The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

For those of us who would be described in HR packets at progressive workplaces as “gender nonconforming” or “of non-normative gender presentation,” it can sometimes be really hard to get a haircut.

The places where one might get one are usually gender-segregated zones, where cisgender people go for what one might call gender-affirming care—that is, cosmetic care toward redeclaring their man- or womanhood. Still, enough gender studies papers have been written about the barbershop as a masculine space and the hair salon as the center of an all-women’s social world. I, frankly, don’t want to get into all of that.

But my point here is, in the expensive coastal cities where broke queer and trans people congregate for safety and community, it can be difficult to find an affordable haircut. When I moved to New York City, I was inundated with ads for queer-affirming barbershops. But these were all promoting places where haircuts cost $120—not, for me, a particularly affirming price tag. For a while, I resorted to making my friends cut my hair with drugstore scissors. 

Then I met Ruth Boirie. Ruthie’s been cutting hair for 44 years, and she charges a flat rate of $30 cash for haircuts in her small barber-slash-woodshop (yes, woodshop). In late December, she’ll be 77 years old. 

Ruthie has seen it all. Once upon a time, she cut hair for $3.50, in a room she rented for $15 a month. Now, she pays just over a thousand dollars per month for her studio, with “RUTHIE’S NEIGHBORHOOD BARBER SHOP—EVERYONE WELCOME” lovingly hand-painted in gold on the window. 

I found out about Ruthie through a friend of a friend: She’s been handing out her business cards, adorned with clip art of a palm tree on a beach, at the lesbian bar down the street from her home for decades. She scouts the bar for people who might be in need of her services: “I get my cards every day over there, and…when I see the short haircuts, I say, Do you live in the neighborhood? Well, here’s my card, if you’d ever like to try me out.” 

“I want them to feel my heart, you know, when I come in and the way I greet them, and that right away, I open their hearts up from the warmness I give them when I shake their hand, because a lot of barbers don’t do that with them,” Ruthie said in a New York LGBT oral history interview back in 2022. “Every person that comes into my shop, I ask them, ‘What’s your name? How are you doing?’ and I shake their hand.” 

“Every person that comes into my shop, I ask them, ‘What’s your name? How are you doing?’ and I shake their hand.” 

When I walked into Ruthie’s barbershop on a freezing December night, she was cutting the hair of someone she described as an “old lady,” a client she’s been seeing since she opened the store in 1996. She finished up her work—a simple short style, like most of us get there—and ushered me into her chair. I settled in for more or less the same haircut. 

Ruthie’s Neighborhood Barber Shop is cluttered with 20 years of knickknacks. Little dolls and vintage action figures in the window entertain the neighborhood children, a few of whom came in out of the cold in their puffer coats for a piece of candy from Ruthie’s bowl as I sat. Even the physical structure of the shop is Ruthie’s own. After each cut, she sweeps hair off the floorboards she laid herself.

“I made the benches,” Ruthie told me. “Something to make it look neat enough for people to want to walk in and feel comfortable.”

Her haircuts take a long time: She’s obsessively precise, and she’s also certain to take a break anytime someone from the neighborhood stops in. And that’s the thing: Everybody stops in. A man with a bulldog grabs a treat for the dog and says hi to Ruthie; a young dad with a wiggly baby in his arms struggles to wave at Ruthie and keep ahold of the baby at the same time. 

Ruthie keeps posters of the neighborhood as it was when she was young, streetcars and all. And she keeps sepia-toned pictures of her mother—elbow-length gloves and a wedding gown, age 23—which she eagerly shows customers. “Hey, Mama,” she asks the portrait sometimes, “how you doing?”  

When Ruthie was left with unexpected bills after her mother’s death, the neighborhood banded together to raise enough to get her back on her feet. But now, almost a decade later, that love might not be enough to save the shop. Lately, Ruthie said, the clientele at the bar has changed. Not as many customers have been coming through her door.

As she cut my hair, Ruthie told me that, at 77, she’s applying for jobs—using the computer is hard for her, but she’ll fold laundry and keep things neat at a laundromat if they’ll have her. She has a social worker but isn’t sure whether that social worker can help her with much beyond getting EBT. 

A younger friend stopped in as Ruthie was adjusting and readjusting her clippers at the back of my head. They asked if they could help Ruthie fill out a job application on Indeed. They struggled to then explain to her what Indeed is—people who are 77 should not need to know that kind of thing.

Maybe the laundromat job will call back. Or maybe, as the weather gets warmer, customers will begin lining up at Ruthie’s door again.

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

Dozens of rare animals including tigers, lions, and cheetahs are dying as bird flu infiltrates zoos, with potentially “grave implications” for endangered species, researchers have warned.

As a growing number of zoos report animal deaths, scientists are concerned that infected wild birds landing in enclosures could be spreading it among captive animals. In the US, a cheetah, mountain lion, Indian goose, and kookaburra were among the animals that died in Wildlife World Zoo near Phoenix, according to local media reports last week. San Francisco Zoo temporarily closed its aviaries after a wild red-shouldered hawk was found dead on its grounds, and later tested positive for highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAIV). A rare red-breasted goose died at Woodland Park Zoo in Seattle, causing aviaries to close and penguin feeding for visitors to be suspended in November. These cases follow the deaths of 47 tigers, three lions, and a panther in zoos across South Vietnam over the summer.

“Given the potentially fatal consequences of an HPAIV infection in birds and in some mammals, such as big cats, these infections may have grave implications for endangered animal species refuged in zoos,” said Dr Connor Bamford, a virologist from Queen’s University Belfast.

“We need to consider how to manage this situation, either through enhancing zoo biosecurity or by vaccinating zoo animals.”

Researchers say cases have probably emerged in zoos because of infected wild birds flying in and out of enclosures, and this tends to happen more during the migration season. A number of US states, including Louisiana, Missouri, and Kansas, have reported an increase in bird flu cases, especially in geese and waterfowl. There has been a “sharp jump” of cases in Iowa, according to state authorities, after “nearly a year” with no detections of the virus.

“We need to consider how to manage this situation, either through enhancing zoo biosecurity or by vaccinating zoo animals. This instance gives us another wake-up call to the importance of HPAIV and its impacts on animals, and people,” said Bamford.

Researchers have warned for decades that this variant of bird flu could kill primates, rodents, pigs, and rabbits, with reports of Bengal tigers and clouded leopards also being killed. Infections in zoos were not unexpected, said virologist Dr Ed Hutchinson from Glasgow University. Visitors to zoos in the UK in recent years may have noticed bird enclosures being temporarily closed off or netted when the risks of infection by the H5N1 bird flu variant from wild birds were known to be high, he said. “When zoos care for animals from endangered species, taking measures to reduce the risk those animals face from H5N1, such as limiting access of wild birds to enclosures, is particularly important.”

Zoos are usually home to high densities of animals and have varying approaches to biosecurity, health and welfare, and opportunities to be visited by wildlife. These factors affect their vulnerability, according to Prof Rowland Kao, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh. “There isn’t necessarily one thing and one cannot point to a specific zoo and say ‘they did this wrong’ – but those variable factors, the many pathways this virus seems to be taking and the low viruses doses that can potentially start outbreaks, means that it will pop up in all sorts of places,” he said.

Bird flu viruses can be passed among a wide variety of animals. In 2020, a variant spread across the world, finally reaching the Antarctic in late 2023, causing millions of wild animals to die across Eurasia, Africa, North America, and South America on its route. In the US, it fully adapted to cattle, increasing the risk of human infections.

The spread continues in dairy farms, especially in California – the US’s top-producing dairy state – where nearly half of the state’s 1,300 farms have now been affected, and two farm workers tested positive this month. Two indoor cats are suspected to have died in Los Angeles after drinking infected raw milk.

Prof Ian Brown, a virologist from the Pirbright Institute in Surrey, said: “There is always a risk but zoos should take additional hygiene precautions for such species—I know some zoos have confined flamingos to their house during risk periods for spread of virus.”

In some regions, such as the UK and the EU, licensed bird flu vaccines can be used on captive zoo animals. In the US this is not allowed.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

When was the 2024 presidential election really lost? 

Maybe you’d argue (though I would not) that it was the rubber-stamp nominating process for Vice President Kamala Harris. You could point, on a symbolic level, to Trump’s fist pump after surviving an assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania. For a time, it seemed like the clearest answer to this was the first debate, when President Joe Biden melted down on stage. But I think if you want to pinpoint when things went irreversibly downhill, you have to go back further—to the aftermath of the midterms two years ago, when a then-80-year-old Biden moved ahead with his plan to run for a second term.

Biden had always insisted that he was never planning on being a one-term president. Still, he tried to allay concerns about his age that dogged him even in 2020 by referring to himself as a generational “bridge,” and behind the scenes, aides offered context for his public denials. “He’s going into this thinking, ‘I want to find a running mate I can turn things over to after four years, but if that’s not possible or doesn’t happen, then I’ll run for reelection,’” an aide told Politico in 2019. “But he’s not going to publicly make a one-term pledge.” After a strong showing in the midterms against a predicted red wave, any notion of a smooth transition to the next in line—or a competitive primary—went out the window. Democrats shuffled around their primary calendar to warn off challengers. And that was that. Biden was dead set on running, he argued, because the stakes were too high and he was the best candidate for the job. 

That was, in hindsight, sort of the opposite of the case. Biden only got more and more unpopular, and it was hard to separate the general public anxiety about his advancing age from the general national malaise that was bringing him down. The line from the Democrats was that there was something ageist and unfair about all of this—if you can do the job, you can do the job. That was a bit cynical: Biden’s own aides reportedly thought he could do his job best between 10 a.m. and 4 p.m. and internal rumblings about his stamina dated back to the early months of the administration. The disastrous debate finally put an end to the facade, even if the complaints that this was all a vast media conspiracy persisted in some corners.

It would perhaps be more forgivable if it were just denial. But Biden, who positioned himself as the defender of the nation’s “soul,” continued to act as though only he could win the election, when in reality, he was tanking the Democratic brand so severely that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer had to stage an intervention.

By staying long past his expiration date, Biden did more than ease Trump’s path to victory; he was the apotheosis of an entire gerontocracy that brought us to this point. (He came back to win the nomination in 2020 only after the party closed ranks to stop the even-older Bernie Sanders.) As Semafor’s Dave Weigel recently observed, you could tell the recent history of the party through the people who didn’t quit when they should have. Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy’s death threatened to blow up the Affordable Care Act. Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death, after she declined to retire when Democrats could still replace her, likely cemented several decades of right-wing dominance on the Supreme Court. California Sen. Dianne Feinstein’s refusal to quit hampered Democrats on the judiciary committee. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin is 80; Schumer is a sprightly 74. Nancy Pelosi, 84, who led the House Democratic Caucus for nearly two decades, demonstrated her unique gifts when she adeptly nudged Biden out of the race—but she was still out there after the election, working behind the scenes to block New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez from defeating Virginia’s Gerry Connolly (74) for ranking member of the oversight committee.

The Biden reelection bid was, above all, uncomfortable; he was a walking reminder of our own mortality.

Every piece about Biden since the election has also included a few sentences like the ones that follow. His record, domestically, was pretty good, especially when you consider the sorts of people the rest of America sent to work with him. I can rattle off the policies that everyone of my general persuasion always does—his belief in industrial policy, his efforts to link climate change adaptation to a growing green economy, his embrace of labor unions. Biden’s team dramatically reshaped the government’s approach to corporate monopolies. His management of the post-Covid global economic crisis ultimately left the United States in a far better place than it might have otherwise. But it is hard to convince people things are getting better when the messenger himself kept looking worse and worse. The Biden reelection bid was, above all, uncomfortable; he was a walking reminder of our own mortality.

When it took the form of a halting gait or an on-camera freeze-up, that weakness could be as humanizing as it was politically damaging. There has always been an emotional heaviness about the man. When that weight took the form of foreign policy, it produced a historic moral abdication. Biden’s legacy will be more than a year of virtually unchecked Israeli carnage as the so-called “rules-based international order” he championed dissolved into nothing. There was seemingly no line Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu could not cross. Not the clear “red line” on Rafah. Not Netanyahu’s invocation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a defense of his flattening of Gaza. Not thousands of dead kids. Not a clearly stated desire to bulldoze the United States government’s official preference for a two-state solution. Not the attacks on journalists and aid workers or even the death of American citizens. Biden seemed like the only person in the whole situation who didn’t realize that Netanyahu, a right-winger from Philadelphia, was just dog-walking him to get to a president he likes better. 

“To answer the question on everyone’s minds: No, Joe Biden does not have a doctorate in foreign affairs,” senior deputy press secretary Andrew Bates wrote on X earlier this year, during a press conference on foreign policy in which the president referred to Harris as “Vice President Trump.” “He’s just that fucking good.”

Well, sometimes even honorary PhDs need a refresher course. The last photo I saw of Biden before I started writing this was of the president leaving a bookstore in Nantucket, clutching a copy of Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. It felt like a haunting epitaph for an entire era of liberalism—stopping in to do some Black Friday shopping while staying at David Rubenstein’s estate and walking away with a book that the author himself said Biden should have checked out years ago. Biden stuck around past the point that he could deliver for the people who needed him to. And now the world is stuck with the consequences.

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

Dean Phillips is a Democratic congressman from Minnesota. He is quite rich and seems to have been an average-to-good representative in Congress. None of that matters for the purpose of this post. 

What I care about is not Phillips the man, but Phillips the deed. In 2024, when everyone around President Joe Biden said he was capable of winning a second term, despite his bad poll numbers and obvious oldness, Phillips stood up and said: Come on. He was the only elected official to challenge Biden in the Democratic primary. 

In doing so, Phillips mounted a presidential campaign unlike any I’ve seen. He repeatedly made clear that he’d wanted and had tried to get much higher-profile and more electable Democrats to run. Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer ignored his calls, he said. After failing as a recruiter, he threw in his own name.

It was a protest campaign made not in opposition to a specific policy or seeming out of selfishness, but an act against stupidity on the part of the president and his inner circle. Phillips was in the race to say: This is nonsense. We’re running an obviously declining octogenarian who the vast majority of Democrats, independents, and Republicans don’t want to see in office for a second term. And we’re doing so in an election in which we are planning to make protecting democracy the central theme. 

“If Democrats do not listen right now, I’m afraid the consequences will be another Trump administration.”

“I don’t know how one can dismiss what we’re hearing, what we’re seeing, what we’re sensing, and what we’re reading. And it all points to the same thing,” Phillips told CNN of Biden’s standing. “If Democrats do not listen right now, I’m afraid the consequences will be another Trump administration.”

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal, Phillips stressed that he saw Biden as “a man of good character and competency who is in decline, who is at a stage in life where human beings are no longer able generally to accommodate the demands of any job, let alone the most demanding job in the world.” He described his campaign as an “intervention for a party that has become addicted to a delusion.”

Predictably, his campaign went nowhere. Even in his home state of Minnesota, he lost badly not only to Biden, but to the “uncommitted” ballot line. He ended up with four delegates—one more than Jason Palmer, the nonentity who heroically prevailed over Biden in American Samoa’s primary. Palmer, who had never been to American Samoa before, was described by the Associated Press as a Baltimore resident who had “worked for various businesses and nonprofits.” He was essentially a guy on LinkedIn. Nevertheless, Palmer defeated Biden 51-40 in the territory’s primary. (That’s a vote total—not a percentage.) Unfortunately, Palmer and Phillips’ combined seven delegates could not quite match the 3,861 pledged to Biden. 

Along the way, fellow Democrats went out of their way to take down Phillips. Future vice presidential nominee and Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz attacked people in his state for doing “crazy things” and turning themselves into “political sideshows.” Rep. Robert Garcia (D-Calif.) called Phillips a “total joke” who had “torched his reputation.” An Axios headline declared that “Dean Phillips’ standing on Capitol Hill has all but collapsed.” Rep. Sydney Kamlager-Dove (D-Calif.) argued, “He seems to be taking a page out of the Trump playbook.” She added, “It makes me wonder…if he’s a real Democrat.” 

Particularly with the benefit of hindsight, these were morbid symptoms. The Democratic Party was being held hostage by a president who ended up not being able to survive more than a few minutes on a debate stage without his entire campaign imploding. Instead of trying to do something about it, the party paid the ransom. It cost Democrats the election they said was more important than any other. Defending democracy only went as far, for many Democrats, as ensuring their reputation and future within the party. Whatever they said about Donald Trump ending democracy, many clearly believed there would indeed be an election to run in 2028.

Phillips, on the other hand, got his obituary. No matter what happens from here on out, he’ll always be the one who tried.

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

Sebastian Cocioba’s clapboard house on Long Island doesn’t look much like a cutting-edge plant biology lab. Then you step inside and peer down the hallway to see a small nook with just enough standing room for a single scientist. The workshop is stuffed with equipment Cocioba scored on eBay or cobbled together himself with a little engineering knowledge. This is where the 34-year-old attempts to use gene editing to create new kinds of flowers more beautiful and sweeter smelling than any that currently exist. And it’s also where he hopes to blow the closed-off world of genetic engineering wide open.

Cocioba’s fascination with plants started in childhood when he was enthralled by the intricate inner structure of a fallen maple leaf. During high school, he noticed a dumpster full of orchids outside a Home Depot store. He took the plants—his mother’s favorites—and coaxed them back into bloom with the help of some growth hormone paste bought online. Soon he was selling the plants back to the store. “I had this racket going where I was taking their trash, reflowering it, and selling it back to them,” he says.

The money he earned doing that was enough to put Cocioba through the first couple of years of a biology degree at Stony Brook University. He completed a stint with a neglected plant biology group that taught him to experiment on a shoestring budget. “We were using toothpicks and yogurt cups to do petri dishes and all of that,” he says. But financial difficulties meant he had to drop out. Before he left, one of his labmates handed him a tube of agrobacterium—a microbe commonly used to engineer new attributes into plants.

Cocioba set about transforming his hallway nook into a makeshift lab. He realized that he could buy cheap equipment in fire sales from labs that were shutting down and sell them on for a markup. “That gave me a little bit of an income stream,” he says. Later he learned to 3D-print relatively simple pieces of equipment that are sold at extreme markups. A light box used to visualize DNA, for example, could be cobbled together with some cheap LEDs, a piece of glass, and a light switch. The same device would retail to laboratories for hundreds of dollars. “I have this 3D printer, and it’s been the most enabling technology for me,” Cocioba says.

All of this tinkering was in aid of Cocioba’s main mission: to become a flower designer. “Imagine being the Willy Wonka of flowers, without the sexism, racism, and strange little slaves,” he says. In the US, genetically modified flower work is covered by the lowest biosafety rating, so it doesn’t subject Cocioba or his lab to onerous regulations. Doing gene-editing as an amateur in the UK or EU would be impossible, he says.

“Imagine being the Willy Wonka of flowers, without the sexism, racism, and strange little slaves.”

Cocioba set himself up as a self-described “pipette for hire”—working for startups to develop scientific proof-of-concepts. In the run-up to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics, the plant biologist Elizabeth Hénaff asked Cocioba for help with a project she was working on: designing a morning glory flower with the Games’ blue-and-white checkerboard pattern. It just so happened that a checkerboard flower already existed in nature—the snake’s head fritillary. Cocioba wondered if he could import some of the genes from that plant into a morning glory. Unfortunately, it turned out that the snake’s head fritillary had one of the largest genomes on the planet and had never been sequenced. With the Olympics looming, the project fell apart. “It ended in heartbreak, of course, because we couldn’t execute on it.”

As Cocioba moved deeper into the world of synthetic biology, he started to shift his focus slightly—away from just creating new kinds of plants and toward opening up the tools of science itself. Now he documents his experiments on an online notebook that’s free for anyone to use. He also started selling some of the plasmids—small circles of plant DNA—that he uses to transform flowers.

“We’re at the golden age of biotech for sure,” he says. Access is greater, and the research community is more open than ever before. Cocioba is trying to recreate something like the 19th-century boom of amateur plant breeders—where hobbyist scientists shared their materials partly just for the thrill of creating new plant varieties. “You don’t have to be a professional scientist to do science,” Cocioba says.

Alongside this work, Cocioba is also a project scientist at the California-based startup Senseory Plants. The company wants to engineer indoor plants to produce unique scents—a biological alternative to candles or incense sticks. One idea he’s playing with is engineering a plant to smell like old books, olfactorily transforming a room into an ancient library. The startup is exploring a whole smellscape of evocative scents, Cocioba says, in part designed in his home laboratory. “I really, really, love what they’re doing.”

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

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act stands as the single largest piece of legislation to address climate change in United States history.

The IRA contains nearly $370 billion for programs like tax credits for more efficient appliances, building new battery plants, and subsidies for renewable energy. And it triggered a boom in new construction and manufacturing for things like solar panels. It also created hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

But two years later, much of that money remains unspent.

The largest investment—ever— for the clean energy transition has yet to materialize into actual hardware like heat pumps or wind turbines. Despite more than $7.5 billion allocated to building electric vehicle chargers, for example, only a handful have been built. About 40 percent of big IRA projects hit delays, according to the Financial Times.

There were a lot of factors behind Democrats’ loss of the White House, but one particular source of frustration for the White House was that President Joe Biden received little credit for IRA spending, much of which was targeted at Republican-led districts and was structured to meet the goals of environmental activists, like prioritizing disadvantaged communities. The slow rollout is part of why the IRA barely registered with voters, even among those concerned about climate change.

“We always have this trade-off between how many safeguards we want to have to prevent misuse of money and how insistent we are on the other hand to get money out in a way that stimulates economic growth.”

Now President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to claw back the unspent money and congressional Democrats are getting antsy. In a recent letter, dozens of senators and representatives wrote to the White House asking Biden to get more money out the door, from the IRA as well as other legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

“[T]here are so many more good projects, good jobs, and good savings to unleash,” they wrote. “To avoid future politicization or manipulation of climate programs, we ask that your agencies move expeditiously to disburse key climate and clean energy programs.”

The White House in turn is rushing to get programs like clean energy loan guarantees out the door. Some households are also scrambling to take advantage of incentives for heat pumps, home weatherization, and energy-efficient appliances before the new administration takes office.

All of this shows that despite the political will and time pressure, spending money can actually be pretty hard. Many state and local governments are finding that federal funds come with more strings attached than they anticipated. Ordinary people meanwhile are running into obstacles such as paperwork and supply chain snarls as they try to take advantage of tax credits and discounts.

In the waning days of the Biden administration, the White House could still step up its climate investments, but the question is whether they can go to work in time, and whether the next president can roll them back.

One of the big challenges with spending most federal funds in programs like the IRA is that the money doesn’t go straight to suppliers for construction materials, EV chargers, batteries, or home insulation. Rather, the funds are sent to state and local authorities who then distribute the money.

That added step creates a lot of complications. First, a lot of local officials simply are not set up to receive a lot of cash all at once. It requires rigorous accounting and record-keeping, so before they can use the money, recipients have to invest in the personnel and tools to track it. Then when money hits bank accounts, local officials have to decide where to spend it. That means seeking out proposals, soliciting competitive bids, and giving enough time for communities to weigh in. Even for “shovel-ready” projects, they often have to contend with last-minute hurdles like rising financing costs from inflation, supply chain snarls, and litigation that can halt ground-breaking.

Local governments also have their own incentives. While Biden’s White House wanted to juice the clean energy economy as fast as possible, often state and local governments want to stretch out the funds. “There’s always a sense that if money is spent too quickly, people might get used to the money, maybe even addicted to it, and then officials would have to raise taxes to make up the difference” when it runs out, said Donald Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy who studies government spending.

Delays also result from how the funding is leveraged, whether it’s a grant, a loan, a loan guarantee, or a tax credit. Tax credits add an inherent lag because you don’t receive the cash benefit until you file your taxes.

There have been some counterexamples, though. Many of the Covid-19 pandemic spending measures like the Paycheck Protection Program did get money into people’s hands quickly. Those programs were relatively simple to administer. The stimulus checks automatically went out to people based on their tax records, for example, but the programs also didn’t have strong guardrails, leading to malfeasance and fraud. Billions of dollars in the PPP went to companies owned by celebrities and was spent on hotels, jewelry, and luxury cars.

“We always have this trade-off between how many safeguards we want to have to prevent misuse of money and how insistent we are on the other hand to get money out in a way that stimulates economic growth,” Kettl said. “Every time we do something like this, we tend to set that balance at a different spot.”

For ordinary people, getting IRA funds has also proven challenging. Many would-be EV buyers, for example, have been frustrated by dealers who don’t know about all the tax credits and discounts that can shave down the sticker price. Often, it’s the buyers educating sellers about the sweeteners. Homeowners have also struggled to find installers for heat pumps. Production declines and shipping delays have made it harder to buy more energy-efficient appliances.

There are also factors beyond Biden’s direct control at play. Changes in global demand and uncertainty about the outcome of the presidential election led some companies to hold off on executing IRA-funded projects. And those that do want to get rolling often have to go through a tedious, sometimes years-long permitting process before they can break ground.

Trump has never had a favorable outlook on clean technology and wants to cut spending and “waste” across the government. Even Trump’s pick to run the new Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of one of the largest electric vehicle companies, has said he’s in favor of rolling back EV tax credits. But Trump may not be able to do much to recall any money already spent and prevent money that’s been appropriated from going out the door. The fact remains that Congress is mainly in charge of spending money and it would take another act of Congress to undo the IRA.

Trump and his allies, however, have floated the idea that the president has the authority to impound funding. It’s a legally questionable mechanism by which the president could stop money that’s already approved by Congress from being spent in the future.

“The courts have largely been on the side of Congress on that. Whether or not the courts would be more favorable this time is anybody’s guess.”

“The courts have largely been on the side of Congress on that,” Kettl said. “Whether or not the courts would be more favorable this time is anybody’s guess.”

Any changes to tax credits likely won’t take effect in the current tax cycle and will have to go through the budgeting process. It’s worth noting that Trump extended tax credits for renewables, energy efficiency, and carbon capture during his first term.

Trump could slow-walk the remaining funding, and if his second turn in office is anywhere near as chaotic as the first, it may not even be a deliberate choice. But he may pay a political price for cutting back on clean energy funding. Though Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t reap many benefits from laws like the IRA at the ballot box, they will likely get harder to reverse as the programs mature.

“The political logic was sound but the rollout was too rushed for the various programs to reap electoral benefits so soon,” Steven Vanderheiden, who studies environmental politics at the University of Colorado, wrote in an email. “While I think that the Biden team could have done a better job in communicating the value of these efforts, ultimately I think that there was just not enough time for them to become a real game-changer in the recent election.”

When Trump takes office, IRA investments will only get more entrenched.

Republicans may remain ideologically opposed to such programs, but about 60 percent of the resulting jobs are in districts whose representatives voted against it. About 80 percent of the investments are in Republican-led states. The political uncertainties that deterred clean energy spending prior to the election have now been resolved, and there may be appetite for more projects.

So while Trump may try to cut off any more new money from the IRA, it’s only going to get harder to stop what’s already underway.

Reveal has been a weekly investigative podcast for nearly 10 years now, so we’ve produced hundreds of hours of investigative journalism over the years designed to inspire, inform, or infuriate you (and occasionally, all three at the same time). We’ve curated some of our favorite Reveal series and serials to take you through your holiday travel time—episodes that will resonate today and into 2025. You can find the link to each episode on your preferred podcast platform below.

Four hours+ trip

Mississippi Goddam (seven-part series): Billey Joe Johnson Jr. dreamed of graduating high school, going to college, and one day playing pro football. On a cold December morning in 2008, that future was shattered. His story is a reckoning of justice in America.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

American Rehab (eight-part series): Reveal exposes how a treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce. This reporting was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

After Ayotzinapa (three-part series): In 2014, students from a rural college in Mexico came under attack by police. Six people were killed and 43 young men disappeared without a trace. Families suspected the government was hiding the truth. Now, Reveal is exposing corruption at the highest levels and an unsettling connection to America’s war on drugs. 

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

Three-hour trip

40 Acres and a Lie (three-part series): It’s often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But “40 acres and a mule” was more than that. It was real. This three-part series from Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity tells the history of an often-misunderstood government program that gave more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people land titles, only to take the land back, fueling a wealth gap that remains today.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio

The COVID Tracking Project (three-part series): This three-part series exposes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s bungled response to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic and takes listeners inside the massive volunteer effort to collect data about tests, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the US.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

Two-hour trip

Buried Secrets (two-part series): After decades of stripping away Native American identity from its students, a Catholic boarding school seeks to help the community heal. This series was a partnership between Reveal and ICT, formerly known as Indian Country Today.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

Listening to these next two investigations together will deepen your understanding of the risks and consequences for new mothers suspected of drug use:

They Followed Doctors’ Orders. The State Took Their Babies: Jade Dass began taking medication to treat her addiction to opioids before she became pregnant. After Dass delivered a healthy daughter, the hospital reported her to the Arizona Department of Child Safety.

Even as medications like Suboxone help pregnant women safely treat addiction, taking them can trigger investigations by child welfare agencies that separate mothers from their newborns. To understand the scope of the dragnet, reporter Shoshana Walter, data reporter Melissa Lewis, and a team of Reveal researchers and lawyers filed 100 public records requests, putting together the first-ever tally of how often women are reported to child welfare agencies for taking prescription drugs during pregnancy.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad. Child Services Took Her Baby: Hospitals across the country routinely drug test people coming in to give birth. But the tests many hospitals use are notoriously imprecise, with false positive rates of up to 50 percent for some drugs. Our collaboration with The Marshall Project investigates why parents across the country are being reported to child protective services over inaccurate pee-in-a-cup drug tests.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

One-hour trip

Your Retirement Investments Are Probably Fueling Climate Change: Reveal reporter Jonathan Jones was working on a story about a massive coal plant expansion in Montana when he wondered who was bankrolling the project. It turns out a major shareholder of the energy company driving the project was the Vanguard Group, the investment firm where he happens to have his retirement savings. This discovery put Jones on a quest to find out why Vanguard and other asset managers continue to invest in fossil fuels at a time when we need to burn less oil, gas, and coal.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

The Racist Hoax That Changed Boston: After a pregnant woman’s murder, Boston police rounded up countless Black men in search of her killer. But they were chasing a lie.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

Red, Black, and Blue: Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes spent months on the campaign trail talking to Black voters about how they see the goals and limits of their own political power. He paid special attention to Black Republicans and the new crop of Black supporters of former President Donald Trump. 

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

Trump’s mass deportation agenda is already taking shape—for a second time—in coastal Oregon.

A racist letter reportedly circulating through Lincoln County, which has a population of about 50,000 people and is located on the state’s western coast, encourages residents to surveil and report “brown illegals…who you suspect are here in our country on an illegal basis” to the Department of Homeland Security.

The letter implores white locals to help facilitate “the largest round-up of brown illegals in our history,” referring to Trump’s pledge to begin mass deportations of approximately 11 million people, and promises white residents a chance to seize the victims’ homes.

In starkly racist language, it proceeds to outline a dystopian vision for surveillance of people of color everywhere from churches to schools and grocery stores:

Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate [number] of brown folks. This is extremely important if you attend a catholic church—many brown folks are catholics!! Shopping, again if you see a bunch of brown folks getting in a car—write down the plate [number]. Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate [number]. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate [numbers]. If you see a construction crew and/or a landscaping crew who have brown folks—write down the name of the company and a phone [number].”

This is the full letter being distributed around Lincoln County Oregon pic.twitter.com/VlvbzFldzZ

— Rachel Bitecofer (@RachelBitecofer) December 20, 2024

Perhaps most disturbing are the ways that the letter directly echoes some of the Trump administration’s own anti-immigration talking points: Attacks on sanctuary cities, promises of detention, and allegedly solving the housing crisis through mass deportations, which the letter compares approvingly to Japanese internment.

The letter claims Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state makes it especially fitting for its perverse anti-immigrant demands: “We have received information brown folks, who are currently in Idaho and Montana, are planning to move to our state, because they believe it will be ‘safer’ for them. So don’t limit the license plate to just Oregon—brown folks from any state will be able to be reported to the Department of Homeland Security.”

And it outlines Trump’s vision for how deportations will be enacted, writing, “the brown folks will remain [in county jails] until the camps are completed in Texas—then these folks will be transferred there,” referring to the detention camps that, as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, Trump’s acolytes plan to build.

“When the brown folks are rounded up,” the letter continues, “their properties will be confiscated just like the properties belonging to the Japanese in California were during World War II. So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high—the prices will be very low and affordable.” (Again, experts say otherwise.)

It is unclear how many people have received the letter, but the recipients included local lawmakers in the city of Toledo, including its mayor, who received a copy in the mail, Portland NBC affiliate KGW reported. He, and other local officials, have publicly condemned the letter: In a Facebook post, Lincoln County Sheriff Curtis Landers characterized it as “harmful, divisive, and inconsistent with the values we uphold as public servants and community members.”

“We strongly advise against engaging in activities such as those outlined in this letter, including collecting or sharing information about individuals based on their demographic or perceived immigration status,” Landers added. His post also notes that state law “generally prohibits the inquiry or collection of an individual’s immigration or citizenship status, or country of birth,” and that the sheriff’s office “does not inquire about, document, or share such information with” ICE. The sheriff could not immediately be reached for comment on Sunday.

Oregon’s Democratic Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum also condemned the letter. ABC affiliate KATU of Portland reported that the FBI’s Oregon office is aware of the letter, and encouraged “community members who feel they are being physically threatened” to report concerns to local law enforcement.

In a statement provided to Mother Jones Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said: “Racism has no place in Oregon or anywhere else, and I’m proud to add my voice to the chorus of state and local officials denouncing this cowardly and cruel letter.” Oregon’s other Democratic Senator, Jeff Merkley, does not appear to have publicly commented on the letter, and his office did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday afternoon.

The letter is reminiscent of the racist texts, now the subject of an FBI investigation, sent to Black people in the days after the election, demanding they “pick cotton,” as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time; other texts also targeted Hispanic and LBGTQ people. Anna also reported on a theory of where they originated:

Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.

“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.” 

While the identities of the senders of those texts, and the letter in Oregon, may be unknown, one thing is clear: Right-wing racism is gaining steam.

Update, Dec. 23: This post was updated with a statement from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

President Joe Biden has officially surpassed president-elect Donald Trump’s record of judicial appointed to federal courts—by one single judge.

On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with carrying out the confirmations of Biden’s appointees, announced that it had confirmed Biden’s 235th judge—one more than Trump during his term in office, when he blitzed the courts with white, male, right-wing judicial activists. “We just beat Donald Trump’s judicial confirmation record,” the committee announced in a post on X. “Our 235 judges confirmed under President Biden are diverse, fair, qualified, and will be a frontline of defense on attacks against our democracy.”

The judges will be “a significant protection for our civil rights and civil liberties to preserve our democracy” in Trump’s next term, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the committee, told reporters on Friday. As I have reported, the judges—who are appointed for life—play a significant role in deciding cases focused on reproductive rights, among many other issues of major importance to Americans; it was Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, for example, who issued the anti-science ruling last year that paved the way for anti-abortion activists to bring an ultimately unsuccessful case to the Supreme Court challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion.

The sheer amount of cases federal judges take on also contributes to their power: “The power of lower court federal judges is immense,” David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, told me last month, “because the Supreme Court only deals with such a limited number of cases.”

The courts are also expected to play a particularly significant role in light of the threats posed by Trump, who has threatened to prosecute his political enemies, and the ultra-conservative Supreme Court that has enabled political corruption, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote.

“The rule of law, which we used to take for granted, is under enormous stress, and is really threatened,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said Friday, “and the importance of what we did is that we have 235 jurors who are committed to the rule of law—and that includes a respect for judicial restraint, a respect for the proper role of the legislative branch, and a willingness to step in when there’s overreach, either by the legislature or the executive branch.”

According to the committee, the confirmed judges include 187 district court nominees, 45 circuit court nominees, one Supreme Court nominee—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the high court—and two Court of International Trade nominees. About two-thirds of the judges confirmed under Biden are women and about two-fifths are women of color—both records, the committee says.

“Judges shape our lives,” Biden said in a post on X, announcing the record-setting confirmation. “I’m proud of those who heeded the call to serve, and of the legacy I’ll leave with the men and women I’ve appointed.”

“These exceptionally qualified individuals are dedicated to upholding the rule of law,” added Vice President Kamala Harris, “and they reflect the diversity of America.”

Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Biden beating his record—but he may be glad to know that there are still 36 judicial vacancies he can fill in the federal courts, all but 2 in the district courts. (A couple of Biden’s nominees did not wind up being confirmed after he reportedly did not formally submit their nominations to the Senate in time.) Republicans are already preparing to squash Biden’s newly-established record: “On January 20 of 2029, Trump’s going to brag about having 240,” incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told NBC News.

To Cohen, the law professor from Drexel, the news is more nuanced than either Democrats or Republicans would like it to be. “Multiple things can be true at the same time,” he told me Sunday. “It’s fantastic they confirmed so many judges to counterbalance the Trump cadre of judges. But also, there should be zero vacancies remaining.”

When Valentino Rodriguez started his job at a high-security prison in Sacramento, California, informally known as New Folsom, he thought he was entering a brotherhood of correctional officers who hold each other to a high standard of conduct.

Five years later, Rodriguez would be found dead in his home. His unexpected passing would raise questions from his family and the FBI. 

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Before he died, Rodriguez was promoted to an elite unit investigating crimes in the prison. His parents and his widow say he had been hoping for the position for a long time. 

But once inside the unit, the job consumed him. From day one, his fellow officers began to undermine and harass him. Stressed and fed up with how he was being treated, Rodriguez reached a breaking point. 

He left the prison, but his experiences there still haunted him—so he went in for a meeting with the warden. He didn’t know it would be his last.

This week on Reveal, we partner with KQED reporters Sukey Lewis and Julie Small and the On Our Watch podcast to explore what this correctional officer’s story shows about how the second-largest prison system in the country is failing to protect the people who live and work inside it.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2024. 

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

I was 11 years old the year my older stepsister brought her high school boyfriend home for the first time. It was Thanksgiving 2006, and his Southern manners fit right in as we bantered between mouthfuls of cornbread stuffing, fried okra, and marshmallow-topped sweet potato casserole. Then, in the overstuffed lull before the desserts were served, my dad plunked his laptop in the center of the table. He opened it up and began clicking through a PowerPoint presentation chock full of data on ice sheet melt and global atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration. 

My stepsister’s eyes grew wide with embarrassment. In an effort to welcome her sweetheart to the family, my dad had rolled out his version of a red carpet: one of his many family lectures on the horrors of climate change. 

This wasn’t the first—or last—time my dad’s climate obsession took center stage at our family gatherings. On that particular occasion, he was doling out factoids about Arctic amplification—the prevalence of which was then a debate among climate scientists. It was just a warm-up to a typical holiday season spent quibbling over the ethics of farmed Christmas trees and openly scoffing at scientific inaccuracies during a movie theater showing of Happy Feet, the year’s seasonal offering about a dancing penguin named Mumble. A month later, on Christmas Eve, he forwarded me an email about how Santa Claus’ body would disintegrate if he were to travel through the atmosphere at the speeds necessary to meet his seasonal duties, adding a personal note: “Not to mention the emissions!”

Over the years, these tendencies earned him the family nickname “Dr. Doom”—a nod to his university professor title and compulsive need to share terrifying facts about our warming world. My dad hammed it up, interrupting his own lamentations by hooting out, “We’re all gonna die!” in a cartoonish falsetto. More than anything, it was a term of endearment. After all, we knew other households that spent their holidays arguing over whether climate change was even real.

Many of us know a Dr. Doom in our lives, or at the very least, a pessimist with a particular fixation. We each have our own ways of responding to it, such as my brother’s pragmatism, my stepmom’s knee-jerk optimism, my stepsister’s exasperation. Or, perhaps you are the doomer yourself. 

I’m usually tempted to respond with, “I see hope in the next generation.” But doomerism—a label often used to describe climate defeatists—doesn’t typically leave room to talk about a better future. It’s a contagious kind of despair, often too credible to dismiss. Nowadays, my brother and I both work in climate-related fields, undeniably thanks to Dr. Doom’s influence. But growing up, it only took a few days of dad’s soapboxing before I’d tune out of anything climate-related until the New Year.

This Christmas, as we once again prepare to pass around the cranberry sauce and discuss the end of the world, I can’t help but wonder how my dad became Dr. Doom. And in a world of rising doomerism, what influence do such tidings have on others?

My dad’s journey to becoming “Dr. Doom” started with his formal training as a tropical ecologist. Until the early 2000s, his work meant trudging through rainforests, studying photosynthesis while battling mosquitoes. Then, the wear of human activity on his surroundings became too much to bear. He switched gears and has since spent his career leap-frogging between climate education jobs—from director of an environmental science program at the University of Idaho to president of a small school in Maine, which, in 2012, he led to become the first college to divest fully from fossil fuels.

Those entrenched in science, like my dad, seem to be especially susceptible to climate despair. That’s according to experts like Rebecca Weston, the co-executive director of the Climate Psychology Alliance of North America, a community of mental health professionals trained to address the emotional and psychological challenges emerging in our warming world. Many in scientific fields, Weston says, are first to document and review the data behind irreversible loss.

The facts of the crisis are so dire that despair seems to be a hazard for many—scientists or not. After all, a study by researchers at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that some 7 percent of US adults report potentially serious levels of psychological distress about climate change. Gale Sinatra, a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California’s Rossier School of Education who studies how people learn about climate change, put it more simply: “Your dad’s problem is that he knows too much.”

The issue only gets worse when the climate-informed try to share what they know. In a short-lived position in 2007 as science advisor to the Florida state government (back when then-Governor Charlie Crist would actually acknowledge “climate change”) my dad was silenced during a presentation to the legislature. A report later said that the “awkward” situation arose when a Republican senator took issue with a discussion topic that “had not yet been accepted as fact.” According to my dad, the controversy stemmed from his decision to share the famous “hockey stick” graph, a data visual that shows that global average temperatures began spiking after human societies industrialized.  

“We’re starting to understand it as moral injury,” said Kristan Childs, co-chair of a committee to support climate scientists with the Climate Psychology Alliance, referring to a psychological phenomenon that happens when people witness actions that violate their beliefs or damage their conscience. “They’ve been informing people for so long, and there’s just such a betrayal because people are not believing them, or are not doing enough to act on it.”

Like many, my dad’s response to this was to get louder—and darker. There’s conflicting research on how different kinds of messaging can affect people’s behavior. Some studies show that those experiencing distress are also more active, while others say that emphasizing worst-case scenarios, like so-called climate “tipping points,” is an ineffective strategy that can overwhelm and de-motivate audiences instead. It can also backfire on a personal level: Listeners of the podcast “This American Life” may be familiar with a story about a climate activist dad whose zeal led to his children cutting him out of their lives. 

As a journalist on the climate beat, I’ve interviewed dozens of self-described “doomers,” and yet I’ve found the term is a bit of a misnomer. While many fixate on the worst possible climate scenarios, they’re generally not quitters. As Childs put it, “I don’t know anyone who’s just given up on it all.” Instead, nearly all have dedicated their lives to addressing climate change. And they can’t help but evangelize, warning everybody within earshot of the ways the coming century could change their lives. 

Throughout these interviews, I’m tacitly looking for any insight that might help my own Dr. Doom. (Recently, I accompanied my dad to a physical therapy appointment where, upon seeing a disposable blood pressure cuff, he attempted to regale his doctor with facts about the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the US health care system.) Childs might just have some. She offers a 10-step program for professionals who work in science-oriented fields, affiliated with a larger collection of support groups offered by the Good Grief Network, a nonprofit organization dedicated to processing emotions on climate change. 

“The group work is powerful because it really, really helps dissolve the sense of isolation,” Childs said. As she spoke, I shifted uncomfortably, wondering how many times my teenage tendency to tune out or respond flippantly made my dad feel I was invalidating his concerns.

The best place to start is often the hardest: acknowledging how bad the problem is. “It’s actually helpful to give people a place to share their biggest fears,” she said, adding that the typical workplace culture in scientific fields discourages expressing emotions. “Somehow some acceptance of how bad it is, and the fact that we can then still stay engaged, shifts the question to who we can be in these times.”  

Weston agrees that entirely erasing climate anxiety isn’t realistic, especially as the effects of Earth’s changing atmosphere become more apparent and frightening. Instead, her group suggests reframing ideas of what having a meaningful impact looks like. “It depends on breaking through a kind of individualist understanding of achievement. It’s about facing something that will be resolved past our own lifetimes,” she said.

My dad has spent his career chasing that elusive sense of fulfillment—never quite satisfied with the work he’s doing. But lately, he’s found a reason to stay put. In 2019, he returned to my hometown to teach climate change to undergraduates at the University of Florida. Now and again, I’ve wondered how these 18- to 22-year-olds, many of whom grew up in the increasingly red state, respond to his doomsaying.

This year, while home around Thanksgiving, I sat in on his last lecture of the semester—a doozy on how economic systems can destroy natural resources. His students seemed completely at ease—chatting with him at the beginning of class, easily participating when he asked questions. I was already surprised.

“He’s just sharing the facts,” one of his students told me, when I asked a group of them about his teaching style after the class. 

Another quickly interjected: “He’s too dogmatic. It’s super depressing, it’s super doom.” Others nodded. 

A third chimed in: “It helps me feel motivated.” 

Later that week, while I was reporting a different story at a local climate event, both his former students and local activists flagged me down to say how much they appreciated my dad’s courses and op-eds in local newspapers. 

“We need all sorts of climate communication. People are responsive to different messages,” said Ayana Elizabeth Johnson, the markedly anti-doomer author of What If We Get It Right?, a recent book that puts possibility at the center of climate action. In 2019, a Yale study on how people respond to different messaging tactics underscored this point—finding that “hope is not always good, and doubt is not always bad.”

For Johnson, getting through the climate crisis starts with who you surround yourself with. “This is not solitary work. Individual changemakers are not really a thing,” she said. “We never know the ripples that we’re going to have.”

The Christmas stockings on the mantle at my dad’s house haven’t changed in years, but the dinner conversations have. Now, instead of trying to brush aside Dr. Doom’s digressions, we lean in. Our evenings are spent butting heads over the recent climate optimism book, Not the End of the World, by data scientist Hannah Ritchie; swapping notes on heat pumps; and debating how to make the most of used-EV tax credits. My baby nephew, Auggie, of the latest generation to be saddled with our hopes and fears, brightens the room with his cooing at all manner of round fruits and toy trucks. 

Between sips from warm mugs, my dad leans back in his chair and frowns at some news on his phone’s screen. “The wheels are really coming off the wagon, kids. Humanity faces an existential threat,” he says, to no one in particular. From the next room, my stepmom calls, “The sky’s been falling since I met you, Stephen.”

It’s hard not to smile. Who knows how many people my dad has influenced, or if he will ever feel satisfied with his mission. But as his doomy, gloomy self, he’s built a community and family that share his values. At that moment, I find myself thinking of something Childs told me: “You cannot protect your kids from climate change. But you can protect them from being alone with climate change.” 

In our changing world, these conversations feel like something to be thankful for. 

Last month, Missourians voted to add the right to abortion until viability into their state constitution—making their state one of ten to enshrine abortion rights since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.

But simply having the constitutional right to abortion does not alone change anything on the ground: The courts must enforce this right by affirming that anti-abortion laws violate states’ newly amended constitutions. A ruling this week by a Missouri judge shows just how fraught it is to depend on the courts for abortion access—even after the people, by popular vote, demand it.

Within 24 hours of the November election where Missouri voters passed the state’s abortion-rights amendment, Planned Parenthood sued to ask the courts to enforce this change. On Friday, a state judge weighed in for the first time: She temporarily blocked the state’s near-total abortion ban. But she left in place several anti-abortion laws that will continue to prevent abortion providers from serving patients.

In a partial preliminary injunction issued on Friday, Jackson County Judge Jerri Zhang temporarily allowed the state’s licensure law to remain in place, giving the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services the power to withhold licenses from abortion clinics if their hallways, rooms, and doors don’t meet the architectural requirements of ambulatory surgical centers. The hallway width requirement is a classic example of what’s known as a TRAP law, standing for “targeted regulation of abortion providers.” Back when the United States still had a national right to abortion, passing TRAP laws that were near-impossible to comply with was the strategy of choice for the anti-abortion movement in its quest to shut down clinics. Missouri’s TRAP laws were so effective at achieving this goal that in the years before Roe was overturned, just one abortion clinic in the state was still in operation—providing only around 100 abortions per year at a Planned Parenthood facility in St. Louis.

“While Planned Parenthood stands ready to start providing abortions in Missouri again as soon as the Court permits, the abortion restrictions remaining in effect—including Missouri’s medically unnecessary and discriminatory clinic licensing requirement—make this impossible,” Planned Parenthood Great Plains said in a statement after Zhang’s ruling. “The vast majority of Planned Parenthood health centers cannot comply with the medically irrelevant size requirements for hallways, rooms, and doors.”

In her order, Zhang said she was allowing the licensure law to remain in place while the lawsuit continues because it involves rules for facilities rather than “the right of individuals seeking care”—without addressing the reality that the facility rules were designed to undercut the right to abortion. Either Zhang has been duped, or she’s playing along: “The Court finds there may be a compelling governmental interest in licensing abortion facilities in this manner,” she wrote in her order.

Now, no Missouri abortion clinics have a license. To get one, they’ll have to apply to some of the same state officials who fought this year’s abortion rights ballot initiative tooth and nail, earning rebukes from the court system. Their track record runs deep: Back in 2019, the state health department did its utmost to close the St. Louis Planned Parenthood clinic, declining to renew its license and imposing shifting requirements that providers likened to harassment, my former colleague Marisa Endicott reported.

Ultimately, the clinic was only able to keep its doors open thanks to court orders and an administrative hearing officer. “The licensure requirement also leaves Planned Parenthood facilities at the whim of anti-abortion officials in Missouri, who can continue to weaponize the licensure process to limit abortion access, as they have done for decades,” Planned Parenthood Great Plains said in its Friday statement.

There is a silver lining to the ruling: Doctors in hospitals who need to perform emergency abortions will no longer be operating under the threat of state punishment.

“Hospital-based providers across the state are able to provide more care today than they could yesterday now that the fear of criminal prosecution has been removed,” said ACLU of Missouri litigation director Gillian Wilcox in a statement on Saturday. Zhang also granted the preliminary injunction blocking other TRAP laws: a 72-hour waiting period for abortions, a requirement that patients take abortion medication in the presence of a doctor, and a rule stating that abortion providers have admitting privileges at a hospital within 15 minutes’ drive of a clinic, among others.

There is also another threat coming down the line. While the legal battle continues over which Missouri anti-abortion laws can coexist with the new abortion-rights amendment, state legislators are weighing their own ballot initiatives for the next election cycle. That includes a proposal to ask voters to re-impose a blanket abortion ban, and another that would shift “fetal viability,” generally understood as the time when a fetus could survive outside the pregnant person’s body, from around 24 weeks gestation to the 6-week mark of pregnancy—when embryos measure around the size of a pea and have almost no organs.

The Supreme Court agreed last week to hear a case that could pave the way for states to kick Planned Parenthood clinics and affiliated doctors out of their Medicaid programs. The case threatens the ability of the nation’s largest family planning organization to provide their low-income patients with birth control, cancer screenings, and STI testing and treatment—services that have nothing to do with abortion.

Back in June, the Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), the religious-right legal group behind the fall of Roe v. Wade, legal attacks on the abortion pill, and some of the most important anti-LGBTQ laws and Supreme Court cases of recent memory, filed the request that the nine justices hear this case.

They asked on behalf of their client, the South Carolina health department. That is part of a pattern: ADF has increasingly represented state governments in efforts to defend abortion bans and anti-trans laws. My colleague Pema Levy reported earlier this year that this work has raised ethical questions about how a religious organization that brings in over $100 million annually from mostly undisclosed donors can represent the public in court while also advancing a religious agenda.

The case, known as Kerr v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic, dates back to the summer of 2018, when South Carolina Republican Gov. Henry McMaster ordered his state’s health department to declare any doctors or clinics who provided abortion “unqualified” to offer other family planning services. McMaster’s order didn’t have anything to do with the doctors’ resumes or the quality of their healthcare. Instead it was calculated to punish Planned Parenthood financially by making it ineligible to receive Medicaid reimbursements for the non-abortion services that, contrary to popular misconception, make up the vast majority of its work. Medicaid, which provides health coverage for people who are low-income, already does not cover abortion—a prohibition that has been federal law for decades. But “the payment of taxpayer funds to abortion clinics, for any purpose, results in the subsidy of abortion and the denial of the right to life,” McMaster reasoned in his executive order.

Politically, the executive order was a way for McMaster to “take an anti-abortion stand,” per the resulting headlines. But practically, it hurt South Carolinian women on Medicaid who relied on their local Planned Parenthood clinic for everyday reproductive healthcare.

South Carolina wasn’t the only state to attack Planned Parenthood in this way. Arizona, Arkansas, Indiana, Kansas, and Texas all tried to impose similar restrictions, according to Jane Perkins, litigation director for the National Health Law Program. Texas was one of the few to succeed, and as I wrote in October, the attacks on Planned Parenthood there forced many reproductive health clinics to close, cut hours, charge patients new fees, or ration IUDs and birth control implants. Ultimately, they could only serve half as many patients. The teen birth rate rose an estimated 3.4 percent. 

In response to the restrictions, Planned Parenthood patients and state affiliates have filed a series of lawsuits, arguing that they violate a federal Medicaid provision dating back to 1967 that guarantees patients the “free choice” to see any “qualified” provider who agrees to take Medicaid. The whole point of that provision was to stop states from restricting patient options, which Congress worried would be a step toward socialized medicine.

Federal appeals courts have mostly agreed with this argument. At least four of them have decided that states that exclude Planned Parenthood from Medicaid are violating the “free choice” provision, and that abortion clinics and their affiliates “are qualified providers, and what the state’s doing here is essentially a policy or politically motivated activity to ban Planned Parenthood,” Perkins says. But a couple of courts, including the far-right Fifth Circuit, have thrown out the lawsuits on technical grounds, ruling that states have the power to decide if providers are “qualified,” and that individuals can’t sue over their decisions.

That’s the question the Supreme Court has now agreed to review in Kerr. If the court sides with South Carolina, “it would certainly pull the door open” for more states to kick Planned Parenthood out of their Medicaid programs, Perkins says. Such a ruling could have consequences beyond reproductive healthcare—giving states greater power to pick and choose which doctors can see Medicaid patients.

It would also be in line with the conservative justices’ recent tendency to declare that courts should defer to state decision-making on whether to restrict healthcare for women or trans people. That’s essentially what happened in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which allowed states to ban abortion. The same outcome appears likely in a current case, United States v. Skrmetti, where the justices seem poised to green-light state bans on puberty blockers and hormone therapy for trans minors. 

Perkins is worried about Kerr. “I sort of went through a hair-stand-on-end,” she says. Just two years ago, the Supreme Court took a case on a similar question, and reaffirmed the framework courts use to decide when individuals can sue over Medicaid provisions. That case is similar to this one, though it involved nursing homes rather than abortion providers.  “To come along not two years later and take a case on…enforcement of Medicaid provisions, it’s startling,” she says. “But I understand that this is a politically charged subject matter.”

Another factor that makes it different this time: It’s the Alliance Defending Freedom asking. “This is really different,” Perkins says. “This is a nonprofit organization that, my understanding is, has a religious mission. So here’s the question: What about the establishment clause [requiring separation of church and state] of the Constitution?”

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

The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act stands as the single largest piece of legislation to address climate change in United States history.

The IRA contains nearly $370 billion for programs like tax credits for more efficient appliances, building new battery plants, and subsidies for renewable energy. And it triggered a boom in new construction and manufacturing for things like solar panels. It also created hundreds of thousands of new jobs.

But two years later, much of that money remains unspent.

The largest investment—ever— for the clean energy transition has yet to materialize into actual hardware like heat pumps or wind turbines. Despite more than $7.5 billion allocated to building electric vehicle chargers, for example, only a handful have been built. About 40 percent of big IRA projects hit delays, according to the Financial Times.

There were a lot of factors behind Democrats’ loss of the White House, but one particular source of frustration for the White House was that President Joe Biden received little credit for IRA spending, much of which was targeted at Republican-led districts and was structured to meet the goals of environmental activists, like prioritizing disadvantaged communities. The slow rollout is part of why the IRA barely registered with voters, even among those concerned about climate change.

“We always have this trade-off between how many safeguards we want to have to prevent misuse of money and how insistent we are on the other hand to get money out in a way that stimulates economic growth.”

Now President-elect Donald Trump has said he wants to claw back the unspent money and congressional Democrats are getting antsy. In a recent letter, dozens of senators and representatives wrote to the White House asking Biden to get more money out the door, from the IRA as well as other legislation like the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law.

“[T]here are so many more good projects, good jobs, and good savings to unleash,” they wrote. “To avoid future politicization or manipulation of climate programs, we ask that your agencies move expeditiously to disburse key climate and clean energy programs.”

The White House in turn is rushing to get programs like clean energy loan guarantees out the door. Some households are also scrambling to take advantage of incentives for heat pumps, home weatherization, and energy-efficient appliances before the new administration takes office.

All of this shows that despite the political will and time pressure, spending money can actually be pretty hard. Many state and local governments are finding that federal funds come with more strings attached than they anticipated. Ordinary people meanwhile are running into obstacles such as paperwork and supply chain snarls as they try to take advantage of tax credits and discounts.

In the waning days of the Biden administration, the White House could still step up its climate investments, but the question is whether they can go to work in time, and whether the next president can roll them back.

One of the big challenges with spending most federal funds in programs like the IRA is that the money doesn’t go straight to suppliers for construction materials, EV chargers, batteries, or home insulation. Rather, the funds are sent to state and local authorities who then distribute the money.

That added step creates a lot of complications. First, a lot of local officials simply are not set up to receive a lot of cash all at once. It requires rigorous accounting and record-keeping, so before they can use the money, recipients have to invest in the personnel and tools to track it. Then when money hits bank accounts, local officials have to decide where to spend it. That means seeking out proposals, soliciting competitive bids, and giving enough time for communities to weigh in. Even for “shovel-ready” projects, they often have to contend with last-minute hurdles like rising financing costs from inflation, supply chain snarls, and litigation that can halt ground-breaking.

Local governments also have their own incentives. While Biden’s White House wanted to juice the clean energy economy as fast as possible, often state and local governments want to stretch out the funds. “There’s always a sense that if money is spent too quickly, people might get used to the money, maybe even addicted to it, and then officials would have to raise taxes to make up the difference” when it runs out, said Donald Kettl, professor emeritus at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy who studies government spending.

Delays also result from how the funding is leveraged, whether it’s a grant, a loan, a loan guarantee, or a tax credit. Tax credits add an inherent lag because you don’t receive the cash benefit until you file your taxes.

There have been some counterexamples, though. Many of the Covid-19 pandemic spending measures like the Paycheck Protection Program did get money into people’s hands quickly. Those programs were relatively simple to administer. The stimulus checks automatically went out to people based on their tax records, for example, but the programs also didn’t have strong guardrails, leading to malfeasance and fraud. Billions of dollars in the PPP went to companies owned by celebrities and was spent on hotels, jewelry, and luxury cars.

“We always have this trade-off between how many safeguards we want to have to prevent misuse of money and how insistent we are on the other hand to get money out in a way that stimulates economic growth,” Kettl said. “Every time we do something like this, we tend to set that balance at a different spot.”

For ordinary people, getting IRA funds has also proven challenging. Many would-be EV buyers, for example, have been frustrated by dealers who don’t know about all the tax credits and discounts that can shave down the sticker price. Often, it’s the buyers educating sellers about the sweeteners. Homeowners have also struggled to find installers for heat pumps. Production declines and shipping delays have made it harder to buy more energy-efficient appliances.

There are also factors beyond Biden’s direct control at play. Changes in global demand and uncertainty about the outcome of the presidential election led some companies to hold off on executing IRA-funded projects. And those that do want to get rolling often have to go through a tedious, sometimes years-long permitting process before they can break ground.

Trump has never had a favorable outlook on clean technology and wants to cut spending and “waste” across the government. Even Trump’s pick to run the new Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, who is also the CEO of one of the largest electric vehicle companies, has said he’s in favor of rolling back EV tax credits. But Trump may not be able to do much to recall any money already spent and prevent money that’s been appropriated from going out the door. The fact remains that Congress is mainly in charge of spending money and it would take another act of Congress to undo the IRA.

Trump and his allies, however, have floated the idea that the president has the authority to impound funding. It’s a legally questionable mechanism by which the president could stop money that’s already approved by Congress from being spent in the future.

“The courts have largely been on the side of Congress on that. Whether or not the courts would be more favorable this time is anybody’s guess.”

“The courts have largely been on the side of Congress on that,” Kettl said. “Whether or not the courts would be more favorable this time is anybody’s guess.”

Any changes to tax credits likely won’t take effect in the current tax cycle and will have to go through the budgeting process. It’s worth noting that Trump extended tax credits for renewables, energy efficiency, and carbon capture during his first term.

Trump could slow-walk the remaining funding, and if his second turn in office is anywhere near as chaotic as the first, it may not even be a deliberate choice. But he may pay a political price for cutting back on clean energy funding. Though Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris didn’t reap many benefits from laws like the IRA at the ballot box, they will likely get harder to reverse as the programs mature.

“The political logic was sound but the rollout was too rushed for the various programs to reap electoral benefits so soon,” Steven Vanderheiden, who studies environmental politics at the University of Colorado, wrote in an email. “While I think that the Biden team could have done a better job in communicating the value of these efforts, ultimately I think that there was just not enough time for them to become a real game-changer in the recent election.”

When Trump takes office, IRA investments will only get more entrenched.

Republicans may remain ideologically opposed to such programs, but about 60 percent of the resulting jobs are in districts whose representatives voted against it. About 80 percent of the investments are in Republican-led states. The political uncertainties that deterred clean energy spending prior to the election have now been resolved, and there may be appetite for more projects.

So while Trump may try to cut off any more new money from the IRA, it’s only going to get harder to stop what’s already underway.

Reveal has been a weekly investigative podcast for nearly 10 years now, so we’ve produced hundreds of hours of investigative journalism over the years designed to inspire, inform, or infuriate you (and occasionally, all three at the same time). We’ve curated some of our favorite Reveal series and serials to take you through your holiday travel time—episodes that will resonate today and into 2025. You can find the link to each episode on your preferred podcast platform below.

Four hours+ trip

Mississippi Goddam (seven-part series): Billey Joe Johnson Jr. dreamed of graduating high school, going to college, and one day playing pro football. On a cold December morning in 2008, that future was shattered. His story is a reckoning of justice in America.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

American Rehab (eight-part series): Reveal exposes how a treatment for drug addiction has turned tens of thousands of people into an unpaid shadow workforce. This reporting was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

After Ayotzinapa (three-part series): In 2014, students from a rural college in Mexico came under attack by police. Six people were killed and 43 young men disappeared without a trace. Families suspected the government was hiding the truth. Now, Reveal is exposing corruption at the highest levels and an unsettling connection to America’s war on drugs. 

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

Three-hour trip

40 Acres and a Lie (three-part series): It’s often thought of as a promise that was never kept. But “40 acres and a mule” was more than that. It was real. This three-part series from Reveal and the Center for Public Integrity tells the history of an often-misunderstood government program that gave more than 1,200 formerly enslaved people land titles, only to take the land back, fueling a wealth gap that remains today.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio

The COVID Tracking Project (three-part series): This three-part series exposes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s bungled response to COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic and takes listeners inside the massive volunteer effort to collect data about tests, cases, hospitalizations, and deaths in the US.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

Two-hour trip

Buried Secrets (two-part series): After decades of stripping away Native American identity from its students, a Catholic boarding school seeks to help the community heal. This series was a partnership between Reveal and ICT, formerly known as Indian Country Today.
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

Listening to these next two investigations together will deepen your understanding of the risks and consequences for new mothers suspected of drug use:

They Followed Doctors’ Orders. The State Took Their Babies: Jade Dass began taking medication to treat her addiction to opioids before she became pregnant. After Dass delivered a healthy daughter, the hospital reported her to the Arizona Department of Child Safety.

Even as medications like Suboxone help pregnant women safely treat addiction, taking them can trigger investigations by child welfare agencies that separate mothers from their newborns. To understand the scope of the dragnet, reporter Shoshana Walter, data reporter Melissa Lewis, and a team of Reveal researchers and lawyers filed 100 public records requests, putting together the first-ever tally of how often women are reported to child welfare agencies for taking prescription drugs during pregnancy.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

She Ate a Poppy Seed Salad. Child Services Took Her Baby: Hospitals across the country routinely drug test people coming in to give birth. But the tests many hospitals use are notoriously imprecise, with false positive rates of up to 50 percent for some drugs. Our collaboration with The Marshall Project investigates why parents across the country are being reported to child protective services over inaccurate pee-in-a-cup drug tests.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

One-hour trip

Your Retirement Investments Are Probably Fueling Climate Change: Reveal reporter Jonathan Jones was working on a story about a massive coal plant expansion in Montana when he wondered who was bankrolling the project. It turns out a major shareholder of the energy company driving the project was the Vanguard Group, the investment firm where he happens to have his retirement savings. This discovery put Jones on a quest to find out why Vanguard and other asset managers continue to invest in fossil fuels at a time when we need to burn less oil, gas, and coal.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

The Racist Hoax That Changed Boston: After a pregnant woman’s murder, Boston police rounded up countless Black men in search of her killer. But they were chasing a lie.

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

Red, Black, and Blue: Mother Jones video correspondent Garrison Hayes spent months on the campaign trail talking to Black voters about how they see the goals and limits of their own political power. He paid special attention to Black Republicans and the new crop of Black supporters of former President Donald Trump. 

Apple Podcasts | Spotify | iHeartRadio | Pandora

The staff of Mother Jones is, once again, rounding up the heroes and monsters of the past year. Importantly, this is a completely non-exhaustive and subjective list, giving our reporters a chance to write about something that brought joy or discontent. Enjoy.

Modern kids’ songs, the stuff of literal torture, are in lockstep with the AI slop that defines the current era of crushing, synthetic sameness. They suck. So you can imagine my surprise, amid a technicolor migraine brought on by the tyranny of “Daddy Finger” one morning, when the algorithm threw out a familiar voice. With equal parts amusement and skepticism, I asked my husband, “Is this the dude from…Fall……………Out Boy?”

I have zero affection for Fall Out Boy. If anything, I’m certain I thought I was above this music; that’s what idiot teens on the verge of escaping the suburbs think. But I’m back in the ’burbs and have discovered something surprising.

Indeed, the voice belonged to none other than Patrick Stump, singing the theme song of a TV series beloved by my 3-year-old son, Spidey and His Amazing Friends. And there was Stump again on the vocals of every other song that followed. “Spin, Spin, Spin,” “Trace-E Shake,” “Time to Spidey Save the Day,” and so forth. Over the course of the soundtrack, I found myself tickled, even intrigued to hear where Stump would take Team Spidey. And after weeks of marathon listening—at home, in the car, on vacation—my sanity remains strangely intact.

Which isn’t to say that I enjoyed the music. Given a choice between silence and Spidey, the former will always be more appealing. Nor do I have an iota of affection for Fall Out Boy, the band that made Stump famous in the early aughts. If anything, I’m certain I thought I was above this music because that’s what idiot teens on the verge of escaping the suburbs think. But exactly 20 years after leaving the ’burbs, I’m back, toddler in tow, understanding that in each of the songs on Spidey and His Amazing Friends, one quality separates Stump from nearly everyone else in the genre: Stump cares. At times, you can even detect passion, as Stump fully commits to the cheer, “Go, webs, go! Go, webs, go! Go, webs go!” He confers on each song the same gusto of younger, noughtier days.

I was suspicious, though. Why would any self-respecting musician do this? Sure, he probably has children to impress. (Two of them, in fact.) But that still didn’t explain his involvement, at least to my satisfaction. That’s when a more shameful curiosity took hold: The guy must really need a paycheck, huh? What else could justify lyrics about shooting “thwips” to web up Zola than a nice Disney paycheck?

But after a few more clicks into my research, it became clear that my thinking was misguided, cruel even. It turns out Stump is quite wealthy, and more importantly, the guy could not have been more enthusiastic to participate in the project. As he told Billboard in 2021:

“Composing and writing all of the music for the series has been incredible because I am such a big Spidey fan,” Stump says. “The theme song for Spidey and His Amazing Friends, you couldn’t pull me away from the studio after I recorded it because I just wanted to add more stuff. I was just so excited. There’s a certain frenetic energy to Spidey—and the webs swinging—that I just wanted to put into it. So it was all of those things sped up and made overexcited, because that’s how I was feeling.”

Now here is a man, similar in age to the adults forced to listen along, showcasing what it means to pivot with grace. To evolve—yes, maybe to lesser forms!—but with the same big ideas you carried when life brimmed with more promise. To still have fun with it, even at the outset of middle age, when life dulls to the logistics of school pickups and a mortgage.

The truth is that my attempts to reckon with why an erstwhile radio fixture was now slinging Spidey songs say a lot more about me than anything else. At 37, I have settled into a comfortable place with the notion of creative mediocrity. But thankfully, others have figured out the tricky balance of aging and creating—something I now think about every time Spidey makes his way back into our car rides. Will a younger ambition return to me one day? I hope so. Who knew a kids’ song could inspire a grown-up?

Trump’s mass deportation agenda is already taking shape—for a second time—in coastal Oregon.

A racist letter reportedly circulating through Lincoln County, which has a population of about 50,000 people and is located on the state’s western coast, encourages residents to surveil and report “brown illegals…who you suspect are here in our country on an illegal basis” to the Department of Homeland Security.

The letter implores white locals to help facilitate “the largest round-up of brown illegals in our history,” referring to Trump’s pledge to begin mass deportations of approximately 11 million people, and promises white residents a chance to seize the victims’ homes.

In starkly racist language, it proceeds to outline a dystopian vision for surveillance of people of color everywhere from churches to schools and grocery stores:

Sit in your church’s parking lot and write down the license plate [number] of brown folks. This is extremely important if you attend a catholic church—many brown folks are catholics!! Shopping, again if you see a bunch of brown folks getting in a car—write down the plate [number]. Schools, as you wait in line to pick up the kiddos or the grandkiddos—if you see brown folks—record the plate [number]. Your neighborhood—you know where the brown folks live in your neighborhood—again record the plate [numbers]. If you see a construction crew and/or a landscaping crew who have brown folks—write down the name of the company and a phone [number].”

This is the full letter being distributed around Lincoln County Oregon pic.twitter.com/VlvbzFldzZ

— Rachel Bitecofer (@RachelBitecofer) December 20, 2024

Perhaps most disturbing are the ways that the letter directly echoes some of the Trump administration’s own anti-immigration talking points: Attacks on sanctuary cities, promises of detention, and allegedly solving the housing crisis through mass deportations, which the letter compares approvingly to Japanese internment.

The letter claims Oregon’s status as a sanctuary state makes it especially fitting for its perverse anti-immigrant demands: “We have received information brown folks, who are currently in Idaho and Montana, are planning to move to our state, because they believe it will be ‘safer’ for them. So don’t limit the license plate to just Oregon—brown folks from any state will be able to be reported to the Department of Homeland Security.”

And it outlines Trump’s vision for how deportations will be enacted, writing, “the brown folks will remain [in county jails] until the camps are completed in Texas—then these folks will be transferred there,” referring to the detention camps that, as my colleague Isabela Dias has reported, Trump’s acolytes plan to build.

“When the brown folks are rounded up,” the letter continues, “their properties will be confiscated just like the properties belonging to the Japanese in California were during World War II. So, within a short term, there will be a whole lot of homes on the market for us white folks to purchase and with the inventory so high—the prices will be very low and affordable.” (Again, experts say otherwise.)

It is unclear how many people have received the letter, but the recipients included local lawmakers in the city of Toledo, including its mayor, who received a copy in the mail, Portland NBC affiliate KGW reported. He, and other local officials, have publicly condemned the letter: In a Facebook post, Lincoln County Sheriff Curtis Landers characterized it as “harmful, divisive, and inconsistent with the values we uphold as public servants and community members.”

“We strongly advise against engaging in activities such as those outlined in this letter, including collecting or sharing information about individuals based on their demographic or perceived immigration status,” Landers added. His post also notes that state law “generally prohibits the inquiry or collection of an individual’s immigration or citizenship status, or country of birth,” and that the sheriff’s office “does not inquire about, document, or share such information with” ICE. The sheriff could not immediately be reached for comment on Sunday.

Oregon’s Democratic Attorney General Ellen Rosenblum also condemned the letter. ABC affiliate KATU of Portland reported that the FBI’s Oregon office is aware of the letter, and encouraged “community members who feel they are being physically threatened” to report concerns to local law enforcement.

In a statement provided to Mother Jones Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) said: “Racism has no place in Oregon or anywhere else, and I’m proud to add my voice to the chorus of state and local officials denouncing this cowardly and cruel letter.” Oregon’s other Democratic Senator, Jeff Merkley, does not appear to have publicly commented on the letter, and his office did not respond to a request for comment. Spokespeople for the Trump transition team did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Sunday afternoon.

The letter is reminiscent of the racist texts, now the subject of an FBI investigation, sent to Black people in the days after the election, demanding they “pick cotton,” as my colleague Anna Merlan reported at the time; other texts also targeted Hispanic and LBGTQ people. Anna also reported on a theory of where they originated:

Researchers at the Bridging Divides Initiative, a nonpartisan think tank at Princeton that studies and attempts to mitigate political violence, wrote in a rapid response analysis that the language of the texts appears to have been drawn from 4chan and from a now-deleted subreddit that was removed by Reddit’s moderators.

“An individual or individuals likely copy-pasted the text and used virtual phone numbers to send out the texts, selecting recipients based on their demographic profile,” the researchers wrote. “The recipient phone numbers could have been obtained via a data broker or a pre-existing data breach.” 

While the identities of the senders of those texts, and the letter in Oregon, may be unknown, one thing is clear: Right-wing racism is gaining steam.

Update, Dec. 23: This post was updated with a statement from Sen. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.).

President Joe Biden has officially surpassed president-elect Donald Trump’s record of judicial appointed to federal courts—by one single judge.

On Friday, the Senate Judiciary Committee, tasked with carrying out the confirmations of Biden’s appointees, announced that it had confirmed Biden’s 235th judge—one more than Trump during his term in office, when he blitzed the courts with white, male, right-wing judicial activists. “We just beat Donald Trump’s judicial confirmation record,” the committee announced in a post on X. “Our 235 judges confirmed under President Biden are diverse, fair, qualified, and will be a frontline of defense on attacks against our democracy.”

The judges will be “a significant protection for our civil rights and civil liberties to preserve our democracy” in Trump’s next term, Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.), a member of the committee, told reporters on Friday. As I have reported, the judges—who are appointed for life—play a significant role in deciding cases focused on reproductive rights, among many other issues of major importance to Americans; it was Matthew Kacsmaryk, a Trump-appointed federal judge in Texas, for example, who issued the anti-science ruling last year that paved the way for anti-abortion activists to bring an ultimately unsuccessful case to the Supreme Court challenging the FDA’s approval of mifepristone, one of the two drugs used in a medication abortion.

The sheer amount of cases federal judges take on also contributes to their power: “The power of lower court federal judges is immense,” David Cohen, a law professor at Drexel University, told me last month, “because the Supreme Court only deals with such a limited number of cases.”

The courts are also expected to play a particularly significant role in light of the threats posed by Trump, who has threatened to prosecute his political enemies, and the ultra-conservative Supreme Court that has enabled political corruption, as my colleague Pema Levy recently wrote.

“The rule of law, which we used to take for granted, is under enormous stress, and is really threatened,” Sen. Peter Welch (D-Vt.) said Friday, “and the importance of what we did is that we have 235 jurors who are committed to the rule of law—and that includes a respect for judicial restraint, a respect for the proper role of the legislative branch, and a willingness to step in when there’s overreach, either by the legislature or the executive branch.”

According to the committee, the confirmed judges include 187 district court nominees, 45 circuit court nominees, one Supreme Court nominee—Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, the first Black woman on the high court—and two Court of International Trade nominees. About two-thirds of the judges confirmed under Biden are women and about two-fifths are women of color—both records, the committee says.

“Judges shape our lives,” Biden said in a post on X, announcing the record-setting confirmation. “I’m proud of those who heeded the call to serve, and of the legacy I’ll leave with the men and women I’ve appointed.”

“These exceptionally qualified individuals are dedicated to upholding the rule of law,” added Vice President Kamala Harris, “and they reflect the diversity of America.”

Trump does not appear to have publicly commented on Biden beating his record—but he may be glad to know that there are still 36 judicial vacancies he can fill in the federal courts, all but 2 in the district courts. (A couple of Biden’s nominees did not wind up being confirmed after he reportedly did not formally submit their nominations to the Senate in time.) Republicans are already preparing to squash Biden’s newly-established record: “On January 20 of 2029, Trump’s going to brag about having 240,” incoming Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) told NBC News.

To Cohen, the law professor from Drexel, the news is more nuanced than either Democrats or Republicans would like it to be. “Multiple things can be true at the same time,” he told me Sunday. “It’s fantastic they confirmed so many judges to counterbalance the Trump cadre of judges. But also, there should be zero vacancies remaining.”

When Valentino Rodriguez started his job at a high-security prison in Sacramento, California, informally known as New Folsom, he thought he was entering a brotherhood of correctional officers who hold each other to a high standard of conduct.

Five years later, Rodriguez would be found dead in his home. His unexpected passing would raise questions from his family and the FBI. 

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Before he died, Rodriguez was promoted to an elite unit investigating crimes in the prison. His parents and his widow say he had been hoping for the position for a long time. 

But once inside the unit, the job consumed him. From day one, his fellow officers began to undermine and harass him. Stressed and fed up with how he was being treated, Rodriguez reached a breaking point. 

He left the prison, but his experiences there still haunted him—so he went in for a meeting with the warden. He didn’t know it would be his last.

This week on Reveal, we partner with KQED reporters Sukey Lewis and Julie Small and the On Our Watch podcast to explore what this correctional officer’s story shows about how the second-largest prison system in the country is failing to protect the people who live and work inside it.

This is an update of an episode that originally aired in March 2024.