Science | The Atlantic

The AI Pandemic Isn’t On Its Way

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Zoos Are Doubling Down on Very Unnatural Habitats

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

Photographs and video by Cody O’Loughlin

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

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

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

A gibbon inspects a motion-sensitive bubble machine.

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

A black bear at Stone Zoo, in Massachusetts

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

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

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

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

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

Cody O’Loughlin for The Atlantic

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

The Dark Side of Mindfulness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lauren Lancaster for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lauren Lancaster for The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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The Missing Ingredient of Modern Life

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Atlantic Reads: The Small Stuff with Ian Bogost]

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Netherlands Will Never Be Rid of Louisiana Crawfish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Growing Lawlessness in California’s Forests

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Way of Seeing Alien Worlds

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

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

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

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

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

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

Coronagraph delivery and unboxing (Chris Gunn / NASA)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

America’s Rural Lands Are Burning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody Knows What Ultra-Processed Food Is

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spain Is Ready for an Extraordinary Run of Eclipses

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Human-Origin Story Is Being Radically Revised

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What if Freud Was Right?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Read: Panic attacks and the meaning of life]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[From the November 1962 issue: Jung on Freud]

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

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

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

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

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

Climate Change Is Moving Mountains

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Return of the Monarch

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

Photographs and Videos by Ana Hop

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.