Following a chaotic race for Wisconsin governor, moderate Democrat David Crowley defeated progressive Francesca Hong on Tuesday night. 

Although Hong held a convincing lead in many of Tuesday’s polls, she lost by about 4,000 votes—a narrow 0.5 percentage point. As someone presenting herself as a member of the Democratic Socialists of America and without endorsements from key progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.)—who notably distanced herself from more progressive policies on Sunday, Hong came across as an outsider candidate who gained popularity over time.

Critics on the right, and some Democrats, criticized Hong for past social media remarks, such as a deleted post to “Cancel Thanksgiving” and calls for “defunding the police as a first step towards abolishing the police”. If she won, she would have become the first democratic socialist governor in US history. 

On the establishment Democrats’ side, multiple candidates who were once considered front-runners withdrew—including Sara Rodriguez, Wisconsin’s current lieutenant governor, who suspended her campaign in mid-July after she fired her campaign manager for inflating financial reports. Even the victor, Crowley, re-entered the race shortly after Rodriguez’s departure (he initially suspended his campaign in early July due in part to poor polling).

It was a messier race than others where progressives won, such as Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate primary victory in Michigan, and may provide fewer clear takeaways about the future of progressives running as Democrats.

A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Like many offbeat ideas, this one originated in a bar.

I was drinking with a fellow author, and we were bemoaning the future of writing in a world of artificial intelligence. We nervously pondered how much of what we writers do could be replicated now or in the near future by a chatbot. We assured ourselves that our work—researching and investigating and then composing articles and books on complicated topics, which present fresh material, compelling context, and sharp analysis in (we hope) an engaging manner—cannot be supplanted by a machine. At least not yet. But what of other fare? Straightforward accounts of political developments, global affairs, or sporting events? Recipe books? Or histories and biographies? Short stories or novels? Film scripts?

What could AI produce? Generative artificial intelligence has already invaded—or infected—the world of fan fiction. I have friends who have used AI with their kids to create children’s books. Iranian meme-makers have deployed it to concoct slick Lego-style videos deriding Donald Trump.

The issue is not the ability of a chatbot to churn out algorithmically determined masterpieces. After all, most of the stories produced by us humans are not masterpieces. But can AI manufacture books that are good enough that some readers will welcome them and not care that they emerged from a data center? Perhaps even pay for such fare? Might many writers soon face an extinction-level event?

Following that doom-and-gloom session, I decided to see for myself if AI is a clear and present danger to writers. I asked Claude, Anthropic’s AI chatbot, to generate a novel. It did, and I’ll cut to the chase: The novel isn’t so bad.

Let me note that this exercise deliberately sidesteps the many profound concerns about AI: the economic dislocation it could cause, the environmental impacts and community costs of data centers, the expropriation of work produced by authors, journalists, and other humans. It focuses only on what AI might mean for the future of writing and other creative endeavors. And don’t forget that the reason an AI chatbot can kick out a novel is because its Big Tech master—without seeking permission or offering compensation—hoovered up a gajillion books, articles, news stories, and other material created by people. (The Center for Investigative Reporting, the parent company of Mother Jones, has sued OpenAI for copyright violations. OpenAI denies the allegations.)

I began with this prompt:

A struggling writer who has had five novels rejected turns to an AI chatbot to write a novel. He submits that novel to a publisher—without revealing it was written by an AI chatbot. It is accepted and goes on to become a bestseller. No one knows it was written by AI. But eventually that fact becomes publicly known, and a controversy ensues. The writer then writes a book about that experience. And it becomes a bestseller.

That’s it. That was all I gave Claude. (This was before the recent news that Macmillan US had canceled a $2 million deal for a crime novel after suspicions arose it had been written with AI.)

Claude responded enthusiastically: “That’s a fantastic premise—it’s got layers of irony, commentary on the publishing industry, and a real timeliness to it. Let me write this for you.”

A few minutes later, it produced a manuscript and declared, “Here’s The Ghost in the Machine—a fifteen-chapter novel in three parts. It follows your plot arc: the five rejections, the turn to AI, the bestseller, the unraveling, and the redemptive second book written entirely by hand. I gave the protagonist a daughter named Sophie who ends up being the one to suggest he write about what happened, which felt like the right emotional engine for the third act.”

I took a glance at the file without reading it. The supposed novel was 6,000 words—much too short. I pointed that out, and Claude agreed: “This comes in closer to a novella. A proper novel would be 70,000–90,000 words.” It asked if it should expand the manuscript—was it a manuscript?—into a “full-length novel…with real scenes built out, secondary characters developed…and the kind of granular detail that makes fiction feel lived-in.” I replied, “Please do that.” As if I were talking to a person.

Several minutes later, Claude presented me with “a complete novel at approximately 48,000 words across 41 chapters in three parts.” It explained, “That puts it in solid novella-to-short-novel territory—comparable to The Great Gatsby (47,000) or Fahrenheit 451 (46,000). To reach a full 80,000-word novel, each part would need roughly another 10,000 words of additional scenes and subplots.” The short version, I figured, would suffice for this experiment.

I began reading. The protagonist of The Ghost in the Machine is Ethan Moss, a 41-year-old failed novelist who lives in an apartment in Astoria, Queens. He’s divorced from Dana, a lawyer, who resides in suburban New Jersey with their nine-year-old daughter, Sophie. Ethan has a cat named Bellow (get it?); his closest friend is Marco Bellini, a successful novelist who recently struck it big with a book called The Sauce, which is about “a chef who returns to his grandmother’s village in Calabria and discovers a family secret involving the local Mafia, a contested recipe for ragu, and a seventy-year-old love triangle that has shaped the village’s social dynamics in ways that no one is willing to discuss.”

Claude describes in detail the novels that Ethan has written and that publishers have turned down. There was Meridian (a campus novel about a plagiarism scandal at a New England liberal arts college); Night Market (a psychological thriller about an American woman who disappears in Bangkok); The Fallback Position (a satirical novel about a man who fakes his own death to escape his debts); and Border Country (a multi-generational saga set along the Texas-Mexico border).

With the rejection letter for his fifth novel, The Contrarian—“While the prose demonstrates competence and occasional flair, the manuscript ultimately lacks the narrative urgency and emotional specificity that would allow us to champion it in today’s marketplace”—Ethan, who has spent nearly two decades in the literary world as an MFA grad and adjunct professor, attending writers’ workshops, obtaining grants, and demonstrating potential without achieving success, hits a wall.

He is stuck. Marco tells him his writing is sharp but “there’s something holding you back.” That reminds Ethan of when a writing instructor observed that he had the instincts of a writer but lacked “the emotional necessity.” Clearly, he must change something.

He lies in bed one night and wonders if AI could be the answer. Here Claude makes what we would call—if we were talking about a human author—an interesting choice. Ethan doesn’t turn to the machine to produce a novel (as I did). Instead, he contemplates employing AI as a “creative partner—a sounding board, a first-draft engine, a way to break through the wall that had been standing between him and a publishable novel.” He then reflexively rejects the idea: “This is cheating…You are a writer. Writers write. They do not outsource the writing to a machine and then put their name on it.” Writing, he once said at a conference, is “not a product. Writing is a process.” A human being struggling with a blank page—or blank screen.

But Ethan has lost that struggle. He opens his laptop, goes to an AI site, and types: “I want to write a novel. Literary fiction. Contemporary setting. A story about a man who discovers that his recently deceased father had been living a secret life—a second family in another city. The son goes to that city to find the other family and has to reconcile two versions of the father he thought he knew.”

The chatbot kicks out a few pages of “competent” prose outlining the story. Nothing better than what Ethan could have produced on his own. Phew, he thinks at first. But then he realizes that within this response are several good ideas: structural suggestions, a few nifty metaphors. He asks the chatbot, “What would make this story feel urgent? What’s the emotional engine? What does the son want that he can’t admit he wants?” The reply is long and dry. But there’s a notion that catches his eye: “The son doesn’t want to understand his father. He wants to understand why his father chose the other family. Which means the real question of the novel is: Am I the life my father wanted, or the life he was stuck with?”

“That was it,” Ethan thinks. “That was the book.”

He begins writing. Each morning, he spends several hours writing, as he always did. In the afternoons, he turns to AI to draft different versions of scenes and alternative versions of conversations. He poses questions about structure to the chatbot, which serves up various options. He doesn’t incorporate the material straight into his draft. But AI helps create a map for him. As Claude “writes,” the prose “was always his. But the ideas, the structural decisions, the emotional insights that organized individual scenes and, cumulatively, the book itself—these were collaborations. He was the writer, but he was not writing alone.”

This goes on for months, and Ethan produces The Other Side of the Door. Reviewing his AI-assisted work, he concludes, “The book was good. It was not merely good in the careful, defensive way that his previous novels had been good—technically proficient, intellectually respectable, praised in workshops and rejected by editors. It was good in a different way. It was alive. It was, by a considerable margin, the best thing Ethan had ever written.” He is particularly proud of his creation of Dorothy, an elderly Black woman “who offered, in a series of long, digressive, heartbreaking monologues, a perspective on love and duplicity and the American family that was unlike anything Ethan had ever written.” AI had nothing to do with Dorothy. She was all his.

You know what happens next.

Ethan sells the book for a sizable advance. The novel is hailed as his breakthrough. He is feted by the literary world. It becomes a bestseller. Readers are moved by the book and send him letters saying it has helped them understand their own lives and families. There’s a demand for his next book. He has trouble firing that up. He tells no one about his reliance on AI. The guilt builds—and builds. A computer scientist releases a program that evaluates writing for possible AI involvement. His book registers as possibly including AI-produced content. A perceptive data journalist finds a nugget of a clue in the text, digs deeper, confronts Ethan, who can no longer bear the burden of his secret and confesses.

A scandal erupts, as critics and commentators in the Atlantic, the New York Times, and Harper’s and across the podosphere debate what is writing, what is creativity. Was this cheating or merely using an available tool? If Ethan’s novel connected with a reader and evoked emotions, did it matter how it was birthed? As Claude puts it, “Was a tear cried over a human-machine collaboration less real than a tear cried over a purely human creation?”

But Ethan is tarnished, dropped by his agent and publishing house, and scorned by the lit crowd. He loses the movie deal for the book. Worse, he must explain to his daughter he was dishonest.

Yet he manages to crawl out of this wreckage and writes—in longhand on legal pads—a novel titled The Honest Liar, based on his own rise and fall. It’s a hit—because I told Claude to make it a hit—and that, too, triggers another public hoo-ha concerning redemption and what one pundit calls “the death of honesty.” Ethan takes his lumps but prevails and carries on as a writer. I did ask for a happy ending.

You can read the novel—if we can call it that—yourself. Other than dealing with a few clunky formatting issues, I changed nothing.

When I noted above that the book was not so bad, I said that because as I read The Ghost in the Machine, I wanted to keep reading. The plot is taut and, though I knew what was coming, the journey to the narrative guideposts I requested is a good ride, with a few surprises along the way. The discovery of Ethan’s secret is well designed.

But there are obvious flaws. Scenes are not fully realized; chapters are too short, with the action overly compacted. There’s not enough dialogue. More could be done with the secondary characters. The word “particular” is overused. A few chronological inconsistencies distract. The final stretch is confusing in spots. Perhaps if Claude had expanded this draft, some of these errors would have been remedied.

Other problems, perhaps not. The writing is too reliant on similes. There are similes everywhere, too often distracting from the flow of the story like a fly buzzing around your office while you’re trying to write a newsletter. “The lie did not disappear,” Claude observes. “It waited, patient and implacable, like the tide.”

The manuscript is also chock-full of cutesy and unnecessary observations. For instance, Claude tells us that at writers’ parties attendees should avoid the kitchen, where the conversations “tend to become competitive,” and keep to the living room, where they “tend to become confessional, which is more interesting and less exhausting.” (Wry reflections on the publishing industry are sprinkled throughout.) And there’s way too much of the darn cat in the story. Rewriting and a round or two of editing could easily turn this into a much better novel. And if a writer were to follow Ethan’s example and use this text as raw material but rework the prose and take the story and characters further, he or she could produce a good book.

But credit where credit is due. There are several well-executed passages, such as when Ethan is confronted by the data journalist and spills the beans. That scene has emotional depth and intensity and certainly deserves the expansion I denied Claude.

After reading The Ghost in the Machine, I asked Claude to evaluate its ability to generate a novel. It replied:

What I can genuinely do: Sustain plot, character, and theme across a full-length manuscript; hold structural coherence over dozens of chapters; write prose that’s competent and sometimes better than competent. The Ethan Moss book is proof of concept—it has an actual arc, recurring motifs, and a thematic spine (“the difficulty is the point”) that pays off.

Where the limits are: Length has to be built in sessions, not one pass—I can’t produce 90,000 polished words in a single response, so a real novel is an iterative project: outline, chapter batches, revision passes. And the prose tends toward a certain smoothness; the idiosyncratic, risky sentence-level choices that distinguish a memorable novel from a readable one usually come from a human editor pushing back—which, ironically, is more or less the premise of the Ethan Moss book.

According to Claude, AI needs a human to craft a good book. For the time being, that is.

Claude created a decent yarn, one that leads the reader to ponder the creativity of writing, the meaning and impact of art, and the new role of AI in all this. It’s not mind-blowing, but it is thought-provoking.

Worried about AI? About the battle between humans and the machines? Claude ends up coming out on the side of us meat puppets. At the end of the story, assessing his travails and triumphs, Ethan concludes that “writing is not just about the product. It’s about the process. And the process is where the meaning lives. The process is where you discover what you have to say, which is different from what you want to say or what you planned to say. The machine gave me what I wanted. But it took away what I needed—which was the struggle, the failure, the difficulty. The difficulty is where the writer becomes the writer. Without it, you’re just a person with nice sentences.”

Thus, a machine can’t truly be a writer.

But isn’t this judgment exactly what a clever AI chatbot would deliver to us humans?

This experiment did not convince me that Ethan is right. The Ghost in the Machine was a fun read for me. Maybe because I was biased and impressed by the novelty. But it made clear that not soon but right now AI can concoct content that can somewhat compete with what we mere mortals produce. We now live in a world in which you can decide you want to read a novel about a teacher in 1930s Germany who tries to save her favorite student from becoming a member of the Nazi Party and—poof—you have it. Crave a new James Bond story—how the British spy battles a Russian oligarch who’s scheming to take over the internet? You can get that too. (If there’s a copyright issue, call him James Broad.)

Rework Shakespeare? How about a play in which they decide not to wait for Godot? A movie script for The Godfather Part IV? Eventually AI will be able to turn any script into video. Imagine Jerry Seinfeld hanging with Lucy and Ethel. (Maybe Jerry Steinfeld.)

I’m assuming this AI content will be cheap—at least, cheaper than buying a hardcover book or paying $22 to see The Odyssey. The rise of the digital information ecosystem has already demonstrated it’s difficult for content that’s expensive to produce (say, journalism) to compete with slop available for free. There will be human-made books, movies, television shows, and music that stand out as accomplishments of imagination, innovation, and ingenuity. But the tide of AI-generated material is rising fast. Most of it won’t be great works of art. The threat is that they will be sufficient.

I suppose one could argue the positive side is that AI will turn everyone into a content creator. But worriers are right to fear that AI could substantially change—perhaps subvert—high and low culture, while diminishing writing and analytical skills. (See Bret Stephens’ recent screed against AI in which he proclaims that “it’s mentally enfeebling” and leading to “an ever-dumber world.”) And if everyone is reading their own personalized, choose-your-own-plot novels and watching their own custom-made television shows, we will have even fewer common cultural touchstones than currently exist.

At the end of the manuscript, Claude added this:

Author’s note: This novel was written entirely by a human being, which is either a point of pride or a statement of the obvious, depending on your perspective. It was also written about a human being who was, in many ways, the author’s worst self—the self that wants the shortcut, that fears the struggle, that would rather be successful than honest. If you recognized that self, you are not alone. If you didn’t, you are either very fortunate or not paying attention.

That was obviously a lie. But what was the point of this note? Was it meant to be ironic? Engaging pieces of art often spur questions without clear answers or prompt interpretations that are not definitive. Was Claude aiming at that? I decided not to ask it.

Lettuce contaminated with cyclospora. Cruise ship passengers contracting a deadly form of hantavirus. Legionnaires’ disease (yet again) in big cities. RFK Jr. refusing any responsibility for measles outbreaks. That’s just a brief list of public health stories in America this summer. And we haven’t even mentioned Dr. Anthony Fauci being held in contempt of Congress during a hostile Congressional hearing over the Covid-19 pandemic.

Public health stories are everywhere right now. So that’s why we invited epidemiologist and science communicator Jessica Malaty Rivera back onto the show. Malaty Rivera fills a vital role through her work translating medical breakthroughs and sorting through conflicting health advice. It’s a role she says the public needs now more than ever.

“I think we are in a long-haul journey of repairing the fractures that have happened in public trust in science and public trust in public health,” Malaty Rivera tells our host Al Letson. “And if the Dems or if any party wants to get back on track with science, they need people to make science make sense.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Malaty Rivera talks through the ongoing efforts to link vaccines and autism at the highest levels of the Trump administration, which produce we should (and shouldn’t) be eating right now, and the many ways the federal government’s response to public health crises today are driven by politics rather than science.

Find More To The Story on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeartRadio, Pandora, or your favorite podcast app, and don’t forget to subscribe.

Since President Donald Trump returned to the White House, he’s been vowing to stamp out gender-affirming medical care—what his administration terms “sex-rejecting procedures”—for young people diagnosed with gender dysphoria. Now, his administration is specifically going after the health care of trans kids from low-income families. On Tuesday, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services released a final rule forbidding Medicaid and the Children’s Health Insurance Program from paying for puberty blockers and hormone therapy to treat gender dysphoria, as well as the surgeries provided in rare cases to older teens.

The Medicaid part of the rule applies to patients under age 18, while the CHIP provision applies to patients under 19. The rule will take effect in October, with one exception: For patients already on cross-sex hormones, coverage for those medications will continue for an additional six months to allow for a “limited tapering period,” according to the final rule.

A second rule—the so-called “nuclear weapon” designed to force hospitals nationwide to stop providing gender-affirming care for trans kids, or lose all Medicaid and Medicare funding for all their patients—is now scheduled to be finalized by December.

Gender-affirming medical treatments for minors remain supported by virtually all leading US medical associations. But the Trump administration, no stranger to “alternative facts,” commissioned its own report criticizing trans youth healthcare last year—a project spearheaded by conservative activist Leor Sapir and authored by outspoken critics of gender-affirming care for minors. Their report, published by the Department of Health and Human Services, “misrepresents the current medical consensus and fails to reflect the realities of pediatric care,” American Academy of Pediatrics president Susan Kressly said at the time. Yet the final Medicaid and CHIP rule issued Tuesday heavily cites the Sapir team’s report as evidence for why the new restrictions on coverage are justified.

In announcing the rule, CMS administrator Mehmet Oz denied the demonstrated benefits of gender-affirming care for trans kids’ mental health. “Children deserve our protection, not experimental interventions that pose serious risks and convey no proven benefits,” Oz told Fox News in an exclusive on Tuesday announcing the final rule. “By cutting off federal funds for these sex-rejecting procedures, we’re following the science, saving taxpayer dollars, and, most importantly, protecting children from potentially irreversible harm so they can truly flourish.”

“We know what this is—a dangerous and unnecessary attempt to prevent transgender and nonbinary young people from accessing the best-practice health care they need to lead healthy and happy lives,” said Rodrigo Heng-Lehtinen, of the LGBTQ youth suicide-prevention group the Trevor Project, in a statement on Tuesday. “The Trevor Project’s research shows that access to this care is associated with significantly lower rates of depression and suicide risk among transgender and nonbinary young people who receive it.”

Twenty-six states have outlawed gender-affirming treatments for minors since 2022, in response to a coordinated campaign by religious-right and anti-LGBTQ activists. Since Trump returned to office and started threatening providers of transgender healthcare with defunding and prosecution, dozens of hospitals in both Democratic and Republican-led states have preemptively ended gender-affirming treatments to minors. Since then, families of young people diagnosed with gender dysphoria have been forced to travel long distances—or uproot their lives entirely—to get their kids to providers still offering treatment. As a result, the attacks on trans youth healthcare already hit poorer families the hardest.

Nearly 35,000 public comments were received on the new Medicaid and CHIP rule, with over 90 percent of commenters opposing it. As I reported in April, many of them were the parents of transgender children, who pleaded with the government to not proceed:

For a teenager struggling with gender dysphoria, a break in treatment could mean their body proceeds with the puberty of their birth sex, with potentially severe mental health consequences. Blair’s mom worried about her son losing not just his medication, but also the counseling, regular blood tests, and side-effect monitoring he received from his team at the MetroHealth clinic. So after taking some time to think, she wrote a comment on Regulations.gov, beseeching the government to stay out of her family’s personal business.

“I have learned that my original vision of what my child’s life would look like is very different from reality—and yet, this version is just as beautiful, if not more so,” she wrote. “That is why I find it so hard to understand why the government would try to interfere in such personal and medically complex matters.”

She’s not the only parent pleading with the Department of Health and Human Services not to cut off their child’s treatment. “Every decision I have made as a parent is to keep my kid healthy and safe,” wrote one of the 30,000-some public commenters on the proposed regulation. “In an emerging culture where parents’ choice is so important to school and child development policies, why is my choice to consult with my child’s medical team and make informed decisions being taken away and infringed on?”

LGBTQ rights organizations have said they intend to take the issue to the courts. “The rule announced today will face legal challenge,” GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders announced in a statement Tuesday after the final rule was released.

“Despite this being called a ‘final rule,’ we have time to fight back,” Heng-Lehtinen added. “Nothing will change overnight—and this rule would not ban this care nationally, nor would it ban hospitals from providing these services. We will continue working closely with our partners and allies across the country to stop this dangerous rule, and to create a country where all young people can receive the best-practice health care they need.”

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez invoked the term “Woke 1.0” during her Sunday interview on ABC News’ This Week to refer to rhetoric many progressive circles used during some of the social movements of the late 2010s—but instead of engaging with them in a 2026 context, she dismissed them as ideas of the past.

If you missed it, the New York congresswoman backed away from some of her previously-stated positions—such as defunding the police—in her interview with ABC News’ Jonathan Karl. She said that many lawmakers and activists only used that rhetoric during the pandemic. “There was a huge opening of the Overton Window” to try to “entertain any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place.” She cited New York City council member Chi Ossé posting on X in May that “Woke 1 was crazyyyy” with some levity, seemingly brushing off the ideas as just part of the past. 

“Rhetoric in that time is not rhetoric that we would use today,” she continued, pointing to other progressives who have recently walked back remarks deemed by more moderate Democrats and conservatives as radical, such as Wisconsin gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong.

Ocasio-Cortez, who is no longer endorsed by the Democratic Socialists of America’s National Political Committee, told Karl that she doesn’t support many of the positions on the DSA’s policy platform, ideas that Republicans have targeted in the lead-up to the midterms. AOC seems to be trying to come across as more presentable in front of a broader swath of the electorate.

While this may be valuable in future elections, it raises the question of what it says to those who elected Ocasio-Cortez and are still confronting the struggle of the late 2010s and previous decades. One can win votes without laughing off progressive discussions. What if the rhetoric of six years ago evolved into a more widespread, substantial reckoning? In 2026, it’s not enough to repeat the same rhetoric—let alone signal toward going backward. 

AOC conflates “entertain[ing] any and every policy that was going to get us to a better place” with vital work from people who are fed up with the status quo. After all, these policy discussions are what helped get her elected in the first place.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Supreme Court justice Samuel Alito gained up to $2.9 million from his fossil fuel interests between 2005 and 2024, a new review of financial disclosures shows.

The analysis from the nonprofit advocacy group and judicial watchdog Court Accountability, shared exclusively with the Guardian, found that even at the lowest range of estimates, Alito gained almost $400,000 from his oil and gas interests since being tapped for the high court by George W. Bush in 2005.

The findings come as the Supreme Court prepares to take up a case in which the oil companies Suncor Energy and Exxon asked the justices to find that federal law prevents subnational governments from filing lawsuits against fossil fuel producers for the climate-warming effects of their products.

The Supreme Court said this month it will hear oral arguments in the case on 5 October, the opening day of its new term. The Trump administration, which is siding with the oil companies, has asked for 10 minutes of argument time. Court Accountability and other groups have called for a Senate committee to investigate Alito, the sole Supreme Court justice with holdings in energy companies, and said he should recuse himself.

He and the court rejected those calls.

Supreme Court ethics rules focus specifically on investments in companies named in court cases. In May, a Supreme Court spokesperson told NBC News that Alito is not required to recuse himself from the Suncor lawsuit as his holdings do not include the companies directly named in the case, Suncor and ExxonMobil.

But Lisa Graves, co-founder of Court Accountability who authored the new analysis, said Alito’s oil-tied wealth provides grounds to question whether Alito can impartially weigh in on cases affecting the entire fossil fuel sector.

“You might have real appreciation for how that industry has helped make it possible for you to perhaps buy a second home on the water, or live a [certain] lifestyle,” she said.

The Guardian has contacted the Supreme Court and Alito for comment.

Alito’s financial disclosures show his reported assets—excluding his home and other personal property—grew from about $1.1 million in 2005 to between $3.4 million and $8.4 million by 2024. Federal financial disclosures report assets in broad value ranges.

During that period, his oil and gas holdings made him between $390,000 and $2.9 million, Court Accountability’s review shows. Most of those gains came from a property in Grady county, Oklahoma, in which Alito’s wife, Martha-Ann, holds a mineral interest.

Graves said Alito may have undervalued the worth of this property, because in 2017, a relative of the Alito family sold an adjacent plot for $800,000. “It’s reasonable to assume that means the value of the Alito property would have increased to around $800,000,” said Graves, but he continued to report its value at $100,000 to $250,000.

The justice reported two windfalls from rental income on the property in 2019 and 2022, with gains of between $100,000 and $1 million in both years.

Alito’s wife agreed to lease the plot of land to the private oil and gas company Citizen Energy in 2022, the Intercept first reported. In 2024, that company was acquired for more than $2 billion by Validus Energy, in which hedge fund Elliott Investment Management holds a majority stake. Elliott was founded by Paul Singer, who ProPublica found had paid for a private jet ride Alito took in 2008 that the justice did not disclose. Alito later defended the trip, saying ethics rules did not require its disclosure.

No reporting or public documents indicate that a well has been drilled on the property, but a lease agreement shows the owners would have received three-sixteenths of the money from any oil extracted from the land.

“It raises concerns because you have a sitting justice who is hoping to get richer based on oil exploration of this land,” said Graves.

Another large portion of Alito’s fossil fuel gains came through inheritance. In 2004, the justice disclosed that he obtained a bequest of ExxonMobil stock valued between $100,000 and $250,000.

The Exxon stock was the highest value of any single liquid investment listed by Alito “by a good margin,” Graves said.

Alito appears to have since sold his stock in ExxonMobil, as indicated by the Supreme Court’s May statement to NBC News. “But my view is that you shouldn’t be able to sell a stock just so you can sit on a case, even though that company’s profits have benefited you,” said Graves.

Alito is the only justice who has not yet submitted his 2025 disclosure document. The filing was due on 15 May. Justices can obtain a 90-day extension; if Alito received one, he should file the document this Thursday. Last year, he filed his disclosure in August.

Alito has had a variety of smaller investments in more than a dozen oil firms, including ConocoPhillips and its predecessor Phillips 66, Chevron and energy infrastructure company Kinder Morgan.

“A reasonable person would think if you’re invested in the industry that could benefit from the outcome of a lawsuit, then you could personally stand to benefit from the outcome, even if you don’t hold the stock in the specific company that happens to be the named plaintiff,” said Graves.

Alito has a history of voting in favor of fossil fuel interests. In the landmark 2007 case Massachusetts v Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), he was one of four dissenting justices who argued greenhouse gas emissions could not be regulated under the Clean Air Act.

Then in June 2022, when the Supreme Court decided West Virginia v EPA, Alito joined Neil Gorsuch’s majority in arguing that the EPA lacked broad authority under the Clean Air Act to mandate a shift away from fossil fuels.

More recently, he joined the majority in two 2024 decisions that overturned the longstanding Chevron doctrine and could make it harder for agencies to defend expansive environmental regulations.

Alito has recused himself from other environmental cases. In January, he stepped away from a lawsuit focused on whether energy companies could be held responsible for Louisiana coastal degradation because he owns stock in ConocoPhillips, the parent company of a defendant in proceedings tied to the litigation.

In 2023, Alito also recused himself from considering a petition in the Suncor lawsuit, brought by the company and ExxonMobil. That request was denied.

Later in 2023, the Supreme Court adopted its first-ever formal ethics code amid a slew of scandals involving senior rightwing justices. It states that justices should recuse themselves from cases where their “impartiality might reasonably be questioned,” though it allows them to make that decision themselves.

Though Graves harshly critiqued that ethics code, saying it is “toothless” and “not worth the paper it’s written on,” she said it should in theory prevent Alito from weighing in on Suncor v Boulder in October.

“His impartiality may be reasonably questioned in terms of his affinity towards the industry that has helped build his nest egg,” she said.

“The thing that will always stay with me,” former California Rep. Katie Porter said of her harrowing experience hiding with then-colleague Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez during the January 6 attack on the Capitol. “I was saying: ‘Well, don’t worry, I’m a mom, I’m calm, I’ve got everything here we need. We could live for like a month in this office.’ And [Ocasio-Cortez] said, ‘I just hope I get to be a mom. I hope I don’t die today.'”

At the time, the remarks reflected the fear felt by two female lawmakers, as rabid men on the hunt for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi roamed the halls of Congress screaming, “Where is she? Where is she?” But when I first heard about this exchange, nearly one month after the Capitol attack, I recall being struck by how much Ocasio-Cortez’s comment echoed my own thoughts as a woman of a similar demographic: mid-30s, working, and hopeful for motherhood but unsure how it would unfold. Would it ever happen? If so, when? Have my choices hurt or helped that one outsized desire? Such questions tend to hum anxiously in the background for a woman of a certain age, in both mundane and extraordinary moments, as the one Ocasio-Cortez shared with Porter.

I thought of this anecdote again this weekend after the New York congresswoman posted a series of videos announcing that she was freezing her eggs. “This is a choice that I am making to feel more in control of my life,” Ocasio-Cortez said in one Instagram video. In another, the 36-year-old progressive filmed herself injecting the procedure’s hormone medications into her abdomen. “I think it’s important for us as leaders to have these conversations and share these processes, especially for working women across the country, and normalize them,” Ocasio-Cortez told ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday.

It was in the same interview that the progressive lawmaker made her strongest public comments yet that she was considering higher office. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” Ocasio-Cortez responded when asked if she would ever consider a presidential run. What about minority leader Sen. Chuck Schumer’s (D-N.Y.) seat? “Anything is possible at this juncture,” she replied.

When it comes to her reproductive choices, Ocasio-Cortez does not owe the public any explanations—full stop. Still, the timing of her fertility journey, specifically the way it dovetails with her intimations that she might seek higher office, has predictably inspired some petty criticisms, particularly from those on the right who disparage the disclosure of her personal decision as a calculating play for political virality. Others, like the conservative commentator Matt Walsh, appeared to assume the role of reproductive physician, arguing that at 36, she was already too old to consider having kids. “Totally backwards and ridiculous,” he wrote on social media. Then there were arguments, nearly all from men, that she should try to have kids naturally and soon—a wild claim that assumes so much of Ocasio-Cortez’s personal life.

But the most interesting responses came from the video’s unlikely supporters and defenders. “The same people who call themselves pro-family think a woman’s uterus has an expiration date they get to police,” said Newsmax political analyst Mehek Cooke, citing her own experience of having children later in life because her “body did not cooperate with her schedule.”

“If one woman wants to preserve her right to have children, which means more than having none—we should celebrate that,” Katie Miller, the right-wing podcaster and wife of Stephen Miller, wrote on X. “If she inspires other women to have babies, we should celebrate that.”

It would be shortsighted, if not downright asinine, to view Miller’s post as a kind of political evolution; she and her husband appear singularly obsessed with declining birth rates, a preoccupation that is by turns racist and hyperbolic, often blaming those rates on birth control and feminism. But in applauding Ocasio-Cortez, Miller and her ilk still revealed something significant: That at least with the issue of fertility, many are not in lockstep with staunch conservatives who see reproductive procedures like egg freezing as immoral. Indeed, they even appear to welcome more options for people struggling to have children.

Options. Aren’t they what Ocasio-Cortez may be exercising as she embarks on her fertility journey? By freezing her eggs, the congresswoman isn’t ruling out the possibility of having kids, much in the same way Ocasio-Cortez isn’t not thinking about the White House in this very moment either. In fact, it seems that for Ocasio-Cortez, the two potential futures—kids and higher office—braid together, because of course they do. That is not surprising for so many of us in the face of aging, careers, and prohibitively expensive fertility procedures. (For me, now the mother of one kid, the questions surrounding the next still loom profoundly.) Any anger from men on the right underscores how deeply ignorant they are about the acute challenges many people of reproductive age face in considering fertility and climbing professional ladders. And yes, that includes all the way up to the White House.

This story was originally published by Inside Climate News and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

When Gerard Mullin decided to train in offshore wind, he didn’t know what to expect. But on his first long-term project in Massachusetts, he immediately relished the consistency of the work, the good pay, and the novelty of laboring at sea.

“I thought it was the best thing in the world,” he said.

In his first eight weeks working offshore, Mullin made more money than he had saved in the previous five years.

But the industry was on shaky ground. Mullin had his bags packed for five weeks offshore with Empire Wind in New York when President Donald Trump’s stop-work order last year stranded him at home in Boston. Trump—who had railed against the industry in his 2024 election campaign—halted all future permitting last year and canceled 12 offshore wind leases this spring and summer. 

Thousands of workers like Mullin who were promised steady, well-paying careers in offshore wind now find themselves racing to secure the few positions left or returning to their prior work. Meanwhile, the supply chain that emerged to support offshore development has been left adrift, including in towns in need of a promised economic boost.

Those are less-discussed consequences of the political turmoil besetting the domestic industry, said Elizabeth Wilson, a professor at Dartmouth College studying offshore wind. “All of the promises of economic development that offshore wind was supposed to help support have evaporated,” Wilson said.

For Mullin, the change was shocking.

“All of a sudden, the federal government is concerned with my work, and there’s nothing I can do to change how they view it,” Mullin said. “Now there are things completely outside of my control, changing how I make a living.”

Trump has long scorned offshore wind, calling the 2012 project he unsuccessfully opposed near one of his Scottish golf courses “disgusting and inappropriate.” His administration, which has inaccurately described renewables as costly and unreliable as it tries to block them in favor of climate-altering fossil fuels, said his offshore wind policies are good for the economy and workers.

“President Trump has delivered on his popular promise to reverse the Left’s costly Green New Scam to lower prices for families and businesses and strengthen our country’s energy security,” Taylor Rogers, a White House spokeswoman, said in a statement. “By prioritizing the production of reliable, affordable, and secure energy sources, the President has restored US energy dominance—creating thousands of good-paying energy jobs across the country.”

Tim Sullivan, who was CEO of the New Jersey Economic Development Authority until December, said he can’t comprehend the White House’s logic.

“It’s the strangest thing: I’ve spent 15 or so years working in public-sector economic development; I’ve never seen people cheering for job destruction, particularly elected officials,” he said.

As a pile driver, a specialized structural laborer essential to offshore wind projects, Mullin lived and worked on a ship five weeks at a time, followed by five weeks at home with his family. It was a schedule that suited him well. 

Mullin joined offshore wind projects across Massachusetts, Virginia, and New York. His employer, an international contractor, even brought him and other members of his union across the Atlantic for a wind project off the coast of Scotland. 

Now, Mullin is back to the same type of onshore construction work he did four years ago, before he started with wind. “The writing was on the wall that this idea that I’m going to go to the same ship, five weeks on, five weeks off, steady—that just isn’t the reality anymore,” Mullin said.

Joshua Grigsby, 42, took his son to Rio de Janeiro, Disney World, and SeaWorld. Natalie MacDonald, 26, stopped living paycheck to paycheck. Others bought homes and started families.

Inside Climate News spoke with over a dozen workers and union leaders who said the financial opportunities from the nascent US offshore wind industry had been unparalleled. They saw long-term careers ahead of them. They feel that opportunity slipping through their fingers.

Anthony Hibbard was on one of the first boats that carried ironworkers to Vineyard Wind, off the coast of Massachusetts. What he found was “financial freedom,” he said, and he worked his way up to become a foreman on Coastal Virginia Offshore Wind. 

After the Trump administration’s moves to scuttle the industry, Hibbard returned to local, onshore jobs in Portland, Maine, where he earns just one-fifth of what he did offshore.

“I make enough to get by, but I like to be smart with my money, and I don’t have the scope to continue being smart with it,” Hibbard said. “It’s definitely—you can feel the difference, that’s for sure.”

The loss of offshore wind has had financial consequences for many union workers. While many were paid the same per hour as jobs they could find onshore, they could work more than double the hours, and the company covered many living expenses. Grigsby made double to triple what he did onshore.

When Zaheer Razi, 28, joined the Piledrivers Local 56 union as a commercial diver, he transitioned into offshore wind as soon as he could. The logic was that it could be the anchor for people’s careers, he said—union leaders told workers to “set your roots down,” expecting over a decade of steady work.

He’s still working on Revolution Wind near Rhode Island, but he knows it won’t last.

“I’m probably one of the few guys that’s probably going to be working till mid-August, I believe, and then it’s really going to be silent for the next two or three years,” Razi said. “It is very frustrating, but it’s out of our control. Nobody could have really predicted it, but at this point, we’re just riding it out for what we can.”

Razi’s project is one of the five major US wind farms that appear to remain on track despite the political backlash. But they are nearing completion and the permitting pipeline is all but blocked, meaning construction jobs will soon evaporate, according to multiple experts and union leaders.

Kris Ohleth, director of the Special Initiative on Offshore Wind, a US policy think tank, attributed the lack of employment prospects to the political uncertainty that has stymied investor interest.

“We’ve trained them, we’ve given them this great experience, they’re building their futures for their families, and now they have no projects to work on,” Ohleth said of the offshore wind labor force, “and that’s because of the lack of market confidence.” 

At the time of Trump’s election, the market research firm BloombergNEF forecast that the United States would build 39 gigawatts of offshore wind by 2035, enough electricity to power 13 million homes. By the end of last year, the firm had downgraded that prediction to just 6 gigawatts, according to Harrison Sholler, a wind analyst at BNEF. 

For Garrison Biel, an offshore wind diver, the industry’s decline has meant there are close to no employment opportunities left. “They’re more gigs than jobs,” Biel said. “They’re like short hitches, trying to wrap things up, tidy everything up. So I know people that are still working, but it’s not like how it was the first couple of years when it started, where that’s all you needed to do.”

He switched back to commercial diving around eight months ago because “what was available left offshore was slim pickings,” he added.

Biel said the offshore wind industry was supposed to be reliable, with guaranteed time off to make up for the long periods away from home and the weeklong, 12-hour-per-day shifts.

“Now, everybody that’s doing it, they get off the boat after working seven-twelves for a couple of weeks and they go right back to work, because they don’t know if they’re ever going to go back out on a boat again,” he said.

Grigsby was able to buy a house with his money from offshore wind. His union’s business manager, John Dunderdale, said at least a dozen other members of Piledrivers Local 56 did the same.

When these projects disappear, “you’re taking away their means of bringing back into the community,” Dunderdale said. 

“Now you have a member sitting home, collecting unemployment, because there’s no work,” he added.

Benjamin Hawkins, who lives in Whitman, Massachusetts, said he made enough to upgrade his parents’ house and enjoy a new degree of “leverage” over his life.

“It’s heartbreaking, because you wonder about what’s going to happen in the future with your money,” Hawkins said.

He added: “Offshore wind was the reason I could improve that life, so to have the president affect my life, just as an average American—it was not on my bingo card.”

Offshore wind first began edging into the US energy market in 2011, decades after it had taken off in Europe. An Obama administration study that year predicted that a vibrant offshore wind industry could help meet the nation’s renewable energy needs while investing in infrastructure and creating “thousands of construction and operational jobs.”

The first US offshore wind farm, Block Island, came online near Rhode Island in 2016, and states began offering financial incentives to drive development. The Biden administration made offshore wind a central priority in 2021, and from there, state and federal agencies geared up for a boom. The federal government sold leases to major international energy companies that began to see the US as an attractive market, centered in the Northeast, Virginia, and California.

Construction and permitting began in force not long before Trump returned to office with a promise to kill offshore wind. “That’s like somebody working on skyscrapers, and then somebody saying, ‘We’re not allowed to build any skyscrapers,’” Biel said. “It’s just a kind of crazy thing.”

No comprehensive or exact estimate of offshore wind-related jobs exists, but New Jersey’s Economic Development Authority estimated in 2022 that a typical project creates around 1,000 construction jobs per year and 100 lifetime operational jobs. 

Dunderdale said shutting down any project at that size and scale is a “huge hit,” both for the workers and their local economies.

Central to the fledgling domestic industry was the growth of training and certification programs, primarily through community colleges and unions.

Millwrights Local 1121, which operates across New England, met with developers in 2021 to start offshore wind job training, which would cost $10,000 to $20,000 per person. It was worth it, said the union’s vice president and business manager, Andy Benedetto, because they had heard there would be “years’ and years’ worth of work.” 

“We invested millions of dollars in training, more or less, and lots of hours went into putting all this together, and now that work is dried up for the foreseeable future,” Benedetto said. “We hope not too long, but we built this whole workforce, and we sold this dream to our members that if they get involved and get the training and go on this first project, then they’re going to carry over for the next 10 years.”

His union wasn’t alone. Public and private investments poured in to develop the new workforce. New York, New Jersey, and Massachusetts led the Northeast with millions of dollars in grants to training and research programs.

Ironworkers Local 7, which operates across the Northeast, received $300,000 from Massachusetts in 2022 “to be ready for when the work comes,” said Grant Provost, the union’s Maine business agent. “And the work never really came.”

Dunderdale helped build the only US-based school with heavy-lift training for Piledrivers Local 56. In total, offshore wind training cost the union about $30,000 per person, which he said was “an investment in the member.”

Esther Rosario, executive director of the labor coalition Climate Jobs New York, said unions that spent years preparing for the offshore wind economy have to reassess their plans.

“We’re ready to work, we’re ready to build, we have the trained workforce—we need work,” Rosario said. “You can’t apprentice somebody into a job that doesn’t exist.”

Offshore wind was billed as a boon not just for the building trades but for the entire economy. Manufacturing would move to the United States and locals would fill those jobs. For port cities like Massachusetts’ Salem and New Bedford, or New Jersey’s Paulsboro, the loss has threatened years of expected economic progress.

In August 2025, Trump canceled a $34 million grant to build an offshore wind terminal in Salem, which Frank Callahan Jr., president of the Massachusetts Building Trades Unions, said at the time put 800 construction workers out of a job.

“It means fewer jobs, fewer career opportunities,” Callahan said in a recent interview. As an example of this loss, he pointed to Prysmian Group, an Italian manufacturer, abandoning plans in January 2025 for an offshore wind cable plant near New Bedford.

At one point, Salem County, New Jersey—one of the state’s poorest counties—was poised to gain 1,500 new jobs for its population of 65,000. 

“That’s a huge inflection point in that county’s economy that at this point is hard to see materializing any time soon,” said Sullivan, the former New Jersey official.

The thousands of offshore wind workers aren’t all suddenly unemployed. Most did some trade work before, and unions are used to moving members onto different projects when conditions shift.

Still, Provost, the Ironworkers business agent, said offshore wind is a huge dent in unions’ portfolio of opportunities.

“If we’re not building offshore wind, and we’re not building jobs like that, you got to get in on university- and state-funded projects, and that doesn’t keep everybody busy,” Provost said. “We’ve got a massive amount of unemployed people in Local 7 right now.”

And just because workers can transition doesn’t mean they want to. If he had a choice, Hawkins said, “I’d never work on land again.”

In addition to the financial opportunity, Razi said offshore wind was a once-in-a-lifetime experience. “We were meeting people from all over Europe, all over the world, and it was just a great environment to learn as somebody being in their mid-20s,” said Razi, who is finishing up an offshore diving job.

Living and working together consistently for weeks on end, crews became good friends, even vacationing together and learning each other’s languages. Hawkins joked that every rigger knew how to curse in at least three languages.

“It’s like being at the UN,” he said.

Benedetto said the millwrights he represents are eager to return to offshore wind, but they feel burned by political headwinds turning against them.

“They did a good job,” he said, “and they’re bummed out that they’re middle-class workers being used as pawns.”

Last November, Mullin’s building in Boston caught on fire, and he lost everything he owned. Six weeks later, he said, he was able to buy a condo near the city. “That would not have been possible without offshore wind,” he said.

Mullin said he wishes others, especially young people entering the trades for the first time, could have the opportunity he did.

“It’s just too bad because they were good jobs and people were happy with them,” he said. “And it really was just a fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay.”

On July 31, in the final days of the North American leg of her tour, Ariana Grande released the music video for “Petal,” her newest single from an album of the same name. The video instantly reignited the years-long discourse over Grande’s body into something of a new low, with many presenting the video as irrefutable evidence that the singer is suffering from an eating disorder.

Reactions to those opinions, by turns emotional and censorious, have been intense. They revealed questions about a public unable to cope collectively with a woman’s body. Are such comments inherently sexist? Do well-meaning instructions warning us to refrain from speculation ever have exceptions? What does it mean to express “concern” for someone in the public eye whom we don’t personally know? How does the frenzied discourse land for people with eating disorders?

I reached out to Dr. Rebecca Boswell, a director at Penn Medicine Princeton’s Center for Eating Disorders, to explain the complications of navigating these fraught conversations, and what patients with eating disorders often hear when a celebrity’s weight makes headlines.

There’s been intense debate about the politics of talking about people’s bodies. On one hand, such commentary is often sexist; we aren’t privy to larger dynamics that may be going on with someone. But do we have a responsibility to acknowledge that some appearances may not be healthy?

Many things can be true at the same time, and there’s truth in all sides of this debate. The media has a long history of idealizing and visually showcasing thin bodies in a way that can be extremely harmful to young, vulnerable people and to folks with eating disorder histories or active eating disorders. We know that media coverage and celebrity coverage can play a role in the development and maintenance of eating disorders, and that it’s a major risk factor for the development of body image concerns.

That context makes it important to have responsible reporting around other people’s bodies, especially because so much of this discourse centers around women and women’s bodies. It’s a bit of a Goldilocks phenomenon: What’s too hot? What’s too cold? What’s too big? What’s too small? That can leave folks feeling like there’s no right way to exist in a body. That being said, when there are really concerning things happening or something seems noticeably different, there are helpful and unhelpful ways to express concern.

What do you think when you read all the online diagnosing?

We can’t look at someone and assume things about their health or their mental status. That really is reserved for physicians and people who know someone well and can see changes in behavior or health status. Because someone can lose a lot of weight and have cancer, right? Or someone can be very malnourished in a larger body. There is no one-to-one correlation between thinness and health, and it’s doctors who can make good evaluations with physical exams to discern if someone is experiencing malnutrition or eating-related problems. So can family members.

When it comes to public messaging around concern, again, multiple things can be true. It can be true that it’s powerful when the public expresses concern about someone in the public eye, and that may help them and their teams to evaluate whether there’s a risk or a problem. But it can also be the case that expressing concern garners a lot of clicks, chatter, and a lot of revenue. It also tends to highlight surveillance around women’s bodies in a way that can still be really difficult for folks who have experienced that surveillance themselves, either from family members or from the world in general.

How does that discourse typically affect someone with eating difficulties?

Every time there’s a media story about someone losing weight or being on a GLP-1, therapists hear about it. What we hear can range from “I’m so mad that I have to work on my recovery, and this person’s being glamorized for changing their body in such a profound way,” to “This makes it so much harder for me to stay committed to treatment.” There’s also “It’s so unfair that her people get to live in this like weight loss world, and I’m trying to live outside of it.”

I also hear a lot of sadness around the way that people’s bodies are judged and evaluated, not just in the context of media and culture. It can remind people of their private personal experiences of being judged or bullied or excluded because of the way that they look, and be really retraumatizing.

What about negative reactions to extreme weight loss? Can public concerns when someone famous looks so visibly [too?] thin ever help people with eating disorders?

It’s never a positive effect. What I hear is, “This is a really difficult thing to visually have to see, even when people are talking about how negative this is.” I often hear people saying that the conversations remind them of when they were really sick. They’ll say, “Can’t we just live and like not be evaluated based on our bodies?” They will also often bring up how they would have preferred people telling them that they were concerned about their weight.

I hear from people that it is hard when you’re very ill with an eating disorder to accept the possibility of needing care, and that expressions of concern from loved ones make a big difference—while public or group scrutiny is challenging.

What exactly happens to the body when an eating disorder is identified?

Different eating disorder symptoms affect the body differently. Intake restriction and prolonged malnutrition have profound effects on every body system. It affects bone density in a way that is often not reversible. It affects GI system function. It affects your kidneys, your liver, and causes cardiac stress. It can even shrink the size of your brain.

The way that the body adapts during malnutrition is incredibly survival-oriented. It slows everything down and shuts everything off to keep the machine running as long as possible. That is an enormous stressor on the body and requires really significant nutritional rehabilitation to repair tissue damage where it’s repairable, and bring your body back to a healthful state. The [real harm with malnutrition] is the speed and the amount of weight loss that really is most strongly correlated with those physical effects, regardless of the body size you started in.

GLP-1’s are everywhere. We have corners of the internet that outright promote anorexia. Is the discourse around body image worse than ever?

I do think that with the rise of GLP-1s, there’s been an increased focus on thinness in the media and the internet in a way that surveils and glamorizes thin bodies. I think that has a negative effect, not just on people with eating disorders, but on children and youth who are vulnerable to developing [eating difficulties].

You talked about the role of responsible reporting when writing about a public figure’s appearance. What does that look like?

That is where the nuance comes in. There have been studies that show, for example, articles that express concern in a kind and thoughtful way, but featuring really sensational pictures, can worsen people’s body image. There’s responsibility around the visualising of the story. There are kind ways to talk about concern that don’t involve [judgements] of like, “This person looks so bad or good” or “Go eat a burger.” Those kinds of comments are not useful.

Personally, I think there’s a lot of good, feminist intentions advising us against commenting on a woman’s body. But I also think that guidance can ignore the way that most of us, especially young people, discover images, which is on social media.

There’s a difference between observing and surveilling, between observing and judging. It is possible to observe variation in a non-judgemental way; that is a mindful, neutral practice. But once judgment comes in, that starts to bring up questions around what’s right and what’s wrong, and that’s where I think the harm comes in, especially part of the narrative around women’s bodies. It’s very uncommon to hear neutral observations around women’s bodies without judgement or shame. That ultimately detracts from women’s achievements, internal talents, and their leadership.

One middle ground I’ve seen being tossed around is that anyone concerned about a celebrity’s weight should reserve this concern for private conversations. What advice do you have for navigating these conversations, especially when talking to our kids?

Private conversations are incredibly powerful when it comes to suspected eating disorders and malnutrition because they come from a place of known love, concern, and respect. Many people who are experiencing problems with nutrition and eating may have limited insight into the severity of their problem. So loving support matters. Typically, I recommend that people focus on behavior and not appearance, because appearance can be really difficult for people to feel like that’s the focus of their loved one’s concern. So instead of saying, “You look very thin,” say, “I’ve noticed that you’ve been skipping meals. I’m worried about your health. I care about you. Is there anything I can do to help you?”

[When it comes to talking about a celebrity,] start by emphasizing that bodies come in all shapes and sizes. That people can be healthy with any body shape and size. Sometimes people can look visibly sick, and we don’t know why. That’s why health is private. We don’t always get to know what’s going on with people, even when they’re public figures. I might also ask, “How does this image make you feel about your body?”

A few weeks ago, I wrote about how elder care services will be devastated by the end of the Temporary Protected Status program that has offered legal status to about 350,000 Haitians living in the US, many of them healthcare workers.

Since then, I’ve heard some harrowing anecdotes from sources following the Supreme Court decision to end the TPS program, and President Donald Trump’s administration’s efforts to target Haitian immigrants. Real estate agents report that many in the community are considering selling their properties or placing another relative on the title of their homes. The Haitian American Chamber of Commerce of Florida told me that employers are reluctantly letting go of employees now that their work permits are no longer valid. 

As several immigration policy experts explained recently, Haitian TPS holders will either try to remain in the US as undocumented immigrants or find another pathway to legal status. Many will likely be deported.

But there’s another option many TPS holders are considering: voluntarily returning to the island. In recent years, the country has faced growing instability due to gang violence that has ravaged much of Haiti, including the capital of Port-au-Prince. The US Department of State has warned Americans to avoid travel to the country, citing armed conflict between these gangs, the risk of kidnappings and other violent crimes, and a ban on US commercial flights to the main airport in Port-au-Prince after several planes were struck by gunfire.

But in more rural communities, building a life is still possible, MarieGuerda Nicolas, a Haitian American psychology professor at the University of Miami and co-founder of Ayiti Community Trust, told me. For many Haitians, they may prefer to leave the US on their own terms instead of living under the growing fear of deportation.

Nicolas has been thinking about creating options for returning Haitians for years. When thousands of Haitians were deported during the Biden administration, Ayiti Community Trust partnered with several organizations in the US and Haiti to create a program that would assist them in safely and compassionately returning to the island. Called Ayiti Home Link, the program is basically a case management system that assists in accessing employment, housing, and other community resources. There’s also a resource guide that helps them navigate the nation’s bureaucracy—think driver’s licenses and passports—as well as listing available hospitals and health care clinics. Each region of the country also has a “hub,” as Nicolas calls it, a nonprofit on the ground that serves as the point of contact for someone just arriving in that area, should they need help settling in.

Ayiti Community Trust and its partner organizations have helped nearly 200 people return to Haiti. Now, with TPS protections gone, Nicolas anticipates many more will reach out for guidance. I talked to her on the phone last month about how this program works and what she’s hearing from the Haitian community during such a tumultuous time. Our interview has been lightly condensed and edited for clarity.

Can you tell me about the Ayiti Community Trust and the different ways the organization is helping TPS holders?

Clearly, TPS and people really thinking about coming back home have been a central part of what the community foundation engages in. We’ve been really working around this idea of, what does resettlement of Haitians going back home look like? What are the models of resettlement across the globe so that we don’t have to reinvent the wheel? One of the things we learned is how important it is to make sure that it doesn’t feel like a crisis response or humanitarian crisis response. There are about eight organizations that have been working on a resettlement plan and process for the country. And the first thing we put out was the resource guide in English and Creole that allows people to know: how do you get your identification card? Where do you go to get your passport? How do you enroll your kids in school? Where are the clinics? And so on.

There is a lot of instability and gang violence in Haiti that has been highlighted in the media as well as by human rights organizations. Despite these challenges, is it still possible to build a life in the country?

Port-au-Prince doesn’t represent the entire country. Whatever happens in Port-au-Prince permeates the narrative of the whole country, and that’s just not the case. So somebody who’s from Cap-Haïtien, of course they can go back home. They had homes there. They have communities there. The cost of living is not the same as it is in the US, in terms of being able to go back. Would people like to be in a country that feels sovereign, where the political situation is stable, where there are more economic opportunities? Absolutely. But I don’t think that the people who are back home are feeling like, “Oh my God, I’ve made the worst decision.” I haven’t seen that because I think the stress of being here and of being in a space where you don’t know what could happen to you…I think removing that stress has been a huge part of it as well.

We never want anybody to come back to their home feeling like they’re going to hell. We want them to feel like they’re going home with dignity and a sense of humanity. As part of this process, we have to recognize the sheer amount of struggle and difficulties and challenges for people to leave one country and go to another country, even if it’s their native country. We are supporting people through that process in a way that is dignified, considering that the experience that they just had in the United States is an undignified, inhumane experience.

In the last few weeks, what are some of the things that you’re hearing from people here with TPS who are just now assessing their options?

It’s incredibly stressful. I’m a psychologist, and I’ve seen 12 domestic violence cases and eight suicide attempts. People are stressed about this situation. So it’s incredibly difficult for people who are feeling the impact of all of this.

At the same time, not all TPS holders are the same or have the same options. I’m talking to a family where the mom is in the middle of chemotherapy right now. So that looks very different from this other person who I spoke to whose husband has TPS, and she’s a US citizen. They have two kids, but he went back to Haiti to situate himself and get things settled for the family to join him. It’s very different for different people in terms of figuring out what they need to do. How do I need to do it? Do I go back to Haiti or take my chances in Canada? Do I take my chances in the United States and live with the stresses of not being able to leave my house for fear that I might get picked up?

How are organizations in Haiti stepping up to help TPS holders?

They are thinking about welcoming them and making sure that people come back home in a really meaningful way. I was in a meeting a couple of weeks ago, and one of the organization’s leaders said, “The Haitian diaspora has been incredibly good to Haiti. It’s our turn to return the favor and be good to them.” How powerful is that? I want people to know that it’s not like people in Haiti are not thinking about the need to support people coming back home. They are dedicating their time and energy to that.