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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?”

Canada’s Forests Will Burn and Burn

2026-07-16T17:55:44-04:00

When the boreal forests of Canada catch on fire, no one can do anything about it in many cases. The forests are part of Earth’s largest land biome, a greenbelt of wilderness that encircles the globe, and they’ve been suffering from the planet’s thermostat being jacked up. Wood-boring pests that flourish in milder climates have swept north and east, through tens of millions of acres. Droughts and dwindling snowpack have stressed the trees. They are ready to burn.

Many people simply don’t grasp the sheer magnitude of the boreal forest or what it would take to manage fires across its enormous area, Jed Kaplan, a professor in the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment at the University of Calgary, told me: “You can’t control these fires. You cannot put personnel, fire engines, over an area that is the size of the entire American South, or something like that. It’s just way too big of an area.”

And so the fires spread, pouring out smoke that washes over the residents of faraway cities. The “Ontario Armageddon” (as one wildfire newsletter called it), along with several large fires burning in northern-Minnesota forests, has left Toronto with some of the worst air quality in the world this week and has shrouded New York City in a sickly gray haze. Canada has 869 active fires at the moment, and most are burning in wilderness areas where authorities monitor them but don’t try to put them out.

Although these boreal forests have evolved to burn and are adapted to fire, the size and intensity of the wildfires have increased as the atmosphere warms. Two of the worst wildfire seasons on record in Canada, in terms of acreage burned, occurred in the past three years, the worst of which was in 2023, when smoke crossed the border to cover East Coast cities and turned New York’s sky a deep, eerie orange. Smoky summers have become a familiar reality in Western Canada and the western United States, but eastern cities are now dealing with the same problem more often, Anabela Bonada, the managing director for climate science at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, at the University of Waterloo, told me: “It’s slowly becoming a fixture.”

The smoke rolled into her area, outside Toronto, yesterday and quickly reached the worst level on Canada’s air-quality health index. The fires also prompted the closure of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in Minnesota, this week. First Nations communities in Ontario have been forced to evacuate. And in one particularly harrowing incident, caught on video, the crew members of a freight train in rural Ontario were surrounded by flames. They managed to escape.

Canada’s wildfire season had been off to a slow start, but now more than 6 million acres have burned so far this year, on pace to become the third-highest total on record. “What is unfolding is what climate and forest scientists have been predicting for 30 years,” Werner Kurz, a retired senior research scientist at Natural Resources Canada, told me. “That as the world gets hotter and drier, we are exposing forests to more and more risk, and the old strategies of fire suppression are simply being overwhelmed.”

In the particularly bad stretch from 2023 to 2025, some 8 percent of Canada’s forests burned, Bonada said. Repeated, large fires have caused a decline in the predominant species of conifers, the black spruce, shifting what vegetation regrows. These enormous swaths of boreal forest from the Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador—more than 1 million square miles—act as massive vaults for carbon, which is locked away in billions of trees and the forest floor. But so much of those forests is going up in smoke that they have become their own notable source of greenhouse gases in recent years. A 2024 study published in Science found that carbon emissions from wildfires had increased by 60 percent in the prior two decades. Fires in boreal forests such as Canada’s were the main reason. Another study, published in Nature, found that Canadian wildfires in 2023, when more than 43 million acres burned, generated more emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but the three most-polluting countries.

When these forest fires really get going, they can generate a destructive power that is hard to fathom. A notorious 2016 fire, known as “the Beast,” destroyed much of Fort McMurray, in an oil-producing region of Alberta, and burned across nearly 1.5 million acres. Such huge fires can generate hurricane-force winds and towering pyrocumulus clouds; when the smoke gets high in the atmosphere, it can drift across oceans and continents. Many of these fires coincide, as this week’s blazes in Ontario have, with heat waves. The town of Lytton, in British Columbia, was nearly wiped off the map in 2021 the day after it endured Canada’s hottest temperature on record, 121 degrees.

“Having these temperatures in forested areas, it’s just impossible. The forests don’t remain,” John Pomeroy, a hydrologist at the University of Saskatchewan who has studied the effects of climate change, told me. He is based at a research lab in the Canadian Rockies, in Alberta. Last week, the whole area was blanketed in smoke, he said, from wildfires in British Columbia. In addition to causing harmful health impacts, wildfire smoke also darkens glaciers in the mountains. Those darker glaciers absorb more sunlight, which causes them to melt faster. The world is caught in these loops, and they’re only going to keep repeating.

The Bizarre Partnership Between the U.S. and Venezuela

2026-07-14T15:59:00-04:00

James Story, America’s last chargé d’affaires in Venezuela before the embassy closed in 2019, left after the foreign minister passed along a message. The warning was stark, Story told me: If he stayed, he might be murdered.

When American diplomats raised the flag at the embassy in March, for the first time in seven years, they stood outside a building that had been festering in the tropical heat and taken over by black mold. The hostility between the two countries had been festering too, culminating in the moment that the Trump administration sent in special operators to snatch President Nicolás Maduro and his wife. Since then, U.S. leaders and staff—many of them working out of a Marriott two miles from the embassy—have been racing to get reacquainted with one of the most repressive regimes in the hemisphere, filled with some of the same people whom the U.S. has put under indictment for drug trafficking or who have U.S.-sponsored bounties on their heads.

The humanitarian response to the deadly earthquakes in Venezuela last month has only deepened this bizarre partnership. U.S. Marines have become air traffic controllers at Venezuela’s main international airport and are helping run the port in La Guaira, the coastal state that was hit hardest. The State Department’s disaster-assistance team is distributing boxes, emblazoned with the American flag, of food, water, and other supplies.

People displaced by the June 24 earthquakes check the contents of a box of U.S. humanitarian aid at a shelter in Catia La Mar, La Guaira. (Martin Bernetti / AFP / Getty)

Venezuelans have welcomed such lifesaving efforts after the earthquakes left at least 4,490 people dead and close to 18,000 homeless, according to Venezuelan authorities. But the Trump administration’s approach, in concert with Venezuelan officials who have spent years treating opponents brutally and are widely reviled, risks that goodwill. Last week, the leaders of the U.S. mission on the ground—Chargé d’Affairs John Barrett and General Francis Donovan, the commander of U.S. Southern Command—faced Venezuelans’ outrage after they met with Diosdado Cabello, the interior minister, who oversaw security forces that targeted political opponents. (Previously, the U.S. had offered a $25 million reward for his capture.)

Through multiple U.S. administrations, including Donald Trump’s first term, American diplomats followed relatively consistent tenets in Venezuela: finding common cause with opposition leaders, seeking to free American prisoners, pushing for democratic elections. Then Story, who served in both Trump terms and in the Biden administration, was told the extreme opposition was plotting to kill him and precipitate a war with the U.S.—at a time when relations were so hostile with Maduro’s regime that no one wanted to risk people coming over the embassy walls. Nonetheless, he left a note on his desk saying that he was “filled with optimism that Democracy is within reach.” Now Story worries that whatever tactical success came from Maduro’s capture would be squandered without a democratic transition. “And if that is delayed now because of the earthquake, at some point the frustration will bubble over to the United States,” he said. More of the quiet work the U.S. has been doing in Venezuela since Maduro’s capture is now out in the open, and the choice to decapitate the government without changing much else is being put to a test.

Barrett has maintained that, in the aftermath of the earthquakes, the U.S. government has been fully focused on the humanitarian effort and that Venezuela’s interim government “has been fully compliant of our requests.” At a briefing with reporters last week, he did not answer a question about whether Cabello remained a wanted enemy of the United States; he stressed that the Trump administration’s three-phase plan for Venezuela remains intact.

But those phases—first stability, then economic recovery and political reconciliation, and finally a democratic transition—also seem badly damaged by the earthquakes. No date has been set for democratic elections. The 180-day period defined by Venezuela’s constitution for a temporary presidential absence passed earlier this month with the interim president, Delcy Rodríguez, still in charge. Some U.S. officials are optimistic that her government is acceding to U.S. pressure. Earlier today, her brother, Jorge Rodríguez, the president of the National Assembly, announced new negotiations starting next month with former opposition lawmakers as a way to “strengthen democracy,” after the earthquake. Also today, Delcy Rodríguez posted about “this new stage of dialogue, cooperation, and mutual respect” with the United States.

A State Department spokesperson told me that the U.S. focus remains on its humanitarian response and that “adding sensitive political issues to the mix at this time is counterproductive to our response efforts following this tragedy.” But Secretary of State Marco Rubio acknowledged last month that the earthquakes complicated the path back to democracy: “It’s a setback in that regard,” he told reporters, before reiterating his belief that “Venezuela’s going to emerge stronger from it.”

Venezuelans seem less certain. They have complained about their government’s shortcomings in the nearly three weeks since the earthquakes: its absence in the crucial hours when rescues were still possible, bureaucratic hurdles that choked the flow of aid, soldiers and police looting amid the rubble. Rodríguez has defended her government’s response, saying that widespread reports of chaos were manufactured by “media laboratories” and blaming opponents for politicizing a humanitarian tragedy. The most popular opposition figure, María Corina Machado, tried returning to Venezuela soon after the earthquakes, but the Trump administration ordered her airplane be turned around mid-flight, The Wall Street Journal reported. Her supporters worry that the U.S. relationship with the Rodríguez government could drag on indefinitely, even as its response to the earthquakes has led to more questions about its legitimacy.

[Read: Venezuelans were sorting through the rubble alone]

“There’s a real chance that we’re going to squander this opportunity,” Rebecca Bill Chavez, a former Pentagon official who is now the president of the Inter-American Dialogue, told me. “Betting that stability and Venezuelan oil basically can come first and democracy can wait indefinitely—it’s a dangerous bet.”

During Maduro’s tenure, which started after Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013 and featured a staggering economic collapse, the Venezuelan population repeatedly rose up to demand better lives and fair elections. When I visited Venezuela in this period, the scale of the daily protests against Maduro’s government felt overwhelming—as did the brutal tactics security forces used in killing and torturing their opponents, documented extensively in human-rights reports. Every day felt like a rolling street fight as shock troops chased protesters through downtown Caracas, firing tear gas and rubber bullets and bludgeoning back the waves of opposition.

Even in his first term, Trump seemed willing to take an aggressive posture toward Venezuela: Lee McClenny, who served as charge d’affaires in the first year of the Trump administration, recalled the president requesting “military options” for Venezuela. Trump’s team seemed willing, he said, “to force a decisive confrontation they felt sure they’d win.” Todd Robinson, who was in the country as the top American diplomat in early 2018, told me that he met with the wife of the imprisoned opposition leader, Leopoldo López, in her home, against the regime’s wishes. He went “toe to toe” with Rodríguez, then the president of the Constituent National Assembly, on the porch of his residence in Caracas, telling her that it was not U.S. sanctions but her own government’s failures that left so many hungry. (After an election that the U.S. described as an “insult to democracy” because it excluded opposition candidates, Maduro accused Robinson of conspiring against his government and gave him 48 hours to leave the country.) “We were visibly, vocally anti-regime when I was there,” he told me. “So the idea that we’re now going to treat the rump regime as the current government in Venezuela—to me it just doesn’t make any sense.”

Trump’s suggestion that the U.S. could run Venezuela for years worries many of these former American diplomats, who saw up close the corruption and human-rights abuses of a Venezuelan government that included Rodríguez, Cabello, and others who remain. Just two years ago, the State Department’s human-rights report on Venezuela cited credible accounts of “arbitrary or unlawful killings; disappearances; torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment; arbitrary arrest or detention,” and on, and on. Rodríguez’s government has released hundreds of political prisoners and pushed out some of Maduro’s allies in government. But many still see a difficult road ahead. “We’ve bought ourselves a big problem that will last a long time, cost a lot of money, lose us a lot of prestige, and still will not be resolved to our satisfaction,” McClenny said.

The Trump administration’s race to show up after the earthquakes—especially after cutting back foreign aid in many parts of the world—suggests that the U.S. accepts, to some degree, that Venezuela’s problems are now its own. The U.S. has spent some $310 million on the earthquake response, delivered more than 1 million pounds of relief supplies, and donated 10 containers with freezer capacity to help store the dead, according to U.S. officials leading the effort. “We are with Venezuela today,” Barrett told reporters during a briefing last week, “and we will be with you tomorrow.” The scale of this response, however, still lags far behind the billions the U.S. spent after other major disasters in the region, such as the Haiti earthquake in 2010. The head of the United Nations relief effort, Tom Fletcher, has said another $300 million is needed to help more than a million people who need “life-saving support.”

Displaced people take shelter in tents at the Cesar Nieves baseball stadium in the La Angustia neighborhood of Catia La Mar, La Guaira. (Raul Arboleda / AFP / Getty)

By this point, many search-and-rescue teams have returned home. Thousands of people displaced from collapsed homes are living outdoors and in tent camps in La Guaira; the Associated Press reported a surge in skin conditions and diarrheal diseases amid shortages of fresh water. “You don’t have fresh water, you don’t have sanitation,” Paolo Cravero, a spokesman for the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies, told me from Venezuela. “If those things are not urgently addressed, those will create public-health problems.”

For some aid workers who rushed to help Venezuelans, the U.S. military presence has been jarring. As he drove from Caracas to La Guaira last week, the chef José Andrés, who founded World Central Kitchen, told me that, although everyone was grateful for the U.S. military’s assistance, the presence of helicopters and armed troops made him feel like “they were coming to invade more than they were coming to help.” Donovan, the Southcom commander, has not given a timeline for when the roughly 900 U.S. troops might leave, but he told reporters earlier this month, “When we’re done, we will depart Venezuela.”

The embassy, though, will stay open; eventually repairs will finish and the staff will move back in. Several former diplomats and other officials told me that they wanted the U.S. to stop sidelining the opposition, to press to release the hundreds of remaining political prisoners, and to hasten elections. Some Venezuelan opposition figures still have patience: Jose Ferreira, a leader of the opposition party Primero Justicia, told The Atlantic some exiled political figures have been able to return and, despite the post-earthquake cooperation, he expects that Cabello and others facing sanctions will eventually face justice. “Venezuelans trust that the United States will help Venezuela reach its goals,” he said.

Just steps from the U.S. embassy, in the hilly Valle Arriba neighborhood, 10 to 20 Venezuelans—relatives of political prisoners—have been keeping vigil for almost a month. A Venezuelan flag hangs from a nearby tree with one word written on it: libertad. José Mendoza joined the vigil after Rodríguez’s government scrapped an amnesty law meant to free political prisoners; his son is a former soldier accused of taking part in a failed 2020 attempt to overthrow Maduro. No one from the embassy has come out to talk with them. While the diplomats are dealing with the earthquake damage, he doesn’t expect they will anytime soon.

Mariana Zuñiga contributed reporting from Caracas.

The Thinking About Kids and Heat Has Flipped

2026-07-11T08:00:00-04:00

You know it’s hot when summer camps have to cancel bonfires and doctors warn that playgrounds could be dangerous. Last week, when a heat dome was descending on New York City, I grew a bit concerned myself. My children’s outdoor day camp promised to “pivot to ‘water games,’” as the email put it, and said that there would be fans and misters. “Of course,” the camp added, “if you feel the heat for the rest of this week will not set your camper up for success, feel free to keep them at home.”

And why not? The public-health advice is pretty clear on just this point: Kids are not, in fact, well equipped for scorching weather. “Children are especially at risk of heat-related illnesses,” says heat.gov, a website run by a collaboration of the CDC, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and many other federal agencies. Essentially the same message is repeated almost everywhere a mom or dad might go for guidance: in academic articles and UNICEF announcements, in messaging from the EPA and state public-health departments, in published interviews with specialists in pediatric medicine.

The weird thing is, actual heat-related-illness data seem to tell a different story—that kids are unusually resilient when it comes to heat. Take heat-related deaths: According to a large-scale study from the CDC, the lowest rate applied to those ages 5 to 14. The same pattern largely holds for heat-related hospitalizations and visits to the emergency room, at least in the United States: Children tend to have the lowest risk.

For a parent who wants to know whether his feisty 7-year-old will be safe at camp when it’s 99 degrees, this disparity between the standard public-health advice and the epidemiological evidence is baffling. I just want to know: Is my camper set up for success, or isn’t he?

This turns out to be a parable about the long and winding road that runs from mere hypotheses through lab results and real-world data, and then on to solid truth. The scientific thinking that produced the standard, blanket warnings about overheated kids is almost 50 years old. Its reasoning is sound. But decades’ worth of research has since produced a bunch of unexpected findings, and some aspects of the old idea have had to be adjusted—if not completely overturned.

In 1980, the founding father of pediatric exercise medicine, the Canadian Israeli physician Oded Bar-Or, laid out the case that kids might be uniquely vulnerable to overheating. His paper “Climate and the Exercising Child” noted that, for one thing, children’s bodies have more surface area relative to body mass than adults’. At mild or warm temperatures, this helps them cool off more quickly, as heat dissipates from their skin into surrounding air. But when the weather gets extremely hot—hotter than the surface of our skin, which might be 94 or 95 degrees—this process would be expected to reverse: At that point, children’s greater surface area ought to make them take on heat more quickly than adults. Bar-Or also pointed out that children have a smaller sweat response than adults at the same temperatures, and he suggested that kids may acclimatize to heat more slowly. Shortly thereafter, in the summer of 1982, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) put out its first official warning on the matter. This message has persisted, more or less, until today.

In the meantime, though, the underlying science has shifted. One of Bar-Or’s former graduate students, Bareket Falk, told me that in the ’90s, the lab gathered data suggesting that even when children were subjected to triple-digit temperatures, they seemed to fare no worse than adolescents or adults at maintaining their body temperature. Other research pointed in the same direction, and by 2008, Falk and other exercise physiologists were arguing against the status-quo assumption that kids had some major natural deficits in thermoregulation.

More recent work has only reinforced the changing view. “There’s been quite a reversal of the thinking,” Caroline J. Smith, the director of the Environmental & Occupational Physiology Laboratory at Appalachian State University, told me. Sure, children produce less sweat than adults do—but their sweating may be more efficient. “They actually have less electrolytes in their sweat, so it evaporates a little more easily,” she said. (The evaporation of sweat is what cools the body.) Falk, who is now a professor of kinesiology at Brock University, said that kids’ sweat forms in smaller droplets, which may also help the sweat evaporate, and that kids don’t tend to waste their sweat as grown-ups do, by pouring out so much that it soaks their T-shirts and drips off onto the ground. The AAP changed its policy in 2011, noting that the facts had changed: Kids are not, in fact, especially vulnerable to heat, it said.

But as before, the thinking on this question ran a little faster than the evidence. Even now, researchers have barely any data showing heat’s effects on young children, who are more challenging to study in the lab. “There’s a lack of knowledge, despite what you may have read,” Glen Kenny, the director of the Human and Environmental Physiology Research Unit at the University of Ottawa, told me. “There are studies that have been essentially designed incorrectly.” In his view, more and better research must be done, and until that happens, the old assumptions are still basically correct: “Do we know that children are more vulnerable? Yeah, because it comes down to both a combination of size and the development of the heat-loss mechanisms, your ability to sweat and your ability to increase blood flow.” He also said that short-term lab experiments tell you nothing of the pernicious, longer-term effects of overheating: Being hot for many hours, or many days, may affect a child’s body, degrade his mood, or hamper school performance.

So why don’t we see more cases of pediatric heat-related illness, if children are at elevated risk? Kenny said that it’s because children are looked after by adults. An elderly person, living alone, might succumb to heat exhaustion with no one around to help; a kid who ends up overheated at a summer camp will be tended to by counselors. In other words, kids may be physiologically more vulnerable and behaviorally at risk, just as the standard public-health advice suggests—but they’re socially protected. The stats might also miss lesser forms of heat-related illness, Perry Sheffield, a pediatrician and an environmental-health researcher at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told me. “You know, if a child gets a little bit dehydrated and then throws up all night, then you’re not sending them to camp the next day,” she said.

At least for kids below the age of 10, defaulting to the old precautions may be reasonable, Smith said. In any case, the same principles of mitigating risk—staying hydrated, avoiding exercise during the hottest parts of the day, seeking shade, acclimating to the weather, wearing loose-fitting clothes—apply to young and old alike.

Still, if everyone should take precautions against the heat, what is really gained by saying that kids are at extra-special risk? Those who prefer this cautious guidance might say that no harm is done. But people do react dramatically to the idea that kids might be in danger. In the United Kingdom, more than 1,000 schools closed during last month’s record-setting European heat wave, and those choices naturally brought up memories of pandemic policies, and old debates over how such restrictions should be understood. Are the school officials following the science, or are they succumbing to alarmist tendencies in public health? Speaking as a parent, I wish there were a simple answer to that question.

Lab-Leak Payback Has Begun

2026-07-07T13:09:31-04:00

Updated at 5:43 p.m. on July 10, 2026

The origins of the coronavirus pandemic remain contested; the evidence is incomplete. But pundits, activists, and members of the Trump administration have long insisted that the case is closed, and that the virus slipped out from a lab in China. They’ve maintained the view that U.S. scientists were involved and later tried to hide the facts. They’ve said that justice must be served.

Now the reckoning they want appears to have arrived. An expert on the flu got hauled off by the FBI. A coronavirus researcher was indicted in Detroit. Two prominent virologists stepped down or were removed from senior roles. And a fifth infectious-disease researcher—Anthony Fauci, the central figure in an alleged “lab-leak” cover-up—was recently subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. Senate.

The precise timing of these cases, which have all come to light since April, may be a coincidence. Yet all five are centered on a small community of scientists affiliated with the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which Fauci ran for nearly 40 years. “There has been a snowballing of developments recently,” Richard Ebright, a molecular biologist at Rutgers University who focuses on biosafety issues and has repeatedly denounced Fauci and his “criminal associates,” told me. “I can’t provide an explanation for why it’s taken so long for that process to begin.”

The first case was Ralph Baric, a 72-year-old virologist and bat-coronavirus expert at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Baric worked closely with researchers at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, which many adherents to the lab-leak theory posit as the source of the pandemic; one contingent thinks that Baric might have been the creator of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. On April 15, the NIH, which has in the past provided Baric’s lab with hundreds of millions of dollars in research funds, referred him for debarment from all federal contracts for at least three years. The claims against him focus on some inconsistencies in paperwork and a series of decade-old experiments that the agency says were carried out in violation of a pause of a “gain-of-fuction” research. Baric told Science magazine’s Jon Cohen that he’s fighting the debarment, and that he’d been targeted on account of the furor over COVID origins; he appears to have retired from UNC on June 1. (Neither Baric nor the Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees NIH, responded to requests for comment.)

The day after the government kicked off Baric’s debarment proceedings, David Morens, a 78-year-old influenza specialist and one of Fauci’s close advisers at NIAID, was indicted for conspiring to hide or falsify discussions of coronavirus research grants. “We have to keep all communications like this on private email so that it can’t be retrieved via a FOIA,” he wrote in one message from 2021. On April 27, per Cohen’s reporting, armed federal agents in bulletproof vests arrived at Morens’s home in Chester, Maryland, and handcuffed him in his underwear. Morens pleaded not guilty to the charges. (The FBI told Science that this description of the arrest was “inaccurate”; Morens’s attorney declined to comment for this story.)

Just a few weeks later, news came out that the acting head of NIAID—the virologist Jeffrey Taubenberger, a very close colleague of Morens’s—had either stepped down or been fired from his role. He and Morens had worked together on more than 60 academic papers, including 13 that also list Fauci as an author—and both had been on the radar of the lab-leak hard-liners. (Taubenberger did not respond to a request for comment.)

News also broke in May that the FBI was investigating another NIAID virologist, Vincent Munster, who had been called out for collaborating with Baric and the scientists in Wuhan. Since then, prosecutors have filed an indictment charging Munster and another researcher from his lab with a conspiracy to smuggle mpox into the U.S. and with making false statements to federal agents. The government claims that on January 25, Munster and that colleague arrived at an airport in Detroit from the Republic of the Congo with a black plastic case containing samples of the mpox virus, seemingly deactivated and noninfectious, and that they both lacked proper documentation for these materials and misled the customs agents who questioned them. The two virologists have pleaded not guilty. (Munster’s attorney did not respond to a request for comment.)

[Read: Trump thinks he knows what started the pandemic]

The strongest argument for connecting all of these cases is that lab-leak activists themselves have done the same. Anthony Bellotti, the founder and president of the White Coat Waste Project, an animal-activist group that has leveraged the lab-leak theory in pursuit of its goal of ending all taxpayer-funded animal testing, declared that “Morens’ indictment should be the beginning—not the end—of long-overdue lab leak accountability at NIH.” Just two weeks before Munster was indicted on charges that seem to have no connection with the pandemic, Bellotti’s group joined the right-wing activist Laura Loomer in hawking what they called a “whistleblower report” about the virologist’s alleged misdeeds. That document describes Munster as a “Fauci acolyte and all around egotistical, arrogant foreigner that joined his research project (to aerosolize covid virus) to Ralph Baric’s project (to weaponize it).” (I could find no evidence that Munster, who is a Dutch citizen, ever worked on a project to “aerosolize” SARS-CoV-2 in order to engineer a new virus, as the whistleblower document seems to suggest. He did work on several papers that tested its stability in aerosols.)

In the meantime, Senator Rand Paul has linked Munster’s name to an early draft of a Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency grant application, with Baric listed as a principal investigator, that proposed to gauge the spillover risk associated with bat coronaviruses. The project’s ultimate goal was to limit that threat but involved altering the viruses in ways that might have made them more infectious—and more like SARS-CoV-2. (The final version of that proposal does not mention Munster, and the extent to which he knew its details are unclear.)

If you believe, as Paul and others do, that this unfunded DARPA project may have been a blueprint for generating the pandemic virus—and that, one way or another, virologists’ disregard for biosafety helped cause the deaths of millions—then seeking justice would be natural. If you’re also sure that COVID got its start in studies funded by the U.S. government, and specifically through NIAID, then there is no greater villain in this story than Fauci. Just last week, Paul announced that he’d subpoenaed the lab-leak theory’s final boss to testify in Congress at the end of this month. “He has not really gotten his just deserts,” Paul said in a weekend interview on Fox. He later added: “There needs to be repercussions.” A hearing is one of the clearest avenues to pursue such measures: The blanket pardon that Fauci received from President Biden wouldn’t cover any charges of lying to Congress that arose from new sworn testimony. (Neither Fauci nor Paul responded to requests for comment.)

Those repercussions may yet extend to other scientists. Ebright, the Rutgers professor, gave me a long list of names of researchers who he says should be held accountable. Justin Goodman, the senior vice president for advocacy at White Coat Waste, told me that every holdover from the “Fauci era” at NIH ought to be fired for their involvement in gain-of-function research, which the group sees as responsible for creating COVID. “I would throw Morens, Munster, and Taubenberger all in the same box of reckless and arrogant animal experimenters who fucked around and are finding out,” he said.

Even if this thirst for COVID retribution could be satisfied, its supposed higher purpose—to help prevent the next pandemic, by promoting more responsible research—hasn’t yet been served. Despite the years of Sturm und Drang about pandemic origins, and the wholesale adoption of the lab-leak theory by the party that controls both Congress and the White House, a shaky status quo still persists in biosafety. The rules for how to work on dangerous pathogens and which sorts of experiments should be allowed aren’t clear; oversight is spotty.

A better, more comprehensive system remains a worthy goal. Shortly after President Trump took office, his administration took a few half steps in that direction. Last May, the president issued an executive order meant to limit and track all research that involves the potential enhancement of dangerous pathogens. “This is an historic day—the end of gain-of-function-research funding by the federal government,” HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. told reporters at the signing ceremony; NIH director Jay Bhattacharya said gain-of-function work would “go away forever.” Yet Ebright and others told me that this project has stalled out. The Office of Science and Technology Policy had been placed in charge of revising the rules on this research by the end of last summer and implementing a national strategy for tracking all gain-of-function research before the end of last year. Those deadlines came and went. No such policies were put in place. (In response to a request for comment on this delay, the White House said that the administration “continues to implement our updated framework to govern, limit, and track dangerous gain-of-function research across the United States.”)

[Read: The lab leak will haunt us forever]

In the absence of that administrative work and with little progress being made on the various biosafety laws that have been proposed in Congress, the nation has been left with just the vengeful spectacle of lab-leak prosecutions. In effect, research policy is being handled by the Department of Justice. America’s doctor may soon be dragged out to testify once more: The science that he championed appears to be unfettered; the scientists he funded are at risk of ending up in chains.

This piece was updated to clarify that Munster worked on several projects that involved the generation of SARS-CoV-2 aerosols.

Prepare for Airplane Purgatory

2026-07-05T08:00:00-04:00

One evening in May, passengers boarded United Flight 661 from Newark, New Jersey, to Chicago. As the plane readied for takeoff, a thunderstorm swept in, grounding the plane. The storm, which produced winds upwards of 50 miles an hour, was fast moving and cleared a few hours later. And yet, seven hours after Flight 661 first left the gate, it was still on the tarmac, passengers crammed inside. Around midnight, the flight was canceled.

More and more travelers across the United States are coming home from trips with similar stories. That same night in May, passengers flying to Denver, Rochester, and Milwaukee were also stranded on planes in Newark for roughly as long as Flight 661. In the first five months of this year, 342 domestic flights were held on the tarmac for more than three hours, according to federal data. (International tarmac delays are far less common.) At that rate, 2026 could become the year with the highest number of extended tarmac delays since the Department of Transportation began policing them in 2010. Currently, that dubious honor lies with 2025, which saw more than 700 three-hour-plus domestic delays. The most torturous category of flight delay is getting more common.

Tarmac delays happen in part because modern airlines depend on keeping planes moving. Although air-traffic control decides each plane’s ultimate time of departure, airlines decide when a given flight boards, and holding passengers on the tarmac, rather than at a gate, frees up valuable real estate for the next arriving flight. It also ensures that a plane is ready to depart the moment a weather window opens. But some tarmac delays seem to be a matter of happenstance. I was recently on a flight that sat on the tarmac at LaGuardia for more than two hours after the airport closed a runway because of what the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey called a “two-inch depression” next to it. Plus, so many flights need to depart and land each day that a small stop in operations—because of, say, a passing storm—can create a pileup on the runway that takes hours to rectify. Even before Flight 661 was due to take off, air-traffic control had announced plans to delay flights out of Newark in anticipation of weather problems, then temporarily halted flights that evening because of thunderstorms in the vicinity. A spokesperson for United told me that Flight 661 requested to return to the gate as soon as crews figured out it wouldn’t take off in the foreseeable future, but the process “took longer than expected because of ongoing ground congestion.” Certain airports are also being forced to increase the time between takeoffs—and sometimes stop them altogether—owing to shortages of air-traffic controllers.

None of this, though, explains why tarmac delays seem to have gotten so bad, so fast. When asked to comment on the recent delay statistics, Airlines for America, which lobbies for the largest airlines in the U.S., blamed “more frequent and unpredictable severe weather patterns across the country, which can significantly affect airport and air traffic operations.” And climate change really has made weather more volatile. But 2025 had nearly three times the average number of tarmac delays as the decade prior, and the weather is not three times worse.

[Read: Did climate change ground flights in Phoenix?]

The aughts, too, were a grim time for air travelers. Extended tarmac delays were through the roof—nearly 900 in 2009 alone—and a number of high-profile incidents made the news, including a JetBlue flight on Valentine’s Day 2007 that stayed on the tarmac for 10 hours. Lawmakers took note, and in April 2010, the Department of Transportation implemented a rule allowing airlines to be fined $27,500 for each passenger who was left sitting on a grounded domestic flight for more than three hours.

That rule isn’t perfect. It does little for passengers who are stuck for less than three hours, beyond guaranteeing them water and a working bathroom. Those shorter tarmac delays can still be miserable (so miserable that a minor tarmac delay recently inspired one passenger to attempt to escape a Delta plane out of the front cabin door). Plus, the fines levied by DOT have rarely lived up to the government’s early threats. Since 2010, most extended tarmac delays that have occurred resulted in no fines. “Even in the cases where there have been enforcement actions in years past, the flight crew could probably pick up the change that was left behind in the plane to pay the fine,” Teresa Murray, a consumer-protection advocate at the advocacy group PIRG, told me. In 2018, DOT fined Allegiant Air just $225,000 for keeping passengers stranded on 10 different planes at some of the nation’s hottest airports in the middle of summer, without adequate climate control, and in one case without food or water. (Allegiant said in its official response to the fines that triple-digit temperatures made cooling the cabin difficult and that it was considering “passengers’ consistently strong desire to get to their destination as quickly as possible” when deciding whether to keep people on planes.)

But the possibility of enforcement nonetheless seemed to improve airlines’ behavior. The number of extended tarmac delays dropped from 868 in 2009 to just 14 in 2011. Even when Hurricane Irene battered the East Coast in 2011, forcing nearly 12,000 cancellations, not a single plane was stranded on the tarmac for more than three hours.

[Read: The golden age of flying wasn’t all that great]

One possible explanation for why tarmac delays are now racking up is that airlines are no longer even a little afraid of running afoul of the law, Bill McGee, a senior fellow for aviation and travel at the American Economic Liberties Project, told me. Since Donald Trump’s second presidential term began, Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy so far has issued zero fines for extended tarmac delays. That’s not entirely out of step with past administrations; the Biden administration, for example, issued fewer than a dozen fines for the more than 1,200 domestic extended delays that happened on their watch. But one of those was the largest fine of its kind in history: $4.1 million for American Airlines for 43 delays. (“While these events are relatively rare—we had just seven domestic events per 100,000 flights in 2025—we continue to review our operation and invest in tools, coordination and operations planning aimed at reducing their occurrence and minimizing the impact on our customers,” an American Airlines spokesperson told me in an email.)

The larger issue is that Duffy, a former lobbyist who has worked on behalf of airlines, has walked back other Biden-era efforts to punish airlines for inconveniencing consumers. In November, Duffy scrapped a plan to reimburse consumers for flight delays. In December, DOT did not collect the final installment of a $140 million fine that the Biden administration had levied against Southwest Airlines for a systems meltdown that caused mass cancellations during the 2022 holiday season. A spokesperson for DOT told me that Duffy has taken action to limit flight delays, including mandating fewer departures from major airports and pushing for air-traffic-control software upgrades, and that the decision to cancel the last Southwest payment was made on the condition that the airline “invest the remaining amount due under the fine towards system improvements that directly benefit passengers.” On tarmac delays, the spokesperson told me the department is “currently tracking 84 incidents for potential violations” and that “they’re undergoing exhaustive, objective legal review right now.”

Stricter enforcement of tarmac-delay rules could come with trade-offs. Airlines might decide to cancel more flights preemptively rather than waiting out storms. In fact, several reports found that flight cancellations increased in the years immediately following the 2010 rule. A more cancellation-minded business model for the airlines could mean headaches for consumers too. DOT data show that flights are, on average, about 83 percent full. On certain routes, one cancellation could mean that passengers are forced to wait days to get rebooked on an open flight. That’s not to mention the holidays, when flights regularly sell out.

[Read: The worst airport in America]

The question then becomes: Are passengers better served by trying to get flights out at all costs, or by a system that is more willing to throw in the towel early? When I was sitting on the tarmac at LaGuardia, I was desperate to get home to Chicago. My flight had already been delayed for nearly three hours before I even boarded. My fellow passengers and I had waited this long, so turning the plane around would have seemed like a defeat. But as I reached hour two of being planted in my middle seat and the two children in front of me wailed, trying again tomorrow didn’t sound so bad.

Hell Arrives in Washington

2026-07-03T18:35:22-04:00

On the eve of the United States’ 250th birthday, in the nation’s capital, people were sweating through their shirts, and tourists were pressing electric fans directly to their foreheads. The record-breaking heat wave that roasted the Midwest earlier this week has turned Washington, D.C., into hell. Temperatures peaked at 102 degrees Fahrenheit, with a heat index of 117. The sky was cloudless, and the humidity was encouraging me to lie down and cry. It was difficult to believe that D.C. has been four degrees hotter than this twice before, in August 1918 and July 1930. Tomorrow may be even more surreal, with another day of oppressive heat and throngs of tourists in town to see what the president has billed as the biggest fireworks display in human history.

On Tuesday, August 6, 1918, “so hot was it that the asphalt paving of the downtown streets became so soft that in places the heel marks of pedestrians were left in it,” The Washington Herald reported at the time. Josephine Lehman, a young woman who’d come to D.C. to work as a secretary in the Department of War when World War I began, wrote home to her mother that “the cement pavements burned one’s feet through the soles of the shoes.” In an apparent first, the head of the city police decided to let his officers patrol without their jackets. Indoors, conditions were unbearable. Fifty government staffers in the State, War, and Navy Building—now called the Dwight D. Eisenhower Executive Office Building—were taken to the emergency room on account of the heat, the Evening Star reported at the time. City officials ordered ice-cream parlors to stop making ice cream in order to conserve the district’s ice supplies. They also waived occupancy limits at community pools, worried that people would pass out in line to swim. Each pool ended up holding 600 to 700 people.

The pools were packed to capacity as well on July 20, 1930—the second time D.C. hit 106 degrees. Thousands fled the city for the beach, which was “too hot for all but the most daring” anyway, the Herald reported. The paper also ran a photo of about a dozen kids splashing in the Reflecting Pool that day; a cop, standing in the background of the photo, seems happy to let them play. The Washington Daily News reported that “a Sunday throng” still showed up to the National Zoo, where staff hosed down the elephants and the hippo stayed in its bath. Meanwhile, thousands of people slept on benches, fire escapes, and parks across the city, especially in Potomac Park, just south of the National Mall. Those who chose to rest on the banks of the Potomac River could be seen by steamship passengers playing bridge and dancing in the river breeze. Just beyond the city, forest fires raged across Maryland. According to the Washington Times, “sufficient help could not be mustered as volunteers were loath to brave the intense heat.”

Now D.C. residents and visitors have the option of staying cool indoors with air-conditioning. That’s good news, because many of the sites where residents cooled themselves in years past were closed to the public today. Yellow tape separated me from Potomac Park; when I made eye contact with a member of the park police, he wagged his finger at me. Because of fireworks and other planned festivities for the 250th, the National Mall is currently a maze of chain-link fences, megastages, Porta Potties, and temporary Greco-Roman structures. The incredibly shadeless Great American State Fair, where dozens of people were treated for heat-related problems today, was canceled until 5 p.m. At one point, I asked a member of the National Guard if it was possible to walk to the Lincoln Memorial, and he apologized for the heat. When I noted that he was the one covered in military fatigues (no officials seem to have loosened uniform standards in this heat wave), he admitted to “suffering” but said that he was surviving.

No one could cool off in the Reflecting Pool—a place where swimming is never encouraged and which is now additionally fenced off, thanks to the algae that bloomed after President Trump’s failed attempt to beautify it. Black bags of fireworks lined its perimeter, stationed for the spectacle to come. As close to the water as people could get were about five protesters in inflatable frog costumes, one of whom carried a sign that read TEAM ALGAE. As I spoke with one of the frog protesters, who gave her name only as Val and had stuffed ice packs into her sports bra to keep cool, about 20 fighter jets flew overhead, leaving a trail of red and blue smoke.

[Read: Science has a name for what’s plaguing the Reflecting Pool]

The fighter jets reappeared when I was checking on the wildlife at the National Zoo. No one was hosing off the elephants, but an employee told me that they have three wave pools to choose from and that staff will periodically run showers for them. The pachyderms seemed to be fine, if sluggish, until the sonic booms began. One of the elephants, 51-year old Swarna, began running around her enclosure in a circle, like a bucking bronco. As I waited for my Uber out, I sat next to a mother and daughter who had flown to D.C. for the Fourth of July and were advising Dad, who was still at the hotel, to skip the zoo: The heat was “worse than Disney.”

I ended my adventure at one of D.C.’s packed community pools. A mom of two, Lanay Brown, told me that she’d brought her kids and nieces to the pool most weeks since school had let out. Today was the first they’d had to wait in line to enter. Summery pop and rap blasted from a speaker. Max, who is turning 1 in four days, sat next to the kiddie pool in his own inflatable pool, biting it. His dad, Andre, who had moved to D.C. from Florida, told me that this is the hottest he’s felt since leaving the state five years ago.

I’m also a Floridian, but Florida, quite frankly, has never tried me like this. I waded into the pool in my dress and felt a relief I can only imagine was similar to what D.C. residents felt many summers ago. I went home thinking that this was maybe the most American day of my life, with the poolside rap and the warplanes and the many, many patriotic T-shirts. It was definitely the hottest.

Venezuelans Were Sorting Through the Rubble Alone

2026-06-30T16:31:07-04:00

The Conjunto Residencial Belo Horizonte, twin apartment towers in the Venezuelan state of La Guaira, stood 16 stories high and offered sweeping views of the Caribbean Sea. Erick Rosas, a few weeks shy of his college graduation, was living with his family on the third floor, but when the shaking started on Wednesday, he was visiting his uncle, about 15 miles up the coast. It was a national holiday, commemorating a 19th-century battle that led to Venezuela’s independence, and Rosas was in the swimming pool.

In those first terrifying moments of back-to-back earthquakes, more powerful than any the country had experienced in more than a century, Rosas could think of little but escape, he told me. He pulled himself from the water and leapt from the pool deck over a concrete wall that dropped about 10 feet to the street. Apartment buildings behind him, and to his left and right, were falling to the ground. Shirtless, in flip-flops, he set out to find his family. To reach the Belo Horizonte, he walked and caught rides on the backs of motorcycles through dust and smoke, amid the clamor and confusion of the trapped and wounded, past rubble and burning wreckage of once-familiar streets. It took him five hours to get home, only to discover that much of the tower had pancaked and collapsed.

Matias Delacroix / AP

The Belo Horizonte residential complex was damaged by the earthquakes in La Guaira, Venezuela.

Near the end of the first week of one of Latin America’s worst natural disasters in years, at least 1,700 people have been confirmed dead, some 5,000 are injured, and more are missing. The death toll is sure to climb. The hardest-hit state of La Guaira is teeming with search-and-rescue workers and humanitarian help from dozens of countries, including the United States. The United Nations is coordinating more than 2,000 rescue workers out of a command center in a stadium. American military forces have helped reopen the nearby international airport that serves Caracas. And a Navy warship, the USS Fort Lauderdale, is docked on the coast.

But much of this help came well after the most crucial period, when residents of the Belo Horizonte and the hundreds of other destroyed buildings were urgently attempting to rescue survivors in critical condition. In those first days, the people closest to the disaster felt acutely the absence of any assistance from their own government. “It was just us, the relatives, the neighbors,” Zuleica Perez, a 66-year-old Caracas resident who searched for her family in the rubble of the Belo Horizonte, told me.

Along the Venezuelan coast, and especially in La Guaira, the evening of the earthquakes was primed to be a festive one. The area was hosting the feast of San Juan, an important Afro-Venezuelan celebration, during which the image of Saint John is placed on a public altar. People sing and dance; drumming fills the streets. Perez’s nephew, Christopher Pineda, was at work at a nearby beach club. Pineda’s wife, Maria Eugenia Garcia de Pineda, a high-school math and physics teacher, was home with their two children in their penthouse apartment on the 14th floor of the Belo Horizonte’s Tower A. The World Cup match between Brazil and Scotland was starting, and they were watching the game.

When the shaking subsided, Perez could not reach her nephew, or his wife, by phone. She drove from Caracas to the coast to find out what happened. Hundreds of buildings collapsed that evening; videos from the beach show one nearby building fall as people scream and wail. But Tower A didn’t fall flat; it crumbled into parts and fell to the side. A few lower floors held. By the time Perez arrived, it was dark, and the power was out. The rubble towered over her in a heap of broken concrete and twisted metal. She could find no sign of Maria or her children.

Rosas arrived at the downed towers late that night as well, after his escape from the swimming pool. His mother, he told me, had chosen that apartment tower in large part because she considered it safe. Her prior home had been washed away in the floods in La Guaira in 1999, in which thousands had died. Now more than 10 stories of the building had tumbled down. Their third-floor apartment had been destroyed. But it didn’t fall. Rosas’s family had survived.

He joined the throngs of people in the street trying to help pull out any survivors. “The truth is the neighbors were the ones who were going through the rubble; they were doing this work of rescuing,” he said. “It was an acquaintance, a neighbor, a friend, a relative.”

Similar scenes were playing out up and down the coast. Those first days, residents from Caracas and elsewhere rushed to help as they could, driving in on motorbikes and carrying water, diapers, generators, and tools to help people digging out the wreckage. Many complained that the government lacked heavy machinery to move rubble. By the weekend, government authorities would restrict access to people visiting La Guaira, asking for papers to show permission to be there. This helped bring some order to the search for survivors but also restricted the flow of assistance to people who had suddenly lost their homes and were sleeping outside, Lexys Rendon, the director of the human-rights group Laboratorio de Paz, told me. People in La Guaira had trouble communicating with those outside the area. Daniela Ropero, 38, who was helping mothers find lost children, did not want to leave, in case she couldn’t return, so she slept on floors in strangers’ homes, she told me over the phone. She stood by a truck with a Starlink internet connection, not far from the Belo Horizonte, to make calls. “There’s no running water. There is garbage everywhere now. There’s no public bathrooms. Between that and the smell of corpses—” she said before the connection broke up.

For the first three days, a crucial period to find survivors, the crowd of neighbors and relatives connected to the Belo Horizonte did what they could. In street clothes, many without helmets or masks or tools, they climbed into the rubble, risking their own safety to find those still alive. Videos posted on social media of this effort show people trapped high in the wreckage who showed signs of life but could not be reached. In one video, which Rosas told me captured what remained of his building’s fifth floor, the camera zooms in on a woman lying face down in the space between two collapsed floors and moving slightly. “She’s alive. She’s still alive,” the person filming says.

Diko Betancourt / Anadolu / Getty

Family members and volunteers search through the rubble at the Belo Horizonte towers.

As the neighbors searched, they taped to a wall a handwritten list, more than 10 pages long, with the names and phone numbers of people who lived in the building. An Instagram account compiled dozens of photographs of residents from the building who were missing or deceased. Rosas told me the crowd managed to extract some people alive, but many more of the people they recovered were dead.

During the 48 hours that Perez and her relatives searched, she talked with others about the same grim mission: the 12th-floor family, two floors below her own apartment, and the husband who had gone out to buy bread minutes before the earthquake. “His wife and his daughter were entombed in there, and he was left out in the street,” Perez said.

By Friday evening, her nephew had found a pink teddy bear that belonged to his own daughter, Eugenia, beneath slabs of concrete. When they found the girl, she was in her mother’s arms; both had died, along with his son, who was in sixth grade. Extracting them took hours of strenuous work. As Perez recounted the ordeal, she was agonized. “They couldn’t pull out the girl,” she told me. “They’re not rescue experts.” It was late at night by the time they loaded all three bodies into a truck and drove through La Guaira to find a hospital.

Across the city, green spaces and parking lots had turned into improvised camps filled with displaced families. Others had taken shelter in stadiums and sports fields. On the streets, bodies were covered with sheets, lime scattered over them to soften the smell.

This country has long been in decline, under the repressive authoritarian rule of Nicolás Maduro, who took over after Hugo Chávez’s death in 2013. Venezuelans have endured food shortages and hunger; rampant inflation; protests by tens of thousands of people, who were beaten back by tear gas, water cannons, and worse. After the Trump administration overthrew Maduro in January, many Venezuelans expressed hope for better days ahead. But even though the economy has shown signs of life under Delcy Rodríguez’s leadership, “Venezuela is still in a profound crisis,” the economist Asdrúbal Oliveros told me. The earthquakes have “overwhelmed the capacity of the state.”

International search-and-rescue teams started arriving in La Guaira on the day Perez’s relatives were pulled from the Belo Horizonte. When Rosas eventually saw them, with their acoustic sensors and specialized tools, he felt as if they were coming not just from another country but another time. “We are taking out bodies with our bare hands, without gloves, and they show up with thermal cameras,” he told me.

These teams spread out amid the wreckage, far and wide beyond the Conjunto Residencial Belo Horizonte, and a new phase of the recovery began.

Mariana Zuñiga contributed reporting from La Guaira.

A Long-Standing Theory of Childbirth Is a Myth

2026-06-29T11:39:10-04:00

As billions of people can attest, giving birth is hard for humans. Our infants have an exceptionally large head for their body size and yet have to squeeze through a very narrow pelvis. Appendages can get stuck; bones can fracture. At worst, the consequences can be lethal for mothers or babies. Until recently, many researchers believed that our species weathered that particular hardship alone: Other primates, they supposed, didn’t need to strike the same compromise between super-brains and walking upright, and so could birth babies with relative ease. But new evidence has started to challenge the notion that human childbirth is uniquely dangerous.

A new paper published today in Nature Ecology & Evolution offers one of the most compelling cases to date against that assumption—showing that other primates, too, must push their babies through some seriously restricted spaces, contributing to infant-death rates that can exceed 34 percent. Humans have long put ourselves on an evolutionary pedestal—“We always think we are special,” Nicole Webb, an evolutionary biologist at the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum, in Germany, who wasn’t involved in the new research, told me. But the more scientists have looked across the animal kingdom, the more the biological realities of other animals have upended this narrative.

The assumption that people have it especially rough during childbirth can largely be traced back to a scientist named Adolph Schultz. Schultz’s research was revolutionary: Nearly a century ago, he was the first to gather evidence on the pelvic proportions of several primate species as a proxy for how easily their babies would fit. But his approach also had serious flaws, Nicole Torres-Tamayo, an anthropologist at the Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology, in Spain, and one of the new study’s authors, told me. Schultz was wrong about the orientation in which the fetal head of different primates moved through the birth canal. He also incorrectly assumed that the measurements that scientists had taken of the human birth canal would be the most relevant ones to take for other species.

Generally, the most limited section of the human birth canal is the section between the upper part of the sacrum and the front of the pelvis. But in other primates, the birth canal narrows farther down than that. Those errors led Schultz to overestimate just how much room other primates had to shepherd their babies through the birth canal.

So a few years ago, Torres-Tamayo and her colleagues decided to take a new set of measurements with a more open-minded approach. After surveying more than two dozen primate species, they found that humans were far from alone in having to squish babies through an unaccommodating pelvis. According to their research, we’re not even the most disadvantaged among primates. Human babies have heads almost exactly as big as the mother’s pelvis—a squeeze by any standard and a tighter fit than other great apes. But some other primates, including tamarins and bush babies, must birth infants whose head is almost twice as large as what their mom’s pelvis seems to accommodate.

Squirrel monkeys—a petite, chirruping, tree-climbing species whose dark muzzle gives the impression of permanent 5 o’clock shadow—have to deal with that proportional dilemma, too. Although they’re one of the smallest primates around, they can give birth to babies that, overall, weigh as much as 15 percent of what the mother does. (For a 150-pound human, that’d be the equivalent of vaginally delivering a 22.5-pound infant—a feat that, historically, does not end well.) Some data suggest that, at least in captivity, more than a third of squirrel-monkey babies may die, Lia Betti, an anthropologist at University College London and one of the study’s authors, told me. In one study from the 1990s, a researcher observing seven squirrel-monkey births watched two of the babies get stuck; neither survived.

And yet humans, squirrel monkeys, and all other still-living primates have somehow made it work, in large part by evolving anatomical work-arounds. Many primates, for instance, emerge from the birth canal not with the crown of the baby’s head popping out first, as humans do, but face-first—a position that seems to put the head in the least obtrusive position as it transits through the pelvis. Squirrel monkeys are also able to successfully birth babies by completely dislocating their pelvis during delivery—and their infants have been documented pulling themselves out of the birth canal once their shoulders are in the clear.

These particular options aren’t available to humans, though. Our erect posture and the position of the spine makes it very risky—and uncomfortable—to deliver babies face-first. For us, a baby who is delivered head down and is facing the mother’s spine, with their chin tucked toward their chest, has the easiest path out. And for us, a strong, solid pelvis is thought to be key to supporting our weight as we walk upright, nixing the option of keeping those bones loose and fully dislocatable, Betti told me.

Making these kinds of comparisons, though, can tell researchers only so much. Each species has such a unique anatomy, physiology, and evolutionary history that no single metric or measurement can fully capture the complexity of birth. Anna Warrener, an anthropologist at the University of Colorado at Denver who wasn’t involved in the new paper, also pointed out that most serious human-birth complications actually don’t involve babies getting stuck: They instead get dangerous when a mother starts to bleed uncontrollably, or suffers complications from an infection. Birth is probably treacherous for many, many animals in ways that humans don’t yet appreciate.

Ultimately, what sets humans apart the most may be our ability to cope with birth in creative ways. Humans monitor pregnancies closely and attend one another’s births; we can intervene to minimize bleeding and infection, and extract babies surgically. Many experts have cautioned against the dangers of over-intervening during delivery; at the same time, the availability of clinical care, when properly deployed, has clearly saved countless lives. And even outside of that clinical assistance, “from a grand evolutionary perspective, our species has done a pretty good job,” Warrener said. Difficult births aren’t necessarily unsuccessful ones—and certainly, she added, “there wouldn’t be 8 billion of us if we hadn’t cracked the code.”

Perhaps France Should Reconsider AC

2026-06-25T08:19:53-04:00

A summer escape to Paris, at least in the American mind, evokes a certain set of images: quiet strolls along the canals, long hours in bookstores and museums, a pleasant park bench, a glass of wine. Those pleasures are now contending with one of the most brutal and dangerous heat waves that Europe has faced in decades, a muggy, enervating stretch of weather that has forced millions of people across Europe, many of them in homes without air-conditioning and with few options for refuge, to endure triple-digit temperatures.

Tourist icons of Paris—the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre—have been closing early. Thousands of schools across France (and elsewhere in Europe) have closed or changed hours, but others, also without air-conditioning, have remained open. The heat has disrupted train travel, spiked utility prices, and led to power blackouts for thousands in Brittany and in Italian cities such as Turin and Milan. French television showed throngs of people swimming in Paris’s Canal Saint-Martin, once notorious for its pollution. Tuesday was the hottest day recorded in France in nearly 80 years. Yesterday was even hotter. Since the heat wave started, two children died in an over-hot car, and the rush to cool off has had its own terrible consequences—at least 48 drownings across France since the heat wave began last week, according to French authorities. And that glass of wine? During Sunday’s Fête de la Musique, an annual music festival, outdoor alcohol consumption was restricted.

“It is just unbearable,” Yamina Saheb, a lecturer at Sciences Po, told me. “We are locked in the heat.”

Saheb, an expert on adapting buildings to the warming atmosphere and an author of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, has been rising at 3 a.m. to work in the slightly cooler overnight hours. She took her 6-year-old son to an evening movie for a brief escape. On Sunday, she fainted in her apartment in the 14th arrondissement, in the southern part of Paris. “I was so tired at that point. I’m not old, and I don’t have any health issue, but I cannot stand the heat,” she said.

Only about a quarter of France’s housing stock has air-conditioning, a much smaller proportion than in the United States and other parts of the world. Much of that housing is ill-suited to the extended stretches of dangerous heat that have blanketed Europe in recent decades. A notorious heat wave in August 2003 killed an estimated 70,000 people across the continent, and even though European countries have tried since then to protect themselves by establishing cooling sites and making registries for vulnerable people, those measures do not appear to be keeping up with the threat. The World Health Organization says that heat has killed more than 200,000 people across Europe in the past four years.

Paris authorities announced plans yesterday to extend hours at public swimming pools; some 1,400 cooling spots, including misting stations and fountains, were open across the city. Authorities were also conducting welfare checks on individuals, the city said in a statement. In Paris, many buildings have zinc roofs and are made of concrete (both materials trap heat); some lack shutters or blinds; top-level apartments are notorious for their ovenlike qualities on hot days. In a week like this, such spaces “have become uninhabitable,” as a story in Le Monde put it. The French entertainer Olivier Giraud, known for his show How to Become a Parisian in One Hour, demonstrated that he could seemingly cook various dishes—l’oeuf campagnard (country-style eggs), cote de boeuf (rib eye)—by letting a frying pan heat on his window ledge. He suggested in one video that people come to the theater for his one-man show, where at least “we have air-conditioning.”

Peter Thorne, a climate scientist at Maynooth University, in Ireland, was attending a climate-adaptation conference in Oxford this week; he stepped out of his hotel into a humid mid-90s afternoon that he described to me as a “sauna.” (Yesterday also set the record for the hottest June day in the United Kingdom.) He has been alarmed by the magnitude of this heat event, which is Europe’s second extraordinary heat wave in a month and which has been breaking records by large margins, and early in the summer. “We’d expect records to be broken, yes, but we wouldn’t expect them to be smashed to smithereens,” he said. “This is absolutely not normal.”

The weather pattern responsible, a heat dome sealed in by an area of high pressure, is itself nothing new. But now “we have loaded the atmosphere with greenhouse gases for the past 200 years,” which traps heat in the atmosphere, Thorne said. Reduced sea ice and snowpack don’t help. Temperatures in Western Europe are about 3.6 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit hotter, depending on location, than they would have been in similar weather patterns during the second half of the 20th century, the organization ClimaMeter estimated.

Those elevated temperatures are expected to last through the week while moving north and east, possibly into Scandinavia, across cities and towns that were designed to trap heat, not dispel it, Thorne said. The improvements in forecasting and early-warning systems, as well as plans for cooling sites, will help reduce the death toll, but Thorne still expects it to be substantial. “This is truly extraordinary, unprecedented weather happening in places that are simply not designed to cope with this kind of heat,” he said. “Europe’s not prepared for this in the slightest.”

In France, access to air-conditioning has become a hot-button political debate; some far-right politicians have been pushing an AC-for-everyone message, while people on the left worry about the cost and environmental impact. Vidhya Ragunathan, an American attorney who has lived in Paris for nearly four years, has noticed that a surprising number of people still use handheld or paper fans; for her part, she’s running the fans and portable AC units in her third-floor apartment, which isn’t in direct sunlight most of the day. “This is where the American in me comes out: Those fans will run when somebody’s in that room,” she told me. “I don’t need heatstroke to throw on my plate right now.” Her children’s school remains open but has encouraged parents to keep kids home, and it has been sending letters asking which children intend to show up each day. “I throw a bunch of ice cubes in my kids’ water bottle, and I’m like, ‘Let’s go to school. We have five days left,’” she said. She’s found that some metros and buses have air-conditioning, whereas others do not; public transportation has faced delays and interruptions. An important appointment that she had at a government office, originally scheduled for tomorrow, has been canceled because of the temperature. “The thing I’ve learned about Paris is the city is completely capable of handling winter and rain; it cannot handle any sort of summer at all,” Ragunathan said. “France buckles under heat.”

At a school in Morlaix, Brittany, for children with learning disabilities and mental-health issues, some of the live-in students have tried to escape the heat by sleeping in hallways, the school’s director, Lena Bleunven, told me. Teachers have taped newspapers over the windows to block out the sun. Without air-conditioning, the school, where some 50 students spend the night, is relying on 15 fans to stay cool. “I should have bought more, but we never had this,” Bleunven said, and there were “no more fans in shops.” Last week, she’d asked regional health officials, who oversee the school, if they planned to close it for the heat wave, but she was told that there was an obligation to continue public service, she said.

In Saheb’s flat in Paris, in a building built in 1959, window AC units are not allowed on the facade that faces Parc Montsouris; on the back side, such an addition requires consensus among all owners in the building, who have so far refused, she said. After she fainted on Sunday, she wrote an open letter to President Emmanuel Macron from her cellar—“the only habitable place” in her building, as she described it. Macron, in a message on X, had urged people to look out for one another during the heat wave, particularly children and the elderly. (Macron’s office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.) Saheb considered that message insufficient and criticized Macron for failing to do more to help France adapt to this climate emergency. “I don’t know about you, but I refuse to hand down to my son a country where the only refuge is the basement, and the only survival strategy is fending for oneself,” she wrote.

Is It Warm Out There?

2026-06-23T14:53:15-04:00

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Summer has begun—which is to say, wildfires in the West are chasing residents from their homes, the snowpack has dwindled to near-record lows in several states, drought is spreading, and temperatures are regularly exploring new heights. Yet America does not seem to be sweating climate change. You could call it “climate hushing,” as Senator Sheldon Whitehouse and others do, or a “worry gap,” as one study has. Whatever you call it, America’s interest in talking about climate change is at an ebb.

Certainly, the Trump administration has made a point of disregarding climate change. Yet when President Trump made similar moves in his first term, he was met with a surge of resistance. Environmentalists and Democratic politicians formed their own climate alliances and pushed through state and local laws designed to take carbon out of the American economies. At the time, Jay Inslee, then the Washington governor, said, “We governors are going to step into this cockpit and fly the plane.”

These days, Democrats and even climate activists are acting as if fighting to slow global warming, let alone campaigning on it, is passé. As gas prices soared during the Iran war, blue-state governors have given fossil fuels another look, pushing the message of affordability, debating new gas pipelines, and putting off, in some cases, commitments to cut emissions. California’s frontrunner for governor, Xavier Becerra, who took campaign donations from oil companies, has not committed to phasing out gas cars as the state has planned; New York Governor Kathy Hochul rolled back the state’s landmark 2019 climate law. Congressional Democrats, who need to win seats during the midterms, are focused on economic issues. “Look at the Senate map,” Jane Flegal, a senior fellow at the Searchlight Institute, a moderate Democratic think tank, told me. “I mean, Alaska, Texas, Iowa. These are not places where anyone with brain cells would say: Run on blocking fossil fuels and addressing the climate crisis.”

Many of the climate activists who came of age during Trump’s first term have since broadened their portfolio. The most famous one, Greta Thunberg, posts about Gaza and ICE raids alongside her critiques of the fossil-fuel industry; the Sunrise Movement, the youth-led group that championed the Green New Deal, has pivoted to defeating authoritarianism as a prerequisite for passing climate legislation, Aru Shiney-Ajay, the group’s executive director, told me. Her organization was still hopeful, she said, early in the second Trump administration, that they could mobilize support among Republicans to save some of the funding for renewable energy and climate-related projects. But they quickly saw that wouldn’t happen. The Trump administration has pushed to expand oil drilling, including in sensitive Alaskan wilderness and California coastal waters; to block offshore wind farms; to stop regulating greenhouse-gas pollution, an effort EPA administrator Lee Zeldin described last year as “driving a dagger straight into the heart of the climate-change religion.”

While Democrats and environmentalists have challenged such actions in court, the public hasn’t made much noise about them, and some advocates fear that these kinds of rollbacks could be gathering their own quiet momentum, even in Democratic strongholds, Jon Binder, the executive director of the Model Climate Laws Initiative at Columbia University, told me.

Some environmentalists are more optimistic that the ever-improving economics of clean energy can keep tamping down emissions. They see the need to expand the electricity grid—if mainly to feed the hyper-scale data centers—as an opportunity to add wind and solar energy. And yet, the people who think most about climate seem immobilized. “It’s the responsibility of the environmental community to elucidate what’s going on,” Kathryn Phillips, a longtime California environmental advocate, told me. “But somehow they’re stuck.”

The people still trying to make noise about climate worry that this phase of “climate hushing” doesn’t actually reflect what Americans want. Voters care deeply about the growing risks of floods and wildfires, Whitehouse told me, and about the rising cost of homeowner’s insurance and the threat that poses to the wider economy. But how politicians talk about these issues matters, he said: You’re getting screwed, and your bills are going up because of the fossil-fuel industry is a “much more powerful and salient argument” than setting future climate targets without a way to get to them.

Voters in Rhode Island, where Whitehouse is from, are not exactly on the same page about these questions as voters in, say, Texas, but he may be right that Americans want something more from their leaders on this issue. Jennifer Marlon, a climate scientist at Yale University, which has long polled Americans about the climate, told me that a majority of people do want their politicians to take action on climate change. “What’s changing is leadership,” she said. “A lot of leaders are thinking, Oh, I’m going to get in trouble if I talk about it, or, It’s too polarizing. It’s turning into this vicious circle.”

Fewer people—in rich countries, at least—appear to be dwelling on the perils of a warming planet. In the U.S., just more than half of the respondents—51 percent—to the new Lloyd’s Register Foundation World Risk Poll, conducted by Gallup, considered climate “a very serious threat” over the next 20 years. The poll also found that people tended to underestimate how worried their peers were. Only 10 percent of Americans thought most other people here saw climate as a real threat. And that makes sense, on some level. If only a bare majority of Americans are that worried about climate, even those who are might reasonably question the country’s collective concern.

Marlon, the Yale scientist, has found, too, that in much of the country, people don’t worry enough about the real threats they face. One of her recent studies mapped heat risk across the country, as determined by the CDC, and compared it with survey results about how worried people are about extreme heat. Apart from the Southwest, where the lethal dangers of heat are well documented and discussed, the level of concern among the public in much of the country lags behind the expert assessments of the risk.

Few places, her study found, face a greater threat from heat while residents worry about it less than a swath of rural counties in Oregon. Three of the top 10 counties in the country with the greatest “worry gap” were in the state. (Virginia also had three in that group.) The finding made me wonder what it feels like out there, where climate threats abound but nobody stresses too much. A place like that seemed pretty in sync with our country at the moment.

I drove out to Gilliam County (population 2,000) last week—No. 4 on the “worry gap” list—on what happened to be the hottest day of the year so far. Thick smoke from a wildfire drifted over the Columbia River into this swath of north-central Oregon. (By the next evening, authorities had ordered more than 10,000 people to evacuate as another fire burned through parts of Spokane; one person died.) Temperature records would break that day in Portland and other cities across the Pacific Northwest. The state had just declared a drought emergency for Gilliam, along with nearly half of Oregon’s counties.

Amid the dry-land wheat fields and sagebrush hills where Trump won handily the past three elections, the residents I spoke with were keenly attuned to the conditions of the soil and the changes in the air. In Condon, the county seat, Gibb Wilkins, the interim city administrator and public-works superintendent, told me he was focused on trying to get the community to conserve water to avoid mandatory restrictions. The winter’s scant snow has stressed water supplies across the West; Condon did not run its snowplows once, when it normally might do so a dozen times. (Wilkins is also the town’s nighttime snowplow driver.) His public-works crews that day were out mowing grass in case they needed to build proper firebreaks later this summer. These employees are older—the town’s median age is more than 60—and he’s had to pull some of them off the job on particularly hot days. “We’re not cooling off like we used to at night,” he said.

If people did not express worry to an official survey taker, he suggested, it probably has to do with the hardiness and resolve of the residents, many of them farmers who have weathered a lifetime of lashing from the elements. “A lot of people here survived the farm downturns of the ’80s, and they just see it as another obstacle that they’ve got to overcome,” Wilkins said.

So maybe people just adapt without complaining. With the morning temperature in the mid-80s and rising, Mark Griffith was kneeling on the patio outside the Elks Club, spreading concrete. The 66-year-old cowboy and construction worker has spent a life outside here. “I enjoy it,” he told me. “It gets a little hot for moving cows around and stuff.” He’d noticed the fire season seems to keep starting earlier, he said, in June, or even May. And he’d noticed that the four-foot snowfalls he’d seen as a kid, back in the ’60s and ’70s, had disappeared. “We’re definitely seeing a change in the environment, for sure,” he said. “What causes it? I don’t know. I’m sure man caused a lot of it, you know. We ruin about everything we touch.”

He knelt back to his work, positioning a metal pole. He was building a sunshade.

America Desperately Needs More Sterile Screwworms

2026-06-23T12:50:06-04:00

This time a year ago, experts were already predicting the return of flesh-eating screwworms to the United States: a matter of not if but when, Wayne Cockrell, a Texas rancher, lamented to me at the time. Screwworms had been eradicated from the U.S. to Panama and then were cordoned off through the continual release of almost 20 million sterilized screwworms every week over the narrow Isthmus of Panama. But screwworms, which grow into flies as adults, had jumped the cordon and infested a large swatch of Mexico by last year. This month, they indeed reached Texas.

The math of the crisis then and now is brutally simple: The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s screwworm program cannot produce enough sterile adults to get the parasites under control. A factory in Panama has already quintupled its weekly production to its physical max, just more than 100 million, but more, many more, flies are needed to re-eradicate the screwworm: 500 million.

Two new factories are under construction, but both were delayed, according to reporting in Politico, by the Trump administration’s aggressive reviews of government spending last year. The first, in Mexico, will be fully online only this fall and the second, a much larger one in Texas, in the fall of 2028. “To win this war, it’s all about the number of sterile flies,” Cockrell, who is also second vice president of the Texas and Southwestern Cattle Raisers Association, reiterated to me recently.

In the meantime, the screwworms will keep percolating through the country, and ranchers will keep finding the grisly, telltale wounds in their livestock. The best that ranchers can do until more sterile flies arrive is “hold the line, weather the storm,” Jason Sawyer, the chief science officer of the East Foundation, an agricultural-research organization that manages six ranches in Texas, told me. Optimistically, he expects the re-eradication of screwworms in the U.S. to take three years. Realistically, he thinks it’ll take five years.

The parasites pose the biggest threat to cattle—which could push beef prices even higher—but they can also infect pets, wildlife, and even the unlucky human. After the first case of screwworms was discovered in the umbilical stump of a Texas calf on June 3, 15 more animal cases quickly came to light. The cases have been scattered over hundreds of square miles, a worrisome geographic spread that suggests that screwworms have dispersed in the U.S. beyond one isolated outbreak. Experts told me that they hope and expect the screwworm will not spread far outside Texas, but one case, in a dog, had already been found just over the state border in New Mexico.

Fernando Llano / AP

The wait for more sterile flies is all the more frustrating because the technology itself is so old. It has remained fundamentally unchanged since screwworms were originally eradicated in Texas, in the 1960s. Screwworms are reared in a factory and then blasted as pupae with radiation to render them impotent. When released en masse as flies, sterile males mate with wild females to produce nonviable eggs. Over the years, the screwworm program refined this technique but saw no reason for radical overhaul. Why mess with something that’s not broken?

In 2026, the outlook is quite different. The search is on for anything and everything that could possibly mitigate the long wait for more sterile flies. The USDA last week announced $105 million in funding for 40 projects that run the gamut, including new irradiation techniques and detection dogs and novel insecticides.

The USDA has even resurrected a male-only strain of genetically modified screwworms developed nearly a decade prior. Factory-reared males and females are currently released together, but only the sterile males are actually useful for eradication. (They mate many times, while female screwworms only mate once.) To that end, Maxwell Scott, an entomologist at North Carolina State University, began working on a male-only strain for the USDA back in 2010. The lab science went quickly, he told me, but getting approval for a field trial in Panama took three years. His team then created an even more efficient strain, which was never field-tested. The male-only project more or less went on pause, which frustrated Scott. “It was a lot of work to make these strains, and I thought they were good,” he said recently. “It wasn’t my decision.” He stopped working on screwworms.

Last year, with the screwworm’s return imminent, Scott heard that the USDA was interested in a newer version of the male-only strain again. The agency in March submitted paperwork to register a version of the more efficient strain—newly dubbed “NovoFly”—as a pesticide with the Environmental Protection Agency. (The USDA did not respond to my questions about when NovoFly would be ready for use.) Scientists are still waiting on approval for a field test in Panama, though. If the male-only strain is proven to work soon and deployed quickly, switching to it could ease the sterile-fly shortage. Scott also received a grant to continue working on a male-only strain as part of the USDA’s funding push.

Ironically, the basic technology behind these male-only strains is outdated now, Scott said. Since the strain’s original creation, CRISPR has revolutionized scientists’ ability to manipulate DNA in the lab. Scott is now interested in using CRISPR to create a “gene drive” that forces sterility to spread among wild screwworms. Theoretically, a single release of flies carrying a gene drive could even, over time, sterilize the entire screwworm population. At that point, screwworms could feasibly become eradicated from not just North and Central America but also South America, making the screwworm barrier at Panama entirely obsolete. But gene drives are controversial precisely because they may be uncontrollable once out in the wild; the technology in screwworms is not ready for even a field trial.

For now, Texas ranchers awaiting more sterile flies must rely on old-school strategies dating to the pre-eradication era: inspecting cattle, treating wounds with anti-screwworm drugs, and curbing the movement of infested animals. “When everybody in an area is doing that, you can keep the numbers low in the environment. But all it takes is one neighbor, as a source, that is not,” Cockrell says. And the work is labor intensive, because cattle herds can be spread out over hundreds or even thousands of acres, and ranches routinely employ fewer employees than they used to. “I’ve had people ask, ‘My parents told me about how they had to manage this in the ’60s,’” Sawyer recounted. “‘I don’t know if I have the capacity for that.’”

Even if ranches get a good handle on their own livestock, wildlife may serve as continual reservoirs of breeding screwworms. The role of wildlife in today’s outbreak is a real “wildcard,” Sawyer said. Deer populations in particular boomed following the eradication of screwworms. (It’s directly related: Screwworms used to kill 40 to 80 percent of fawns in Texas every year.) “Candidly, there’s not any great answers” for screwworm mitigation in wildlife, he told me. How much wild animals will contribute to the outbreak will become clearer only in a few years’ time—at which point the eradication effort will hopefully have enough flies to push the screwworms back to the Mexican border, and eventually even the Panamanian border.

A Fancy Name for Junk Food

2026-06-23T07:30:00-04:00

Once again, Americans are in a panic over what we eat. More than two-thirds of those surveyed now regard the industrially produced, ultra-processed foods, or UPFs, that dominate the U.S. food supply as addictive, according to a study published earlier this month in the American Journal of Public Health. That’s just the start of it. Most respondents said that UPFs are a major source of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity. At least one-third blame these foods for causing cancer, ADHD, depression, and anxiety. And nearly half—corresponding to some 130 million American adults, if the survey’s findings can be extrapolated—believe that UPFs are simply “not what God intended for people to eat.”

For the past couple of years, concerns about the potential health effects of UPFs have been highlighted in the media, and at nearly every level of the public-health establishment. New restrictions on the sale of UPFs have been introduced or passed in blue- and red-state legislatures alike. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said repeatedly that UPFs are “poisoning” Americans. And the World Health Organization is planning to put out global guidance on the problem.

To some extent, this is nothing more than a rebranding of an old idea, that the foods being sold at convenience stores or fast-food restaurants are anything but good for us. These products, at least some of which are almost assuredly detrimental to our health, have gone by several different names. For those of us old enough to remember the 20th century, we didn’t use to call them “ultra-processed” foods, but simply “processed” foods or “junk” foods. Now an ultra- prefix has been added to the same fuzzy category. Ultra-processed in the world of nutrition circa 2026 is, first and foremost, just the latest synonym for unhealthy.

Any more specific meaning, though, has been elusive. The U.S. government, for all of its UPF-related rhetoric, hasn’t even resolved the most basic matter of semantics: “A definition for ultra-processed foods is really hard,” one FDA official said in April, to explain why the project of creating one had already taken many months and could still be far from done. So many of the foods we eat are processed in so many different ways. Where do we even begin?

To the staunchest anti-UPF crusaders, though, ultra-processing may also represent an outgrowth of a deeper problem. The nutritional epidemiologists and other scholars who have led this push in public health are out to challenge an entire system of beliefs, propagated by nutritionists for a century or more, about what makes a food unhealthy in the first place. When they swap in ultra-processed for junk, they are shifting the focus from the nutrient content of a processed food—whatever fats, salt, carbs, and sugary sweeteners it might contain—to how it’s made, where it’s made, and even why it’s made.

Going by this logic, even basic intuitions about what is good or bad to eat may be twisted into strange new shapes. Keebler’s Soft Batch cookies might be labeled harmful on account of their industrial ingredients—preservatives, emulsifiers, and hydrogenated oils—although your grandma’s home-baked snickerdoodles could be equally sugar-rich and considered benign. Store-bought whole-grain rye bread, with preservatives added to prolong its shelf life, could be viewed as toxic, but home-baked white bread is thought of as just a wholesome treat.

The war on UPFs, if its advocates are to be taken seriously, has many such confusing implications. At best, these complicate the conversation over how we should address the chronic-disease crisis on a national scale: What, exactly, should we eat and why? At worst, they suggest we’re stepping backwards and away from any hope of progress in the science of nutrition.

In the grand tradition of ideological revolutions, the turn against UPFs began with a manifesto—or rather two of them. The journalist Michael Pollan wrote the first. His 2008 best seller, In Defense of Food, blames the rise of margarine, low-fat cookies, and other healthy-seeming packaged foods on a scientific ideology called “nutritionism.” This refers dismissively to just about everything that nutrition researchers had been doing for the past century—that is, assuming that a food’s value is determined by the sum of its nutrients, and that eating healthy means optimizing for that value. Any truly healthy diet would reject this way of thinking, Pollan argues, and instead rely on how people have been eating for generations. Eat real food, the book implores, not “foodlike substances.”

That idea has now been taken up in earnest by the U.S. government as the touchstone of its dietary guidance. But Pollan’s argument would also feed into the second manifesto, which was the call for scientific revolution. Two years after In Defense of Food, the Brazilian epidemiologist Carlos Monteiro laid this out in an academic paper arguing that nutrition science on the whole, and its paradigm of healthy eating, had been a failure. (An editorial accompanying that paper notes Monteiro’s admiration for Pollan and references In Defense of Food.) People in Brazil had been getting fatter, in keeping with global trends, Monteiro observes, but they had not been purchasing more fats, oils, flour, or sugar, as might have been predicted by conventional theories of nutrition. Instead, he focuses on another dietary pattern: In Brazil, he writes, as elsewhere in the world, people tended to be heavier and more likely to have diabetes when their diets were less traditional and more reliant on packaged, frozen, and fast foods. He had already started using the term ultra-processed to describe the latter set of products; now he was declaring it the “big issue” in public health.

Here was the revolution in a single phrase. For half a century, at least, debates about our diet had focused on its nutrient content. That approach was inherently reductive, but it had the benefit of being scientific; it made testable claims about causes and effects. A Big Mac, for instance, contains more than a gram of sodium and almost 100 calories’ worth of saturated fat; nutrition science had hypotheses about the mechanisms by which those substances might lead, respectively, to hypertension and heart disease. A 12-ounce can of Coke delivers 39 grams of sucrose or high-fructose corn syrup—nearly 10 teaspoons—and nutrition researchers could study what those sugars do inside a human body, day in and day out, and speculate about the cumulative effects over a lifetime. That work had been going on for decades, and many of its central questions remain unresolved.

According to Monteiro’s theory, this nutrition research and the arguments that it has engendered are secondary concerns. The fight against ultra-processing does not fixate on the details of a food’s constituents, but on the means of its production. It’s not just what’s in the Big Mac or the Coke or the Cheez-It crackers that should concern us, but what the food industry has done to them: the sum total of unnatural ingredients and industrial processes that have been added to make these products cheap, convenient, and desirable.

[Read: The Big Tobacco playbook comes for your Oreos]

Monteiro and his colleagues can only guess at why a food becomes unhealthy when subjected to this transformation. Among their many hypotheses: Precisely engineered combinations of fat, sugar, salt, and refined carbohydrates might override our satiety signals; soft-textured food could lead to faster eating and more consumption overall; toxic chemicals may be leaching out from product packaging; and flavor enhancers, colorings, and other additives might disrupt the gut microbiome and reduce the body’s natural secretion of GLP-1.

In November, The Lancet, a prestigious British medical journal, published a three-part, 60-page series of papers—co-authored by Monteiro—that explores the science and policy of UPFs. The “key driver” of the global epidemics of obesity and diabetes, it says, is the rise of UPFs, which is itself a product of “the growing economic and political power of the UPF industry, and its restructuring of food systems for profitability above all else.” According to Monteiro and his many co-authors, every aspect of that system is to blame: the food manufacturers, for starters, but also the ingredient suppliers, the plastic producers, the packagers, the grocery stores, the advertising firms, the lobbyists, the industry groups, and even the “research partners” of industry, a category that would seem to include a significant portion of all of the nutritionists and food chemists in academia.

The mere science of “nutrition”—as it has been understood by its practitioners for many years, and implemented by authorities in public health—provides at most a bit of context for this bigger story.

Ultimately, though, the claim that “ultra-processing” is the big issue here—the proximate cause of the obesity and diabetes epidemics—is full of holes. First there is the obvious: What, exactly, constitutes an ultra-processed food? But also: Which aspects of a UPF (however it’s defined) are harmful to our health, and how? And finally: Will demonizing ultra-processing really bring us any closer to addressing the country’s soaring rates of chronic disease?

These are the kinds of questions that public-health authorities should be asking, and whether they can be answered with the existing evidence is at the center of the controversy. In 2010, Monteiro and his colleagues came up with Nova, a food-classification scheme that identifies UPFs as those food products that are industrially formulated to be “ready to eat or ready to heat with little or no preparation.” This working definition was then applied to observational research; the series in The Lancet compiled data from 92 such studies that had been carried out through 2024, and says they show that individuals who eat the most UPF-rich diets are 33 percent more likely to have abdominal obesity, and 21 percent more likely to be overweight or obese, than those who eat the least.

That sounds bad, but how meaningful is this kind of evidence? Even the epidemiologists who do this sort of research are unable to reach agreement on whether associations of this magnitude are even likely to reflect a genuine causal relationship. For comparison, the purported risks of eating UPF-rich diets are roughly one-hundredth the size of the lung-cancer risk that can be attributed to heavy smoking. The Purdue University nutritionist Richard Mattes, writing with half a dozen colleagues, notes that UPF consumption correlates with obesity to just about the same degree as people’s educational attainment, sleep duration, frequency of TV viewing, and many other factors.

[Read: What happens when you’ve been on Ozempic for 20 years?]

Far better research is necessary to clarify the evidence, but the kind of clinical trials that might be definitive aren’t likely ever to be done. Thousands, if not tens of thousands, of individuals—ideally men, women, and children—would have to be randomized to eat diets that are either high or low in ultra-processed foods, they’d have to keep eating their assigned diet for many years, and they’d have to be monitored closely to establish which dietary pattern ended up producing better health. Even if such an expensive trial could be done (at a cost that might run well into nine figures), and even if it demonstrated that a low-UPF diet is superior, which would surprise no one, it wouldn’t tell us why: whether because of the industrial processing and food additives that went into the UPFs or because the UPFs were, like any of the foods we once described as “junk,” simply high in sugar, fat, processed starches, or salt.

So instead, the two sides of the UPF debate argue over a handful of published clinical trials, lasting from a day to a few months, that aim to demonstrate that the ultra-processing of food itself makes people eat too much. The most influential, by far, was a 2019 study led by Kevin Hall, then at the National Institutes of Health. Marion Nestle, a professor emerita of food studies at New York University and a co-author on two of the three recent Lancet articles on UPFs, called Hall’s research “the most important study ever done to explain weight gain.” But some researchers, such as the Harvard endocrinologist David Ludwig and nutritional epidemiologist Walter Willett, both of whom have co-authored papers with Nestle, have argued that the design of Hall’s research is fatally flawed, not least because the experimental diets were maintained for only two weeks each. Willett told me via email that the NIH study and other short-term studies of its kind are not just meaningless but “likely to give the wrong result (which is worse than no result at all).”

Hall, who is now a clinical scientist at AstraZeneca, noted in an email to The Atlantic that this type of research will be necessary if you want to measure energy intake with accuracy and precision. “With all of their limitations, our studies are among the longest and largest such studies that assess how changing aspects of participants’ food environments affects their energy intake,” he wrote.

Whether the results of such research will tell us anything about the cause of obesity remains to be seen. In the meantime, other nutritionists have tried to resolve the conflict between UPFs and traditional nutrition science by amending or rethinking Monteiro and his colleagues’ Nova scheme. In 2024, Susanne Bügel, a nutritionist at the the University of Copenhagen who has studied how plant-based dairy products might be better fortified with vitamins and minerals, proposed a research initiative that would develop a “next generation of the Nova classification” that might account better for each food’s nutrient content and quality. She organized a workshop to bring together critics and proponents of the system, food chemists and nutritionists and public-health researchers, in the hopes that a kind of multidisciplinary synergy would emerge—and with it, a means of establishing not only which foods are “ultra-processed” but also which UPFs might be harmful and which benign.

The project quickly exploded into controversy. Monteiro refused an invitation to participate in the workshop and demanded that it abandon any usage of the terms Nova and ultra-processed foods to avoid the implication that he or his group had actually endorsed the workshop or any new system that might emerge from it. He also took issue with the fact that funding for the project came from the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which is connected to the company that makes Ozempic and other obesity-related drugs. “Public health policy should be based on independent science, not shaped by entities with a financial stake in diet-related diseases,” he told the Financial Times. By that point, Monteiro’s allies had published an open letter calling for a boycott of the project and urging Bügel to “respect the scientific foundations upon which NOVA has been built.” (The Novo Nordisk Foundation has said that its grant decisions are made independently of the pharmaceutical company. Bügel told me that the project’s funders had not exerted any influence: “They don’t interfere; they don’t tell us what to do.”)

[Read: Avoiding ultra-processed foods is completely unrealistic]

In an academic article published in January, Monteiro and half a dozen co-authors make clear that any work dedicated to making food-industry products “healthy”—a category that would include Bügel’s research into plant-based milks—serves to legitimize “industry narratives,” and defeats the purpose of the UPF classification. Even the mere discussion of such products, they suggest, “risks normalizing ultraprocessing and delays effective interventions.” In short, traditional nutritionism is so fundamentally broken, and so compromised by its ties to industry, that it’s counterproductive to the public health on its own terms.

In spite of the rhetoric—and for all of the talk about a war on UPFs—nutritionism itself remains intact, which might not be a bad thing. The U.S. government’s website for this year’s update to the dietary guidelines, for instance, doesn’t actually use the word ultra-processed; it says instead that people should avoid “highly processed foods laden with refined carbohydrates, added sugars, excess sodium, unhealthy fats, and chemical additives.” Reductionist science, and the assessment of a food’s nutrient components in determining its value, still holds sway.

By the same token, Kennedy announced in February that HHS was backing a petition submitted by the former FDA chief David Kessler that would force the agency to reassess the safety of industrial ingredients in highly processed foods. Although that petition has been portrayed as an attack on UPFs, its scope is actually more narrow. The ingredients in question, which could in theory lose their FDA designation as “Generally Recognized as Safe,” are none other than sugar and other “refined carbohydrates.” Kessler told me in an email that he is not necessarily worried about the chemical additives in processed foods, so much as he is the carbs—“flour starches and sweeteners.” In Kessler’s world, the Keebler Soft Batch cookies may be just as harmful as Grandma’s snickerdoodles because both are sugar-rich, and both might be detrimental to those predisposed to obesity and diabetes. We have yet to do the research necessary to establish whether that is true.

Monteiro himself acknowledges the large overlap between UPFs and traditional concepts of sugar-rich junk food. The first article in his Lancet series notes that food products designated as ultra-processed by the Nova system are dominated by sweetened drinks, as well as “sweet snacks, desserts and confectionery.” The same paper notes that these beverages and foods constitute virtually all of the UPFs consumed in low-income countries and, with baked goods added, close to 75 percent of UPFs in high-income countries.

Given those numbers, couldn’t much of the global chronic-disease problem be resolved by communicating the message that, say, sugar and refined grains are harmful, rather than targeting an ill-defined new category that lumps in all of these treats with vitamin-fortified oat milk and whole-grain rye bread with preservatives?

I called Monteiro in Brazil to ask this basic question. He responded by turning the question around and pointing out that 90 percent of the added sugars in the American diet come from ultra-processed foods, along with a significant amount of our saturated fat and salt. “If you avoid ultra-processed foods,” he told me, “you improve your diet in terms of sugar, salt, and saturated fat.” The old advice to avoid specific nutrients could be dead-on, he said, and dietitians, nutritionists, and doctors should continue to dispense it. But that wasn’t enough: “It is not feasible for people to follow advice if you don’t change the food system, to liberate it from these corporations.”

To Monteiro, critics of his UPF hypothesis are conflating discussions about evidence with discussions about policy. “We cannot mix these two,” he said. “One is the evidence, the causality, the explanation for the pandemic of obesity. The other is what each country should do.” To worry about whether UPFs might be a useless or pseudoscientific category is to miss this point. Instead of trying to extrapolate the scientific evidence to policies in a “non-intelligent way” that only slows things down, he said, we should take some obvious steps to address the problem: Tax sugary beverages, subsidize farmers’ markets, and promote more fresh and minimally processed foods.

This all sounded very sensible. Maybe “ultra-processed foods” can be a way of focusing attention on the sorts of policies we need. But even then, wouldn’t the science of nutrition matter? The argument to tax sugary beverages, for instance, depends on evidence that these beverages are chronic toxins that cause obesity and diabetes, and are perhaps addictive as well, not just empty calories that we happen to consume to excess. And if we promote fresh, minimally processed foods, the question is, which ones? Red meat is a minimally processed food, and so are full-fat milk and cream. The current HHS secretary has insisted that red meat and animal fats are good for us, and he’s not alone in thinking so. Monteiro has more conventional views, and the evidence is ambiguous. So what exactly should we do?

The war on UPFs is based on the idea that traditional nutrition science will never land on useful answers to these questions. It sees the failures of the past—ill-fated admonitions from experts to cut back on fat, for example, and base our diets, as the FDA once recommended, on starches and grains—as signs of the inherent rot of nutrition science. But there’s another way to think about this history. Maybe the nutritionists had the right idea with their reductionist approach to the science, but they did a poor job with the research itself. Maybe a concerted effort to identify precisely what it is about the foods we eat that causes obesity and diabetes, done with far greater care and rigor, would at last produce the understanding that we’ve sought. If that’s the case, then an all-out fight to break the power of the multinational food companies, however righteous that may be, would entail enormous wasted effort—and it may not even work.

Paradise Revisited

2026-06-22T07:00:00-04:00

Photographs and videos by Will Matsuda

My first encounter with a Galápagos tortoise came when the driver of my taxi from the airport attempted a risky overtaking maneuver into the path of an oncoming bus. On the island of Santa Cruz, which is bisected by a single highway, this is a favorite sport: The white Toyota HiLuxes that serve as taxis overtake tour buses, while tour buses overtake trucks. But this time, the driver quickly pulled back behind the slow-moving car ahead of us. “Tortoise,” she explained.

And there it was—a great dome, an overturned bathtub, trying to cross the road. What set of circumstances favored an animal that weighs up to 600 pounds, moves at four miles a day, and takes a quarter of a century to reach sexual maturity? The answer is: a remote island chain formed by volcanoes, with little fresh water and no predators, where life moved at a languid, lumbering pace—at least, until humans appeared. The tortoise’s reaction to the traffic was typical of its kind. It retracted its head into its shell and fervently wished for the bus to go away.

The Galápagos Islands owe their place on rich travelers’ bucket lists to the vision of them as an unfallen Eden, touted as “the laboratory of evolution” that inspired Charles Darwin to write On the Origin of Species. When he visited, humans’ presence here was limited to whalers, buccaneers, and political prisoners. Today, more than 300,000 people visit the archipelago each year. Every tourist desperate to see an untouched paradise is part of a constant influx that risks despoiling the very thing they came to see.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Pinnacle Rock, a volcanic spire on Bartolomé Island

On his arrival, in 1835, Darwin marveled at the lack of fear shown by all the animals, thanks to their limited exposure to humans. “Met an immense Turpin: took little notice of me,” he wrote in his field notebook about encountering a tortoise on September 21. Perhaps the poor turpin should have been more wary: By October 12, Darwin was recording that he had been “eating Tortoise meat / By the way delicious in Soup.” Soon he was trying to ride them. “I frequently got on their backs,” he wrote in the published version of his diaries, “and then giving a few raps on the hinder part of their shells, they would rise up and walk away;—but I found it very difficult to keep my balance.”

On these parched islands, the tortoises were prized for their ability to slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti, and to drink enough at the rare springs to sustain them for months on end. Thirst-racked sailors would catch and kill them purely for the contents of their bladders. “In one I saw killed, the fluid was quite limpid, and had only a very slightly bitter taste,” wrote Darwin, having sportingly chugged some tortoise urine for science.

Today, none of this is allowed. El Chato Ranch, which I visited in the pouring rain, permits selfies with its resident tortoises but absolutely no touching, eating, or disemboweling. Most of the Galápagos have been designated by Ecuador as a national park, with a $200 entrance fee—up from $100 just two years ago—and a strict injunction to stay six feet away from the animals. The archipelago is also home to the flightless cormorant, whose former wings are now stumpy nubs; a species of batfish that looks like it is wearing bright-red lipstick; and the marine iguana, which ejects excess salt from its body by sneezing. (Catch a big group at the right moment and they can go off like the cannons in the 1812 Overture.) These animals all exist in the Galápagos and nowhere else.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A giant tortoise lumbers across Santa Cruz Island. Visitors are no longer allowed to eat them.

The usual story of Darwin’s visit is that he cataloged the small differences that had emerged in animals across the islands—discrepancies in the beaks of the finches being a prime example—as each species responded to the unique conditions. In a flash of insight, he understood the mechanism of evolution: survival of the fittest. The truth is more complicated, and more interesting. His ship, the H.M.S. Beagle, spent only five weeks here, and Darwin landed on just four of the 13 major islands. At first, he did not recognize the importance of the variation among the islands, and did not label many of his bird specimens with their precise origins. The greatest study of what we now call “Darwin’s finches” was done by a British couple, Peter and Rosemary Grant, who visited the same uninhabited island, Daphne Major, every year from 1973 to 2013.

Darwin also didn’t notice the numerous subspecies of giant tortoise until the vice governor called attention to their variety and declared “that he could with certainty tell from which island any one was brought,” the naturalist wrote in his field notebook. Tortoises on Hood and Charles Islands, for instance, had evolved shells that were curved upward at the front like a saddle, allowing their necks to reach higher vegetation. Oh, and Darwin didn’t even coin the phrase survival of the fittest. That came from one of the early reviewers of Origin, Herbert Spencer. Darwin liked it so much that he incorporated it into later editions.

The mythology of blinding-inspiration-in-paradise is so appealing that it has outcompeted the truth. The actual story—the one that drove me here—is that Darwin was above all an empiricist. He took nothing on trust. He wanted to see things for himself, measure them, catalog them, and perhaps even eat them, and he was willing to endure any combination of boredom, nausea, and danger to do so. He was an omnivore, as interested in geology as biology when he toured South America, and his most famous theory drew on economics as well. He had an ego, definitely, but he was also open-minded and curious; he wanted to understand nature, not just plunder it like so many colonial explorers. (In later life, he supported animal charities and called for vivisection to be regulated.) He was willing to push back against editors, too, such as the one who suggested that he should reframe Origin to focus only on pigeons, because “everybody is interested in pigeons.”

All of that should make him any writer’s hero.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A bust of Darwin at the Charles Darwin Research Station, near Puerto Ayora

The British first named the individual islands in the 1600s—Charles Island after King Charles II, James Island (where Darwin spent most of his time) after the King’s brother, and so on—although most guidebooks now use the official Spanish names. Today Ecuador treats the Galápagos as precious jewels for both noble and commercial reasons. To enter, you need to complete a biosecurity declaration, promising not to introduce any plants or animals that could rampage through this delicate ecosystem. There are no international flights into the archipelago. For me, the two-hour flight to the territory’s main airport, on Baltra Island, came at the end of a tiring slog from London to Miami, and then on to Quito, the high-altitude Ecuadoran capital, where the thin air gave me a headache the instant I stepped off the plane.

I consoled myself on the long journey by reading accounts of Darwin’s five years on the Beagle, which were marked by seasickness so intense that he traveled overland by horse whenever he could, catching up with the ship farther along its journey. “I hate every wave of the ocean, with a fervor, which you, who have only seen the green waters of the shore, can never understand,” he wrote to his cousin William. His captain, Robert FitzRoy, recorded that Darwin was “a martyr to confinement and sea-sickness when under way.”

One of the great mysteries of Darwin’s life is how he made such a success of his five years at sea, which came between a directionless youth and an adulthood blighted by anxiety and illness. When he left England, at age 22, he was a dilettante who had washed out of medical school and was wavering about becoming a parson. His main interaction with birds and mammals was shooting them. He returned from his sea voyage a more serious and ambitious man, but one plagued for the rest of his life by vomiting, palpitations, “extreme spasmodic daily & nightly flatulence,” and vague, shifting symptoms of mental distress. He installed a lavatory behind a screen in his study at Down House, in Kent, so that he could void himself from either end as necessary and quickly return to work.

During his half decade on the Beagle, though, Darwin worked steadily, sending crates of specimens home on passing ships, and he endured the loneliness and ennui of the voyage with remarkable fortitude. Time at sea was notoriously hard on sailors’ mental health; the Beagle’s previous captain, Pringle Stokes, had killed himself during the bleak southern winter. (The weather was so dreary, he wrote in June 1828, that “the soul of man dies in him.” A month later, he put a gun to his head in his cabin.) FitzRoy took over as captain soon after, and decided that on his second Beagle voyage, he would take a gentleman companion to jolly him along. He and Darwin ate meals together and talked about current affairs, tiptoeing around their different political backgrounds (FitzRoy was a Tory; Darwin was from a Whig family) and intensity of religious belief (FitzRoy was a creationist; Darwin, even then, was a doubter). He gave Darwin the affectionate nickname Philos, for “natural philosopher.”

In addition to seasickness, Darwin had to brave an equatorial climate far removed from the English Midlands, where he (and I) grew up. The midday sun is directly overhead, and on the youngest islands, which have little soil and therefore little vegetation, there is no shade to hide in. “Nothing could be less inviting than the first appearance,” he wrote on landing at Chatham Island (now San Cristóbal, the seat of government). “The dry and parched surface, being heated by the noonday sun, gave to the air a close and sultry feeling, like that from a stove: we fancied even that the bushes smelt unpleasantly.” And this was in September, the cooler of the two seasons! I had come during the first half of the year, the hotter rainy season, when the seas are warm, the air temperature is about 80 degrees Fahrenheit, and the humidity wilts you like spinach.

On the first full day, crossing a scorching beach on the way back from seeing the marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, I began to suffer from some sort of humidity-induced delirium, despite unfurling a legionnaire’s hat over my neck and shoulders. I distinctly remember thinking at one point that I had to “lock in,” the kind of extreme-sports jargon that my fully operational mind would disdain. After I had arrived safely at the hotel and rehydrated aggressively, I was amazed once again that Britons managed to explore and conquer so much of the globe, despite our manifest maladaptation to anything other than mild drizzle. That we did so before the advent of wicking fabrics, bug spray, and SPF 50 is even more implausible; I felt as ill-prepared for the climate as Captain Scott did when he relied on ponies rather than sled dogs in Antarctica, or the equally doomed Burke and Wills expedition, which took 20 tons of equipment, including a Chinese gong, into the Australian outback.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Marine iguanas in Puerto Ayora. Darwin called this species, found only in the Galápagos, “imps of darkness.”

Unfortunately, what drove some of those early explorers was an unfounded (and occasionally fatal) sense of racial superiority: Europeans knew best. On FitzRoy’s previous Beagle voyage, in 1830, a whisper of this attitude crept into the ship’s scientific mission to map the South American coastline. At the southernmost tip of the continent, Tierra del Fuego, FitzRoy effectively kidnapped four Indigenous people as revenge for the theft of one of his boats. He gave them allegedly English names—York Minster, Jemmy Button, Fuegia Basket, and Boat Memory—and took them back to England. (The birth names of the first three were Elleparu, Orundellico, and Yokcushlu; Boat Memory’s name has been lost.) The idea was that they would be “civilized” and returned, accompanied by a missionary, to convert their benighted fellow Fuegians to Christianity.

In fact, the missionary bailed after experiencing a few days of harsh Fuegian life, and the Fuegians quickly reverted to their ancestral ways. “Captain Fitz Roy could never ascertain that the Fuegians have any distinct belief in a future life,” Darwin observed in his diaries. To the average Victorian gentleman, this was proof enough that they were “savages.” I wonder, though, if the assertion gnawed at Darwin, given that his research was already drawing him away from religious faith. “Science has nothing to do with Christ; except in so far as the habit of scientific research makes a man cautious in admitting evidence,” he would write to a friend toward the end of his life, adding: “As for a future life, every man must judge for himself between conflicting vague probabilities.”

While on the Beagle, Darwin had to wait months to reach a suitable port to receive the latest packet of letters from home. Nearly 200 years later, I FaceTimed my husband from the deck of an expedition boat, which had excellent Wi-Fi. Most of the archipelago has Starlink coverage.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Blue-footed boobies on Bartolomé Island

Some of the wildness that Darwin encountered still survives. The walls of my hotel room, up in the misty highlands of Santa Cruz, were flecked with geckos, which dart behind the picture frames if you get too close. Darwin was disappointed that “the insects, for a tropical region, are of very small size and dull colours.” Everything is relative, though, and to me this was a paradise of bugs, evoking fond childhood memories of crickets in the grass, ladybugs on leaves, and wasps on Coke cans. (Now I can go for days in England without seeing anything more exciting than a bluebottle; terrestrial insect populations in North America and Europe have been declining by 1 or 2 percent a year for a while.) Arriving in the Galápagos was like stepping back in time: A huge antennaed something lay outside my hotel-room door on my first morning, its black-and-red carapace glistening in the dawn. What appeared to be gothic bumblebees flew past my face—Xylocopa darwini, female carpenter bees, fat and inky black. (The males are gold.) Monarch butterflies, with their stained-glass wings, danced in the sun; a smaller, violet butterfly, the Galápagos blue, is endemic to the islands.

Today, even after decades of human intrusion, the abundance of the Galápagos is still what sets them apart, thanks to recent decades of human conservation. The embarrassment of frigate birds, with their red, puffed-up throat sacs. The great flocks of blue-footed boobies, dancing for their mates on Tiffany-tinted toes. The lines of flamingos, their feathers a shocking Millennial pink. The frequent sight of a lava lizard doing push-ups, their way of communicating. The pod of dolphins that swam up to the expedition boat for a spot of bow-riding, using its slipstream to slough away the remora fish that cling to their backs. A furious thrashing in the water that revealed itself as a school of rays—mating, or fighting, or possibly both.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A pod of dolphins

Tragically for Darwin, he lived before the invention of the modern snorkel, and so never saw the magnificent world under the islands’ waves. As soon as I dipped my mask underwater off Pinnacle Rock, a volcanic spire not far from where he made landfall, I found myself in an alternate world of pearlescent parrotfish, baby sharks, and vivid blue starfish. The Australian electrician traveling with our party noticed an octopus, and it took a while for my eyes to make out a brown fluidity of fingers, slurping its way along the seabed.

I surfaced to the sound of retching—What the hell?—only to discover that baby sea lions can nurse with a disgusting noise. Then Isadora, our guide, started barking: arf, arf, arf. She was trying to lure a penguin off a rock, she explained, so that we could see it swim underwater. We were rewarded when a black-and-white bullet sped past. (Penguins on land might be comical, but an underwater penguin is no joke at all.) The final surprise came as I swam to the boat ladder and then checked beneath me. Have you ever screamed through a snorkel? Try spotting a full-grown reef shark a few feet below you; that’ll do it. Its sheer bulk and rigidity astonished me, as if I were watching a refrigerator glide through the water.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A Galápagos land iguana (left) and frigate birds (right) on North Seymour Island

On the four inhabited islands, too, animals abound. In London, the main hazard of being absorbed by your phone is veering into the path of a cyclist. Down at the dock in Puerto Ayora, the town on Santa Cruz, it’s stepping on a drowsy sea lion. Walk almost anywhere and you’ll see a land iguana, perhaps two feet long, colored in burnt sienna, gray, and black. The iguanas molt in patches to accommodate their growth and so are covered with loose, peeling skin. Never mind the thrill of riding a tortoise; exfoliating a lizard would provide the ultimate ASMR.

Their distant cousins, the marine iguanas, are so black that they seem to suck the brightness out of the air: Darwin referred to them as “imps of darkness.” (He carried a copy of Milton’s Paradise Lost with him on the Beagle, and you can often feel the effect of its dazzling imagery on his prose.) The iguanas congregate in big crowds, piled on top of one another. At Tortuga Bay, on Santa Cruz’s south coast, I nearly stumbled over a veritable cuddle puddle of them, with one large specimen in the middle, its arm proprietarily draped over another, as if they were on a third date at the movies.

“Come over here,” I yelled to Will, the hip American photographer who’d accompanied me. “I’ve found an iguana polycule.”

He sighed with satisfaction. “It’s like I never left Brooklyn.”

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Marine iguanas at Tortuga Bay, on Santa Cruz Island

The crew of the Beagle treated the iguanas with no more respect than the tortoises. Intrigued by the idea of a lizard that could swim, Darwin caught one—“They do not seem to have any notion of biting,” he wrote—and placed it in the water. Despite being gracefully at ease there, the iguana immediately returned to shore. “Perhaps this singular piece of apparent stupidity may be accounted for by the circumstance, that this reptile has no enemy whatever on shore, whereas at sea it must often fall a prey to the numerous sharks,” he observed. (In other words, they felt predation pressure.) Others in Darwin’s party did crueler experiments on these intriguing creatures. “A seaman on board sank one, with a heavy weight attached to it, thinking thus to kill it directly; but when an hour afterwards he drew up the line, the lizard was quite active.”

The birds did not escape this casual sadism either. Darwin noted their “extreme tameness,” adding that “a gun is here almost superfluous; for with the muzzle I pushed a hawk off the branch of a tree.” The doves used to be even tamer before the arrival of the buccaneers and the whalers, Darwin remarked, because the “sailors, wandering through the woods in search of tortoises, always take delight in knocking down the little birds.”

To me, these passages are some of the strangest in the Beagle diaries. Darwin lived in a world where, whatever you did, more animals would be along in a minute. When Darwin made camp on what is now Santiago, the land iguanas were so plentiful that he struggled to avoid their nests in the sand. “I cannot give a more forcible proof of their numbers, than by stating, that when we were left at James Island, we could not for some time find a spot free from their burrows, on which to pitch our tent,” he wrote. Three years later, though, a visiting French naval officer was the last person to record any land iguanas on James at all. Feral pigs, descendants of domestic animals introduced by settlers, soon wiped them all out. (A population of iguanas was reintroduced in 2019 from North Seymour Island, and is now thriving.)

All the human eating didn’t help. At Cambridge University, Darwin had belonged to the Glutton Club, which aimed to consume meat “before unknown to the human palate.” In northern Patagonia, he listened to the gauchos tell stories of a rare flightless bird, the petise—a type of rhea with feathered upper legs—which he became desperate to add to his specimen collection. At Port Desire, farther south, one of his shipmates shot and killed what he assumed to be a young ostrich, and served it for dinner. “It was cooked and eaten before my memory returned,” Darwin wrote. Oh no! The bird was the elusive petise. He did save the skin and a few of the bones, and still managed to get the bird named after him: Rhea darwinii.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Giant tortoises on the parched islands slurp moisture from prickly pear cacti.

Today, Darwin is known as the great heretic, the man whose work shocked the Victorian establishment and undermined the Church. But the exact heresy he committed is not well understood. He was not the first person to suggest that species evolve—in fact, his own grandfather Erasmus had suggested that all warm-blooded animals might have arisen from “one living filament” in his 1794 book, Zoonomia. Darwin was also not the first person to notice that the boundaries between species were more fluid than the Swedish taxonomist Carl Linnaeus had acknowledged. (The Comte de Buffon, a French biologist, had done so at the time.) And he was far from the first Victorian intellectual to question the spurious biblical chronology suggesting that the Earth was created on Sunday, October 23, 4004 B.C.E. He didn’t even come up with the idea of selection pressures, per se—he got that from an economist, Thomas Malthus, who suggested that human populations tended to outgrow their available food sources and suffer famines as a result.

No, what offended some of Darwin’s early readers was that his vision of the universe counted humans as just another animal, rather than God’s special creation. Accepting evolution meant having “an ape for a grandfather,” as one observer put it. From the start, Darwin understood the political and religious implications of this, and he knew that advancing the notion publicly would make him a controversial figure. His own wife, Emma, was a devout Christian; some of his friends and colleagues were too.

After returning from the Galápagos, he spent more than two decades noodling in his “transmutation notebooks” without having the courage to expose his ideas, and his evidence, to universal scrutiny. In 1844, he wrote to his friend Joseph Hooker: “At last gleams of light have come, & I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” It is like confessing a murder. Another decade-plus passed before he was driven into print by the unwelcome discovery that another scientist, Alfred Russel Wallace, had independently arrived at the same conclusion.

The publication of Origin, in 1859, gave everyone in Victorian polite society the opportunity to have an argument that had been brewing for many years. Soon after its release, Darwin’s critics and defenders clashed in a public debate that pitted the fierce Darwinian Thomas Henry Huxley against the bishop of Oxford and the former Captain FitzRoy, who preferred to believe that the fossils they had seen together in Patagonia had been deposited there by the biblical flood. (Darwin was too anxious and flatulent to attend himself.)

History has recorded this as a victory for the Darwinians, and the framing stuck—evolution was an uncomfortable truth promoted by working scientists and opposed by churchmen and aristocrats. Darwinism was a populist revolt, and for progressives, it also had a racial dimension. If all of humanity were descended from a common ancestor, that challenged the hierarchy of races, in which “Negros” and “savages” were deemed to be lower, less advanced species than Europeans. (Origin came out six years before America abolished slavery.)

To many of his contemporaries, Darwinism came to stand for a cold, bleak vision of the universe, what Tennyson had described as “nature, red in tooth and claw” back in the 1850s. Did everything happen for a reason, as Christian tradition had comfortingly taught, or was life a cutthroat struggle for survival? Echoes of the Malthus text that Darwin drew on had also made it into Charles Dickens’s 1843 novella, A Christmas Carol, in which the miser Scrooge has no sympathy for anyone who will not go to a workhouse. “If they would rather die,” he tells two men collecting for the poor, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”

For Darwin, so much time spent contemplating the natural world subtly changed his attitude toward it. In later life, he was no longer the young man who boasted that killing his first snipe had left him so excited “that I had much difficulty in reloading my gun from the trembling of my hands.” On returning to England, he was captivated by Jenny, an orangutan housed at the London Zoo that played with straw like a “silly listless child.” In 1871, his Descent of Man went further in positioning us as part of nature, rather than set above it. Even though humans had a “god-like intellect,” he wrote, “Man still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin.”

Today, the idea that animals are just like us is more apt to be considered mind-expanding than horrifying—and sometimes amusingly delightful, too. On a day trip to North Seymour, an uninhabited island next to Baltra, I watched male frigate birds puffing out their throat sacs to attract a mate. When several of them gather together in a treetop, the Galápagosians call it a “bachelor’s bar.” Asked about the parenting habits of the birds, our guide informed the woman next to me that, no, the male does not help raise the chicks, because “he is off to another lady.” In situations like this, someone will always mutter “typical” from the back.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

A male frigate bird on North Seymour Island puffs out its throat to attract a mate.

Disemboweled tortoises, stoned birds, drowned iguanas—there’s a strange irony about Darwin becoming the world’s best-known naturalist. His Beagle diaries, which amount to an animal-murder manual, have inspired subsequent generations to keep as many animals alive as they can. Then again, that is the power of seeing ourselves as part of the great chain of creation—and seeing that chain as easily disrupted rather than divinely ordained.

Just outside Puerto Ayora lies the Charles Darwin Research Station, which supports the many scientists who make a pilgrimage to these islands. Its executive director is Rakan Zahawi, a restoration ecologist who grew up on another island chain, Hawaii, and accessorizes his khaki field uniform with armfuls of silver and beaded bracelets. His special enthusiasm is scalesia, a group of shrubs descended from the same family as sunflowers. Here in the Galápagos, without competition from trees, the plants grow up to 60 feet tall. Although Darwin did not know it, the genus’s 15 species are—like the finches—examples of adaptive radiation: One common ancestor produced many variants, reflecting their specific circumstances.

Now, though, the scalesia forests are under threat from the invasive Asian blackberry, Rubus niveus, which was introduced to the islands in the 1960s. The thick vegetation created by the interloper “comes up to the height of this table or even more,” Zahawi told me, gesturing a few feet off the floor, “and blocks out sunlight at the ground level.” The scalesia seeds germinate but cannot grow. The institute’s scientists have studied the blackberry for decades, trying to devise a way to repel it. “The simplest intervention is you take a machete out,” Zahawi said.

But that is hard to scale up across thousands of square miles, in remote conditions, so the institute is looking at a technique called “biocontrol”—disrupting the life cycle of an invasive species with another organism, countering its competitive advantage. For the blackberry, that might be a fungus. A similar problem is presented by Philornis downsi, another invasive species, “which we call the avian vampire fly,” Zahawi explained, “because part of its life cycle requires a blood meal to complete.” That blood often comes from baby birds; too many parasites can kill every fledgling in the nest. The foundation has collaborated with more than two dozen institutions over more than a decade to crack this puzzle, and one possible solution is to introduce a parasitic wasp to eat the parasitic fly. (Perhaps they’ll die.) What Darwin might make of this effort—deliberately trying to restore the flora and fauna of the Beagle era—I couldn’t begin to imagine. But I had a sense that he would welcome the humility: Biocontrol is treated with caution because scientists recognize the dangers of further disrupting the ecosystem, as the early settlers of the Galápagos did with their pigs, dogs, and cats.

The research institute is also the final resting place of Lonesome George, the giant tortoise that has become an icon for conservation efforts—an endling, the last of the Pinta Island subspecies Chelonoidis abingdonii. He was rescued in 1971, and scientists kept hoping to discover a mate—or even a friend—for him. But after a few years, it became obvious that George had been condemned to perpetual bachelorhood by the feral goats introduced to Pinta by fishermen in the 1950s. When George died, his 40-inch shell—curved upward at the front—and leathery skin were sent to a taxidermist, before being returned to a display case in the forest, preserved “in a temperature-controlled box, like Lenin,” as a friend once described it to me. The tortoise’s bones are stored in the institute’s indoor collection.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

The bones of Lonesome George, a giant tortoise that died in 2012, at more than 100 years old

The guide to this scientific charnel house was Andrea Carvajal Román, an enthusiastic entomologist who, in observance of the no-shoes rule in the storage facility, was wearing a pair of slippers with the slogan I LOVE BOOBIES. The insect collection alone numbers more than 75,000 specimens. Upstairs, in the bird-and-reptile section, Carvajal Román pulled out drawer after drawer of wonders: five dead penguins, lined up like a serial killer’s victims; a plethora of blue-footed boobies, to illustrate that their aquamarine pigment does not survive taxidermy. And, yes, a white drawer labeled SOLITARIO GEORGE. I asked to hold his vertebrae and leg bones, which weighed as much as a medium-size dog; earlier, I had seen the inside of a tortoise shell and marveled at how the pelvis and ribs were fused to the carapace. (I had imagined a big, wrinkly sock floating freely inside the shell.)

[From the June 2012 issue: X. J. Kennedy’s poem “Lonesome George”]

After four decades in captivity, George died in 2012, at more than 100 years old. If Darwin had landed on Pinta, he might have eaten George’s uncle or aunt.

As we waited to board our return flight at the Baltra airstrip, the guy in front of me stopped to photograph one last land iguana, which was coolly surveying the runway. Haven’t you seen enough wildlife by now? I briefly wondered, before catching myself. Of course not. How could you ever see enough of this?

After Darwin returned to England, in 1836, he took the next mail coach home and never left the country again. But he never stopped looking, paying attention, collecting. Back in Kent, he spent eight years dissecting barnacles, one of the least-prepossessing animals in the world, after becoming obsessed with a particular parasitic species he’d found off the coast of Chile. (He nicknamed it “Mr. Arthrobalanus.”)

Darwin was never happier than when he was engaged in direct observation, writing to a friend that, after years spent recording his geological findings, “it is delightful to use one’s eyes and fingers again.” But there was another reason to lavish so much care on barnacles—and on the pigeons that he bred in a loft at his home. He knew that a theory was nothing without evidence, and that gathering examples of natural (and, in the case of the pigeons, artificial) selection was crucial. He wanted his idea of “modification” to be bulletproof. He reclassified the world’s barnacles from scratch, exploring their differences, and he proved to his own satisfaction that domestic pigeons were all descended from rock doves.

One of Darwin’s many admirable qualities is that all of this came at a cost, not just to his health, but to the operation of his mind—as he was poignantly aware. By the end of his life, he had lost his taste for poetry, even Shakespeare, and listening to music just made him think about work again. His brain had become, he noted in his autobiography, “a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts.”

To me, this is Darwin’s great lesson as a writer: You are what you pay attention to. If he could live his life again, he wrote, “I would have made a rule to read some poetry & listen to some music at least once every week; for perhaps the parts of my brain now atrophied could thus have been kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, & may possibly be injurious to the intellect, & more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.” In other words, he wished he was still the young man who’d taken a pocket edition of Paradise Lost on the Beagle—just as I sometimes wish I were a little kid, enthralled by a ladybug crawling over my finger.

Will Matsuda for The Atlantic

Sunset at the Charles Darwin Research Station

Travel Notes

Semilla Verde, Santa Cruz

The spendiest hotel on Santa Cruz is Finch Bay, a four-star dazzler with a spa and direct beach access. For a third of the price, however, you can stay at Semilla Verde, up in the highlands, which has giant tortoises roaming freely on the grounds. The staff cooks a communal meal each night, timed for whenever you return from your daily boat trip, allowing you to trade stories of your best sightings with other guests. My top-floor room had views on three sides, across the treetops and down to the sea, making it a spectacular aerie from which to observe the regular thunderstorms that mark the rainy season. I spent a few happy moments before breakfast on my final day—smothered in bug spray, sweating like a Trump nominee at a Senate confirmation hearing—just hanging out with a tortoise down at the pond.

Via a Baltra Km 12, 200350 Puerto Ayora, Ecuador

Darwin’s Arch (RIP)

Charles Darwin got his name on a lot of stuff—not just animals, but places: the city of Darwin, Australia; Darwin Channel, Mount Darwin, and Darwin Sound in Patagonia; and Port Darwin in the Falkland Islands, among many others. In the Galápagos, the naturalist lent his name to Darwin’s Arch, a much-photographed rock formation just off Darwin Island, one of the most remote spots in the archipelago, 100 miles northwest of the main cluster of landmasses. The arch collapsed from natural erosion in 2021 and is now two pillars, but it remains one of the liveliest diving spots in the Galápagos. The spot is reachable only by live-aboard cruises.

Darwin (formerly Culpepper) Island, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

A Murderous History on Floreana

Back in 1931, The Atlantic published three articles by a Nietzsche-obsessed German nudist, Dr. Friedrich Ritter, who had decided to live off the grid on the uninhabited Floreana Island with his former patient Dore Strauch. “From all I could learn, the conditions of soil and climate were such that we could raise enough food for two people—and little more,” he wrote. “That was just what we wanted; only enough for two meant no neighbors.” Unfortunately, their idyll was disturbed, first by another European couple, Heinz and Margret Wittmer, and then by a self-styled baroness and two male companions. None of these people got along. One day, the baroness and half the harem vanished, never to be seen again. Eight months later, Ritter died from apparent poisoning. Had murder come to paradise? No one knows for sure. The Wittmers survived, though, and their descendants run a guesthouse on Floreana, which has a grisly 3.8 rating on Tripadvisor.

Wittmer Lodge, Playa Negra, 200101, Puerto Velazco Ibarra, Ecuador

The Finches’ Paradise

The island of Daphne Major is what’s known as a “tuff crater,” a collapsed cone of volcanic ash. There are no trees and (usually) no people. Any boat tour heading north out of Santa Cruz will pass it, but access is almost entirely restricted to scientists. In 1973, a British couple arrived for what was supposed to be a two-year study of the island’s finches, but Peter and Rosemary Grant—now both nearly 90 and professors emeriti at Princeton—ended up collecting data for decades. They watched as changing weather conditions favored birds with different types of beaks. Darwin thought in eons, but the Grants discovered that sometimes natural selection could happen very quickly indeed. A 1994 book about them, Jonathan Weiner’s The Beak of the Finch, won a Pulitzer Prize for nonfiction.

Daphne Major, Galápagos Islands, Ecuador

Drinking Canelazo

After 17 hours of travel from London, I arrived at the airport hotel in the Ecuadoran capital of Quito giddy with fatigue, along with a thumping headache. Assuming that the problem was dehydration, I poured myself a glass of canelazo, a free drink on offer in the hotel lobby. It was delicious, a warm blend of cinnamon and citrus, with soothing caramel tones provided by panela, unrefined cane sugar. What a delicious fruit cup, I thought, helping myself to a second glass. I woke at 1 a.m. with the sensation of a railway spike being driven through my eyeball. What makes canelazo so warming is aguardiente, a strong clear liquor also made from cane sugar. Lesson learned: Never trust a fruit cup. It was delicious, though.

Wyndham Quito Airport, Parroquia Tababela SN Via A Yaruqui, 170183 Quito, Ecuador

This article appears in the August 2026 print edition with the headline “Paradise Revisited.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

The Butterfly Longevity Diet

2026-06-16T11:00:00-04:00

For most butterfly species, an adult’s life is brief and—with all due respect to butterflies—unextraordinary. After emerging from its chrysalis, a butterfly will stretch its new wings and set off in search of nectar and sex, spending the rest of its days flitting among flowers, mates, and spots to lay eggs. Within a few weeks, it’ll be dead.

Not so for Heliconius butterflies. Adults in this genus can survive for many months after metamorphosizing, which ranks them among the longest-lived butterflies ever documented. In one case, scientists observed a Heliconius species in a butterfly house living close to a year—25 times longer than relatives in a similar genus. From the human perspective, that’s the rough equivalent of another great-ape species surviving for more than a millennium.

Through their final moments, too, these butterflies maintain an unusual vivacity. In experiments, aged Heliconius feed, flap, and lay eggs just as vigorously as their younger peers; even their muscle strength doesn’t measurably deteriorate, according to a new paper, published today in Nature Communications, from Jessica Foley, a researcher at Tufts University studying aging, and her colleagues. Foley has seen Heliconius butterflies zooming around their cage all day, only to find them dead come nightfall. “I not sure how they’re declining,” or really if they are at all, she told me. The butterflies seem to defy the typical process of aging.

Other long-lived animals have evolved strategies to minimize or counteract life’s wear and tear. Naked mole rats and bowhead whales are particularly good at repairing damage to their DNA; elephants have extra cancer-suppressing genes; bats limit the buildup of cellular waste in their body both by tamping down potentially damaging immune responses and by slowing their metabolism to a near-halt during hibernation. Researchers are still working out Heliconius butterflies’ secret, but they do know that the insects have a very unusual diet: As adults, they supplement sugary nectar with hearty pollen, chock full of fats and amino acids.

[Read: Bats could hold the secret to better, longer human life]

How exactly Heliconius manages to unlock those nutrients is still mysterious. “No other butterfly does it,” Stephen Montgomery, a biologist at the University of Bristol and one of the paper’s authors, told me. Other animals can crush the ultra-tough shells of pollen grains with teeth, jaws, or other similar body parts; butterflies have only a proboscis, a flexible, strawlike structure usually reserved for sipping liquid. Heliconius butterflies do devote an enormous amount of time and resources to finding and processing pollen. The parts of their brain dedicated to learning and memory are much bigger than those of other butterflies, which may help them repeatedly return to the same caches. They’ll then collect pollen on their proboscis and slowly furl and unfurl their mouth parts like a paper party horn—maybe rubbing the grains against one another until they fracture, or relying on special enzymes in their saliva for help—sometimes for hours at a time, then slurp the resulting slurry.

The butterflies’ devotion to this special longevity diet pays off. When the researchers deprived Heliconius butterflies of pollen, the insects’ lifespan dropped by about 25 percent, and they more quickly lost weight as they aged. Those butterflies were also weaker than their pollen-fed kin. But gorging on pollen alone wasn’t enough to lengthen a life. The researchers also fed pollen to a close relative of Heliconius, called Dryas, by spiking their sugar water with it; Dryas typically live for just a few weeks after metamorphosizing, and the pollen didn’t change that. The Dryas butterflies also continued to lose weight and strength as they aged, no matter what they ate. And although Heliconius butterflies fared more poorly when their pollen was taken away, they still lived longer than their Dryas kin.

Outside of their particular pollen habit, the butterflies spend their extra time on the same basic routine until the day they die: They wake early in the morning and forage; after a brief respite to digest, they mate, perhaps lay eggs, and maybe feed once again, then turn in alongside the setting sun. “It’s a great life,” Montgomery said. Compared with many other butterflies, Heliconius butterflies tend to lay relatively few eggs each day—on the order of 10—for months; meanwhile, shorter-lived Dryas butterflies can lay dozens a day. That carries some risk for Heliconius. An adult might, say, get eaten or crushed before maxing out its reproductive potential. But focusing on relatively few offspring at a time may allow Heliconius females to be choosier about where they lay their eggs, increasing the chances that caterpillars will survive, André Freitas, a butterfly biologist at the University of Campinas, in Brazil, who wasn’t involved in the new research, told me.

[Read: The DNA fix for aging]

As they age, Heliconius butterflies remain full of vigor and vim, but no creature can forestall damage indefinitely. The oldest butterflies do “look a bit rubbish,” Montgomery said. The scales on their wings fleck off and can’t be replaced. Their vibrant appendages become tattered and dull. This kind of weathering may be what kills some Heliconius individuals, whose wings get so banged up or shredded that they can no longer fly or escape predation, Montgomery said. At the same time, Freitas has seen Heliconius butterflies “with broken wings, almost colorless, still flying and sometimes still laying eggs.” In general, Foley said, she isn’t sure what ultimately kills these hardy butterflies. They seem to manage to live every day as they did their previous one, up until the moment they die.

Why the Media Keep Quoting the Same Climate Scientist

2026-06-11T10:13:13-04:00

The success of the climatologist Daniel Swain rests on a simple foundation: His specialty has long been how global climate change messes with local weather. Many climatologists focus on subjects that seem arcane: mean global temperatures registered in Celsius, radiative forcing, the reflectivity of clouds. Swain, in contrast, talks in plain English—constantly, really, in interviews with CBS, NBC, the Weather Channel, and The Washington Post, as well as on his own blog and YouTube channel, Weather West—about the wind and the rain and the temperature outside, and how they are influenced by the larger forces of the atmosphere.

“He uses language that is both precise and deep but very accessible, and that’s why you see him quoted everywhere,” Mark Hertsgaard, a longtime climate journalist who is the executive director of Covering Climate Now, told me. According to Swain’s own tally, he does more than 200 media interviews a year; he is, in other words, about as omnipresent as a weather guy can be in people’s lives. A climate scientist at the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources’ research unit, Swain is not exactly a “weather influencer,” that breed of streamer who delivers breathless updates about the next big storm. But he has become one of the country’s most influential explainers of the weather’s relationship to the climate; you’ve almost certainly heard from him if you consume just a scintilla of climate-related news.

In January 2025, for instance, he was getting ready to publish a major paper as easterly winds were picking up across a Southern California landscape that was packed with grass after the previous, wet winter and worrisomely dry after a largely rainless autumn. The paper illustrated this phenomenon, which Swain had dubbed “hydro-climate whiplash.” The term describes how global warming will make extreme swings between above-average rainfall and drought more common, leading to damaging floods and destructive wildfires. Swain and his co-authors had taken several years to put the paper together, and as the publication date approached, Swain told the staff at Nature Reviews Earth and Environment that the very thing it warned about was set to come true. “It was a ‘Well, shit’ moment,” Swain told me recently. Two days before the paper’s release, in what Swain called an “eerie coincidence,” fires broke out in the hills around Los Angeles.

As the devastating fires blazed through neighborhoods, Swain hosted nine livestreams on his YouTube channel in the space of a week. Some of them lasted for hours. His phone and email inbox lit up with messages from reporters looking for someone who could coherently explain the disaster. NPR was calling; the Los Angeles Times wanted a quote; The Guardian was asking for a quick comment; CNN needed to know when he might be available. When he wasn’t on-screen talking to his YouTube followers, he was speaking with a journalist. “I did essentially continuous interviews—like, eight or 12 a day—for that period,” he said.

Swain, who is 37, grew up in Marin County, California, a place known more for its mild Mediterranean climate than for weather extremes. Despite (or perhaps because of) the Bay Area’s often-bland weather, he was fascinated with meteorology from an early age. He has a particularly strong memory of a winter storm in December 1995—“a violent, a truly violent storm, wind gusts over 100 miles an hour, really severe thunderstorms, continuous lightning”—that busted the windows of his home and knocked out the power for days.

He was hooked. On family vacations to the Sierra Nevada, he would bring along a battery-powered NOAA Weather Radio so that he could track any thunderstorm activity in the mountains; he was still in high school when he launched his Weather West blog.

Twenty years later, the site is still run on WordPress—it has a distinctly Web 1.0 aesthetic—and has 2 million unique visitors a year, he said. His stream-of-consciousness posts about the intersection of weather and climate change routinely garner thousands of comments. On his livestreams—which he professorially calls “office hours”—he presents a boyish persona with an academic’s seriousness, his cerebral monologues punctuated at times with a droll humor. “What happens in the tropical Pacific doesn’t stay in the tropical Pacific,” he said in a recent livestream about an impending Super El Niño.

Swain went to UC Davis to study atmospheric science, figuring he’d end up as a professional forecaster for the National Weather Service. He made his first splash in climate-change communication a few years later, while working on his Ph.D. at Stanford. He was writing a blog post about the drought then gripping California and searching for a snappy way of describing the high-pressure system that seemed permanently parked over the West Coast when he came up with the phrase ridiculously resilient ridge. The media ate it up, and his phone hasn’t stopped ringing since.

In hindsight, Swain admits that the alliteration was a bit corny. But corny can be catchy. “I just sort of embraced it because I’m like, Well, certainly more people are going to see this interview than read the blog,” he said.

Swain’s instinct for simple but resonant phrasing is a big part of his appeal. Take his research on hydro-climate whiplash (which the media has since shortened to “climate whiplash”). In a 2018 paper for Nature Climate Change about rainfall, he floated the term precipitation whiplash. According to Swain, both the editor and the peer reviewer nixed it on the grounds that it was “too visceral.” Swain thought, “What do you mean? That’s the whole point. I’m trying to be kinetic.” The published title used the more beige precipitation volatility. (Bronwyn Wake, the chief editor of Nature Climate Change, wrote in an email that such decisions about terminology “are guided by the goal of ensuring clarity, scientific rigour, and consistency with established terminology in the field.”)

Noah Diffenbaugh, a Stanford climatologist who served as Swain’s Ph.D. adviser, told me that Swain’s explanatory skills spring from his bona fides as a working climatologist. Some precincts of the ivory tower are suspicious of academics who become public figures. But Swain’s minor celebrity appears to have sparked mostly admiration from his colleagues. If anything, he’s become an object of emulation for up-and-coming climatologists, a model for how to balance deep research with public communication. “I’ll hear from prospective Ph.D. students, and when they tell me what their long-term goal is, they’ll say, ‘I really want a job like Daniel Swain has,’” Diffenbaugh said.

There are, of course, other climatologists who have risen to public prominence. Often, their climate communication tips into political advocacy, their urgency fueled by what they know about the state of the atmosphere. The scientist James Hansen, for example, has long been involved with climate-advocacy organizations; Katharine Hayhoe, a professor at Texas Tech and a sought-after public speaker, is now the chief scientist for the Nature Conservancy. Swain, in contrast, sticks mostly to the weather. His goal is to stay in science-explainer mode.

Still, that hasn’t insulated him from the uglier parts of the climate debate. He told me that he receives “an exceptionally large volume of unsolicited feedback” via email and social media, as well as letters, parcels, and calls to his personal phone. Occasionally, someone confronts him in person. Much of what he hears is positive or at least neutral, he said, but some of it is threatening. People write to him about how he and other meteorologists control the weather, make chemtrails, or work for either Big Green or Big Oil. At this point, he said, he is most disturbed by the messages from people who seem to think that climate scientists are trying to mislead the public for financial gain or at the behest of some foreign power: “It’s tragic that so many people right now genuinely believe that a lot of the folks working hard to improve the way things are in the world—sometimes at considerable personal expense—are trying to do the opposite.”

Swain’s own hard work obscures another personal difficulty: the pain and fatigue he deals with from an autoinflammatory condition called Yao syndrome. Although he has found a way to manage it thanks to “some pretty heavy-duty medication,” he is still frequently knocked out, he said: “It kind of feels like you have the flu several times a month, just forever.”

Living with a rare genetic disease has strongly influenced how Swain thinks about extreme events such as the January 2025 fires. He sometimes shares a slide during public presentations that shows a generic bell curve with a red arrow at the tail end of the distribution that reads, Me, apparently!—an illustration of his whole life being an outlier. “A lot of people will say, ‘A 98 percent chance something won’t happen? That’s great; we can ignore it.’ For me, a 1 percent chance is not really that low,” he said. “It makes me think differently about how we should be thinking about risk and unlikely-but-really-high-consequence events. That’s my experience—my whole life is an unlikely-but-high-consequence event.”

Swain’s health issues have also informed the way he talks about how society might try to manage climate change. He wants people to understand that terrible events do happen but that, in many cases, it’s possible to affect the odds or mitigate the consequences. He calls this “second-order optimism”—the ability to think about big, bad things but not get overwhelmed by them. He has warned us time and again, in simple language that is hard to misunderstand, that a storm is coming, and he still believes that we can do something about it. This sort of partly cloudy outlook is probably the best we can expect of a climatologist in the global-warming era.

*Illustration sources: Kevin Carter / Getty; Dan Kitwood / Getty; Jilmarie Stephens

American Grass Could Ruin the World Cup

2026-06-10T11:17:13-04:00

Every time the United States hosts a major international soccer tournament, the world’s finest players unite to complain about our god-awful fields. At the 2024 Copa América, the Argentine goalkeeper Emi Martínez—widely regarded as one of the best in the world—described the field in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium as both “a trampoline” and “a disaster.” Last year, Chelsea’s captain, Reece James, who played a Club World Cup match in New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium, called the pitch bad for the joints and the quality of gameplay. This year, MetLife Stadium will host the single biggest match in soccer: the World Cup final.

The United States’ poor record on grass has prompted fans and soccer analysts alike to speculate that turf will be the villain of this year’s tournament. FIFA doesn’t allow professional games it hosts to be played on fully synthetic surfaces, but the United States’ largest stadiums are mostly designed with artificial turf for NFL games. So, shortly after Canada, Mexico, and the U.S. won their joint bid to host the 2026 World Cup, FIFA began approaching grass researchers, who have since received millions of dollars to figure out how to turn American football stadiums into, well, football stadiums. You might call this effort the World Cup of grass science.

Slight differences in turf can make a major difference in elite play. Grass that’s even half a centimeter too long can generate unexpected friction that throws off the timing of passes. Grass cut too short can shift the game to a frantic pace. Last year, during a FIFA game held in Cincinnati, the strange physics of the turf contributed to a goal so absurd that analysts said it looked like “a glitch from a 2002 video game.” (A FIFA spokesperson told me in an email that the pitches for the 2026 World Cup represent a “significant evolution” over last year’s Club World Cup.) John Goff, who studies the physics of soccer at the University of Puget Sound, told me that if the ground is too hard, cleats can’t penetrate its surface properly and players slip. But if it’s too soft, players can’t get quick feedback through their cleats. They might lurch their body before their feet actually move, risking shin splints and knee injuries.

[From the November 1884 issue: Grass: a rumination]

In countries that really care about soccer, stadiums are open-air cathedrals to the sport. The grass is fed by the sun, its engineering so involved that the author of FIFA’s pitch-maintenance manual called the United Kingdom “the Silicon Valley of turf” in 2021. Stadiums close for part of the offseason so that the grass can be reseeded. Many stadiums were built from scratch to FIFA specifications for prior World Cups, including Qatar’s, Brazil’s, and South Africa’s. But in the U.S., few major stadiums are dedicated year-round to soccer, and no new ones are being built. Even our NFL stadiums are all-season, multipurpose entertainment receptacles. For example, Hard Rock Stadium, home to the Miami Dolphins, hosted two Shakira concerts days before a Club World Cup game last year. Machines were still installing the field 15 hours before kickoff.

This model means that many North American stadiums have had only months, or even days, to get their grass ready for the World Cup. In Houston, officials refused FIFA’s request that they move the city’s annual rodeo, which takes place on dirt and ended in late March; grass installation at NRG Stadium finished just last week. The first World Cup game there will take place on Sunday. (“FIFA is confident that the extended pitch construction timelines and dedicated exclusive-use periods leading up to the tournament will ensure the consistent delivery of high-quality surfaces across both stadiums and training sites,” the spokesperson said.)

The size and geographic distribution of this World Cup also present unique challenges. The tournament features 40 more games than usual and will be played in 16 stadiums that span nine different climate zones. “The grass in Toronto won’t grow in Miami,” John Sorochan, a professor of turfgrass science at the University of Tennessee, told me. The tournament’s first whistle will sound at 7,300 feet in Mexico City—so a team in his lab studied how to manage turf at altitude. Plus, five of the stadiums are at least partially covered, so they need a grass blend that can grow happily indoors for up to eight weeks.

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To conjure a FIFA-grade stadium in mere days, American groundskeepers have historically relied on grass grown using an almost exclusively American tactic, called sod-on-plastic. Seeds are sprinkled onto a two-inch-deep layer of sand laid out on a plastic tarp, which forces the sod’s root system to grow sideways instead of down. Farmers slice the sod into strips about four feet wide, roll it up like a rug, and transport it in trucks kept at about 35 degrees Fahrenheit. In many cases, the grass is then rolled out onto a new layer of sand over the NFL’s artificial turf. Since the roots remain intact and start growing downward once installed on deeper sand, the green carpet is almost instantly play-ready—or so the theory goes.

But the execution has had issues. Too much rain, and sod-on-plastic won’t establish strong enough roots. Too shallow a sand layer can create the trampoline effect that Martínez complained about. During the 2024 Copa América, Weston McKennie, a midfielder on the U.S. men’s national team, described sod-on-plastic fields as excessively patchy. “It breaks up every step you take,” he told The Athletic. “It’s frustrating.”

The labs that FIFA partnered with have been working to give sod-on-plastic more structural integrity for this World Cup. Jackie Guevara, an assistant professor at Michigan State University, spent much of her Ph.D. growing plots of experimental grass blends, then ripping them apart. She found that seeding Kentucky bluegrass (common on sports fields) with roughly one-sixth perennial ryegrass (not so much) made the bluegrass much stronger. Most of the World Cup stadiums will now use Guevara’s blend, grown by sod farmers across the country under very specific conditions. Meanwhile, in Sorochan’s lab, a research technician developed and iterated on a machine that simulates the pressure an average World Cup player wearing an Adidas cleat would exert on a pitch, and the feedback they’d get. Sorochan’s team used the device, now deployed in every World Cup stadium, to measure playability at 77 high-traffic points on the pitches.

To improve stability, the grass for the World Cup has been studded with plastic fibers, sewn in about every five millimeters by a machine that looks like a Zamboni. Giant hot-pink LED grow lights from the Netherlands have been installed in stadiums with full or partial roofs across North America. They will be deployed between matches, speeding recovery on the parts of the pitch that will be covered when entertainers including Katy Perry perform throughout the tournament. Each stadium also has a bespoke irrigation approach and maintenance schedule. In MetLife Stadium, Ava Veith, a plant-science graduate student at Penn State, is on her hands and knees each day measuring the grass with a three-meter straight edge, documenting each time she hits a divot. The weather in New Jersey was oddly cold last week, so the grass got covered with a blanket each night. In Tennessee, researchers are still conducting last-minute research, Sorochan said: “What if there’s a power outage for two days and we couldn’t get the lights on the field? What’s gonna happen to the grass?”

Retrofitting the stadiums hasn’t been cheap. The Dallas Cowboys’ home stadium is almost 20 meters narrower than a World Cup pitch should be, so the luxury front-row seats had to be removed to make way for corner kicks. Yet installing natural turf has still been the Dallas host committee’s single largest expense.

[Read: The unhappy hosts of the World Cup]

After the World Cup ends, most cities will immediately rip up their gigantic new lawns. Perhaps FIFA will sell glass-encased tufts of it to fans, like it did after the Club World Cup last year. Vancouver might try to salvage its portion for a park. But ultimately, the grass scientists will have won if, after the turf’s short and expensive life, no one remembers it.

The Ordinary Miracle of Existing

2026-06-02T12:56:56-04:00

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On the northwestern shore of Africa, some 150 miles south of the Canary Islands, the coastline slightly bulges in a pimple known as Cape Bojador. For Europeans in the early 15th century, Cape Bojador marked the boundary between the known and the unknown. North of the cape was civilization and the cities of light. South were the mystical lands of Africa and the Mare Tenebrosum, the “Sea of Darkness.” Ancient notions, dating back to Ptolemy, claimed that Africa was surrounded by boiling seas filled with giant creatures, whirlpools, and perpetual darkness. No sailor had ventured south of Cape Bojador and returned.

The challenge was taken up by Prince Henry of Portugal. Between 1424 and 1434, he sent 14 ship expeditions to round the perilous cape. None succeeded. All turned back from fear or foul weather. Yet the unknown beckoned.

Undeterred, Henry dispatched the explorer Gils Eannes for a 15th attempt. This time, Henry’s man succeeded in rounding the cape, giving it a wide berth and steering far to the west. As he turned south, Eannes looked back over his shoulder and was astonished to realize that he had left the dreaded cape behind. On his next trip, the explorer landed in a bay many miles to the south. There, he saw footprints of humans, camels …

Prince Henry the Navigator was a pioneer in what historians have called the Age of Discovery. His triumph allowed improved mapmaking, new understanding of coastlines and ocean currents, and the opening of new trade routes. Most important, Prince Henry enlarged our perspective. He enlarged our concept of the world—not only of geography but also of our place in new lands and seas, our possibilities. Indeed, one can view all of human history (our art, our science, our exploration, our invention) as a gradual increase in perspective, of ourselves and of the world.

Perspective begins at a young age. Toddlers first begin using words such as me and mine around the age of 2, showing an awareness of themselves as separate from the outside world. Shortly thereafter, conscious exploration and discovery begins: Parents and caretakers at first, then the nursery, then the house, then the neighborhood. Little by little, we humans gain an understanding of what the world contains. We socialize, we read, we travel, we experience. But, in hindsight, our perspective remains highly limited. A significant minority of Americans—more than 20 percent—have never traveled abroad. More than half of us live in the same state where we were born.

[Read: The algorithm that makes preschoolers obsessed with YouTube]

Over the span of less than a century, discoveries in astronomy and biology have expanded our perspective almost beyond comprehension, if not as individuals, then at least as a human civilization. We have learned that our solar system sits on the outskirts of an enormous galaxy of a hundred billion stars called the Milky Way. And the size of our galaxy is practically inconceivable. It takes a light ray, which travels at a speed of 186,000 miles a second, 100,000 years to cross from one end of the Milky Way to the other. Other galaxies—many other galaxies—exist too. The mind reels from trying to imagine such expanse. Think of an ant in New York City contemplating a trip to San Francisco. Our houses, our roads and bridges, our cities are a speck in the cosmos, a dust mote, one grain of sand on a vast beach.

We have also enlarged our concept of time in the cosmos. We have learned that the universe began about 14 billion years ago. That’s about one hundred million human lifetimes ago. Just as our entire planet is a speck in the cosmos, our individual lives are fleeting moments in the grand unfolding of time. And, as the Buddhists always emphasize, everything is impermanent. Everything passes away. The ancient cities of Sumer and Egypt are long gone, as are the temples of ancient Greece and Rome. Tenochtitlán, the capital of the Aztec empire; Port Royal of Jamaica; the English coastal village of Dunwich. All gone. All that we see around us today will one day be gone. Against this backdrop of history, on Earth and in the cosmos, our individual lives are brief flickers in the chasms of time.

It is hard to imagine such a cavernous theater we find ourselves in. But it is even more difficult to fathom how unique each of us is, how improbable, how lucky to be alive at all. Advances in biology have shown that the instructions for creating each individual human being are encoded in a set of molecules called DNA. Far more possible arrangements of human DNA exist than there are atoms in the observable universe—each arrangement corresponding to a different human being. One of those many possible arrangements is each of us.

Or consider the process of conception, when a single egg unites with a single sperm. Each human female has about 300,000 eggs during the fertile period of her life. Each male ejaculation has about 300 million sperm. Thus each conception contains about a hundred thousand billion different possible combinations of DNA. In other words, there are a hundred thousand billion unique and different human beings that could result from each procreation event. Only one of those possible combinations led to each of you reading this article at this moment. Here’s a way to visualize that extremely tiny fraction. If you took a very long ruler that stretched from here to the planet Pluto, one inch of that distance would be you. The rest of the distance would be other possible human beings that could have been, but never were. Each of us has won a lottery with a hundred thousand billion different players.

Being alive at all is the most extraordinary stroke of good luck we will ever experience. Yet it is the easiest to overlook, to take for granted. We wake up in the morning, have our coffee, make breakfast, send the kids off to school, go to our jobs, move through our routines, worry about deadlines, check off items on our to-do list. And we forget that beneath all of it lies something profoundly rare: existence itself. The simple fact that we are here, conscious and aware, is so unlikely that it borders on the miraculous. Because we experience that miracle every day, we treat it as ordinary, even guaranteed, mostly unnoticed at all. We postpone joy, assuming there will always be more time. We don’t see the beauty in small moments. We simply go about the business of life, without taking a second to notice life itself. In making this comment, I am aware that in the time-driven, frantic pace of our world today, many people do not have the luxury of pausing to take stock of such moments.

There is a little more to the story. There will never be another you in the future of the universe. (Some apologies are due to Buddhists and Hindus, who believe in rebirth, but even the reborn individual is not the same.) From the distant past, billions of years ago, to the distant future, billions of years ahead, the universe will never see another one of you.

It is almost impossible to wrap our heads around such things. We could not have had this grand perspective as recently as a century ago. And we have found it not through Prince Henry’s ships but through our laboratories, our telescopes, and our minds. So the question is: What are we to make of the fantastically improbable fact of our existence, our moment of life? Or, as Mary Oliver asks in the last lines of her poem “The Summer Day”: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

[Read: ‘Attention is the beginning of devotion’]

I can speak only for myself. First of all, gratitude ought to replace entitlement. Gratitude not only for my great good fortune in a long chain of accidents, but gratitude to the individual human beings who have helped me along the way. Some years ago, I went to a Buddhist meditation retreat and learned about the concept of the “retinue,” a constellation of mentors that one imagines hovering nearby. Attempting to put this beautiful idea into practice, I collected the photographs of a couple dozen people who have guided me in my life—parents, high-school teachers, college teachers, music teachers, rabbis, colleagues. Some had already passed away. I made a poster of the images and hung it above my desk. Each day, I look up at the poster and give gratitude. It seems like a simple thing, but the gesture helps me position myself in the world, helps me slow down and take a moment to acknowledge my good fortune as the recipient of caring attention and the good fortune of simply being alive.

Two millennia ago, the Roman emperor and philosopher Marcus Aurelius understood the fragility of life when he wrote in his Meditations: “Whatever you do, whatever you project, so do and so project as one who may at this very moment depart out of this life.” With my one brief moment, I can try to make the world a slightly better place. Gratitude without action is empty. The mentors hovering above my desk all gave me something. Although I cannot return the favor to each of them individually, I can return it to the world. I can attempt to pass on the kindness and good faith and caring.

There is an irony here. As each of us dwindles in size by comparison to the cosmic stretches of space and of time, our individual lives, our improbable existence becomes more and more important. With the understanding of my great good fortune, I also feel a sense of responsibility. But to whom, or to what, am I responsible? Not the universe, which is without mind. And not the huge number of human beings who could have been but never were. I can hardly be responsible to people who do not exist. I believe it is a responsibility to myself—to not waste my precious life. In the immense hallways of time and of space, out of the fantastic number of potential lives and the infinite chain of accidents that led to this moment, I am here. I breathe. I see. I feel. I experience this grand spectacle of a cosmos I find myself in. That is not a thing to be wasted, or left unobserved.

Early in the 20th century, the Alsatian philosopher and polymath Albert Schweitzer introduced a concept he called Ehrfurcht vor dem Leben, which translates to “Reverence for Life.” According to Schweitzer’s autobiography, one day in 1915, while traveling on a river in Africa, the 40-year-old witnessed, all at once, the sun shimmering on the water, the background of tropical forest, and a herd of hippopotamuses basking on the banks of the river. Suddenly, he felt “the reverence for life.” Later, Schweitzer put it this way: “I am life that wills to live in the midst of other life that wills to live.”

The Trump Administration Is Done With Social Science

2026-05-30T09:10:05-04:00

In the summer of 1945, four days after Japan’s official surrender and a few weeks into the Atomic Age, President Harry Truman began floating the idea of an agency guided by “the free intelligence of the scientist” that would fund investigations into how the world works. As of 2024, the agency that Truman had envisioned, the National Science Foundation, supplied about one in every 10 federal research dollars going to U.S. universities. Its Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences division funds roughly 63 percent of academic research in the psychological and social sciences, according to the NSF.

The Trump administration now seems determined to shrink the NSF—and to quash its ability to fund social sciences. The Trump administration has proposed cutting the agency’s budget in half and eliminating the SBE division altogether in the next fiscal year. Congress would need to approve those changes, and it may not: Last year, when President Trump also requested drastic cuts to the NSF, Congress rejected them and warned the White House against cutting federal research dollars for any one division by more than 5 percent. But already, change has come. On April 24, Trump fired all 22 members of the NSF’s board, which must approve any major changes at the agency. They have not been replaced. (The NSF did not respond to requests for comment.)

The outlook is especially grim for social sciences. In response to a detailed list of questions, the White House spokesperson Kush Desai told me in an email that the administration “is committed to cementing America’s dominance in cutting-edge technologies of the future—innovation that is being driven by advancements in hard sciences, not in ideologically-driven ‘social sciences.’” In an all-staff meeting last month, a group of NSF leaders said that the SBE division would shut down. According to two current agency employees (who, like other government employees I spoke with for this article, requested anonymity out of fear of retribution), the leaders also announced at the meeting that experts who review grant proposals related to the social sciences would be reassigned to different departments within the agency. Some staff have already moved, the two employees said.

Staff at the NSF learned last month, too, that the SBE division’s research budget for the current fiscal year is two-thirds smaller than last year’s, several current employees told me—and last year, funding was already at historic lows. Even that money seems not to have been passed on to researchers. By late May in a normal year, the NSF would give out about 250 social-science awards. This year, it has distributed five, according to Grant Witness, an effort that tracks federal research spending.

Social scientists have been alarmed about the National Science Foundation for months. Beginning last year, the agency ended its support for doctoral-dissertation research in archaeology, linguistics, geography, and anthropology. That funding had been a lifeline in some fields. “Now it’s much less clear how independent research by early-career anthropologists can be supported,” a current NSF employee told me. Last month, 160 behavioral and cognitive scientists attended a Zoom meeting to discuss how they might save the SBE division. (Among the academics whose fields are under threat, behavioral and cognitive researchers may have the least reason to worry: Trump’s budget request calls for sparing some funding for this type of research, possibly because of its utility in developing AI.) National organizations that represent NSF-funded academics communicated the “devastating implications” of Trump’s proposed changes to the agency’s board—which soon would cease to exist. “This is their only place in the federal government to get support,” Antoinette WinklerPrins, a geographer and senior official at the SBE division until last April, told me. “If that money is gone, that is just devastating to those sciences.”

If the National Science Foundation does stop funding social scientists, experts told me, our 5,000-foot-view of American life will get foggier. The NSF, through the SBE division, is the primary funder of the “big three” social-science surveys, which have enabled the work of several generations of academics, economists, and policy wonks. The surveys are run out of university centers, but the agency helps offset the massive cost of executing them, including by funding database upkeep, compensation for thousands of participants, and the surveys’ ground game. (All three still conduct face-to-face interviews.) At times, support for these surveys has accounted for roughly one-sixth of the NSF’s entire social-science budget; according to two NSF employees I spoke with, there has been no indication that the surveys would be insulated from larger cuts.

One of these projects is the world’s longest-running survey of families, which allows for the study of economic mobility and the long-term effects of child poverty; at least nine federal agencies rely on its data. Another is the General Social Survey, which asks about virtually every aspect of domestic life, including respondents’ pets, cultural values, credit history, and general satisfaction. Without federal money supporting this data collection and the SBE division’s other research, the American Political Science Association said in a statement last month, academics’ ability to understand shifts in American attitudes would “undoubtedly weaken.” The last survey is the American National Election Studies database, which has tracked American voting behavior since 1948. In the 1990s, it showed a growing mistrust of government and animosity between parties, which helped birth the study of political polarization. (Polarization is one of many “DEI” words on a list that Senator Ted Cruz’s office compiled last year to flag NSF proposals for extra scrutiny, two former agency employees told me.)

The NSF also has already effectively blocked grant making in at least one area that the foundation has historically supported: science and technology studies, an interdisciplinary field that examines issues in how research is done and the societal ramifications of new technologies. The field tends to engage with thorny social and political questions using theoretical frameworks such as feminism and structural inequality—both words on Cruz’s DEI list. Usually, outside advisers review grant proposals at an annual spring meeting, but those advisers have been told that this year’s meeting for science and technology studies has been canceled, according to an email from NSF leadership that I reviewed and that contains no explanation for the decision. “There’s no indication another meeting will be held,” Martha Kenney, one of the field’s reviewers, told me. “That was the thing that was the most alarming.” Without that meeting, grants in the field seem to have no pathway for being funded.

The social sciences can get a bum rap for lacking rigor, and for being frivolous. Accurately measuring emotions and attitudes is notoriously difficult, and many studies in these fields cannot be reliably replicated. Accordingly, debates have raged for decades about whether the federal government has any business funding such squishy lines of inquiry. The Truman White House initially was in favor of the NSF funding the social sciences, but backed down after conservatives objected. In 1975, William Proxmire, a Democratic senator with a zeal for accounting, gave out his inaugural Golden Fleece award—recognizing the most useless government-supported research—to the NSF for funding a study on why people fall in love. Several years later, President Ronald Reagan proposed cutting social-science funding at the agency by 75 percent.

But Reagan’s position softened. Jolted by the proposed cuts, social scientists made the case to Congress that understanding how society functions is good for the economy (which was then in a recession). Lobbyists used social-science research to advance anti-tax policies. Ultimately, government funding for social sciences doubled during the Reagan years.

Some analysts at conservative think tanks are making similar arguments in favor of the social sciences today, despite a general furor among Republicans for mocking ridiculous-sounding research. Michael Strain, the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, recently wrote on X that “if you care about giving businesses and policymakers the information they need to understand the world,” you should care about the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences division staying. Joshua Katz, a senior fellow at the institute who has helped review NSF grant proposals in linguistics, thinks the federal government should continue to fund good social-science research even if it lacks immediate practical benefits. “There are actually quite a lot of sociologists I like, which is not the sort of thing that you would perhaps expect to hear from somebody like me,” Katz, who has critiqued “hyper-woke ” excesses in academia, told me. “A civilized society,” in his view, should earmark at least some money to understanding the human past through fields such as archaeology and anthropology.

Plenty of NSF-funded social science has turned out to have concrete benefits. In the 1990s, NSF funded economics research that was then used to create a far more efficient national kidney-donor-matching system. U.S. families now save more for retirement because an NSF-funded study by a tax researcher discovered the right tactics to nudge them. Even the work of the much-ridiculed love researchers has remained relevant. Twenty years after being awarded the Golden Fleece, one came up with the idea of emotional contagion, a theory for how exposure to others’ feelings influences our own. (They never received NSF funding again; one of the researchers credits the loss of her dog, marriage, car, and shot at an early retirement to the Fleece.) That concept has since been used to study the impact of social media on mental health—something that the Trump administration has said requires urgent attention.

A coalition of about 40 organizations representing hard-science disciplines, led by the Computing Research Association, recently told Congress, too, that losing the SBE division could lead to “long-lasting, potentially permanent” damage to national research as a whole. The stickiest barriers to progress in areas that the administration wants to prioritize—AI, biotechnology—are “fundamentally human,” the organizations argued. The SBE division often funds tacking a social scientist onto interdisciplinary research projects, Sara Kiesler, a former SBE-division head whose own research has focused on how the adoption of email changed the workplace, told me. And because other NSF divisions would still need to understand how humans interact with technical systems, they might essentially create their own in-house SBE divisions anyway. Whether this administration recognizes it or not, rigorously studying how our society works is possible, and helpful.