data is junk going in,” Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University, told me. Generations of virologists have not come up with firm answers to key questions about what makes certain viruses better at causing diseases than others, or why some people are more susceptible to particular infections than others. Even expert virologists may struggle to ask AI the best prompts to guide it in useful directions.

In her own research on viral transmission, Lakdawala hasn’t found LLMs such as Claude and ChatGPT particularly helpful or correct, she told me, even when she’s asked them questions far simpler than “How do I make a pandemic virus?” (for example, basic questions about the flu-virus genome). Brian Hie, the lead researcher on the team that designed Evo, told me he’s also unconvinced “that AI would even be the method of choice for someone trying to make a dangerous pathogen.” It does not know enough about pathogens, because we don’t know enough about pathogens.

Esvelt, at MIT, argues that AI might not need to understand viruses perfectly, or even that well, to stumble across a dangerous iteration of one. AIs might also improve rapidly enough to make more sense of the existing data than human researchers ever have. But no matter how good AIs get, they so far have no way to build and test new pathogens, Gigi Gronvall, a health-security expert at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, told me. Even a very motivated human—whether they wanted to spark a pandemic for a government or terrorist organization, or for their own ends—would still have to pick through AI-generated possibilities, successfully synthesize them, assess them for enhanced (or at least sufficient) transmissibility and virulence, produce a sufficient quantity to do serious damage, and then release that payload of new virus into the world. All of that requires substantial skill in the lab, as well as expensive equipment and lab animals. It’s not impossible, but it certainly isn’t easy, either.

The practice of building new viruses in a laboratory is fickle: “Even if I give two experienced scientists the same protocol, they’re going to do it differently, and the results could come out differently,” Linsey Marr, a viral-transmission researcher at Virginia Tech, told me. Tinkering with viruses the old-fashioned way has also taught researchers that many hypotheses about what should make a virus more contagious or dangerous don’t pan out. Researchers cannot simply tune up a virus’s transmissibility or virulence like a dial; such changes can come with serious costs, including rendering the entire pathogen nonfunctional—incapable of infecting or hurting a person at all.

Evolution is already a master at tinkering with life forms and building upon their most successful—or dangerous—traits. Viruses are constantly trying out new versions of themselves and aren’t limited by human expectations about what “dangerous” agents of disease look like. Evolving pathogens also need no assistance from malevolent actors to start epidemics; in nature, where species constantly mingle, new outbreaks begin all the time. And nature has an elegant way of dealing with mistakes: Unviable iterations of life simply never come to exist at all. As good as AI is getting, “I can’t look anyone in the eye and say that process is any more harmful than what nature is already operating,” Ogbunu, the Yale evolutionary biologist, said.

The virologists I spoke with did agree that AI models should be monitored and regulated, but were wary of limitations that would hinder AI’s ability to speed the development of new vaccines, shore up viral surveillance, boost epidemiological modeling, or otherwise benefit public-health and infectious-disease research. (Even the types of bacterium-killing viruses that caused such an uproar could be deployed against antibiotic-resistant infections.)

Worries about killer viruses are already interfering with such lines of research. Among the examples of potential threats in Anthropic’s report were gain-of-function work on chikungunya virus and research about how flu viruses adapt to mammals—projects that could have been malicious or, in theory, could improve therapeutics or outbreak detection, respectively. (The company said in the report that it couldn’t confirm whether the queries represented the pursuit of knowledge for the public good or attempts at bioterrorism, and had erred on the side of caution.) Lakdawala and Marr told me that, recently, when they have asked Claude or ChatGPT about, say, genetic quirks in the flu-virus genome or using UV light to inactivate viruses, the AI flagged or halted their conversations. “It happens to me almost daily,” Marr said. (An OpenAI spokesperson wrote over email that “today’s models are specifically trained to withhold biological information that could enable harm” and that researchers “pursuing legitimate biological and life sciences work” can apply to its Trusted Access programs, which require proof of identification. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.)

Lakdawala and Marr are now trying to develop their own framework to help AI models distinguish legitimate scientific pursuits from nefarious ones. Both say that it’s difficult: What would the criteria be? Who would be the final arbiters of those criteria and of ambiguous cases? And none of those guardrails would address the most extreme concerns about viruses created by AI—that a self-improving intelligence might eventually be able to deliberately design, manufacture, and release a pathogen. For now, though, AI is still a tool. We’re still in charge of the questions we ask it, the data we feed it, and the fate of any virus that it might suggest we create.

Zoos Are Doubling Down on Very Unnatural Habitats

2026-09-08T08:00:00-04:00

Photographs and video by Cody O’Loughlin

Hudson, a 10-year-old arctic fox at Massachusetts’s Stone Zoo, was not doing all that much when his caretakers came by his enclosure one sunny morning last month. But the moment he detected their approach, he scurried over. His eyes focused on the pink, kibble-filled puzzle box they were holding—a programmable, lab-made device that’s part of an experiment in letting captive animals play around with technology.

In the past year, in partnership with a team led by Rébecca Kleinberger, an engineer and a computer scientist at Northeastern University, Stone Zoo has introduced Hudson to his puzzle feeder, two black bears to a motion-sensitive bubble machine, a family of colobus monkeys to an interactive cabinet of mirrors, and more. The zoo is not alone in its tech curiosity. At the Maryland Zoo, caretakers have debuted a hunting simulation for polar bears, in which a robot arm extends and retracts a romaine leaf smeared with peanut butter—mimicking a prey animal poking its head out of an ice hole. At Zoo Atlanta, keepers have partnered with engineers at the Georgia Institute of Technology to develop an interactive audio wall where elephants can insert their trunks into motion-sensitive holes to trigger a variety of low-frequency sounds. At some facilities, penguins have been given access to iPad games designed for pet cats, and orangutans have been taught to play on an Xbox.

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

A gibbon inspects a motion-sensitive bubble machine.

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

Rébecca Kleinberger, the lead researcher on a team at Northeastern University studying how technology can enhance the lives of captive animals

Hudson the arctic fox makes a case for the benefits that captive animals can derive from tech. His quarters at the zoo, where he lives alone, offer few of the thrills he’d experience in the wild—chasing after live rodents and birds, wooing mates, fleeing wolves and bears. In the past, when I’d come to his enclosure as a visitor to the zoo, he had always been snoozing; simpler toys rarely captured his attention for more than a few minutes at a time, his keepers told me. This time, he trotted. He sniffed. He wriggled his tail. He reared up on his hind legs and used his long-clawed front paws to spin the pink wheel of his puzzle counterclockwise, then clockwise, until it yielded crunchy bits of kibble.

When Kleinberger’s team first approached Pete Costello, the assistant curator at Stone Zoo, and his colleagues about the prospect of introducing the zoo’s residents to technology, his mind swam with images of creatures clutching iPads, doomscrolling their days away, he told me. But as Hudson spun his box—which can be toggled up and down through four levels of difficulty and programmed to release food at set intervals—I glanced over at Costello and the other keepers. They were beaming like proud parents and complimenting the fox’s deft moves: Ooh, good spin … Yup, he’s got it right away!

Regardless of how well wild animals are cared for in captivity, their lives by definition shrink. In enclosures, removed from nature’s shifting circumstances and perils, and, often, the company of their own kind, they “lead very impoverished lives,” Clara Mancini, a pioneering researcher in the field of animal-computer interaction at the Open University, in the United Kingdom, told me. Technology may at first seem to make captive animals’ lives more artificial. But it’s starting to look like a good way to coax them into behaving more wildly.

The field of technological enrichment for animals might have taken off decades earlier, Joey Golden, the curator of animal-behavior programs at the Maryland Zoo, told me. In the 1970s and ’80s, for instance, the scientist Hal Markowitz tinkered with devices that taught Diana monkeys to dispense food from a vending machine, or flung “flying meatballs” for servals. The animals were, by all appearances, interested in Markowitz’s devices. But “what he was building,” Golden said, “was incredibly artificial” to others in the research community who were focused on better replicating wild habitats.

Animal-behavior researchers have since come around to the idea that the aesthetics of an animal’s surroundings are less important than how well those surroundings serve them. Creatures need the unpredictability of the natural world; in the monotony of captivity, where humans are in charge, a device that can shift with an animal’s needs can offer that creature “a little more control,” Kleinberger told me. A wobbly chew toy stuffed with a mini meatball might entertain a fox like Hudson for a few minutes. But it can’t operate on a shifting schedule or become more difficult as the user learns its quirks—unlike a teched-up puzzle feeder.

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

A black bear at Stone Zoo, in Massachusetts

Kleinberger got her start by creating voice-technology tools for musicians and people who stutter. But several years ago, keepers at the San Diego Zoo asked if she would develop a device to help a beats-loving hyacinth macaw named Sampson control his own playlist. Kleinberger was pleased to see not only that the device not only gave Sampson access to the tunes he wanted to hear, but that he’d bob his head along with the music to attract the types of zoo visitors whom he seemed to particularly enjoy. “He really liked children or people wearing red T-shirts,” Kleinberger said. Sampson, in effect, had made the technology his own.

Determining what animals may get out of different technologies requires some guesses and leaps. At Stone Zoo, a pair of black bears, Smoky and Bubba, are certainly interested in the device that Kleinberger’s team built for them—a motion-sensitive machine that blows scented bubbles. The day I visited, both bears lumbered over to the lemon-scented, then bacon-scented bubbles streaming into their enclosure; they took big, huffing whiffs; flicked their ears; and occasionally licked their chops. The bubbles were stimulating the bears’ keen noses, engaging a sense they might not otherwise use very often. But, of course, the bears couldn’t tell us how much they actually liked the experience. When I asked Mancini how researchers know the full effects that technology has on other creatures, her answer was simple: “We don’t.”

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

Liam Kelly, an animal-well-being adviser at Stone Zoo, holds a puzzle box for Hudson the arctic fox.

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

A motion-sensitive bubble machine positioned outside the black-bear enclosure at Stone Zoo

Animal behaviorists generally don’t like to use words such as enjoyment and boredom to describe their study subjects. “Those are very human concepts,” Kleinberger said. But if the goal is to improve captive animals’ lives, sentiments at least akin to enjoyment and boredom are what enrichment researchers must try to measure. Scientists are left to use the animals’ actions as a code, Malu Celli, Zoo New England’s vice president of animal care, told me. Researchers look for certain behaviors that they might feel are lacking in captivity: more swimming by a penguin, more walking by a bear, more foraging by a fox. They’ll also pay attention to how a creature’s senses are engaged—whether an animal’s ears lift or its eyes focus on a machine—while watching for subtle signs of distress. A positive result can be as simple as “Do they come back to it?” Kleinberger said. Or, presented with the same system, do they run away?

Engagement doesn’t necessarily mean fulfillment. An animal that’s spending long periods of time with a screen might just be drawn in by the lights. And in the same way that chasing a laser might infuriate a cat who can never catch its blinking red “prey,” touch screens that ask animals to chase virtual objects might never satisfy predatory instincts. Tech might also suck up so much of an animal’s attention that it doesn’t do much of anything else, or engross a group of creatures so much that they begin to compete for access, Marcela Benítez, an animal-behavior researcher at Emory University, told me. At some zoos, in fact, caretakers have entirely banned smartphones around their great-ape enclosures out of concern that the animals might get too much screen time.

Researchers are still trying to understand the extent to which different species can recognize two-dimensional images or videos of themselves or others of their own kind. Certain brainy creatures can be good candidates for screen-based interactions: Kleinberger and her colleagues have had success with a video-chatting system for pet parrots, highly social birds that commonly end up isolated in a human home. Many of the parrots they studied would chatter or sing loudly to each other through the screen. One parrot in the study, Kleinberger said, started flying more often after a series of calls with another bird that frequently flitted about. Some of the parrots, though, just lay down next to the device or fell asleep.

Several of the scientists I spoke with for this story also happened to be parents of very young children; more than once, they compared the types of enrichment they were tinkering with to the games and toys they’d shared with their toddlers, for better or for worse. Some wondered about the potential for addiction, or even about skewing certain creatures’ perception of reality by overloading them with artifice. But projecting too much of humans’ own complicated relationships with technology onto animals can unnecessarily limit research. Just as animals might derive the same benefits that people do, they also might not experience the same harms. With Hudson, Kleinberger at first worried that the fox might become unhealthily obsessed with his puzzle box. But the presence of the device, she said, instead seemed to boost his enthusiasm for activity in general. It’s hard to say for sure, but maybe the technology reminded him that there was still fun to be had inside his artificial world.

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

A black bear investigates the bubble machine as it spews bacon-scented bubbles.

The Dark Side of Mindfulness

2026-09-04T09:00:00-04:00

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In 2004, Willoughby Britton, then a doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, began recruiting participants for a study that, she felt sure, would show meditation improves sleep.

Britton, a meditation teacher, was so devoted to the practice that she saw herself as a “double agent,” someone who uses science to promote meditation. Although she had grown up in a nonpracticing Episcopalian home, she’d become deeply invested in Buddhist teachings. She read meditation books in her spare time and at one point considered becoming a Buddhist nun. She was confident that meditation improved most things, including sleep; it had already improved much about her own life.

For her study, Britton split 26 participants into two groups: one that would go through an eight-week-long meditation class, and one that would serve as a control group. She brought them all into a lab to sleep overnight while sensors measured their brain waves, muscle activity, and eye movements.

But when she reviewed the results, she was dismayed to find they were the opposite of what she had predicted. The participants in the meditation group slept more fitfully, with more frequent awakenings, than those who didn’t meditate. They spent more time in “Stage 1,” the lightest sleep phase, from which people are easily roused. “Graph after graph after graph, no matter how you looked at it—number of awakenings, number of micro arousals, number of Stage 1 minutes,” Britton told me, the amount of meditation that the subjects practiced was directly correlated with worse sleep quality.

Britton wasn’t sure what had happened. Had she done something wrong? Designed the study poorly? Was the result a fluke, a random finding that didn’t mean much? Or perhaps meditators just need less sleep. At the time, promoting meditation was more important to her than scientific ethics, and she worried that publishing the results would mean “harming the dharma”—criticizing the teachings of the Buddha. So she didn’t.

On a meditation retreat not long after this, she was chatting about her study with a meditation teacher when the teacher said, “I don’t know why all you psychologists try to make meditation into a relaxation technique. Everyone knows if you meditate enough, you stop sleeping.”

On some level, Britton must have known this. At that point, she had spent years both meditating and studying the brain. Because most kinds of meditation aim to enhance concentration, the practice can act like a stimulant. And just as chemical stimulants such as caffeine and Adderall can interfere with sleep, so, too, can excessive meditation.

What else, she wondered, did meditation teachers know that they weren’t telling people? Gradually, starting with that sleep study, the tiers of thought propping up Britton’s worldview—that Buddhism is a cure-all, and that meditation was always beneficial, and could never cause harm—would collapse. Over time, she would find that meditation, a multibillion-dollar industry that is promoted as a treatment for anxiety, chronic pain, alcohol abuse, addiction, and many other ailments, can sometimes, for some people, cause severe and lasting side effects: depression, anxiety, even acute psychosis. Losing the belief system that had been foundational to her life would lead her to produce a trailblazing body of research about the adverse effects of meditation, and then to found a clinical practice geared toward helping the people—a lot of them, as it turns out—who believe that meditation has harmed them.

Britton has straight blond hair, blue eyes, and a muted affect. When you say something to her, she pauses, as if considering whether or not to smile. A colleague once suggested to her that she might be autistic. “And I’m like, ‘Okay,’” she told me one day recently.

She grew up on a farm in Massachusetts with parents who believed that a person should find a problem that isn’t being solved and embrace it as their niche. Her father’s niche was fermenting waste from local businesses and selling it as compost.

Britton was, by her own description, a weird kid who spent a lot of time by herself. She was always asking strange questions like “What is looking out of my eyes?”

One day during the summer break after her junior year at Colgate University, where she was majoring in neuroscience, Britton went over to the house of her best friend, Sarah, a champion athlete at Dartmouth, and discovered her lying lifeless on the bed, a hunting rifle on the floor and a splatter of blood on the wall. Overwhelmed by the pressure of competitive sports, Sarah had taken her own life.

After Sarah’s death, Britton developed symptoms of PTSD. She grew afraid of crossing the street and of driving. She didn’t like opening doors, because she feared she might find a dead body behind them. At one point, while killing rats at her bench in the National Institutes of Health lab where she worked between college and graduate school, she watched the blood drain from their eyes and wondered aloud to a colleague, “Where does it go?” “In the freezer,” the colleague responded. But Britton wasn’t asking about the rat’s body, but its life force. Where did that go?

She was reluctant to take medication, so her father sent her the book A Path With Heart, by the famous meditation teacher Jack Kornfield. She appreciated Kornfield’s explanation for why humans are so prone to rumination—“over and over we feel the familiar tug of thoughts and reactions that take us away from the present moment,” he writes—and that he offered a way out via meditation. She began meditating for half an hour to an hour each day.

In graduate school, Britton initially focused her research on the neuroscience of near-death experiences, but for her dissertation she pivoted to studying meditation, which had been so steadying for her personally.

Meditation was, even then, having a moment. In 2005, the filmmaker David Lynch established a foundation that aimed to promote Transcendental Meditation in colleges and schools. Soon, tech CEOs were flocking to mindfulness summits to learn about “wisdom in the workplace” or “conscious leadership,” and a mindfulness class for Google employees regularly had a long waiting list. High-powered celebs including Oprah and Arianna Huffington credited meditation for centering them amid their empire building. LeBron James partnered with Calm, a multibillion-dollar meditation-and-sleep app. Today, according to one study, about half of all Americans have tried meditation, and about a fifth meditate regularly.

Meditation’s popularity is well-founded. Although the practice has long been supported by the more woo-woo corners of the wellness industry, as well as by Eastern philosophy, an accumulating body of scientific research has suggested that it has all kinds of measurable benefits. Major studies show that meditation can alleviate anxiety and depression—at least about as well as the antidepressant Lexapro can, but without the cost and with fewer side effects. Even short periods of meditation have shown notable effects on the brain: Several studies have found that eight weeks of meditation training can reduce reactivity in the amygdala, the emotion center of the brain, and another showed that meditation could help activate brain regions involved in attention, memory, and perspective-taking in people with social-anxiety disorder. Other reputable studies have linked meditation to positive mood; improved immune function; reduced chronic inflammation; less back pain; lower blood pressure; enhanced self-awareness; better attention spans; greater compassion; and even reduced feelings of loneliness in older adults.

Beyond the scientific evidence, Britton believes that meditation became popular because it’s a health hack that people can do independently, without relying on expensive medical care. The practice suggests that “underneath all of your thinking is some beautiful, basic state” just waiting to be discovered, she said. It probably helps, she added, that meditation is “this ancient thing from Asia and therefore seems more legit or real or something.”

In graduate school, Britton became a serious meditator in the Western insight tradition, which includes sitting and focusing on an “anchor,” such as one’s breath, sometimes for hours at a time. Britton describes it as an austere practice intended to “train the mind.” She molded her life around ancient Buddhist principles. When colleagues remarked on her plain appearance, she said, “Why would I adorn myself?”

Soon, Britton immersed herself in Tibetan studies. Instead of reading novels at night, she’d read dharma books. Her belief at this time, she said, was that “getting enlightened is the most helpful thing you could do for the world.” She considered dropping out of academia to move to a monastery in Asia, which would have meant renouncing her former life, taking a vow of celibacy, and living under a new name.

But she stayed in the United States and continued her academic work, while also training to teach mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR), a secular meditation program developed in the ’70s by a molecular biologist named Jon Kabat-Zinn, and a related course called mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. These classes promise to help everyday people with their stress, low moods, and chronic pain; alongside daily meditation practice, they typically include some non-Buddhist teachings from psychology and literature.

Britton moved to Rhode Island to begin her clinical residency at Brown University’s Warren Alpert Medical School. She didn’t know anyone, and, working 12-hour days, she felt intimidated by the cutthroat Ivy League academic life. To fill the time she had to herself, she started meditating for three hours a day.

One night, after meditating on her balcony for an hour, she went back inside and noticed that her house felt like someone else’s home. A picture of her with two friends looked like a picture of three people she happened to know.

Britton decided to take a walk, and as she strolled the streets of Providence, she felt like a bird sitting on her own shoulder, watching herself. She walked into a creperie where she noticed two people arguing. When they both turned and glared at her, she thought, Oh my God, I forgot that I am a person.

What Britton was experiencing is called dissociation, a state that can occasionally be evolutionarily useful—it can help people push through a task when faced with overwhelming terrors. But according to Britton and other researchers, it can happen to extreme meditators too. Britton told me that extensive meditation can prompt the prefrontal cortex to essentially shut off the brain’s emotional centers, causing feelings to seem blunted. And without the typical emotions that we project onto objects, familiar things—our hands, our homes—can start to look foreign. Heleen Slagter, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam who studies meditation, says that part of the way the brain gives rise to our sense of self is by predicting how we will interact with the world in the future. If you spend enough time zeroing in on the present moment, as one aims to do during meditation, Slagter says, your sense of the future can start to recede—and with it your sense of self. This can produce dissociation.

Britton began dissociating a few times a week. She had trouble driving because she couldn’t sense where her body began and ended. She’d watch a sappy commercial and suddenly notice her face was wet, not realizing she had shed tears. She felt porous, like other people’s states of mind were her own, a fact that became especially disturbing when she was treating suicidal patients. The dissociation continued for six or seven years, sometimes happening during meditation, but other times at random.

When she told meditation teachers about the dissociation, she said they told her she had entered a new stage of enlightenment—that she was “riding the ox backward.” She had “seen the truth of no-self,” they said, and this was a good thing. They told her to keep meditating, which made the dissociation worse. Somehow, Britton got through her postdoc, but she wasn’t entirely functional. She didn’t date anyone for a decade.

Lauren Lancaster for The Atlantic

Willoughby Britton at home in Vermont. Now retired from Brown University, she runs an organization that counsels people who have had distressing experiences during or after meditation, such as insomnia, anxiety, depression—even psychosis.

Even before she started dissociating, another layer of Britton’s worldview began to crumble after she moved to Rhode Island and was working at an inpatient psychiatric hospital as part of her residency. One day, someone came in from a meditation-retreat center in a state of florid psychosis. Three months later, another psychotic meditator came in, from the same retreat center. That’s weird, Britton thought. Do they know each other? They did not.

It’s well known that psychedelics such as LSD can spark psychotic breaks, but meditation can produce altered states of consciousness almost as powerful as those induced by psychedelics. The brain likes and expects a certain amount of input; go long enough without doing anything and the neurons might start to fire spontaneously, producing, say, flashes of light or made-up memories. Inuit people in the Arctic Circle have been known to experience a type of hysteria known as piblokto, which might be brought on by the sensory deprivation of long winters. No one seems to know why, exactly, psychedelics and meditation can both occasionally prompt psychosis, but it might have to do with the fact that both can have the effect of “rewiring your brain,” which can be a positive thing but can also mean your brain just doesn’t work the way it used to. It might become more easily influenced, for example, or impart grave significance on unimportant events.

At this point in her research, Britton’s studies were still mostly focused on the benefits of meditation, such as on how it can be helpful for depressed people and substance-abusing teens. But now, when she spoke about her studies at conferences, she’d sometimes briefly mention some of the potential adverse effects of meditation. Afterward, people would corner her in the halls or in the bathroom and tell her they’d had negative experiences with meditation—everything from increased depression to psychotic breaks.

She started to wonder whether the unintended effects of meditation might extend beyond a few anecdotes and her own experience with dissociation. Centuries ago, meditation was practiced mostly by monks and other spiritual seekers in East Asia and India; it wasn’t something ordinary people did, Pierce Salguero, a historian of Buddhism and medicine at Penn State Abington and the editor of the book Meditation Sickness, told me. The point of meditation was never merely to relax or just “clear your mind” but to wholly rearrange one’s relationship to one’s thoughts. This might make sense for a Buddhist monk pursuing the great unbinding, but not for a random Brooklynite who just wants to be more productive at work. The “no-self” teachings of Buddhism can be at odds with the goals of Westerners, who are generally aiming to be their best selves, not to disconnect from themselves.

Britton began to perceive that the research on mindfulness contained a giant lacuna: its potential risks. Meditation researchers, she felt, tended not to find adverse effects among their study participants because they didn’t ask their participants about them. What’s more, many meditation studies are funded by pro-meditation organizations, and some study participants might feel pressured to say that their mental health improved after meditating. There’s no such thing as a placebo for meditation, which complicates studying its effects. When Britton looked for past studies on the risks of meditation, she found mostly isolated case reports and small studies—one of which found that two of 27 long-term meditators had had “profound adverse effects,” including confusion, depression, and severe shaking.

Britton still believed in many of the potential benefits of meditation, but she began to rethink her role as a booster for it. “It just seemed like the world does not need another meditation researcher who’s going to promote meditation,” Britton told me. “We’re like Starbucks—there’s one on every corner.” Assessing the extent and severity of possible negative effects of meditation, she decided, would be her version of a problem to solve—her niche. In 2007, she began interviewing meditators for what would become the first comprehensive study of meditation’s adverse effects.

In 2010, Britton met a religious-studies scholar named Jared Lindahl at a conference. At that point, Britton had been meditating so much that she saw stars even with her eyes open—usually either one blue star or one white star—a phenomenon that Buddhists call nimitta. Lindahl had written his dissertation on visual light experiences of this sort. Meeting him, Britton said, “was having somebody understand a part of my experience that no one else had understood.” They wrote a paper about meditation-induced light experiences together, began meditating together, and, eventually, fell in love. The year she met Lindahl, she also finally published the sleep study she’d conducted in Arizona—the one showing that too much meditation can keep people awake.

Lindahl joined her on the meditation-challenges project, for which they conducted interviews about various types of adverse effects experienced and witnessed by 60 meditators and 32 meditation teachers—a smallish sample that is nevertheless rather large for qualitative studies such as this one. They finally published their first study, called “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience,” in 2017, nearly 10 years after they started it.

The most common adverse effects, reported by 82 percent of the meditators (which, importantly, included only people who had experienced an adverse effect of any kind), were “fear, anxiety, panic, or paranoia.” Second-most common were “changes in motivation or goal,” experienced by 78 percent. (Britton later talked with one meditator who sat on her couch for two years, unable to do much of anything, though most of the motivational effects reported were less dramatic.) Smaller numbers reported experiencing delusions, hallucinations, physical pain, rage, and suicidality. The effects lasted for a median duration of one to three years, and the majority of the sample indicated “moderate to severe” impairment in at least one area.

Although the study suggests that what’s most likely to cause problems is intensive meditation—sitting in silence in a retreat hall for hours or days on end—28 percent of the meditators had issues arise from their everyday non-retreat practice, and 25 percent of those in the study were meditating less than an hour each day.

Being an experienced or even expert meditator didn’t necessarily protect people. “I was like, ‘You’ve written a bunch of dharma books. How come you never mentioned this?’” she told me she asked one of the teachers. “And he’s like, ‘Well, it’s not good advertising.’” Notably, much of Britton’s sample of people harmed by meditation had graduate degrees; Britton believes that this is because high achievers tend to try to “ace” meditation, by, say, ignoring any internal sense that something might be wrong. (This struck me as similar to the endurance it takes to earn a Ph.D.: Power through years of pain and tedium for the promise of a big payoff at the end.)

As a study, “The Varieties of Contemplative Experience” had some inherent limitations. Because it recruited people who had had negative experiences, the study could conclude nothing about their prevalence. The study also couldn’t definitively prove causality—for instance, it’s possible that the meditators’ symptoms happened after meditation, but for unrelated reasons. Some Buddhists would also say that experiencing negative emotions or other bad effects is supposed to be part of the practice. But by and large, the study was well received and widely cited in the field. It acknowledged its own limitations and, if anything, respect has grown for it over time.

In part that’s because subsequent studies, some of which Britton was involved with and some not—and some of which were conducted in part by the most well-known academic boosters of meditation—have provided sturdy evidence that some percentage of meditators do experience negative effects from it, ranging from mild to severe. The frequency of bad effects found varies, but most studies, and most experts I talked with, estimate that about 10 percent of all meditators experience them, with the prevalence being considerably higher in certain situations. Richard Sears, a clinical psychologist and Zen master who’s been practicing meditation for some 40 years, has said that he thinks Britton’s research is important. “Something is happening” to these meditators who have bad experiences, “and we should be aware of it. This is opening up a conversation.”

Britton and Lindahl went on to publish many other studies on meditation’s dark aspects, including delusion-like ideation and feeling bolts of electricity traveling through the body. One study subject grew paranoid at a meditation retreat, left, and on the way home believed that street signs were delivering secret messages just to her; another became convinced that she needed to save the world from a “black Tantric plot” contrived by retreat-center staffers, threw water in her meditation teacher’s face and slapped the center’s director; a third began experiencing “messianic visions” about the “need to sacrifice myself in some way for the benefit of saving mankind” and was convinced that meditation teachers were communicating with him in secret code; a fourth reported that meditation awakened an “energy” inside him with “a will of its own” that once almost compelled him to jump from a balcony because it “wanted to lift up and fly.” None of these people had previously experienced any psychosis or been treated for mental illness.

Different types of meditation seem to have different adverse effects on the people who experience them. In one of Britton’s studies, a “noting” practice—labeling thoughts or body sensations—was more likely to trigger anxiety, whereas focusing on an anchor such as one’s breath was more likely to prompt a depressive episode. Overall, Britton has found that about one in 10 people who have meditated, even once, had an adverse effect that lasted more than a month—a rate that, were meditation a drug, would qualify as “very common” under the standard classification used for adverse drug reactions. More frequent meditation tends to increase negative effects, Britton said.

The body of evidence that Britton and Lindahl have amassed showing that meditation can sometimes cause harm is now bolstered by others’ research. A Clemson University study found that mindfulness can paradoxically increase distress. (Cultivating a hopeful outlook was more effective than mindfulness at shoring up workers’ resilience and well-being.) A 2020 study found that 3 to 7 percent of schoolteachers and university students in the U.K. who took a mindfulness class reported “unpleasant experiences”—including anxiety, distressing memories, obsessive thoughts, and physical pain; another study found that a quarter of meditators experienced “unwanted effects” such as panic attacks, nausea, headaches, dizziness, insomnia, and dissociation, though most of these effects were transitory. A German research group studying more than 1,300 regular meditators around the world found that 13 percent experienced adverse effects, including a small number who experienced “very severe effects with lasting consequences” or “extremely severe effects” that were life-threatening or required hospitalization. Yet another large survey found that a quarter of meditators, and a higher percentage of nonreligious meditators, had a “particularly unpleasant meditation-related experience.”

To some extent, this is to be expected. It would be odd if a single treatment, billed as the solution for dozens of mental and physical problems, alleviated all of these ailments without any side effects. In medicine, “if it’s not doing any harm, then it’s probably also not helping,” Nicholas Van Dam, a psychologist at the University of Melbourne who has co-authored papers with Britton, told me. Along with a team of researchers in Australia, Van Dam found that about 9 percent of meditators in their survey reported a functional impairment arising from a meditation-related problem, including sleep changes and a sense of disconnection from others. Van Dam’s team suggested that people should be warned that meditation is contraindicated for certain groups, just as certain medications should not be given to some people. Miguel Farias, an experimental psychologist at Coventry and Oxford Universities who specializes in the science of meditation, told me that the early literature on cognitive behavioral therapy, from the ’70s and ’80s, recommended against meditating during a depressive episode. “Physical activity is a wonderful antidote to depression,” Farias said. But “meditation makes you physically be more passive.” In a systematic review, Farias and his co-authors found that adverse events among all meditators were “not uncommon,” appearing in 65 percent of the studies reviewed; the most prevalent symptoms were anxiety and depression.

Some of the side effects these researchers are finding may be attributable to the fact that, in the years since Eastern traditions of meditation were introduced to the West in the 19th century, this once primarily religious ritual has expanded far beyond its original intent; its more sweeping remit may have consequences that the practice’s original Buddhist context might have prevented. But as Salguero and others pointed out, early Buddhist texts cautioned that “meditation sickness” plagued even the devout contemplatives of earlier eras: In one eighth-century Chinese writing, the Buddha warns of 50 “demonic states” in which meditators could become trapped, including hallucinations, sorrow, anxiety, suicidal thoughts, and possession by ghosts.

While working on my most recent book, about personality change, I wanted desperately to change one thing about myself in particular: to bring down my stratospheric level of neuroticism, the personality trait associated with anxiety and depression. When I Googled how to reduce depression and anxiety, the first drug-free thing that came up was meditation.

So I signed up for an online mindfulness-based-stress-reduction class—the kind of meditation that Britton also once taught, and which now has hundreds of classes and instructors to choose from around the country.

I found some of the class’s Buddhist teachings, though watered down for newbies, very helpful, and by the end of the eight-week class, a test revealed that my neuroticism score had, indeed, ticked down. This surprised me because I’m bad at meditating, so I would spend entire 45-minute sessions reviewing my to-do list, my worries, and other earthly matters.

What annoyed me the most, though, was the way the meditation teachers talked, which tended toward New Age–isms in passive voice. “There’s a subtle striving in what you shared,” one of the teachers responded when I asked a question about how to make “mindful walking” more restorative. “Maybe you want for it to be relaxing and not challenging. But that’s not the reason we practice. We practice for the sake of practicing and to meet with whatever is arising.”

This is what Britton calls a “thought-terminating cliché”: a profound-seeming phrase deployed by people in power to quash debate—or, as Britton put it, a way for teachers to politely convey “Shut the fuck up and do what I say.”

But many Buddhists and meditation teachers would agree with my instructor: Feeling, and observing, discomfort is part of the point. In keeping with this, a good number of the meditators whom Britton has interviewed told her that when they had brought up their symptoms with meditation teachers, the teachers dismissed them, saying things like “It gets worse before it gets better” and “What you resist persists.”Their teachers would suggest that all negative experiences are inherently growth opportunities, or that perhaps the person was meditating incorrectly. The mentality seemed to be “Try our product and if you don’t like it, then you did it wrong,” Britton said.

This attitude tracks with what I heard from a few experienced meditators who suffered acute distress while meditating. One man told me that after a long retreat, when he began experiencing spasms that would seize up half his face, his meditation teacher just told him to relax more. Two other experienced meditators I talked with, Terran Palmer-Angell and Carmen Maria Alvarez, also told me that some fellow meditators at a long retreat they attended, organized by the Center for Contemplative Research, had experienced psychotic breaks or developed tics, including one man who would rotate his head around compulsively. The teacher and one of the center’s co-founders, B. Alan Wallace, they said, told them that it was just “an involuntary movement” and nothing to be concerned about.

Palmer-Angell and Alvarez emphasized that their experiences reflected this specific retreat, and not meditation in general. Eva Natanya, the center’s other co-founder, told me that “no one has been diagnosed with a psychotic break by a psychiatrist” at the retreat since its founding, in 2020. However, she said that some “individuals develop physical tics” because of a “burst of energy” while meditating. She said these tics are sometimes referred to as “involuntary movements,” and that initially, meditators might be encouraged to “let it go and go back to meditating because that energy will work itself out by itself.” She added that she herself worked with the person with the compulsive head rotations by “asking questions and listening.” She said the center has multiple forms of support available, including meetings with herself and Wallace, psychological counseling, appointments with doctors, and physiotherapy.

Britton remembers peddling a version of this logic as an MBSR teacher herself. “I was trying to tell people ‘Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so,’” channeling Hamlet and Stoic philosophy. For a while, this idea seemed radical, and constructively life-changing: The secret to a good life is to just be okay with whatever! But then her own meditation practice started to make her think “like, Okay, but wait; I don’t feel like I exist now.”That didn’t seem like a good thing, no matter how you thought about it.

Lauren Lancaster for The Atlantic

Having moved away from Buddhism, Britton now finds her own kind of tranquility in the natural world, taking care of her plants and chopping wood.

After Britton and Lindahl published the “Varieties” study, the phone in their lab started ringing. People experiencing psychosis, dissociation, tics, and other problems after meditating were asking for help. The meditators felt confused and ashamed, like they had damaged themselves. Traditional psychotherapists, they said, didn’t understand what they were going through—and neither did anyone else. How can you hurt yourself meditating?

The surge in outreach prompted Britton to open what she called Cheetah House—a play on citta, the Sanskrit word for “consciousness”—and develop it into a full-fledged nonprofit aimed at helping people who have had difficult meditation experiences. Based at first out of her house in Providence, it now serves 200 people a month, entirely over Zoom.

The Cheetah House program consists mostly of talks with experts, sessions with a “care team” member, and support groups with other meditators who have had distressing experiences. The program is priced on a sliding scale; most people pay $50 a session with a care-team member, and $100 or more for a session with Britton herself.

Many of Cheetah House’s clients have (relatively) manageable problems such as anxiety and insomnia, but Britton told me that, once or twice a month, she gets a call from someone whose family member has had a psychotic break triggered by meditation. Far more rarely, people have killed themselves after intensive meditation retreats. “When people say that I’m fearmongering,” Britton told me, “my response is, ‘We haven’t even gotten into the suicides yet.’” She recently decided to start a support group for the parents of meditators who experienced severe psychiatric symptoms after 13 families, four of whose children had already died, expressed interest.

Between half and three-quarters of Cheetah House’s clientele began having symptoms after a meditation retreat, Britton told me. People often go on retreats to try to deepen their practice or to “relax”—but these are generally not relaxing affairs. Many retreats involve waking up at dawn, eating very little, and sitting perfectly still while focusing on one’s breath for hours on end. Several days of this, Britton said, can cause neurons to become more sensitive, such that minor stimuli, like the ticking of a clock or the sound of another person’s breath, can start to feel overwhelming—as can emotions such as rage and grief. Kieran Fox, a psychiatrist at UC San Francisco and an experienced meditator, told me that retreats are “some of the hardest things I’ve ever done in my entire life. And that’s including med school.”

Among the Cheetah House clients I interviewed, retreats were a common trigger for adverse effects. One meditator, Dan Millstein, told me that after a 10-day retreat, he spent years feeling emotionally shut down and disconnected, like he was “living behind a glass wall or a veil.” Another man, Billy, who asked that I not use his last name, had been meditating regularly for a decade when a seven-day silent retreat ratcheted up his physical and mental anxiety: Shivering relentlessly, he started feeling better when he stopped meditating.

About 15 years ago, a woman who asked to remain anonymous was on her second 10-day silent retreat when she began feeling a twitch in her face that developed into an urge to roll her head around. She felt like electricity was shooting through her body. She would shake uncontrollably and at times writhe on the floor. Eventually, she was hospitalized for psychosis. She was later diagnosed with complex PTSD, and although she’s learned how to manage those symptoms, she told me that she still experiences involuntary muscle movements today. Another woman, Rebecca Fischer, told me that, more than 12 years after a retreat she attended, she still has chronic pain in her legs and back.

A good number of Cheetah House’s clients do suffer ill effects outside of retreats. In the days after meditating at home with an app, a client named Susan Small told me she was driving when “my whole sense of myself disappeared,” and she went on to experience “waves of terror” for months. A man named Eoin told me that after eight days of doing 30-minute audio meditations on his own every morning, he started feeling like a “nervous wreck,” on the edge of psychosis, and like he didn’t really know who he was, a phenomenon called depersonalization.

These people and other clients said they appreciated hearing from fellow meditators with similar experiences, and that Cheetah House helped them feel less like a “misfit toy,” as Millstein put it. They’d had a hard time finding support elsewhere, in part because one of the most common recommendations for emotional distress is to try meditating. Many of her clients, Britton said, seem relieved when she tells them it’s okay if they want to stop.

One recent New Year’s Eve, Britton hosted what she jokingly called a “parallel play” party—a kind of get-together for introverts where everyone works on a craft so they don’t have to talk much. She made margaritas, and friends and colleagues brought over magazines to cut up for collages. A few hours in, someone held up an article from the magazine Psychotherapy Networker and said, “Hey, is this about you?”

The story was, indeed, about Cheetah House, and Britton waited until everyone left to read it. One quote in particular stopped her cold:

“There should be a trigger warning for the Cheetah House website,” says renowned Buddhist teacher and clinical psychologist Jack Kornfield. “Too much of it is misleading information and over-the-top fearmongering.”

This was the Jack Kornfield, the mindfulness guru who wrote A Path With Heart, the book that had launched Britton’s journey into Buddhism. He was like a father figure and a mentor to her. Jack Kornfield thought she was fearmongering. Now all she could think was “Thanks, Dad.” She spent a week in bed after that. (Kornfield declined to comment.)

As she continued with her research, Britton gradually started to feel iced out of the Buddhist circles that had once comprised her entire personal and professional networks. She said a Buddhist organization sent her a threatening letter after she interviewed members of their community. One time, after she gave a talk about adverse effects at a conference, Britton said a prominent meditation researcher cornered her outside and yelled, “I don’t believe you!” (The researcher denies saying this.)

Invitations to conferences started to dry up—and when she did receive them, she said, it would turn out to be an invite to debate whether meditation-related challenges even existed—“just an insult to everyone that I’ve interviewed,” she said.

“If you want to build a bridge, you can’t just be like, A bridge is gonna be so cool. You have to think about where could it possibly fail,” Britton told me. “And it’s so unpopular to be that person.” Her former postdoc, Roman Palitsky, told me that Britton suffered for pointing out the problems with the bridge. “Nobody was doing meditation difficulties before her, not seriously anyway,” he said. “And I think large parts of the meditation world kind of turned on her.”

Some of this criticism can be chalked up to differing interpretations of the science, and of how best to treat stubborn afflictions such as anxiety and depression when all of the remedies have potential downsides. “Is it better for an anxious person to be meditating or on Lexapro?” is not an easily answerable question. Fox, the UCSF psychiatrist, told me that some of the neuroscientific effects that Britton attributes to meditation, such as increased activity in the insula, can also be interpreted as a sign of better “autonomic awareness”—basically, being more attuned to the inner workings of your body—rather than a sign of trauma or panic.

But some of the criticism seems to emanate from a reflexive defensiveness on the part of meditation’s promoters, who—perhaps understandably, given the abundant benefits that have shown to be associated with the practice—don’t want to tarnish the reputation of a good thing.

I’ve noticed that people are apt to defend meditation with a zeal I haven’t witnessed since evangelical youth group in my teens. You don’t enjoy meditation? Good, you’re not supposed to enjoy it. You say it doesn’t work for you? Well, you’re just not doing it right. The answer to every problem with meditation seems to be more meditation.

This touchiness can extend to meditation researchers, most of whom are meditators themselves; academic meetings Britton attended would sometimes kick off with a meditation. Nicholas Van Dam, the University of Melbourne psychologist, told me that meditation communities tend to carry a sense that “if you say anything bad, you’re negating the good.” Farias mentioned that after he included a chapter about meditation’s risks in his book The Buddha Pill, some of his friends “were very, very annoyed,” and a couple of them told him that “we could not be publicly seen as associates.”

Some pro-meditation researchers are more evenhanded—recognizing the value of Britton’s findings even if they quibble with aspects of them. Eric Loucks, the director of the Mindfulness Center at Brown, pointed out that a person can have a challenging experience during meditation and still find their overall meditation practice to be beneficial. He also noted that several studies have found mindfulness-based interventions to have fewer side effects than pharmacological treatments, including Lexapro. Still, he called Britton “innovative” and “courageous,” and said her work influenced not only his own views and scholarship—including updates to the standard MBSR curriculum, which the Mindfulness Center now maintains—but also mindfulness research as a whole. “Just looking for the good stuff,” he said, is not his goal. “We really want to know the truth.”

But several meditation teachers I interviewed did seem protective of the practice. Carol Greco, a psychologist at the University of Pittsburgh and an MBSR teacher, once co-authored a paper that aimed to “dispel the notion” that anxiety, pain, and psychosis “are adverse events due to mindfulness meditation.” She seemed chagrined that I was working on this story, writing in an email, “I would rather talk with you about how meditation can be helpful.” When Britton’s studies began coming out, she said, it “brought a heightened awareness of the potential of trauma in a person’s background and how we can create a safe environment.” But her “heart hurt” because “it felt like it was making mindfulness and meditation seem like it’s really dangerous and really bad.” She told me that in her two decades as a meditation teacher she’s never seen a serious adverse event like psychosis or dissociation.

A few of the scholars I interviewed who defended meditation acknowledged some of Britton’s findings, at least implicitly. Richard Davidson, a University of Wisconsin at Madison professor of psychiatry and psychology who is a well-known mindfulness researcher, told me that, as far as relaxation techniques go, meditation is fairly benign. He believes that for most people there’s a greater risk of harm from not meditating than there is from meditating, because the physical and emotional benefits of the practice are so robust, and he’s co-authored studies supporting that claim. But, he added, people with serious psychiatric disorders should meditate only under the guidance of a mental-health professional who also happens to be a meditator—advice that would probably come as news to the many thousands of people who meditate by using apps at home.

The Buddhist scholar and teacher Gil Fronsdal told me that although he doesn’t think meditation causes adverse effects, retreats may exacerbate preexisting psychological problems. (Britton said adverse effects can crop up even for people without prior mental-health conditions.) Fronsdal recalled one meditator who gradually lost touch with reality after a monthlong retreat: She stalked Fronsdal’s wife, became homeless, and spent hours in a medical-law library researching how it was that Fronsdal had managed to exchange his wife’s spine for hers. Having schizophrenic people on meditation retreats has been “one of my most challenging situations as a teacher,” he told me. He said that people with psychosis shouldn’t go on meditation retreats, and neither should people who are “hyper-anxious”—a quality that described me when I sat for a daylong MBSR retreat for my book.

The substantial and sometimes hostile pushback against her work has made Britton hypervigilant. Maybe excessively so: To my eye, she sometimes detects criticism where there isn’t any. When I asked her to describe what it was like working at Brown’s largely pro-meditation research group while publishing study after study finding that meditation can be risky, she wouldn’t say much more than that the situation could be “tense.” (Loucks, the Mindfulness Center’s director, denied that there was tension.) “When it comes to somebody choosing their religion or your friendship,” she told me at one point, “they will choose their religion every time.”

Starting in the early 2020s, Britton and Lindahl struggled to find funding to continue studying the downsides of meditation; they said an organization once rejected their proposal for a grant on “transformative experiences” for being too critical of religion. She says that when they submitted papers to academic journals, the peer-review comments for the papers focusing on the risks of meditation were “six times longer” than for those focusing on the benefits.

Equanimity is a cornerstone of Buddhist thought; Britton herself had repeated the words to rooms full of meditation students many times: “Nothing is good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” But she was starting to think that, actually, some things are good and other things are bad. Sure, you can just accept everything, but sometimes you shouldn’t. She had made a big contribution to the field; it seemed to me like she was feeling done with Brown, with academia, with living in Rhode Island, with all of it.

When Britton first met Lindahl, he persuaded her to start taking one day off a week, something she had not done in two decades. Then it was two days. Then she stopped teaching in the summers. Soon, they were scouting for a plot of land in Vermont they could move to. They now live in an off-the-grid cabin in the woods, where a botanical drawing greets visitors on a wall by the entryway. What is the human soul, the caption reads, but a claw pointing back to the forest?

Britton is consulting on a research project with her former postdoc, Palitsky, who is now at Emory University and running a much larger, longitudinal study of meditation-related challenges. This summer, both she and Lindahl officially left Brown. They’re enjoying exploring “other sections of the bookstore,” as she put it. Running Cheetah House takes up the bulk of her time now.

Britton stopped meditating in 2017, around the time she published the “Varieties” study, and she “began to have a less romantic and more nuanced view of Buddhism.” Now she finds her own kind of tranquility in the natural world, taking care of her plants and chopping wood.

It’s important to emphasize that neither Britton’s research nor her work with Cheetah House clients has turned her against meditation per se; it’s just attuned her to the importance of doing it safely. Meditating for longer than about 30 minutes a day tends to be associated with more negative side effects, she said, and certain types of meditation can be a poor fit for certain people. (For instance, some anxious people shouldn’t do a “body scan” type of meditation, because they are already too focused on their body.) People considering extended meditation retreats should try meditating for a few hours at home first, to be sure they can tolerate long stretches. And those who experience challenges with their meditation practice should consider changing the kind of meditation they’re doing, modifying their practice, or just not meditating. “Treat meditation like any other relationship,” she said. “If you feel like shit with that person, maybe it’s time to break up.”

Spending so much time with Britton made me want to revisit my own adventures in Buddhism and what I had found valuable about it. Mostly, I found old notes about how much I hated meditating: “This is the part of the book where I’m not having a lot of fun”; “I would literally rather give birth than do nothing for 45 minutes”; “I’m just an anxious immigrant who fears you can mindful yourself onto a park bench.”

But I also came across some teachings that I did appreciate, and which I’m going to oversimplify here because I’m not a Buddhist. Among them: The Buddha taught that people should pursue a “middle way” between decadent indulgence and rigid austerity—to not live mindlessly, but to not be so ascetic as to immiserate yourself. “Avoiding these two extremes,” one sutta reads, “the Realized One understood the middle way of practice.” Maybe he was onto something.

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The Missing Ingredient of Modern Life

2026-09-04T08:00:00-04:00

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You have, by now, probably come across the notion of maxxing—looks-maxxing, sleep-maxxing, protein-maxxing, potassium-maxxing, sun-maxxing, testosterone-maxxing. Etymologically speaking, maxxing seems to be a descendant of somewhat recent slang—for those of us who remember the late 20th century, “maxin’ and relaxin’ ” and “to the max” both come to mind—but in practice, maxxing is a reductionist worldview cloaked in expansionist language.

The term is often invoked to describe a narrowly focused goal: If you’re maxxing, you’re likely trying to make yourself smaller, sharper, more chiseled. Maxxing requires sacrifice. It requires careful measurement. And in this way, maxxing is a consequence of our broader optimization-obsessed culture, a fixation fueled by every product, device, app, and service that trains people to collect and analyze data generated by their own behavior.

This culture of optimization has been building for some time now, since at least the 19th century, when industrialism made efficiency a core ideal of working life. Later, when offices overtook factories as the emblem of work, efficiency became more abstract. Productivity began to be measured not only in profits maximized, but also in meetings shortened, messages answered, and bottlenecks removed. Over time, workers started managing themselves preemptively in accordance with the mandate of efficiency, optimizing their own calendars and lunch breaks. This optimization mindset leaked out of business and into everything else. People stopped asking what activities were for and started asking how to do them better, faster, or more completely.

[Ian Bogost: People are thinking about looksmaxxing all wrong]

Efficiency now infuses every aspect of contemporary life, if you let it. Instacart and DoorDash can replace grocery shopping and dining out. People optimize their vacations, maximizing credit-card points and airport-lounge strategies. Kindle streaks and Goodreads goals have turned books into items on a checklist. Wearables have turned exercise into VO₂ or HRV maximization. The more nutrition-obsessed among us have transformed eating into macronutrient acquisition. Every pleasure can become instrumental—with every instrument focused on the outcomes it might produce.

Optimization is terrific if you want to get somewhere else in the future. But it’s terrible for being where you actually are right now. When goals overtake experience, you lose the freedom to encounter your life as it happens. And when you lose that ability, you are no longer living in full. We used to optimize work so we could do everything else. Now we optimize life as though living were another job. Too many of us seem to be maxxing our way out of the experiences and perspectives that give us maximum meaning.

I’ve come to believe that wonder, the most immense of our sensations, is the antidote. Wonder can rise up anywhere. It might arrive after you hike to Hopi Point, nearly a mile above the Grand Canyon’s river floor. Or as you take in the northern lights from Tromsø, Norway. Or, on a different scale, wonder might be expected while you hold your newborn child for the first time, recognizing human life in its primal form and knowing that your own has now changed entirely. For children themselves, wonder remains abundant—in the bigness of a Tyrannosaurus rex in a museum, or the flicker of fireflies in the summer dusk. But for many adults, wonder is too often compartmentalized: a feeling we associate with extraordinary and rare experiences, banished to a realm outside the mundanities of daily life.

[The Wonder Reader: A weekly guide to Atlantic stories that will fascinate and delight]

For me, several aspects of modern life have made wonder seem out of reach lately: the rise of “frictionless” automated services for chores; the decline of serendipity in a world where every trip is Google Mapped; the ease with which everything can be done remotely, averting the happenstances and textures of regular routines; the ability to opt out of ambient noise (and impromptu conversations) by popping in AirPods; and, of course, our tendency to fill the gaps in our days by staring at our phones. But most of all, wonder feels scarce because contemporary life has depleted the value of the moment. Time has become instrumentalized, and as a result we have taught ourselves to treat the present primarily as a waiting room in which to plan for—and, yes, optimize—the future.

Efficiency culture has muscled out the present so completely that it feels difficult to occupy a moment at all, let alone fully. Even the seasons, which help us mark the present amid the endless passage of time, seem to be anxious to overcome one another—pumpkin-spice creamers and “Pumking” imperial pumpkin ales now appear in supermarkets in July. Wonder interrupts that impulse to rush to the future before it arrives. It makes the world stop serving our self-centered plans or intentions, and instead offer something worth encountering for its own sake.

For years, I have struggled with the problem myself. The urge to optimize caused me to flee to the future constantly. I realized that I felt best able to overcome efficiency culture when I treated supposedly unimportant sensations, objects, and events as vital ones instead: sliding my feet into the plush softness of slippers in the morning, feeling the warmth of a mug of coffee in my hands, hearing the gravel crunch under my feet as I walked. None of these acts compromised purpose or plans. All they required of me was to construe what I was already doing as valuable.

[Atlantic Reads: The Small Stuff with Ian Bogost]

Eventually I came to recognize that my long-standing obsession with ordinary things—including many that I have written about in The Atlantic, among them toasters, gas-station signs, backpacks, slushies, and gearshifts—offered a reason to take the present seriously. These objects show that beauty and even genius are often expressed through design choices and simple engineering. Tools we might think of as “useful” are in fact wondrous. The A BIT MORE button on modern toasters is a perfect example: so useful that you might overlook it as obvious, yet absolutely transformative in the making of toast. For some readers, this may generate an eye roll. Cynicism is pervasive, and not everyone has time for or interest in the scenic route. But I believe there are more of us wonder-seekers than the cynics and maxxers among us might like to admit. And besides: The route I am suggesting does not require an out-of-the-way trip. It simply asks you to accept gifts that the universe is already handing you.

Wonder may not improve your résumé, make you hotter, or maximize your income. It will simply remind you that you are a body alive in the world, right now, and that is a better place to begin than most self-help advice would have you believe.

Once you allow wonder to arrive, it proves to be astonishingly promiscuous. Over the past year, I’ve made a point of asking people about what inspires daily wonder. I expected themes to emerge, but I also assumed that those themes would be predictable: sunsets and forests; notable structures or works of art.

Many people did describe the familiar icons of awe—the moment when an airplane breaks through the clouds, and all you can see is the great expanse of sky ahead; the experience of strangers gathering silently along a shoreline to watch the sun vanish below the horizon. But just as many have told me that they’ve found wonder in the mundane—watching a procession of ants carrying things they value, for instance. I’ve corresponded with people who described their affection for an old refrigerator; a sewing machine whose hums and clicks became a friend’s familiar voice; pots and pans that carried decades of family meals; and even a toilet whose owner began to admire it after a repair revealed its elegant method of operation.

Whenever you cease treating the world as scenery or equipment, you’ll find that you encounter the world as something inexhaustibly, constantly present. Oceans and ants, sewing machines and sunsets, strangers and screen doors, microwaves and mountains, rocks and racquets, lamps and laughter all prove equally worthy. Our expectations for wonder sometimes wane, but it is with us all along, waiting to be rediscovered.

This article appears in the October 2026 print edition with the headline “The Missing Ingredient of Modern Life.”

The Netherlands Will Never Be Rid of Louisiana Crawfish

2026-09-03T09:51:56-04:00

Confronted with a seasoned, boiled, arguably delicious crayfish, some of the people of the Netherlands are not sure exactly what to do. “Do you suck the head out?” I heard from the table next to me earlier this summer, at Two Chefs, a restaurant in Amsterdam that hosts a monthly crayfish boil.

Yes is the answer: The best way to eat a crayfish is to shell the tail, then slurp the flavored juices out of the head, and pick out the remaining meat with your hands.

This strategy might not be an immediate transatlantic hit. At the boil, one 29-year-old from Maastricht likened the meal to shrimp but with more work. Two twins told me that the crayfish would need to look a little more chic on the plate to appeal to the Dutch public. But, given the ever-growing population of crayfish in the Netherlands, coming around to eating more of them could benefit the country.

Because if Dutch consumers aren’t sure how they feel about crayfish, crayfish inarguably love the Netherlands. They have invaded the country’s waterways so thoroughly that they have become a real problem, and dealing with them will mean persuading more creatures—including Dutch people—to eat more crayfish.

The crayfish invasion started decades ago, but in recent years, the red swamp crayfish (also known as the Louisiana crawfish) has become a particular pest, Pim Lemmers, an ecologist at Radboud University who has dedicated his career to researching crayfish, told me. In the 1980s, it was brought to the Netherlands as food, and people naively released the animals into the environment. The waterways in the Netherlands are very interconnected and became a “crayfish highway” of sorts, Ivo Roessink, an aquatic ecotoxicologist at Wageningen University & Research, told me. But crayfish can walk and breathe on land, too, and have been spotted in parks, along bike lanes, and at Schiphol airport, where the birds use the runway to crush them.

And they can dig—burrows up to three feet long that can collapse the edges of fields into the water and that some people fear could damage the country’s extensive system of dams, dikes, and canals. Scientists emphasize that the risk to dams and dikes is low; from their point of view, the bigger risk is to other creatures that live in the water. Crayfish are omnivorous: “They totally destroy underwater vegetation,” Roessink said. They also eat detritus, amphibian and insect larvae, snails and other invertebrates, small fish, and one another—a sight I witnessed for myself.

But crayfish cannibalism will not end the invasion; in fact, although the Netherlands’ central government is working on a program for crayfish management, getting rid of the species will likely be impossible. “I know of one example where they effectively eradicated crayfish, and that was in the U.S.,” Roessink said. “There was an infected pond, and they turned it into a parking lot.” (Resorting to this solution in the Netherlands would require paving over the entire country.) Research in the Netherlands and elsewhere has shown that even extensive trapping won’t necessarily eliminate crayfish. The most anyone can hope for is fewer of them.

Some water boards of the Netherlands are trying to persuade all sorts of creatures to eat more crayfish, including herons, eels, and European catfish, which are themselves something of an invasive threat. And, in theory, one of the crayfish’s most effective predators could be Dutch people.

Stefan van Ekris and Maarten van der Sanden, who are both managing directors at CrawFish Farm Holland, are trying their best to make it happen. This July, I joined them as they put on waders and immersed themselves in irrigation ditches to set and check their crayfish nets in the Groene Hart, or “Green Heart,” of the Netherlands, the thinly populated pastures and peatlands among some of the country’s largest cities. They get paid per kilogram caught—the expedition I joined yielded about 150 kilograms, or 330 pounds, of live crayfish—but this is really a passion project for them. CrawFish Farm Holland is approved to sell live and prepared catch directly to restaurants and other wholesalers, and hopes to sell its crayfish in supermarkets in the next two years. “We’re not cultivating them,” Van der Sanden told me. “We’re fighting them and eating them.”

In America, Van der Sanden pointed out, Louisiana was able to quickly ramp up crayfish production and demand in the 1980s. But the scientists I spoke with were skeptical of this strategy. “You will never eat yourself out of this crisis,” Roessink said. And if people like crayfish too much, Lemmers said, they might start cultivating crayfish in their backyard or trapping them without oversight, which could promote further spread. Even if more Dutch people come around to the pleasures of a messy boil, the crayfish still could come out ahead.

The image originally accompanying this article did not show a red swamp crayfish. That image has been replaced.

The Growing Lawlessness in California’s Forests

2026-09-01T07:00:00-04:00

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On the day of the kidnapping, the campground at Gumboot Lake happened to be nearly empty, so Joseph Charles Henrichsen was one of the only people to see the two Forest Service biologists pull up in their pickup truck. Federal employees didn’t visit all that much—campers who’d been coming to the small alpine lake for years told me they’d never seen a ranger on patrol in these Northern California woods. But some of the regulars had noticed the “frog people,” as one called them, quietly collecting their specimens the previous summer. These particular biologists, both women, were there to survey the Cascades frog, whose well-being can help signal the health of the overall ecosystem.

People at Gumboot Lake tended to give one another space, but that July morning, Henrichsen approached the biologists as they worked. He was holding, authorities would later allege, an AR-15-style assault rifle, and told the biologists to turn around and put their hands in the air. He zip-tied their wrists behind their backs and ordered them to walk to his camping trailer, parked at a site strewn with crates and refuse, the clothesline heavy with towels. His 23-year-old son, Phoenix, made room for the biologists inside.

What Henrichsen’s intention was that day—what he thought he might achieve by abducting two government scientists, whether he had a clear motivation at all beyond an impulse of self-righteousness and a loaded gun—remains uncertain. Before long, he escorted one of the biologists back to their Forest Service truck. He drove several miles with her down a winding road along the Sacramento River. Glimpses of Mount Shasta, the volcano looming to the east, reared up through the trees. Along the way, he made calls, according to the FBI. He spoke with a Forest Service ranger and left a message with another person who has not been identified. “I’ve taken two Fed biologists hostage from the Forest Service,” he said, according to authorities. “What I’d like to have happen, I’d like to have you send me a fucking Fed investigator, with a goddamn badge, preferably from the FBI. And we can talk things through a little bit.”

Over the next few hours, Gumboot Lake and the surrounding Shasta-Trinity National Forest would swarm with law enforcement in helicopters and Bearcat armored vehicles. Local SWAT teams and snipers, then more than 50 FBI officers, poured into the national forest. A Boeing 757 flew across the country, from Virginia, with an elite FBI hostage-rescue team.

All of these officers were confronting a man who had a history of erratic behavior: Henrichsen had been released from a Washington State psychiatric hospital a few years before, after allegedly tormenting a neighbor by firing a gun, throwing fireworks on his porch, and placing zip-tie handcuffs on his property. But Henrichsen had also managed to stay at Gumboot Lake for months—well past the official seven-day limit—apparently without triggering any official response from the Forest Service. Many of the campsite’s regulars had crossed paths with the Henrichsens over the summer, and although Charles held himself apart, he struck them as a familiar type, not so out of place here among the free spirits and drifters living in their cars. That he’d turned out to be unhinged or anti-government enough to kidnap a couple of federal frog biologists didn’t seem to shock them. In fact, with the way things are going on the woollier fringes of America’s public lands, maybe something like this was bound to happen.

Siskiyou County, the area that includes Gumboot Lake, has a reputation for fierce independence and the hostility toward government meddling that often comes with it. The county leans conservative, though Mount Shasta is a magnet for a crunchier type: crystal enthusiasts, New Age spiritualists, pilgrims on the road to Burning Man. Hikers stream down the Pacific Crest Trail, which runs along a ridge above the lake. On Sundays, some of the campers at Gumboot Lake like to gather for a drum circle, and when the full moon arrives, people convene to celebrate.

The Gumboot Lake campground is free and has no assigned spots, no running water, limited cell signal, and a lone pit toilet. It’s one of dozens of alpine lakes in the Trinity Divide accessible by car or off-road vehicle. Others are more popular. The Forest Service described the campground in one write-up as a “typical meadow type lake, not very beautiful.” But it’s relatively easy to get to, just a 40-minute drive up from Interstate 5.

I made that drive last month, not long after the Forest Service had reopened Gumboot Lake, less than a week after the kidnapping. I saw old vans and school buses parked along the Forest Service road leading to the campsite; people had strung up hammocks between the trees. At the lake, several campers had already set up their tents and parked their mobile homes. One camper, a 24-year-old backpacker from Australia, told me the campsite was a place to “drop in with the land, drop in with each other, cook meals with each other, and just be super present.” As we talked, a large shirtless man, whom she called Zephyr, appeared and handed her a slice of papaya.

The Forest Service is supposed to be a steward of its public lands, preserving them while still allowing people to enjoy the woods and use their resources. Dispersed camping—outside of established campgrounds—is allowed in most national forests. And although people here are supposed to move on after seven nights, locals say that plenty of people live out of their cars for much longer. Informal settlements are widespread on the national-forest lands of Oregon and Northern California. People tend to cluster along the river corridors, most of them peaceable campers. “But the last 10 percent of them are pretty sad,” says Gabriel Howe, the executive director of the Siskiyou Mountain Club, a group that maintains trails and campgrounds in the region. “People living out there, people manufacturing drugs and all sorts of nasty stuff.”

Policing a remote forest is unlike any other job in law enforcement. The Shasta-Trinity spans more than 3,000 square miles, and the Forest Service is perennially under-resourced. Carmen Kinch, a Forest Service law officer who patrolled the area around Gumboot Lake in the late 1990s and 2000s, told me that back then, seven law-enforcement officers worked across the entire forest. Today, there are four. Not one, she said, is currently based in the Forest Service management unit that includes Gumboot Lake.

The drop in personnel is not just a problem in this one forest. Since last year, the Forest Service’s staffing across the country has fallen by about 20 percent as a result of firings and departures encouraged by the Trump administration, part of its push to reduce the federal workforce. In the Shasta-Trinity forest, excluding firefighting roles, the permanent staff—employees who maintain campsites and conduct wildlife research—has been reduced by about a quarter, one former U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the topic, told me. (Bob Doucette, a Forest Service spokesperson, told me that staffing levels are “similar” to what they’ve been in the past few years and said that “all employees continue to meet public needs.”) Howe has worked in the region for 15 years, and he sees the Forest Service as a slowly dying patient. “Around COVID, it went into palliative care, and now it’s on hospice,” he told me.

A sense of lawlessness seems to be growing on the public lands in the region. People on Howe’s staff have returned to find their cars stripped at trailheads—no wheels, no batteries, gas siphoned. They’ve encountered mountain roads blockaded by hostile civilians. Michael Kauffmann, an ecologist and the executive director of the Bigfoot Trail Alliance, told me that he’s recently instituted more training for his researchers and trail crews on safety measures and defusing confrontations. More than anything, Kauffmann has noticed a greater disregard for the rules—more graffiti, a lot more garbage, and less appreciation for these lands as places to care for rather than to joyride over with guns and four-wheelers. One person who regularly hikes in the area around Gumboot Lake told me that he’d felt safer during “close encounters with bears and lions” than with some of the armed and unfriendly people around.

The Henrichsens had apparently lived at Gumboot Lake since at least early May, when Todd Heie, another camper who visits the lake regularly, first encountered them. In early June, Joseph Charles Henrichsen, who goes by his middle name, asked a neighbor at the campground, Kevin Airoldi, for a lift into town. On the 45-minute drive, Charles said that he and his son were “just traveling around, trying to do it on the cheap.”

Charles mentioned that they’d come down from the Pacific Northwest but not what he’d left behind. He’d once been a successful mortgage-loan broker in Orange County, California. But he had run into business trouble, and his relationship with Phoenix’s mother had fallen apart. By 2022, he was divorced and living near Bellingham, Washington, up by the Canadian border. That year, he spent six months in a county jail, charged with a hate crime for allegedly harassing his neighbor. Police said that he “appeared to be spiraling in his mental health,” according to court documents. Henrichsen, who kept multiple guns at his home, would rant about world events, including the war in Ukraine; an evaluation found that he likely had schizophrenia or another psychotic disorder. Although a judge ordered him to be admitted to a hospital for psychiatric treatment, bureaucratic delays kept him out for months. Even then, he was admitted only briefly, after the charges had been dropped.

At Gumboot Lake, both Charles and Phoenix Henrichsen tended to keep to themselves in their Feather Ultra Lite trailer, parked amid the lodgepole pines. The other campers would watch them pacing around the lake, lap after lap, as the father appeared to loudly lecture, or preach, to the son, who kept his head down and rarely said a word. Many found Charles intense and standoffish. He would burn red sage during the day, and at night he would play a type of chanting Indian music that Heie, a former director of the county’s department of corrections, sometimes listened to as he drifted in his kayak, looking up at the sky. At one point, Aaron Sullivan, a software engineer who was working remotely out of a Winnebago along the lake, stopped by the Henrichsens’ campsite. He’d been impressed by Charles’s strong, lean frame and “big, beautiful beard.” Sullivan invited them to one of the full-moon gatherings. We won’t be doing that, Charles told him.

The Thursday morning of the kidnapping, on July 16, Charles Henrichsen must have been watching the biologists before he approached them—it’s unclear how long. After he had captured the women and herded one of them into the pickup truck, he kept her tightly restrained. He told the unidentified recipient of the message he left while driving down the mountain that “her hands are behind her fucking back, and I’ve got live rounds ready to fucking [inaudible] anyone who fucks with me,” according to the criminal complaint.

When Siskiyou County Sheriff Jeremiah LaRue was alerted to the situation that morning, he thought the man could be swatting, he told me—attempting to trick his office into scrambling to respond. His county is larger than Connecticut, and more than half of it is public land. Sheriff’s deputies soon arrived at Gumboot Lake to find the campsite gate closed and a gray Subaru blocking the road. (The Subaru, police would later learn, was stolen, possibly by the Henrichsens, and likely parked there to block others from entering during the kidnapping.) The sheriff’s deputies flew a drone overhead and quickly spotted the Forest Service truck that Henrichsen had commandeered, LaRue said. A man stepped out of the trailer, carrying a rifle, and later the deputies saw him with someone whose hands were bound. “He’s now pointing a rifle at the drone,” a deputy said over the radio. LaRue knew he had to get more people up there.

Police set up in a dirt roundabout on the north side of the lake, within shouting distance of Henrichsen’s trailer, where he had holed back up with Phoenix and both biologists; they blocked access to the campground, and law enforcement streamed in from California and elsewhere, their cars crowding the narrow Forest Service road. Hank Magnuski, a retired tech executive who owned a nearby cabin, came upon the pileup of armored vehicles and heavily armed agents in the early afternoon, at the end of a long drive from his home in Palo Alto. He was startled by the military-style occupation of this out-of-the-way wilderness, but he gave two SWAT-team members a ride up the road. “What’s the occasion?” he asked one of them.

At about 3:30 p.m, more than four hours after his initial calls, Henrichsen’s voice came over law-enforcement radio. He had taken one of the biologists back to their truck, where she helped him access the radio to contact the Forest Service’s dispatcher and the FBI. He seemed calm; he repeated his request to speak with FBI officials, “so I can release these hostages. Over.”

The reception was choppy enough that he started negotiating with the FBI agent Russell Quiniola about how they might speak in person. “Are you comfortable putting the rifle down and coming to a point where you feel safe?” Quiniola asked.

“Listen, you come and talk to me,” Henrichsen responded. “I would suggest coming unarmed, because if you have one, that might trigger something in me, you never know. Or you may have a rifle, and you see me, that might trigger something in you. But I suggest we get the show on the road. These ladies would like to go home. Over.”

The fact that Henrichsen had initiated contact with authorities by requesting to talk with the FBI was, to some degree, encouraging. It suggested that his intentions went beyond simply harming the biologists, Gary Noesner, a former chief of the FBI’s crisis-negotiation unit, told me. In such situations, every hour that negotiators can keep the kidnapper talking is one without violence. Unless they sense that the risk is increasing, Noesner said, “we’ll talk ’til the cows come home.”

Quiniola and other FBI agents spoke with Henrichsen over the next nine hours. By 1 a.m., the standoff had gone on so long with such little progress that LaRue was surprised when someone in his vehicle said, “One of the females is coming out,” and the first biologist opened the door of the trailer and walked toward the police. Her colleague followed six minutes later. Another hour and a half would pass, during which FBI agents exploded flash-bangs around the trailer—a commotion heard by hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail above the lake—before Phoenix and then Charles finally turned themselves over and the government vehicles lining the road to Gumboot Lake started heading back down the mountain.

By the time I arrived at the lake, almost all signs that this place had been the site of such force were gone. The Henrichsens’ trailer had been towed away; their debris had been bagged and left in the outhouse, along with a note that read, “Trash from the kidnappers campsite.” One camper had held on to three wooden billy clubs found amid the mess. I set up my tent at a campsite next to the Henrichsens’, where I could see the lake through the pines. Everything was serene. The day was cloudless, and the sun sparkled on the water.

Charles and Phoenix Henrichsen eventually pleaded not guilty in federal court in Sacramento to charges of kidnapping federal employees and other felony counts that carry the prospect of life in prison. Charles’s lead defense attorney, Mia Crager, told me that her client had intended no harm to the biologists; according to police, the two women, who have not been named publicly, did not appear to suffer major injuries during their 15 hours as hostages. “What happened on July 16 was preventable and resulted from system failures on a number of levels,” Crager said in a statement. She did not elaborate on the type of failures she was referring to, and didn’t respond to questions about any specific allegations against Henrichsen. She said that Charles “hopes that some good will come of the case, including that his son Phoenix will get the mental health care he sorely needs.”

Phoenix’s lawyer, Kresta Daly, told me that Phoenix had been an unwilling participant in the standoff: He had no gun, didn’t know what was going to happen, and, once the crisis had started, he hoped that it would resolve peacefully. His main thought, Daly said, was “How do I stop anyone from dying today, me included?” His father, Daly told me, had hurt him before; he’d been in the hospital earlier this summer after Charles beat him up. Charles Henrichsen, through his lawyers, did not respond to questions about that accusation, but agreed that his son “was not at all at fault for what happened that day, nor was he an active participant.”

Henrichsen’s specific demands during the hostage crisis have not yet been fully explained. He did not leave a manifesto. An FBI spokesperson declined to describe those hours of discussions with Henrichsen, citing the ongoing investigation. Sheriff LaRue, who had been inside a Bearcat with the FBI negotiators during part of the process, said he couldn’t hear Henrichsen “discussing anything as to why he was doing this, what his motives were.” At least in that moment, he seemed to want the attention of the federal government. He got it.

The day of the biologists’ release, the chief of the Forest Service, Tom Schultz, wrote an email to agency staff expressing his gratitude to law enforcement and his support for the two women after their ordeal. A safety manager with the agency followed up the next week, with links to security tips and videos with titles such as “Avoiding Trouble” and “Building Trust in Small Towns.” Despite such internal gestures, some former Forest Service leaders heard little public support for the staff from an administration that has shed civil servants without much remorse. “There’s not an ounce of empathy for federal employees,” Vicki Christiansen, a former chief of the Forest Service during the first Trump administration and the Biden administration, told me. “Not an ounce.”

As I talked with people at the lake, the hostage episode began to seem inseparable from the deepening neglect of our country’s public lands. Whatever the Henrichsens’ personal motives may have been, the erosion of day-to-day management has made ruptures in the fragile relations among strangers in the woods all the more likely. “They shouldn’t be letting someone stay here for months on end,” Heie, the former corrections officer, told me. In the early evening, I watched him paddle his kayak to the middle of the lake. Another man stood in the shallows, casting a fishing line. Through the trees, I heard a couple laughing. I kept looking around at the peaceful scene, unable to shake the unsettling feeling that something was off. As darkness settled, I sat in my camping chair, listening for the sounds of the frogs.

This El Niño Will Be Unlike Any in the Past Eight Decades

2026-08-30T07:00:00-04:00

In the middle of the Pacific Ocean, along the equator, scientists have drawn a box. It’s a big box, two-thirds the size of China, yet hardly anyone lives inside it. This rectangular swath of open ocean is monitored by satellites and a network of moored buoys that measure minute changes in the temperature of the water, with an eye toward anomalies. Every few years or so, driven by changing winds and currents, the water temperature in this part of the ocean starts to rise; even a half degree Celsius above normal over months warrants a designation that an El Niño phase has begun. That’s enough warming to unleash floods and fires, drought and famine, around the world. The box is called Niño 3.4. Right now, it’s hot in the box.

“Like a baby pool,” Kristina Tietjen, who spent most of August scuba diving in the middle of this mass of abnormally warm water, told me. Tietjen has been coming to the world’s largest atoll, Kiritimati, for more than a decade to study its coral reefs. She usually dives in a medium-weight wetsuit; this trip, her team needed only rash guards. It is still early in this El Niño cycle—which is likely to be the strongest ever recorded—but the waters around Kiritimati have already been 3 to 4 degrees Celsius above normal.

Tietjen’s time on Kiritimati (pronounced like Christmas) has allowed her to watch, in brutal detail, what these repeated warm-water cycles, playing out in a steadily warming ocean, mean for the great tropical coral reefs here, which were once near pristine. During her first El Niño, in 2015–16, 90 percent of Kiritimati’s coral reef died. Years of slow, partial recovery followed. This month, Tietjen and her colleagues, part of the Canadian scientist Julia Baum’s lab at the University of Victoria, discovered that nearly half of the island’s remaining corals had already bleached—a prelude, if warming persists, to death. When Tietjen comes back, she may well be swimming over a graveyard.

Most of the world experiences El Niño’s ripple effects as the heat building up in the equatorial Pacific radiates into the atmosphere and around the globe. This means great gouts of rain in supercharged storms in some places; in other areas, crop-killing dry spells that can extend for months. Along the Pacific Coast of South America, torrential rains and landslides have forced the temporary closure of a main route to Machu Picchu, in Peru; deadly floods have swept through arid regions of northern Chile. Countries such as India and Ethiopia are enduring some of their driest summers on record. El Niños tend to mean more rainfall across the southern United States and drier stretches across a band in the North. Strong El Niños can mean record-breaking heat, and this one is shaping up to be unlike any cataloged in the past eight decades. A 2-degree-Celsius increase in the Niño 3.4 box typically earns the title of “Super El Niño”; we’re already past that threshold, and experts project that the warming could peak at roughly twice as high. “We are now pretty certain this will be an exceptional event,” Malte Stuecker, the director of the International Pacific Research Center at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, told me.

Part of the reason Stuecker expects this warmth to keep building is that the buoys along the equator can detect water temperatures well below the surface. Down more than 100 meters, an enormous mass of warm water has built up and will rise to the surface in the months ahead. The amount of heat brewing in the ocean has produced one of those graphs in which the current year departs drastically from past trend lines, wriggling up erratically into unfamiliar territory.

Although scientists continue to debate the extent to which climate change makes El Niño cycles more frequent or intense, they agree that these cycles are occurring in an ocean that is warmer than it was. Last Saturday, the daily global average sea-surface temperature reached 21.1 degrees Celsius (70 degrees Fahrenheit), its highest level on record, according to Europe’s Copernicus Climate Change Service. Even if El Niño cycles are not changing at all, as they spiral around that ascending baseline, the temperature peaks they hit keep getting higher, causing repeated blows to marine life and disrupting ecosystems in ways that may be irrevocable.

Carlos Zavalaga, the director of the seabird lab at the Universidad Cientifica del Sur, in Lima, began to comprehend the magnitude of this year’s warming in mid-June, when he visited Macabi and Guanape Norte, two islands off the northern coast of Peru. He’d been hearing from colleagues about dead birds washing up by the hundreds on the coasts of Peru and Ecuador. He’s seen the news stories about flocks of hungry Peruvian pelicans swarming the fish markets in port cities looking for food. On the two islands, which just last year were thronged with pelicans, Inca terns, and Humboldt penguins, Zavalaga found empty nests, some with eggs and starving chicks. “They were abandoned islands,” he told me.

These seabirds feed on schools of anchovies swept up in the Humboldt current, the cold, nutrient-rich upwelling waters that create bountiful fisheries off South America’s Pacific Coast. During El Niño years, that current gets displaced by warmer waters pushing east across the ocean, and these great schools of feeder fish can vanish from the coasts. The decline has been severe enough that Peru this month shut down an anchovy fishery that is a key economic engine for the country, with much of the year’s quota unfilled. Long before satellite monitoring, Peruvian fishermen noticed these cycles of warmer waters and dwindling fish stocks; they named the phenomenon, which peaked around Christmas, after the Christ child. References to El Niño in Peru’s scientific literature date back to the 19th century.

In his three decades studying seabirds, Zavalaga has witnessed die-offs before. But it is the rapid-fire nature of these blows and the severity of the disruptions that make him so concerned. Just three years ago—the same year avian flu killed more than 500,000 seabirds—another El Niño slammed into the coast of Peru. The birds that had made a tenuous recovery since then now face the prospect of another die-off. “It’s like a boxing match: You have a first knockout, you try to recover quickly, and then you have a second knockout,” he said. “I cannot imagine what will be the scenario by the end of this year.” He doubted that the birds could go extinct, but some species might move farther south in search of colder waters. The coastline in Peru and the culture that depends on the fish and the birds could be permanently altered.

When the warming started around Kiritimati, one of the few populated islands in the Niño 3.4 monitoring zone, Bill Newton, an island resident, was fascinated by how evident the changes were. He told me that the normally dry island turned sopping wet, and regular floods started washing out the roads. The wet brought swarms of mosquitoes (prior El Niños have led to outbreaks of dengue and chikungunya) but also clouds of dragonflies, which he hadn’t seen before. Higher-than-normal tides poured into seafront homes. Tuna, which can do well in warmer water, attracted dozens of fishing boats off the coast. Prevailing winds changed direction.

Corals have a particularly hard time when water warms; they can’t move elsewhere, and they are sensitive to heat stress. As little as four weeks in water just a degree warmer than normal can cause bleaching, the loss of the symbiont algae that supply corals’ food and brilliant colors, according to Baum, whose lab Tietjen works at. Baum, an ecologist, has studied Kiritimati’s reef since 2009. After the El Niño a decade ago killed off nearly the entire reef, Baum began to consider the possibility that she would witness the obliteration of an ecosystem in her lifetime. In a 2018 paper in Science, she projected that successive bleaching events could occur frequently enough that coral reefs, which take roughly 10 to 30 years to recover from mass mortality, would not have time to regrow. In the years since, she had been hopeful that nature could fight back as she watched surviving corals take up symbionts that were more heat resistant. This year’s warming and the pace of bleaching already under way have dispelled that hope.

What happens next is in some ways predictable. El Niño is not a haphazard force of destruction; it’s a warming phase in a specific area in the Pacific Ocean that scientists have determined shifts the probabilities for certain weather outcomes in various parts of the world. Those probabilities are reliable enough that, for example, the U.S. Navy already plans to send a hospital ship to the coast of Peru in February to be in position to help after expected floods. But as Baum and other scientists who study and love the delicate ecosystems in the equatorial Pacific are finding, just because El Niño is a familiar cycle doesn’t mean things will be the same when this one is over.

A New Way of Seeing Alien Worlds

2026-08-29T08:00:00-04:00

Tomorrow morning, if all goes to plan, NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, its latest and greatest orbital observatory, will lift off from its launchpad and add a little rocket-booster light to the Florida sunshine. A lot is riding on this mission. If the Roman is successful, it could give humanity a new way to see the planets around other stars and a fresh understanding of the largest-scale objects that we know to exist. But if it fails, NASA’s science program, which is already fending off ruinous budget cuts, will need to seriously rethink its future. The Artemis mission to the moon was a big win for human spaceflight, and now the science side of the house badly needs one.

NASA’s engineers have spent more than a decade readying the Roman for this moment. Before the telescope arrived in Florida, it spent more than a year in NASA’s largest clean room at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. To get near it, you had to be mummified alive. When I visited in December, NASA staffers led me to a sterile, fluorescent-lit locker room. They tossed me a white jumpsuit and two sets of booties with tight-fitting straps. They told me to put on a beard net and hair net, and triple-wrapped the gap between my jumpsuit sleeves and gloves with blue tape.

The astronomers didn’t want my skin exposed in the clean room. Dry flakes of it could drift off and settle onto the telescope’s ultrasmooth primary mirror. “You’re going to be the dirtiest thing in here,” one of them told me, as we walked through a little chamber where more than 30 nozzles blasted us with air. I jotted down this remark on special mint-green paper that sheds fewer particulates than a regular notebook, and then stepped into a cavernous eight-story white space soundtracked by the hum of six school-bus-size fans. At its center, the Roman stood more than 40 feet high, and it was surrounded by more than a dozen people, all in identical jumpsuits. Half were standing in clusters, talking, while the other half were up on motorized lifts, fussing with the telescope, applying duct tape and making final adjustments. More than a thousand people have worked on this project, and those who are lucky enough to get close to the hardware seem to derive a physical pleasure from the experience.

[Read: Inside Donald Trump’s attack on NASA’s science missions]

The Roman has a pretty shady backstory for a scientific instrument. Its primary mirror was part of a surprise gift bestowed on NASA by the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO is one of America’s most secretive government agencies, and it apparently had a Hubble-class spare just lying around. A cash-strapped agency can’t afford to be too choosy about provenance: NASA took this mirror that was supposed to point down at the ground, for surveillance, and will instead point it out at the stars.

Coronagraph delivery and unboxing (Chris Gunn / NASA)

The NRO’s spare mirror has also solved a bit of internal politics for NASA’s science program. The Roman is built to monitor the universe at the very largest scales, to map the cosmic superstructure of galaxy clusters that stretches out from us in every direction, to see how it has expanded over time. These observations might lead scientists to a more refined sense for gravity, and may even help them discover new physics. But the idea for a mission like this was originally conceived of around the early 2000s, shortly after the discovery of dark energy, and a survey of the large-scale universe seemed like the obvious next thing to do. When NASA was finally ready to build the telescope, in the early 2010s, the action in astronomy had shifted closer to home. Scientists were in the midst of discovering thousands of new planets around nearby stars, and they wanted to find more. Although the Roman’s original mission plan did allow for some planet-hunting, the new mirror would allow them to do it in a whole new way.

[Read: The Nobel Prize winner who thinks we have the universe all wrong]

Finding a little world with its own atmosphere in the glare of a nearby star is tricky work. Even the very largest planets will be a billion times fainter than the suns they orbit. When I spoke with Dominic Benford, Roman’s program scientist at NASA Headquarters, he likened the challenge to spotting a firefly buzzing around a powerful searchlight from thousands of miles away. To make this possible, astronomers have lodged an exquisite new kind of coronagraph into the Roman’s metallic guts. Coronagraphs originally helped astronomers see the plasma flares emanating from our sun, by blocking out the far more brilliant light from the solar disk. In a sense, the device creates a brief artificial eclipse inside the telescope. The Roman’s coronagraph is designed to do something similar for more distant stars so that astronomers can see the planets that surround them.

When the telescope is trained on a star in our Milky Way, it will catch a lot of light, and then run it through the coronagraph’s system of barriers and mirrors. Two of the mirrors that it uses may be even more beautiful in their design than the ultrasmooth, eight-foot primary. Each is smaller than the average makeup compact, and has more than 1,600 actuators that can individually deform tiny portions of the glass in tiny increments, less than the diameter of a helium atom. Astronomers will employ hundreds of these warping movements, spread across the mirrors, to deflect a specific star’s glare, creating an image of the star within a ring of nearly pure darkness. Deformable mirrors like these have previously been used on the ground to help telescopes see through the warble and blur of Earth’s atmosphere. But no one has ever sent one of this complexity to space.

The Roman team believes that up there, where the viewing conditions are more pristine, the Roman will be able to deliver the first direct images of distant planets in visible light. Until now, most of the extrasolar planets that scientists have observed have been detected indirectly. In some cases, a planet’s existence is inferred from the gravitational force that it exerts on its host star, causing the star to wobble. Or astronomers might see a host star dim, repeatedly and predictably, as an orbiting planet passes in front of it. We have been able to get direct snapshots of only a few young planets that were still roiling hot and glowing brightly, and mainly in infrared. The Roman telescope’s coronagraph should be able to see worlds that aren’t glowing at all. Like Earth, they will be illuminated solely by the soft visible light of their host stars.

[Read: When a telescope is a national-security risk]

I asked Vanessa Bailey, the coronagraph’s instrument technologist, if there were any particular stars that she was excited to inspect. Because the coronagraph isn’t part of the telescope’s main mission, just three of the first 18 months will be set aside for its observations. Bailey said that the astronomers will use that time to look at previously detected planets that are only tens of light-years away. She mentioned the Epsilon Eridani system, where a Jupiter-size world is known to orbit an orange dwarf star. With the coronagraph, they’ll stare at it for many hours, letting photons from the planet slowly pile up. “It’s just going to be a little fuzzy smudge, just barely there,” Bailey said. “But we might be able to tell if it’s cloudy or clear, and we might be able to say whether it’s more like Jupiter or Neptune.”

All of this could go wrong. Bailey told me that the coronagraph has never been tested outside the lab, and in space, it may not work. If for some reason the mirrors are misaligned, or the instrument malfunctions, any planets would be lost in the astral glare. NASA’s long-running quest to find another living world in the universe would be set back, perhaps by a decade or more. But if the coronagraph does fulfill its mission, it will serve as a proof of concept for NASA’s next really big telescope, the Habitable Worlds Observatory, which the agency has been developing for more than a decade.

Roman’s coronagraph will be able to find only large planets—Saturn-size or ideally bigger—that circle their stars in chilly, distant orbits. NASA scientists want to place a much more precise one on the HWO. That mission will fixate on more than 100 nearby stars that share the sun’s rough age and brightness. Its coronagraph will cast a much tighter ring of near darkness around them, to see if any planets show up in the closer, warmer orbits that might be more hospitable to life—and it will even look for signs of life in the planets’ atmospheres. But the HWO won’t lift off until the late 2030s at the earliest. For now, the Roman has to prove out. It has to survive the violence of launch and fly a million miles from Earth so that its mirrors can catch the light of a nearby star and then surround it in darkness so deep that a faint alien world appears.

America’s Rural Lands Are Burning

2026-08-18T09:22:16-04:00

The summer of 2026 has been one of extraordinary fires. In Europe, they have burned hundreds of thousands of acres in France and Spain and destroyed homes across England; they killed 13 people in Spain last month, and an elderly couple in Greece this weekend. In Canada, fires have consumed an expanse of forestland larger than Belgium—which is also battling its biggest recorded wildfire. In the United States, about 7.2 million acres have burned, the largest year-to-date area in the past decade and nearly double what it was at this time last year, according to data from the National Interagency Coordination Center. Allison Rayburn, a program coordinator for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me that in the eastern part of the state, “you can barely see the sun” through the smoke: “It’s just devastation, and miles and miles and miles of blackened landscapes.”

In Europe, many of the fires have threatened populated areas, but in the U.S., much of the area burning in the West has been rural. Near the Oregon town of Jordan Valley, the Big Grass Fire has been burning since July 23 and is among the largest fires in the state’s modern history; toward the end of last month, it hopped a canyon and crossed the border to Idaho, where the smoke from this and other fires made the air quality the worst in the country. The complex of fires in Spokane, Washington, flattened entire neighborhoods; three other wildfires 10 times its size are burning elsewhere in the state.

If 2025 was a year of urban fire that destroyed large swaths of Los Angeles, 2026 is a year of rural fire, Daniel Swain, a climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources’ research unit, told me. “This is an extraordinary fire season in the American West,” Swain said. “It just hasn’t been in California”—which usually accounts for much of the nation’s fire activity and its media attention.

Many of the biggest fires this year started because of back-to-back lightning strikes and have grown because of extreme heat, drought, and dry fuel left behind after an unusually warm winter. They’ve destroyed grazing land and crops, killed livestock, and incinerated fruit that was just shy of harvest. Many of the ranchers and government employees I spoke with compared 2026 to Oregon’s devastating fire season two years ago, when 1.9 million acres burned across the state; already this year, residents have lost hundreds of thousands more acres than that. When I spoke with Dave Upthegrove, Washington’s commissioner of public lands, he was driving from the fires in Spokane to one near Walla Walla that was threatening the town’s water supply; the week before, he’d visited the burn area of the 150,000-acre Sinlahekin Fire. Firefighters there had used a road as a fire line, he said, and on one side of it, all was flat and black. On the other side, crops were wilting from the fire’s heat.

Because so many of the fires this year are burning on rugged terrain without many roads, the elite firefighters who rappel from helicopters and hike through miles of forest to reach a fire line have been in high demand, Upthegrove said. But these hotshot crews cannot hit every fire, and in many cases, ranchers are the first to get there. Silas Skinner, a sixth-generation cattle rancher, told me that when the Big Grass Fire broke out, three government trucks were there; the rest were rigs from the Jordan Valley Rangeland Fire Protection Association. RFPAs—about 40 of which are spread across Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada—are independent, volunteer firefighting nonprofits composed of local ranchers and farmers who are trained by state and federal agencies to help fill the firefighting gap in rural areas. Their equipment comes largely from military surplus—literally, in some cases, bulldozers that didn’t get sent to Vietnam, “and some that did,” Rayburn, who is one of the RFPAs’ main contacts in the Oregon government, said. In the weeks since lightning struck and started the fire, Skinner and about 100 other volunteers have been using military trucks, outfitted with water tanks and sprayers, to help government agencies fight the Big Grass Fire. It is currently burning an expanse of sagebrush and juniper trees nearly the size of Luxembourg.

Federal agencies have also been sending in thousands of employees to fight the fires. But with so many fires burning simultaneously, government resources have been stretched thin and diverted to those in more populated places such as Spokane. The volunteer firefighters, then, have taken on more of a share of the work than they have in the past, they told me. (Both the Forest Service and Wildland Fire Service said that it’s standard for RFPAs to take on more work during a fire season this active.) When I spoke with Morgan Kromm, a rancher and the secretary of the RFPA in Crane, Oregon, and Tom Doman, the association’s chairman, they’d just come off a 10-day stretch of back-to-back firefighting. They told me they’d been working in 36-hour shifts, and when I asked where they’d catch naps during those stretches—in their trucks?—Doman clarified: “We were not sleeping.” The Crane RFPA has already handled 18 fires this year—normally the total they’d have seen by about October—and “we still have 90 more days of fire season,” Doman said.

Fire seasons vary by region, but in general, they have been getting longer and less predictable. Both RFPAs and state officials told me that this has made it difficult to get resources when and where they’re needed. Typically, Oregon enters into mutual-aid agreements with states in the Southwest and along the East Coast that have different fire seasons and can help one another out. But the whole country has been so dry that “they’re busy with their own fires,” Michael Curran, the chief of fire protection for the Oregon Department of Forestry, told me. RFPAs provide mutual aid to one another too, while members also try to manage their own ranches and farms alongside firefighting. “Yesterday, we were moving cows, and the fire was burning right above us,” Skinner said. “So everybody kind of had an eyeball on it.”

Some of his grazing land has already burned. Other ranchers have found that their cattle died in the fire. In Jordan Valley, community members have been donating hay to those whose land burned, so their cattle will have something to eat. Rayburn told me that since that terrible 2024 fire season, she has watched landowners “for two years rebuilding fences and reestablishing water holes and reestablishing their cattle herds.” Now the fires are burning those same places—land where families have lived for generations, and land upon which their livelihoods still depend.

Nobody Knows What Ultra-Processed Food Is

2026-08-12T13:27:27-04:00

You might know a tomato when you see one, but for the federal government, identifying one is harder. Is a tomato a fruit or a vegetable? In 1893, this question went all the way to the Supreme Court, which decided that, for tax purposes, at least, a tomato was a vegetable. What about milk? For a bureaucrat setting standards, a straightforward explanation such as “liquid from a cow’s udders” won’t quite cut it; according to the FDA, milk is “the lacteal secretion, practically free from colostrum, obtained by the complete milking of one or more healthy cows.”

Even for the government, however, tomatoes and milk are relatively simple to define compared with ultra-processed foods. Although many researchers agree that these creations are negatively affecting people’s health, they cannot agree on what foods do and don’t belong in that category. That’s not keeping Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from trying: After months of promising the federal government’s first formal definition of ultra-processed foods, the secretary of Health and Human Services announced on Monday that the department is finalizing one.

He stopped short, though, of sharing the exact text in either the public announcement or at a “food policy celebration” held Monday at HHS’s Washington headquarters; the definition is still being reviewed by the White House. This effort may have real upsides. Having a regulatory definition of ultra-processed foods (or UPF, as they’re often referred to) could at the very least advance inquiries into the harms of these products. But the effort also raises the question: Can the government adequately define a problem before researchers know its true cause?

So far, scientific efforts to define UPF have revealed only how fuzzy the category is. The most commonly used definition, which was developed by Brazilian researchers, takes the most expansive approach: It lumps all foods with industrial ingredients, such as sweeteners and emulsifiers, into the ultra-processed category. A classification system created by academics at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, meanwhile, defines “highly processed foods” as products “processed to the extent that they are no longer recognizable as their original plant/animal source.” Yet another well-respected system, this one designed by a French analytics company, attempts to incorporate additional factors, such as a food’s salt, sugar, and fat content, as well as the “function, number, and potential health risk of additives.”

These rubrics are distinct enough from one another that flavored yogurt is an ultra-processed food under the Brazilian system and a moderately processed food under the UNC system. Under the French system, the classification depends entirely on the yogurt itself (even though a paper from the group found that 95 percent of flavored yogurts in French grocery stores were indeed ultra-processed).

Researchers disagree on how to define these foods, because the science around how and why they may be harmful is ambiguous. Epidemiological studies have found that UPF-heavy diets have consistently been associated with a range of maladies including cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. But although researchers suspect that certain additives are causing dietary issues, the number of industrial ingredients or additives in Americans’ food is so large that many more may also be causing trouble. Nor do researchers know what processing steps cause everyday food ingredients to go from healthful to harmful. That means Kennedy and his department are essentially trying to define a food group that no one really understands.

Kennedy is under no illusions about how little we know about the American food supply. He has frequently criticized a decades-old loophole that allows food companies to put new additives in their food without even telling the FDA. On Monday, he announced a new proposal to fix this issue; if finalized, the rule would require companies to let the FDA know when they’re introducing a new additive. But even that won’t fully solve America’s additive problem.

Researchers at the Pew Health Group estimated in 2011 that America’s food supply already features more than 10,000 additives. The new rule would require manufacturers that quietly introduced such compounds to tell the FDA what those additives are but not to submit any scientific proof of the additives’ safety. And although the FDA can do its own review of such ingredients, that process is often glacially slow. (The agency still hasn’t completed its rereview of several chemicals nearly a year after announcing that it was taking a second look at their safety.) Plus, certain additives may be safe when consumed on their own but harmful when consumed alongside other additives. A study published last year found, for example, that consuming a cocktail of emulsifiers, a preservative, and a dye was associated with higher rates of type 2 diabetes but that several other industrial concoctions were not.

If anything, researchers know less about how processing changes the ways humans digest certain foods. As the term ultra-processed implies, researchers believe that the ways food companies process individual ingredients has had a profound impact on our health. But because that concept is so new, very little research has been done on it. The Brazilian researchers, for example, have cited pre-frying as a mark of ultra-processing, even though it’s hard to imagine that precooking chicken nuggets could meaningfully affect how they’re digested. And although research does suggest that extrusion, which is used to make products such as cereal by pushing ingredients through a heated tube with rotating screws, makes it easier for the body to break down starches, the evidence of any ill effect on humans is limited.

All of this makes Kennedy’s push to define UPF difficult. Any earnest effort to “Make America Healthy Again” cannot ignore the fact that a majority of the calories Americans consume come from ultra-processed foods, and that something in those foods seems to be making people ill. Creating a definition is an obvious first step toward addressing the issue, and the previous definitions for ultra-processed foods have undoubtedly advanced researchers’ understanding of those foods’ impact on our health. A 2019 study using the Brazilian definition found, for example, that people ate faster and gained more weight when fed an ultra-processed diet compared with an unprocessed one.

But for researchers, the definition of UPF serves more as a hypothesis—an idea that they can test and adjust about how to think about this category of food. A government definition of UPF has a different purpose—it can prompt research, but it can also be used to make rules about how foods are tested, advertised, and sold. An overbroad definition could cost food companies millions in unnecessary costs and stoke unsubstantiated fear in consumers; a narrower definition, based on a hunch, could cause the same problems.

Government definitions are not written in stone: In 2024, the FDA overhauled an outdated definition of healthy foods, which was issued amid the low-fat craze of the 1990s and excluded foods such as nuts and fatty fish. But the process of revising the definition took eight years. As Kennedy said Monday, “If you can’t define a problem, you can’t solve it.” But if you define a problem in the wrong way, you probably can’t solve it either.

Spain Is Ready for an Extraordinary Run of Eclipses

2026-08-11T07:00:00-04:00

Normal days in Spain can suddenly turn otherworldly. On a trip to Málaga in April, for instance, during Semana Santa, my friends and I happened upon a midnight procession of about 50 men in hoods who were carrying a 1,000-pound sculpture of a crucified Jesus Christ on their shoulders, lit by hundreds of candles that swayed with every step they took. But starting tomorrow, Spain’s regular drumbeat of fairs, street parties, and patron-saint festivals will be accompanied by improbable astrological luck.

After a century of no total solar eclipses over the Iberian Peninsula, and none in mainland Europe in the 21st century so far, three solar eclipses will be observable from Spain in the next 500 days or so. This is “very, very unusual,” Sandra Benitez Herrera, the head of science communication and education at the European Space Agency, told the German broadcaster DW last month. It will also probably be a lot of fun.

The Spanish government expects hundreds of thousands of astrotourists—including me—for Eclipse Number One this week. In most places on the path of totality, the sun will be fully eclipsed for about a minute or two, which makes this the shortest of the three celestial events. But totality will hit at sunset, a coincidence that amplifies the experience of the eclipse and occurs only about once in a decade globally, Kelsey Johnson, an astrophysicist and the former president of the American Astronomical Society, told me. The shadows will feel strange, she said: Sunset already makes shadows long, and the eclipse will add its own distortions, including the white squiggles of light that sometimes coat the ground just before totality. Then, after the sun has set, people can gawk at the 60 to 100 meteors that are expected an hour, as the Perseid meteor shower peaks against the blank slate of a new moon.

Madrid and Barcelona will see 99 percent totality, but, as Annie Dillard wrote in her classic 1982 essay, “seeing a partial eclipse bears the same relation to seeing a total eclipse as kissing a man does to marrying him.” So eclipse chasers are traveling to smaller towns that will go completely dark, where visitors are liable to encounter the particularities of Spanish August. This is the month when Spaniards return from cities to their hometowns, and the heat makes people nocturnal. They throw summer festivals, put on concerts, and release the bulls. The eclipse only adds to a general sense that this is a time to cast routine aside.

Take A Coruña, the first major city in Spain that will experience totality. The city’s minute of total darkness will end at 8:29 p.m.; half an hour later, A Coruña’s professional football team, Deportivo, plays Real Madrid for the first time in nearly a decade after clawing its way back from a lower-tier league. “A bunch of people are going to be looking at the eclipse right outside the stadium and then going straight to the game,” Pablo Gomez-Garcia, a University of Virginia law student who returns to A Coruña every August to see family, told me. Others might chase the eclipse with a concert: The city is in the midst of a monthslong festival that is named for María Pita, a woman who stabbed an English captain with his own spear after her husband was mortally wounded defending the city, and that features daily outdoor performances in the evenings. The performer tomorrow will be an orchestra called the Satellites. The city is expecting so many visitors—20,000 are supposed to enter by cruise ship alone today and tomorrow—that its government decided to close one popular viewpoint, a Roman-era lighthouse on the northwest coast, to avoid trampling.

In Briviesca, a town in the north of Spain, the eclipse overlaps with the weeklong patron-saint festival. On the day of the eclipse, the city will host, among many free activities, a fishing contest, performances by local bands, a parade of “giants and big heads”—a tradition from the Middle Ages that involves people donning 13-foot papier-mâché costumes depicting royals and monsters—and a toro de fuego, a metal bull filled with fireworks that will shoot sparks at people in the town square. In Tarragona, where I’m viewing the eclipse, there will also be a showcase of human-tower making, during which people stack themselves into six-to-10-person-tall monuments, a Catalan tradition.

These local practices are meant to be outlandish visual spectacles that eject you from the everyday. The weirdness of witnessing an eclipse can conjure a similar sense of awe and delight—and the eclipse fervor that has gripped many visitors suggests a hunger for that sense. The colors change. The shadows get very sharp. “You sound like a crazy person, but the feeling is like, I must not be on Earth anymore,” Jesse Tomlinson, an eclipse chaser and the creator of a popular app that helps people choose eclipse viewpoints, told me. The wind direction shifts, and the temperature suddenly drops. You grow giddy to see another. Johnson, the astrophysicist, said that her flight from Virginia to Barcelona was full of eclipse chasers chatting across rows.

Like any massive party, these eclipse celebrations have the potential to get out of hand. The population of Mallorca, for instance, already swells in August, and eclipse tourists are heaping onto the island’s temporary population. The regional government of the Balearic Islands has decided to not promote the eclipse to avoid creating an even larger surge in visitors, and is papering the area with reminders to avoid engaging in dangerous observation practices, going drunk boating, and lighting fires. On the podcast Majorca Mallorca, Nick Brown, a Brit living in Mallorca, predicted that “this is going to be the colapso to end all colapsos.” In the days leading up to the eclipse, local Spanish governments have denied permits to eclipse festivals marketed to Anglophone ravers.

But for the most part, Spain’s central government has gone all-in on promoting this eclipse and has called the Iberian Peninsula “the only populated place in the world where the total solar eclipse of August 12 can be fully enjoyed.” (This is a bit of a snub to Iceland’s capital of Reykjavík, where totality is more likely to be marred by bad weather.) The setting you experience an eclipse in does matter, Johnson said. She is leading a tour group off the coast of Mallorca from a boat that seats 80; natural settings, she said, can help establish the transcendent connection to Earth you want to find during the brief window where the moon blocks the sun.

Still, anyone in the path of totality has a chance to experience something out of the ordinary, even if there are no human towers for miles around. And this eclipse is really just a rehearsal for the one to come. Spain’s next eclipse, in August 2027, is already being billed as “the Eclipse of the Century” for the six minutes of totality it will bring.

The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised

2026-08-08T08:00:00-04:00

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Some 50,000 years ago, modern humans wandered into Ice Age Europe. The continent was new to us Homo sapiens, but not for beings of our general kind. Neanderthals and their ancestors had been living among Eurasia’s glaciers for ages, and in ways that would have struck us as familiar. Evidence suggests that they may have strung eagle talons together into necklaces and stained their bodily ornaments with pigments. They tended fires, cooked food, and maybe even made their own glue. On sandstone cave walls, they etched wavy lines, dots, and other geometric designs.

After first contact, under social circumstances that we cannot possibly imagine, modern humans and Neanderthals had children together; around the same time, in Asia, our species also procreated with another species, the Denisovans. Scientists know this because they have sequenced DNA from Neanderthal and Denisovan remains, and they can see fragments of their code in our genomes to this day. Now we are learning that still more of these fusions of blood and culture may have shaped our lineage. Last week, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley and Johns Hopkins University published new evidence in Science suggesting that two “ghost” ancestors haunt our family tree—not Neanderthals or Denisovans, but some other hominin populations.

DNA analysis is only one of the techniques that scientists have been using to cast narrow shafts of light into the dark abyss that is the human past. Researchers from several disciplines have been collecting and reinterpreting ever smaller traces of our forebears to reimagine how they lived, what they made, and what family secrets they might still be hiding.

The ghost-ancestors paper is the most recent example. The team from UC Berkeley and Hopkins analyzed some very odd sequences of DNA in the human genome, which were discovered 20 years ago. These don’t match up with those of any ancient hominin species that have already been sequenced, and their origins have been mysterious. But now we have some suspects. One of the strange sequences appears to come from a hominin who mated with us before we ventured out of Africa. The other may come from the great wanderer Homo erectus, who left Africa nearly 2 million years ago and ranged across Asia. Homo erectus may never have encountered Homo sapiens directly, but the researchers suspect that the hominin interbred with the Denisovans before the Denisovans interbred with us. Either way, all of these people—if it is right to call them people—played a role in our species’ story of becoming, yet we are only now learning the nature of that connection.

All year, scientists from different fields have been making revisions to the human-origin story. In January, one team announced that they’d found handheld wooden tools along an ancient lakeshore in present-day Greece—a refuge between glaciers where hominins of some kind butchered elephants about 430,000 years ago. These are surely not the first wooden tools ever to be made, but they are the most ancient that we’ve managed to find—and they were used during the Stone Age. That name—“Stone Age”—is misleading. It reveals more about the limits of archaeology than about the material culture of the people who lived through the period, who may not have thought of themselves as being defined by stone tools at all. We perceive them that way only because their knapped axes of flint and obsidian are likelier to have survived to the present day than the digging sticks that our forebears smoothed and sharpened.

[Read: When did humans first start wearing clothes?]

Beyond stone and wood, these lakeside elephant butchers likely put all kinds of natural materials to clever use. They may have employed woven twine to sew animal hides together, but we wouldn’t know it, because twine unravels into thin, disintegrating filaments, and bacteria rapidly remove hides from the world. Wood tends to rot away too. In this location, the tools had the good geological fortune to be buried quickly under mud.

Stone tools have themselves been reinterpreted. Researchers recently detected traces of poison on an ancient set of quartz arrowheads that were dug up in 1985. The weapons were found in a South African rock shelter that was used by modern humans 60,000 years ago—tens of thousands of years earlier than what had been regarded as the oldest confirmed human use of poison. The ancient South African archers retrieved the neurotoxin from a plant bulb that grows as large as a honeydew melon and dabbed it onto the cold stone of their arrowheads, knowing that it would slow down any animal that they pierced. Some scientists are now calling for a reappraisal of other ancient arrowheads to see whether they too had been sheathed in poison by people whose ingenuity had previously been underestimated by science.

Piecing together the history of our species in this way is tedious work, because the evidence is so fragmentary. The Earth’s violent, self-renewing processes erase so much. During the planet’s cold spells, its glaciers steamroll from the poles toward the equator, grinding and scraping whole landmasses clean. In its warmer, middle zones, jungles can sprout up within decades, covering human ruins in a thick and devouring layer of green.

Scientists have recently learned that the Amazon rainforest has been concealing millennia-old earthworks on an enormous scale. A team of international researchers spent weeks flying lidar-equipped planes back and forth over a swath of Amazonia. Their laser scans revealed nearly 400 immense structures that were previously unknown to science. From the sky, they saw that these systems of raised banks and deep ditches formed geometrically precise circles, octagons, and squares, and were linked to one another by remarkably straight roads. The earthworks were built 1,200 to 2,500 years ago by the Aquiry civilization. Having surveyed only one small portion of Aquiry territory, the researchers suspect that tens of thousands more of these structures may be waiting silently under the region’s trees.

One hundred thousand years from now, the Aquiry ruins might vanish altogether, and in Earth time, 100,000 years is nothing. In 10 million years, even the skyscrapers and continent-sprawling infrastructure of our own civilization will be crushed into sedimentary layers. Nearly everything that we have created will be reduced to trace elements and isotopes, but for a few specimens lucky enough to be fossilized. For all of the other details of our world to persist in human memory, science would need to get better, or civilization itself would need to keep existing, and telling its own story, from now until then.

What if Freud Was Right?

2026-08-04T07:00:00-04:00

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To announce that you are embarking on a course of psychoanalytic training today is tantamount, in many quarters, to admitting that you plan to treat your patients using astrology or by parsing the entrails of a goat. To say that you are undergoing psychoanalysis as a patient is to reveal that you are entrusting your mental health to a witch doctor. So if I were to tell you that a respected neuroscientist has undertaken to exhume Sigmund Freud and make a case for both his theory of mind and his psychoanalytic method as the best—indeed, the only—approach that can cure emotional disorders, you would likely rate that a quixotic project, and its author perhaps a candidate for serious therapy himself.

Freud’s cultural and scientific influence crested some 70 years ago, and much of psychiatry’s history since then has consisted of a renunciation of the man, his concepts, and his therapeutic techniques so comprehensive as to have an edge of savagery, even vengeance, to it. He has been deemed a sexist, a misogynist, a bully, a narcissist, a homophobe, a pervert, an addict, an opportunist, a plagiarist, a fabulist, and a scientific fraud, as well as a disloyal friend and a credit-stealing protégé. Not to mention a bungling, incompetent therapist—“a dogmatist who browbeat his patients and consistently failed to mark the crucial difference between their fantasies and his own.” (So sums up the flap copy on a collection of Freud-filleting essays by 18 psychiatrists, philosophers, historians, and others compiled in 1998 by Frederick Crews, a literary critic and onetime devout Freudian turned virulent heretic.)

If coroners were to pin an actual time of death on Freudianism, they might specify 1963. That year, the philosopher of science Karl Popper held up psychoanalytic theory as the archetypal instance of what he called “pseudoscience”: Worse than mere bad science, psychoanalysis was, in being untestable, simply not science. Based in large part on the highly speculative interpretation of imperfectly recalled dreams, of all things, psychoanalytic theory was impervious to real scientific inquiry. In presuming to explain everything, Popper pronounced, psychoanalysis explained nothing at all.

So who today would dare attempt a rehabilitation of Freud? And why? To take the second question first, here’s one reason: What has followed Freudianism has not been, by many reckonings, any better. In the 1970s, the mental-health profession fled from such squishy psychological concepts as transference and countertransference, the death drive, and seduction theory—as well as more outlandish ones like penis envy, castration anxiety, and the Oedipal complex—and leaned instead into “biological psychiatry,” which had emerged from the drug discoveries of the 1950s and ’60s.

Physiological notions took hold, such as the “catecholamine hypothesis of affective disorders,” which attributed anxiety and depression to deficits of the neurotransmitters norepinephrine and dopamine. Three decades later, in the 1990s, the “chemical-imbalance theory of depression” arrived, tying depression and other mood disorders to dysregulation of another neurotransmitter, serotonin. Psychoanalysts’ highly subjective assessments gave way to the ostensibly more objective measurements provided by neuroscientific instruments that can capture brain activity, such as EEGs, PET scans, and fMRIs. Doctors turned to genetic testing to help identify various temperament types and emotional predispositions, and relied on standardized questionnaires assessed for their validity in diagnosing mental illness.

In repudiating Freudianism and touting the field’s proper medical grounding, science-based psychiatry confidently predicted that measurable success was soon to come. That’s not what happened. Biological psychiatry “overreached, overpromised, overdiagnosed, overmedicated,” as the Harvard medical historian Anne Harrington put it in 2019. Which raises the question of whether psychiatry has simply exchanged one form of witchcraft for another.

The champions of so-called anti-psychiatry and critical psychiatry—now emboldened by Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the MAHA movement—certainly think so. So do some leading figures in biological psychiatry. As the head of the National Institute of Mental Health from 2002 to 2015, Thomas Insel tried to root America’s approach to mental-health care more firmly in brain physiology and the emerging understanding of genetics than in the nebulous concepts of Freudianism. But in 2017, when he looked back on the $20 billion he’d spent on the endeavor, his verdict was bleak: “I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness.”

What biological psychiatry once promised seemed revolutionary; from the suffering patient’s perspective, what it’s delivered has been marginal. Still, reverting to the nostrums of a disgraced Victorian quack seems a little like saying This modern medical technique isn’t working so well—let’s go back to using leeches. Well, as it happens, leeches have become an important part of the modern reconstructive surgeon’s tool kit, for use in skin grafts after surgeries, among other things. Might Freudianism be psychiatry’s leech, resurrected for the astonishing health benefits it contained all along?

The Platonic ideal of the person who might dare to make this case would look a lot like Mark Solms, the author of the new book The Only Cure: Freud and the Neuroscience of Mental Healing. He is a South African neuroscientist armored with a sturdy résumé and hundreds of articles in scientific journals, along with half a dozen books and counting. His lab discovered the specific pathway in the forebrain responsible for stimulating dreams, and he disproved the notion that dreaming is dependent on REM sleep. He’s also done extensive research into the science of consciousness.

Solms is a practicing psychoanalyst as well; he treats neurological disorders (stroke, Parkinson’s, dementia) in addition to psychiatric disorders (anxiety, depression, psychosis). He’s coined a term, neuropsychoanalysis, to describe his clinical work, because he buttresses traditional psychoanalytic techniques—free association and dream interpretation, among other methods of probing the unconscious—with the more recent findings of neuroscience. Much of his research has involved trying to use modern technology to demonstrate the scientific underpinning of certain Freudian concepts and theories. For instance, Solms says that the pleasure-seeking drive (the source of Freud’s “pleasure principle”) is located in the brain networks that communicate via dopamine, and he has mapped the superego onto a region of the prefrontal cortex involved in emotional regulation.

A neuroscientist who is also a practicing psychoanalyst is a rare bird. But Solms is rarer still, having spent the past 29 years completing a revised translation of the complete works of Freud. Twenty-four volumes were published in 2024, and an additional four, consisting of his writings on neuroscience (including some that have never previously been published in English), are due out in 2028. Making available previously overlooked writing has given Solms a chance to correct the misimpression that Freud was homophobic. In a letter to a woman who had asked him to “cure” her son’s homosexuality, Freud writes that being gay “is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness.” (This last bit is ironic in light of the American Psychiatric Association’s official classification of homosexuality as a “sociopathic personality disturbance” or “sexual deviation” until 1973.) Freud goes on to note that some of the most accomplished figures in history—Plato, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci—were gay, and ends by saying that although psychoanalysis can help her son become happier, less neurotic, and more productive, none of that will have anything to do with his sexual orientation. I suspect more than a few Freud detractors will be surprised to read this.

By Solms’s own estimation, there might be “nobody alive who has spent more time with Freud than I have.” But Solms is no doctrinaire acolyte, as guardians of the Freudian flame have tended to be. Ernest Jones, an influential early director of the International Psychoanalytical Association, believed his role was to create a secret committee “like the Paladins of Charlemagne” to protect Freudian theory against heresy. Solms, in contrast, embraces some major criticisms of Freud, calling the death drive, for example, “an egregious error.” As for Freud’s rather “idiosyncratic” theories about sex, Solms writes, “I don’t think there’s any getting around the conclusion that Freud had this stuff seriously muddled.”

Part of Solms’s premise in this book is implicit and inarguable: Despite the attempts to purge Freudianism from psychiatry, its tropes, terms, and concepts—the unconscious; the id, ego, and superego; sublimation; defense mechanisms; the obsession with sex; the importance of early-childhood experiences—have seeped so deeply into our cultural limbic system that they live on in the shared metaphors and terminology we use to discuss personality and mental health: Frank is “anal”; Mary is “repressed”; Donald Trump is a “narcissist” and an “egomaniac”; Jill Biden was “in denial.” When Freud died, in 1939, W. H. Auden wrote that he had become “a whole climate of opinion / under whom we conduct our different lives.”

[From the January/February 2014 issue: Scott Stossel on surviving anxiety]

But the two explicit arguments Solms makes on Freud’s behalf in The Only Cure are astonishingly ambitious—and contentious. The first is that Freud deserves credit for neuroscientific prescience. A recent history of neuroscience states baldly that “Freud had nothing novel or insightful to say about how the brain worked.” On the contrary, according to Solms: Many prevailing theories about how the brain functions were first worked out by Freud. For instance, Solms writes, Freud effectively identified the way that short-term memories get consolidated into long-term ones, and did so more than half a century before the neurochemical mechanism for this was discovered. (To bolster his case here, Solms marshals the very man who identified that particular mechanism, Eric Kandel, who won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for doing so, and who agrees with Solms that psychoanalysis is “the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind” we have, and that neuroscience is the “new intellectual framework” that can reinvigorate psychiatry.)

Or consider Freudianism’s key concept, the unconscious. Freud argued that our personalities and behaviors are governed by a maelstrom of hidden drives and motivations mostly unknown to our conscious selves. What we experience as our “conscious life” is in fact only a post hoc rationalization of things we are doing for other reasons, a devastating blow against not just human rationality but even free will.

For years, evidence of the unconscious seemed inaccessible to objective science. How can you prove the existence of something that none of us, by definition, can be subjectively aware of ? But technologies unavailable to Freud have demonstrated that much of what happens in the brain is in fact unconscious. Studies using fMRI machines have revealed that when frightening images or angry faces are shown to people too fast for them to consciously perceive them, their brains nevertheless register the fear stimuli: The machines detect a flare of activity in the amygdala, which is followed by a surge in heart rate, blood pressure, and stress hormones, among other responses. The feeling of fear in the body then breaks into consciousness, and the brain makes decisions in response to that. It has become hard to deny that, at least in basic outline, Freud was right about the unconscious.

Solms’s second explicit claim is, if anything, even more provocative. There is abundant evidence, he writes, that psychoanalysis and its offshoots “are astoundingly effective”—in some cases, he argues, “as dependable as, say, insulin is at managing type 1 diabetes, or as the HPV vaccine is at preventing cervical cancer. These treatments are so well proven that it would strike most doctors as—to use a technical term—crazy not to deploy them by default.”

Solms’s unqualified endorsement of psychoanalysis is startling after decades of criticism. In support, Solms cites a number of studies and papers from the past 40 years to show that psychoanalytic-style talk therapy is more effective than antidepressants or electroconvulsive therapy for depression, or than antipsychotics for schizophrenia. He also cites research demonstrating that psychoanalysis has a robust “sleeper effect”—that is, symptoms continue to improve long after the treatment has ended.

These results are so striking that I decided to look at the underlying studies, and some other relevant ones. I found that Solms is highly selective in what he cites, and elides a lot of nuance (and sometimes directly contradictory evidence) in service of his case for psychoanalytic-style therapy and against other forms of therapy, especially pharmacotherapy. Cherry-picking is not unusual (especially when dealing with studies that are hard to compare), but the conclusions that flow from it are usually accompanied by a degree of circumspection.

Solms’s verdicts are categorically blunt: “Nearly every psychiatric disorder listed and defined in the standard diagnostic manuals is best understood and treated, not pharmacologically, but psychologically.” And: “There are, as things stand, no physiological cures in psychiatry.” And perhaps most bracing: “The mainstay of modern psychiatry—psychopharmacology—is for the most part a defence against facing the facts about what our patients really need. It is a way of suppressing symptoms instead of asking what they mean and fixing that.”

Solms’s position aligns him, probably unintentionally, with the public pronouncements that RFK Jr. has issued about SSRI antidepressants in his role as HHS secretary, which made the American Psychiatric Association convention in May jangly with tension. Antidepressants are useless, Kennedy has said at various times; they are more addictive than heroin, result in “brain damage,” and could be partly responsible for school shootings. None of this is true. But one reason demagoguing against medication has been easy is that the biological model of psychiatry—although filling the coffers of pharmaceutical companies—has delivered no panaceas, instead fueling cycles of disenchanted overreaction. (Today, one in six Americans takes an antidepressant; no wonder APA attendees were on edge.)

[Read: Panic attacks and the meaning of life]

Solms does concede that while no physiological cures exist in psychiatry, physiological treatments can remediate symptoms. That Advil doesn’t “cure” pain doesn’t stop people from taking the drug to alleviate it. Still, his broadside against pharmacology seems overbroad: Although it is surely true that many of those who take SSRI antidepressants do not need, and should not be on, them, it is also true that many others would be debilitated, if not dead, without them.

Before Freud became a psychiatrist, he himself was a neuroanatomist. Some of his early research was on the gonads of eels and the nervous systems of crayfish. But given the tools available to him in the 1890s, he kept bumping up against the limits of what the physical brain could reveal about the functioning of the mind. Frustrated and in need of money, he put aside the microscope, opened a private practice, and began focusing instead on clinical observation of patients, and of his own mind. Studying consciousness—and the unconscious brain that lay beneath it—from the inside was how Freud constructed psychoanalytic theory. He sometimes expressed embarrassment at this approach. “It still strikes me myself as strange that the case histories I write should read like short stories and that, as one might say, they lack the serious stamp of science,” he reflected in his foundational Studies on Hysteria in 1895.

Freud never abandoned his quest to link physiology and psychology. “We must recollect that all our provisional ideas in psychology will presumably some day be based on an organic substructure,” he wrote in 1914. In 1938, not long before his death, Freud was still at it: “The future may teach us to exercise a direct influence, by means of particular chemical substances, on the amounts of energy and their distribution in the mental apparatus.”

Solms has picked up the baton, but he is adamant that we have not reached the future that Freud was forecasting. Rather, his view is that we need to go back to Freud’s true aim: to treat the soul, not by ministering to the brain, as modern biological psychiatry does, but “by accepting that the ‘soul’—construed as the experiencing, active, living ‘I’—is a part of nature.” And he has company, even among clinicians who came of age during the rise of biological psychiatry: Patients with psychosis are “too fascinating and complex to be reduced to the blockade of dopamine receptors,” the psychiatrist Pesach Lichtenberg wrote in the 2023 book Psychopharmacology Reconsidered. So what kind of map does Solms provide?

You know Chekhov’s famous stipulation that if you introduce a gun in the first act, it must be fired in the third? Well, here’s a corollary: If you introduce a penis on the first page of a book about psychoanalysis, it will go off, or fail to, or both, very soon. In his second paragraph, Solms ushers in a depressed physician named Teddy P, who gets dumped by his girlfriend after struggling with both premature ejaculation and erectile dysfunction (perhaps a bit on the nose for a book about Sigmund Freud).

When Teddy’s case becomes acute—in addition to depression and sexual dysfunction, he develops insomnia, headaches, brain fog, seizures, and evidence of possible dementia—Solms takes him on as a patient. He determines that Teddy’s underlying disease is psychological, not neurological (the seizures had made that an open question), and attributes much of what ails Teddy to the cascading effects of drugs and treatments he’s being given for his depression, anxiety, insomnia, and pain. Solms weans him off his medications and embarks with him on a course of psychoanalysis. Then he puts Teddy aside, leaving the reader in suspense for 258 pages before resuming the account of his fate.

For all his extensive neuromedical training, Solms makes a point of describing the work of psychoanalysis as “less like science and more like a practical trade. Long experience leads to familiarity with many different kinds of glitch and suggests many different kinds of fix.” Some people—and by some people, I might mean me—derive a certain solace from understanding their anxiety and depression as, in effect, mechanical failures, not moral ones: a snag in the temperamental wiring here, an unfortunate genetic variant there, a dysregulation of neurotransmitters not unlike the problems with insulin regulation in a diabetic’s pancreas.

[From the November 1962 issue: Jung on Freud]

But Solms’s contention, drawing from Freud, is that those mechanical problems can be fixed only as part of a wholesale realignment of unconscious drives and emotional needs. That worked for Solms: He had been plagued by a severe death anxiety since he was a little boy, when his older brother suffered brain damage in a freak accident, but was cured by a course of analysis on the couch of Clifford Yorke, a British World War II veteran who had helped care for survivors after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen.

Teddy recovers. (This is no spoiler; readers could hardly have been expecting otherwise.) After four years of arduous work with Solms, revisiting early-childhood experiences and his relationship with his mother, his depression and anxiety lift, his sexual and romantic-attachment issues abate, his growing conscious awareness frees him from damaging unconscious compulsions. He becomes an outstanding doctor.

The treatment involves all kinds of unexpected twists and turns, and Solms deploys a lot of Freudian tools—dream analysis, free association, breaking down defense mechanisms, recovering buried memories, transference and countertransference, and elaborate (too elaborate, if you ask me) feats of interpretation by the analyst. To someone with my firmly materialist leanings, it all seems a bit much.

But I was struck by two things Solms writes in different places earlier in the book. One is that the aim of psychotherapy, at its core, is simply “to help our patients find better ways of meeting their emotional needs.” Whatever you think of the whole complicated Freudian edifice, who could take issue with that? The other is: “Psychoanalysis is a cure wrought by loving your neighbor as yourself.” Solms has set out to complete the Freudian project by giving it a neuroscientific basis—but maybe the more important accomplishment is to have restored to psychiatry its humanity.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “What if Freud Was Right?”

Climate Change Is Moving Mountains

2026-07-31T10:20:25-04:00

On geological timescales, the Earth is a dynamic place. Tectonic plates shift. Continents move. Mountains rise and fall. But during humanity’s tenure on Earth, the ground beneath our feet has largely stayed put.

That stable period may now be at an end. Climate change began in the atmosphere, where greenhouse gases accumulate, trapping heat from the sun. The planet’s waters reacted—precipitation patterns shifted, glaciers and ice caps began melting, the ocean generously sponged up heat and carbon dioxide.

When the Earth’s waters shift, so does solid ground. Now warming is destabilizing land across the planet, and geology is becoming a real-time science. In more and more places, the floor is giving way.

In Alaska, Norway, Greenland, Chile, and New Zealand, as well as across the European Alps, mountains are crumbling. As glaciers retreat, some at unprecedented rates, they leave behind unstable cliffs that were once supported by ice. In 2023, one collapsed into a fjord in Greenland and generated a 660-foot wave that sent ripples through the Earth detected on monitoring stations worldwide for nine days. In Alaska last year, a landslide-generated tsunami struck in a fjord frequented by cruise ships. In Switzerland the same year, part of a mountain glacier detached entirely, burying the village of Blatten in a cataclysmic landslide. In the past decade or so, scientists have collected enough dramatic examples of this phenomenon to suggest that they’re clearly not isolated incidents, but part of a pattern linking the loss of glaciers with landslide risk.

And those landslides could get larger. When the glaciers melted after the last glacial maximum, about 20,000 years ago, the landslides that followed were orders of magnitude larger than any we’ve seen in recorded history. But because some of today’s glaciers have persisted in the landscape longer than those of that glacial period did, they’ve had time to carve steep, unstable cliffs. This means that “we haven’t seen the upper bounds of landslides yet,” Kristian Svennevig, a geologist at the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, told me. In Arctic regions in the near future, the magnitude of landslides could exceed any scientists know of in the geological record.

Along with glaciers, permafrost holds mountains together at high altitudes and latitudes worldwide. It, too, is in retreat, as scientists predicted in the 1980s and as has now become apparent across the Arctic reaches. In the Brooks Range, home of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline, long-frozen mountains have started to spontaneously deform and collapse within the past few decades or so, as their permafrost glue gives way. “We’re pushing these mountains into a state of disequilibrium, where they need to adjust their slopes in order to match the climate of today,” the independent Alaskan geologist Bretwood Higman told me. They’re essentially too steep for this warmer temperature regime.

“As a geologist, I’ve found it shocking how widespread the sudden increase in landslide activity is,” Higman said. When you’re used to thinking on scales that span tens of thousands of years, to see these changes play out over human lifetimes—“it’s very dramatic.”

The thawing of permafrost in mountainous regions already threatens infrastructure. Denali National Park is close to finishing a $100 million bridge that will span a moving permafrost landslide. In the Brooks Range, engineers are pumping refrigerant underground to refreeze permafrost and stabilize pipelines. And mountains aren’t the only land giving way. Cement-solid Arctic ground is turning into bogs. Communities across Alaska have had to relocate as their homes, fuel tanks, sewage lagoons, and garbage dumps tip, spill, or sink. Elsewhere, as massive underground chunks of ancient ice melt, the surrounding earth collapses into the voids left behind, buckling roads and swallowing buildings. In Siberia, once-trapped methane explodes from under permafrost to cause 100-foot craters.

“When permafrost thaws, it changes everything,” Sue Natali, an Arctic-climate scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, told me. Natali and her colleagues are seeing the thaw speed up too. “That is not a maybe thing, and it is not a local thing. It is a pan-Arctic thing,” she said.

Climate is also shifting the land at lower latitudes. A warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, which means more frequent and extreme rainfall events. In recent years, scientists have begun modeling how this kind of rain will increase landslide risk, and linking individual events to storms made more dramatic by climate change. “Harder, more intense, longer-duration rainfall has a greater possibility to generate landslides,” Jonathan Godt, who leads the United States Geological Survey’s landslide-hazards program, told me. These kinds of debris flows and mudslides now threaten more communities. In North Carolina, Hurricane Helene triggered more than 2,000 landslides in a week. In California, slopes wiped clean by logging and drought-fueled wildfires slough away after heavy rain—one mudslide in Montecito destroyed 100 homes and killed 23 people in 2018. Landslides already cause $20 billion in damage globally, and that cost will only climb with climate change.

Already, scientists have been able to catalog the effects of melting glaciers, thawing permafrost, and extreme rain. Other dramatic consequences of shifting precipitation patterns—volcanic eruptions and earthquakes—are only just coming into focus.

More than a decade ago, in his book Waking the Giant, the University College London volcanologist Bill McGuire compiled decades of paleoclimate research to predict that climate change could lead to more volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. An increase in volcanic and tectonic activity would be a natural response to the end of a glacial period. For thousands of years now, the Earth’s crust, which was weighted down by ice, has been slowly bouncing back. That process releases pressure from long-subdued faults and volcanoes, such as those in Iceland. Human-caused climate change is only accelerating these processes. And water, whether from extreme rainfall or glacial melt, can percolate in cracks underground to increase pressure on rock and reduce friction along faults, triggering both earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.

Last year, researchers in Switzerland and France found some of the clearest evidence so far that glacial melt could indeed be affecting seismic hazards in high-altitude regions. After a period of intense glacial melt in 2015, a series of small quakes struck the Grandes Jorasses on Mont Blanc Massif, on the border of France and Italy; the probability of a 3.0-magnitude earthquake rose by 10 times, Toni Kraft, a seismologist at the Swiss Seismological Service at ETH Zurich and one of the authors of a related paper, told me. These quakes are still small, but they could trigger rockfall events that are already on the rise across the Alps.

Falk Amelung, a geoscientist at the University of Miami, has also argued—somewhat controversially—that climate-driven extreme rainfall might have led to the dramatic 2018 eruption of Hawaii’s Kīlauea volcano. Scientists have not been able to find an obvious triggering mechanism for the eruption, and Amelung hypothesized that rainfall had infiltrated the volcano’s edifice and increased pore pressure in the rock, kilometers down, to the highest rates in almost 50 years. USGS volcanologists were unconvinced: A link between heavy precipitation and some types of volcanic activity is widely accepted, but some scientists still reject the theory that an eruption such as Kīlauea’s could be caused by water reaching the magma below. If Amelung and others in his camp are right, though, as many as 700 volcanoes could be at risk of dome explosions and flank collapse over the next 80 years, he calculated.

“The system must be heavily stressed in a way that it’s close to breaking anyway,” he told me. “And then this small stress change due to water brings it over the edge.”

During Earth’s long history, small perturbations have caused millennia-long swings between hothouse and icehouse conditions. The amount of carbon dioxide that we have pumped into the atmosphere, at a higher rate than ever before in Earth’s geological history, is a pretty significant perturbation, which then causes its own significant perturbations. “The crust is not isolated. It’s always connected. The climate, the fluid layers, the solid layer—you cannot separate them,” Benedikt Soja, a geoscientist at ETH Zurich, told me. The atmosphere, ocean, and land are interacting systems, and their fragile equilibrium is reacting together to the stress we’ve put on them.

The Return of the Monarch

2026-07-28T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs and Videos by Ana Hop

“¡Mire! ” My guide, Silvestre, pointed upward, as if I wasn’t already walking with my neck craned as far back as it could go. The sky was alive with millions of fluttering shapes, congregating into clouds at random, occasionally turning into ribbons that wound through the trees. So many butterfly wings beat the air that their vibrations were audible, like a waterfall rushing in the distance. I understood for the first time the immensity of the event I’d come to see.

I was in the center of El Rosario butterfly sanctuary, part of Mexico’s Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. Unaccustomed to the thin air at nearly 11,000 feet above sea level, I’d ridden Pelucha, a rust-colored mare, to the heights of the reserve. About halfway up, the orange-and-black butterflies had begun appearing in groups, alighting on flowers or gathering to sip water from puddles. Coupled pairs mated everywhere, and their constant entanglements on the path made it difficult to avoid stepping on them; Pelucha happily crunched more than a few underfoot. I dismounted at the top of the trail and followed Silvestre as he ducked under a rope that kept tourists from accessing the most sensitive areas of the reserve.

It was February, and the monarchs—northerners that had wintered in Mexico—were preparing for their final journey, which doubled as the first leg of a multigenerational relay race north. Their delicateness belies a life cycle that more resembles long-haul trucking than anything you might read in a children’s book. Each of the butterflies above me had already braved many grueling trials. In the following week or so, the majority would be on their way.

Monarch migration is a wonder of the natural world, one of the longest annual cycles of movement undertaken by any creature on Earth, spanning thousands of miles. Over the past half century, the lands that the monarchs traverse have become more hostile to them, a result of development and herbicides, global warming and organized crime, all of which have put the future of that migration in doubt. And yet, the story I’d come to write—my reason for interloping in this and other sanctuaries—was not just a narrative of beauty being diminished by human trampling and greed. Recently, there’s been good news: Population estimates, after a long march downward, have been increasing for the past two years. This stabilization appears to be connected at least in part to efforts to save butterfly habitats in Mexico, the United States, and Canada. Those developments are reason to hope that there may still be a pathway left for saving the monarchs and their migration.

The monarch persists partly because of the dogged work from its human partners; because of people who have given their life—in every sense of the phrase—to preserve nature. But mostly, the monarch persists because life’s job is to live; because within those thimble-size bodies hides a dynamo of survival that puts our most incredible machines to shame. The more we learn about the butterflies, the more we understand how extraordinary it is that they have so far beaten the odds we have stacked against them, and how forbidding those odds remain.

Ana Hop for The Atlantic

A monarch butterfly in El Rosario butterfly sanctuary, in Angangueo, Mexico

We’ve known just how epic the monarch’s migration is for only about half a century. In the 1970s, using paper tags placed on butterflies’ wings, the Canadian butterfly researchers Fred and Norah Urquhart completed a lifelong mission to uncover the mystery of where all the monarchs born in Ontario went in the fall. To their surprise, the sojourners they followed made it all the way down the length of the U.S., and on to the mountain forests of Michoacán, Mexico. There they roosted, packed tightly into just a handful of colonies that collectively cover no more than a few city blocks, yet hold nearly all of the continent’s monarchs in winter. The Urquharts first visited these colonies in 1976, and National Geographic published a cover story on their breakthrough.

For centuries, Indigenous people in Mexico’s highlands have witnessed the monarchs’ annual return during harvest season, though for most of that time they didn’t know where they came from. The butterflies have been making this migration for as long as 20 millennia, once finding paths to and from the fields gouged out by glaciers retreating with the spring during the last Ice Age. Now their roosting grounds sit within a handful of sanctuaries that I visited. At Sierra Chincua, a few miles north of El Rosario, I stood on a cliff overlooking the slender trunks of oyamel fir trees. I watched living streams of monarchs flying in different directions, sometimes winding about one another like a gigantic knot forever being tied, and looked in vain for three monarchs that I knew were in the fray.

Each had been given a designation in a spreadsheet—CHI016, CHI013, and CHI001—but those were all very boring names for butterflies, so I’d asked my 6-year-old daughter to give them better ones. She’d come up with Cinderella, Eric, and Carle. (She knows The Very Hungry Caterpillar by heart.)

Nothing about the trio was unusual, save for the gear they wore. Affixed to each butterfly’s thorax, like a tiny backpack, was a transmitter the size of a grain of rice. These transmitters, called BlūMorpho tags, had been developed by a company called Cellular Tracking Technologies, and Cinderella, Eric, and Carle were part of the first generation of monarchs to wear them.

Before my visit to the sanctuaries, I’d spoken with David La Puma, an executive at CTT and one of the brains behind the BlūMorpho. The company had initially focused on developing tech for tracking eagles, but La Puma had previously worked in monarch conservation, and carried his interest in the butterflies with him. Tracking a monarch is different from tracking an eagle, as monarchs each weigh less than a dollar bill. Any transmitter attached to one could weigh no more than a few grains of sand.

No battery could be made that small and still provide power over months of flying, and the solar panels that CTT used for eagle trackers were much too heavy. But the team figured out a solution: taking the ultrathin solar squares that line the wings of satellites and carefully chopping them up into tiny bespoke cells. An early version of the tracker, applied to butterflies with dabs of eyelash glue, was linked with a cellphone app via Bluetooth, allowing enthusiasts to follow nearby butterflies—a sort of “Pokémon Go for monarchs,” La Puma said—and record their locations in somewhat haphazard fashion. The newest iteration works more like Google Maps, providing far more complete data on the butterflies’ locations to anyone, almost in real time.

Knowing more about butterflies’ individual habits may enable us to help them thrive collectively (more on that later). The data also just help us get to know the monarchs better. As it turns out, some seem to be worse with directions than others, and can find themselves traveling west or south from Mexico. In the prototyping stage, some monarchs were detected near oil platforms in the Gulf of Mexico, nowhere near land, and some butterflies appeared to enjoy Caribbean vacations. Yet the majority seem to follow well-established paths along invisible corridors in the air.

Cinderella, Eric, and Carle had all been tagged in Sierra Chincua, which meant that I could deduce certain facts about their lives. They were already bona fide world-class wanderers, having flown there all the way from Canada in the fall, a three-month trip. Along the way, they’d dodged birds and windmills and cars, eventually reaching the same patch of forest—perhaps even the same trees—that their great-grandparents had roosted in. For much of the winter, they had not eaten and had barely moved, jamming themselves so tightly against their fellow travelers that from a distance they looked like scales armoring the sides of the trees. Now they’d awakened, stretching their wings and warming up.

Ana Hop for The Atlantic

Monarchs at rest on tree branches at El Rosario in early March. In winter’s colder temperatures, the butterflies pack themselves together so tightly that they resemble scales on the trees.

Though I couldn’t spot them in the sky, I could see from my phone that Cinderella, Eric, and Carle were near. Over the next several weeks, I would keep tabs on them, following their movements with a level of detail that would have been impossible only a year ago.

Individual butterflies can travel as far as 100 miles in a single day and can congregate in groups so thick that they show up as clouds on weather radar. Glider pilots have seen them flying at altitudes above 10,000 feet. Year after year, new generations tend to gather around the same landmarks, despite having never seen them before. They seem, for example, to love the Barnegat Lighthouse on Long Beach Island, in New Jersey.

The monarchs’ feats of navigation are enabled by their internal technology, a set of instinctual tools that in some ways surpasses our understanding. The butterflies’ eyes can sense the angle and intensity of different forms of light. In each antenna, a complex series of molecules maintains their circadian clock, which, when combined with sunlight cues, gives them their sense of direction.

When the sun is unreliable, monarchs have a secondary method of pathfinding— a biological compass that allows them to sense Earth’s magnetic field. Internal thermostats help govern the timing of their northward movements.

The butterflies’ migration evolved to fit North America’s geography. Monarch caterpillars eat only milkweed, which grows best in cooler climates, but the butterflies can’t tolerate freezing temperatures. The length of the continent’s interior, unbroken by mountains or oceans, allows the monarchs to find the right weather and plants throughout the year—a Goldilocks ecology, neither too hot nor too cold. They are a marvel of nature’s engineering, of the kind of elegance that evolution can achieve over deep time.

“Winter is hard for insects that have to survive it, and monarchs basically avoid it by leaving,” says Karen Oberhauser, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and a co-founder of the Monarch Butterfly Fund. Unlike many other butterfly species, which are adapted to very specific microbiomes, monarchs have options if a local environment changes.

Indeed, they seem strikingly well adapted for living alongside the world’s most disruptive change agent: humanity. Milkweed tends to thrive in transitional areas, such as fallow fields, unkempt lawns, and the edges of highways. “When I first started studying monarchs, it really did seem like they kind of had an advantage over a lot of other species,” Oberhauser told me. “That’s a disturbance-adapted species.” She said, affectionately, that monarchs are like rats or pigeons, all part of the strange but sturdy menagerie of modern life.

But there are limits to any creature’s adaptability, and human activity has steadily eroded the monarch’s margin for error. In the 1930s, Mexico’s land-reform program created ejidos, areas designated for communal use by peasants. They began clearing the ancient oyamel forests to plant corn, beans, and squash, and sold the felled timber. Commercial interests also stepped in, accelerating logging in the butterfly’s winter habitats.

North of the Rio Grande, there have been disturbances to the disturbances. Although milkweed can flourish along roads, the advent of the interstate system also introduced one of the most efficient killers of butterflies: speeding traffic. And although farmland in the Midwest was once a reliable (if accidental) incubator for milkweed, the development of Roundup Ready crops in the ’90s allowed more promiscuous use of herbicides. Almost overnight, milkweed disappeared from large-scale farms.

According to a recent report from the World Wildlife Fund, the total area covered by monarch colonies in winter decreased from 45 acres in 1996 to a low of fewer than two acres in 2013. The five-year average of colony size has dropped by 80 percent since the mid-’90s, a plunge of some 170 million butterflies.

As Oberhauser told me, the changes wrought by humans have caught up to the monarchs. In fact, the complexity of the migration might now be a liability, as multiple stops on the journey face upheaval at once. “What makes them so strong also makes them vulnerable,” she said.

My trio of butterflies had been strong from their beginnings. As caterpillars, they’d gorged on milkweed, a plant that is toxic to most animals, and incorporated its poison into their bodies. Their distinct coloring is both a warning for predators and a badge of initiation.

They are already one-percenters—only one in 100 of the eggs laid in Ontario last year had produced butterflies that made it this far. Their generation, called a “super-generation,” is bigger and more robust than their parents’ was or their children’s will be: They are centurions built to make the journey all the way south and partway back. (Two successive generations will eventually complete the round trip to Canada.) Now, after a winter of fasting, huddled close against the cold, they are regaining their strength, sipping nectar from flowers near their roosting trees. On my phone, I can see a map with each location that the butterflies ping as they meander from place to place, ever returning to their central roosts.

My phone shows only their movements, not their more private matters, but I know that before they leave these forests behind, they will each find a mate. For Cinderella and Eric—which, as I told my daughter, is a female butterfly—their mates’ package of sperm will also contain a deposit of nutrients that will help them handle the rigors of the trip. Carle will weaken himself, giving his mate a gift that she must use to ensure the survival of their offspring.

For the past several decades, a diverse group of grassroots activists, scientists, and enthusiasts has worked to forestall the monarchs’ decline. I’d come to Sierra Chincua as the guest of one of them. José Luis Álvarez Alcalá, a local activist and farmer, showed me around. He pointed to the visitors’ center, restaurants, and gift shops near the sanctuary’s entrance. “None of this was here 30 years ago,” he told me. Then he pointed to a copse of young trees creeping up the hills. “A lot of that wasn’t either.” Álvarez Alcalá would know: He helped create much of it.

Ana Hop for The Atlantic

José Luis Álvarez Alcalá at Hacienda la Cruz, his home and tree nursery

Years of chain-smoking can be heard in the thickness of Álvarez Alcalá’s voice, and when we met, he sported a limp from a recent fall while working. He wasn’t originally a butterfly guy, he said, but was interested in revitalizing the region that encompassed the sanctuaries, and he ran a tree nursery on Hacienda la Cruz, a 17th-century Spanish colonial estate that he’d restored. By the 1980s, just a few years after the National Geographic story came out, the monarchs were already drawing streams of intrepid sightseers from abroad, despite almost no tourism infrastructure. Álvarez Alcalá realized that there might be a way to align the survival of the species with the local economy.

In 1986, President Miguel de la Madrid gave national protections to the main colony sites, creating the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve. But those protections did not halt or even slow logging. Encouraged by the butterfly scientist Lincoln P. Brower, Álvarez Alcalá and his associates came up with a more proactive plan. They would give the members of the ejidos oyamel fir and pine saplings to grow, instead of their usual crops. The growers would still be free to profit from their land by selling timber for Christmas trees, lumber, or charcoal, but would be encouraged to harvest the wood sustainably. If done right, on a wide-enough scale, the model could help provide both income for the ejidatarios and the basis for butterfly tourism.

Álvarez Alcalá says that, since launching in 1997, his La Cruz Habitat Protection Project has planted about 20 million oyamel fir and pine trees. Other groups have also reforested hundreds of hectares. The oldest of the trees planted as part of this experiment are now maturing and providing winter homes for exhausted monarchs.

Over the span of just a few years, reforesting and ecotourism have transformed much of Michoacán, the state in which the sanctuaries reside. In the municipality of Angangueo, a brilliant mural depicts the social history of the monarchs, the “hijas del sol,” including a painting of the now-famous 1976 National Geographic cover. In El Rosario, the trinkets and souvenirs, the tour-bus parking lots, and even the stable of horses for rent all speak to a symbiosis that has only recently come to be.

Ana Hop for The Atlantic

An ecotourism industry has developed around El Rosario. Rental horses and guides help tourists travel along the reserve’s high mountain trails.

The monarch’s star turn has changed the places along the more northerly parts of its route as well. In the U.S., seven states list the monarch as their official insect or butterfly, and in many places, monarchs appear on license plates that urge fellow drivers to protect the environment. More than 50,000 yards, parks, and schools now feature Monarch Waystations, special gardens stocked with milkweed and flowers.

According to the World Wildlife Fund, the overwintering areas covered by monarchs this year increased by 64 percent. Cinderella, Eric, and Carle’s generation was the largest to leave Mexico in seven years. The measured takeaway from the WWF is that “despite challenges, conservation efforts are making a difference.”

Yet there are new challenges, new crises in front of the monarchs. And these may eclipse the ones they’ve seen so far.

“Fucking avocados.” Álvarez Alcalá’s son Luca was driving me around the outskirts of Hacienda la Cruz, where La Cruz Habitat Protection Project is based. He pointed to the offending field in the distance, its neat rows of hunter-green bushes a dead giveaway. The fruits represented one of the emerging threats to the reforesting mission, and to the monarch’s survival.

I’d arrived in Mexico just after the annual high-water mark for avocado consumption: the Super Bowl. Michoacán is the largest avocado-growing region in the world, producing nearly all avocados eaten in the United States. Its volcanic soil is ideal for the fruit, and intense American demand for guacamole and fancy toast has, in these parts, given avocados the moniker oro verde—“green gold.”

Unfortunately for monarchs, their forests sit right in the middle of some of the most promising areas for growing avocados. And the green-gold rush is so lucrative that it has drawn the attention of the area’s cartels, which now extort local growers, smuggle many of their avocados across the border, and even operate plantations directly. There’s a good chance that if you bought chips and guac to eat while you watched Bad Bunny during the big game, a cartel profited.

Recently, cartels have been a major force behind illicit logging in the forests that Álvarez Alcalá and his son have tried to revive and protect, and much of the land has been converted for avocado farming. In 2020, Homero Gómez González, a prominent conservationist at the Biosphere Reserve, was found dead in Ocampo, the closest municipality to the sanctuary. Gómez González had been known as a vociferous antagonist of loggers. His killing has not been solved, but many outlets have placed the blame on the cartels.

Those same cartels instigated the crisis that gripped Mexico during my travels. Just three days before I got to Hacienda la Cruz, Mexican authorities killed Nemesio Rubén Oseguera Cervantes, the leader of the Jalisco New Generation Cartel. The death of “El Mencho” sparked violence across the states of Jalisco and Michoacán: Cartel members erected barricades on major roads and ambushed National Guard members, killing at least 25 and also attacking several journalists.

When I asked the elder Álvarez if touring the region would be safe, he gave perhaps the least-encouraging encouragement I’d ever heard: “I think there will be no problems,” he said. “But nothing in life is for sure.” During my trips to El Rosario and Sierra Chincua, both sanctuaries were mostly empty of tourists; cartels had been burning cars near the base of Sierra Chincua. It was all a stark reminder of how precarious monarch tourism is, and how much money there is to be made in destruction.

Ana Hop for The Atlantic

So many butterflies congregate along El Rosario’s high mountain trails that the vibration of their flapping wings can be audible to the human ear.

When I spoke with Megan Fulton, the executive director of Álvarez Alcalá’s project, she was keen to point me to a recent report from the WWF showing that, the avocado boom notwithstanding, rates of forest degradation and illegal logging in the sanctuaries have slowed in the past year. She attributed the positive development to the local communities being galvanized by global warming and weather changes. “They are the communities that are already seeing the effects of climate change,” she said. “So they want to restore their land and protect it for future generations.”

But the very fact that the communities are experiencing tangible effects—unprecedented heat waves that have killed hundreds, record droughts and wildfires that have ruined crops—means that the problem is bigger than organized crime, and perhaps beyond the ability of individual people or local groups to solve. Climate change is an accelerant for troubles that are already afoot. High mountain elevations that were once cool and less hospitable for avocado growing are getting hotter—and thus more tempting for felling. Warmer temperatures will also narrow the already tiny bands of habitability for oyamel firs, disrupting forest ecologies even in places that logging hasn’t yet touched.

[From the December 2025 issue: Vann R. Newkirk II on what climate change will do to America by mid-century]

The most ominous signs were visible from Hacienda la Cruz. In the forests just outside the property, like scars on the green mountainside, three ugly patches of brown, bare tree skeletons stood out. Luca explained that these patches had been infested by pine bark beetles, notorious evergreen-killers that feed on stressed or weakened conifers. The beetles are a normal part of forest ecosystems, and their numbers are usually controlled by cold winters. But the season has grown warmer. More trees now suffer from heat stress and dehydration, making them targets. Oyamels are particularly vulnerable. Authorities have already been forced to cut down whole sectors of the reserve to keep beetle infestations from spreading.

On my phone, I can see that by mid-February, Cinderella is restless, regularly streaming to the southwest and back, even visiting Ocampo once or twice, veering toward Loncheria Los 4 Elementos, a little snack bar in town that sells tortas, burgers, and micheladas. Eric is a bit more adventurous, making her way almost as far west as Ciudad Hidalgo, where the great father of the nation once owned a hacienda. Carle is more of a homebody, sticking closer to Sierra Chincua and often staying in its forests.

Eric is the first of the trio to leave for good, but her eagerness might be her undoing—the weather might not yet be warm enough for a successful transit. She flies north through Querétaro, but then her tracker stops transmitting. Cinderella and Carle choose to leave with the bulk of their cohort a week later, around the second week of March. There’s not much road ahead for Carle; he stops transmitting soon after.

Chase Castor for The Atlantic

A University of Kansas student, Merrie Clough, prepares caterpillar food, which will be sent, along with larvae, to individuals and schools hoping to raise monarch butterflies.

Chase Castor for The Atlantic

A paper tracking tag being affixed to a monarch at Monarch Watch, a hub of butterfly research and conservation in Lawrence, Kansas.

But Cinderella keeps going, winding her way through Querétaro, swerving toward the old colonial city of San Miguel de Allende, then bending northeast. On March 15, she crosses the Rio Grande in the vicinity of Rio Grande City, Texas.

The same week that Cinderella and her fellow survivors began fanning out into the United States, I visited Monarch Watch, an organization based at the University of Kansas that has long served as a hub of monarch research and conservation. I met Kristen Baum, its current director, and Chip Taylor, its founder and director emeritus. Baum runs a blog for Monarch Watch that tracks the radio-tagged butterflies’ movements. These data points could help conservationists model the migration more accurately, anticipate changes in population size, and better decide how and where to allocate resources to restore habitats. The day before my visit, Baum noted that CHI016, Cinderella’s government name, was likely the farthest north among all the tags.

The tiny building that Monarch Watch occupies is jam-packed with records, research, and the butterflies themselves. In one room, I watched as a female split open her green chrysalis and emerged to spread her wings. Across the hall were refrigerators full of milkweed seeds—the group has donated more than 1 million milkweed plants for restoration projects since 2015.

Taylor himself developed an artificial diet that could be used to raise caterpillars in lieu of live milkweed. In 2009, Monarch Watch sent caterpillars provisioned with this food (which looks something like old guacamole) on the Space Shuttle Atlantis to the International Space Station, where they successfully metamorphosed into butterflies.

Chase Castor for The Atlantic

A butterfly habitat box, used to transport monarch caterpillars from the center to the International Space Station in 2009

The word emeritus doesn’t capture the full role that Taylor, 88, still plays; he is a constant presence around the building. Before he secured more generous funding, he’d bankrolled many of Monarch Watch’s activities himself, using the proceeds from investments that he and his wife had made in Apple. He helped pay 100-peso rewards for finding paper butterfly tags—still the standard, low-tech method of tracking the creatures—in Mexico, which became a problem one year when people recovered more than 3,000 tagged butterflies. “That cost me $12,000,” he told me. “I wasn’t too anxious to do that over and over again.”

It was hard, there in the middle of all of the butterfly posters and joyful pictures, to ask him the question I’d really come to ask. But Taylor eventually sighed and launched into an answer on his own. “What we’re doing ecologically to save the monarch butterfly, the scale of it is just nothing compared to what’s going on,” he said. “The population is going to creep lower and lower in time because we’re incapable, I think, at this point, of really mastering enough of the restoration.”

In the United States and Canada, the math leads to a similar place as it does in Mexico. For all the bootstrapped recent successes in forestalling the butterfly’s decline, we’ve merely been playing catch-up. Now climate change is the primary threat to monarch numbers, and it is implacable. Higher temperatures make monarchs more susceptible to infection by a protozoan called Ophryocystis elektroscirrha, a parasite that drains the butterfly’s strength and makes it less likely to complete its journeys. And climate shifts are yet another threat to milkweed’s viability in particular locales, throwing off the distances and timing that are so crucial to each butterfly’s travels.

“Maybe we can do something about the climate, but the opportunities for doing that are really, really diminishing very rapidly,” Taylor said. Even accounting for this year’s surprising bounce-back in numbers, he puts the timeline at 20 years or so before the migrating monarch’s numbers become too low to recover. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service estimates upwards of a 50 percent chance that the eastern migratory monarchs will be extinct by 2080.

When I was growing up, the flowers outside my bedroom window always brought visitors. I’d often wake up in the morning to the buzzing of a hummingbird’s wings. But the visitors I greeted most joyfully were the monarchs. On late-summer days, kaleidoscopes of butterflies would land together, covering the flowers like an orange blanket. Even then, I understood that there was something special about their fleeting delicateness. And fleeting it was: The world will probably never again see as many monarchs as existed then.

But I would not bet entirely against the monarch. The fight to protect the species continues. In its persistence and its cooperative nature, that fight shares qualities with the monarch itself. The project is proof, in a fractured time, that people can join together and decide to help defend the things they see as valuable.

Even as Taylor despaired of the monarch’s future, he mused, briefly, about the possibility of restocking wild-butterfly populations using a scaled-up version of Monarch Watch’s colony program. With that, his exertions in perfecting his homegrown colony process—the green smoothie for caterpillars, testing procedures for parasites—came into clearer view for me. They could be understood, I realized, as the beginnings of an attempt to bottle a fragment of the monarch’s magic for the future world. Maybe migration will continue, in that future, with an assist from something like a butterfly doomsday vault. Or maybe the next generation of the monarch’s friends will find further innovations to defeat problems that now seem insurmountable.

The things we have learned recently about individual butterflies will be helpful for vanquishing those scientific problems, but the most important contribution of all this new information might be wonder itself. I am not a scientist, but after watching and tracking the butterflies for months, it seems to me that monarchs have something of a personality, a level of individuality that might endear them even more to the public. Some appear impulsive, or impressively rangy, leaving earlier and traveling more, whereas others fail to leave altogether. In El Rosario, when I asked Silvestre, my guide, about why groups of butterflies chose specific times to find water, he was enigmatic: “They decide.”

And whether or not we call it personality, there’s science behind the idea of the butterflies’ individuality. In humans, traits such as neuroticism and recklessness appear to have some evolutionary basis—emerging perhaps to provide our species with sentries who alerted us to threats, and with explorers who led the way to new food sources. Research suggests that the goofball butterflies that might seem to lack a sense of direction are actually pioneers, scouts finding new habitats to exploit or new places to hunker down should worse come to worst.

No matter what happens along the Mexico route, the monarch is likely to live on, albeit in smaller numbers, elsewhere. Across the planet, most populations of monarch butterflies—in Spain, in Hawaii—are likely descended from vagrants that veered off the Mexico migration path. Monarchs introduced to Australia in the 1870s have now established an annual migration along the east and southwest coasts—they have earned the fitting local epithet of “wanderers.” And in little pockets of the United States, Central America, and the Caribbean, in places where milkweed grows year-round, small monarch populations have settled in, no longer migrating and now sporting shorter wingspans than their more transient cousins.

For all their seeming fragility, monarchs will be an extraordinarily capable partner in efforts to save them. They may yet surprise us. We may yet surprise ourselves.

Cinderella is a marathoner. She flies through San Antonio and then skirts Austin, avoiding the congestion of the city proper during the South by Southwest festival, and then cuts through the Piney Woods toward Texarkana. At the time of her last detection, Cinderella is in Arkansas, having likely traveled from the Great Lakes to the Mexican highlands, and then halfway back. The diaspora she belongs to has spread out across a wide expanse of the country, ending up in Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and every place in between. They’ve spent themselves, but they have fulfilled their biological missions.

During her roughly eight-month life, Cinderella traveled farther than scientists might have imagined possible, more than 3,000 miles as the butterfly flies. Along the way, she likely glued hundreds of tiny eggs onto milkweed plants. Perhaps some of the hatchlings will live, and continue her line. Perhaps they, too, will have her preternatural strength and tenacity. I hope, for the sake of my own daughter, and her ability to live in a world of beauty, that they will.

This article appears in the September 2026 print edition with the headline “How Do Monarchs Do It?”