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.

Forget the YouTube sensations Ms. Rachel or CoComelon: My household still blissfully lounges in the sweet cocoon of Raffi, the purveyor of gentle, folksy children’s songs and covers made popular in the 1980s. Few days go by when my almost-2-year-old son doesn’t request a round of “Baby Luga,” Raffi’s cheerful 1980 hit “Baby Beluga” about the “little white whale on the go.” My kid has christened his plastic whale toy “Baby Luga,” and it’s as if this moniker has imbued it with magnetic charm, transforming it into his go-to pick of companions during bath time.

For me, this is all very comforting. I’m a so-called “Beluga grad,” a millennial whose early childhood memories come with a Raffi soundtrack. Many of us Beluga grads are now having children of our own, as writer (and fellow grad) Emma Silvers pointed out when she interviewed the Canadian musician for Mother Jones earlier this year. In her piece, Silvers caught us up on Raffi Cavoukian’s whereabouts and recent releases:

Though he’s faded a bit from the limelight, Raffi, now 75, has never stopped making music; his 24th album, Penny Penguin, dropped April 19. In the last three decades he’s also become a vocal climate activist, performed for Nelson Mandela and the Dalai Lama, rejected an offer to make ungodly sums of money with a Baby Beluga movie from the producers of Shrek, and established the Raffi Foundation for Child Honouring, a nonprofit organized around the singer’s “children-first” vision of sustainability.

In other words, aside from crafting catchy but not obnoxious singalong hits, Raffi is clearly a stand-up dude. That’s not all, Silvers writes. On X/Twitter, “he maintains perhaps the most earnest, sweetly radical feed in the history of the internet.” His posts condemn income inequality and the destruction of Gaza, opine on the importance of nurturing children, and muse poetically about ice hockey. In December, eight months after we ran Silvers’ interview, he posted a message about the toppling of Syria’s dictator, urging us to “tune your heart to all you hold dear. to all that is precious. stay strong.”

But none of that really explains why Raffi is my hero this year. In these uneasy times of political turmoil and anger and fear of violence and climate disasters, Raffi’s peaceful and soothing songs have become a kind of bulwark, a necessary reminder that simple tunes sung together can connect us and elevate us above the chaos.

Perhaps more importantly, they can occupy my son enough to prevent him from falling asleep in the car and upending nap time when we arrive home. We listened to “Baby Beluga” on repeat eight or nine times in a row the other day, while stuck in traffic, with that purpose in mind. It worked.

Which brings me to a slight fear: Although Raffi is currently my hero, will all the repetitive listening soon transform him into a monster? Only time will tell. For now, there’s “The More We Get Together” and “Down by the Bay” and “Apples and Bananas.” Put simply, I’ve got the whole world in my hands.  

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

On the second weekend after Hurricane Helene, Swannanoa Christian Church held its first Sunday service since the storm-battered western North Carolina. The sanctuary was piled high with clothes, water, and food, so everyone gathered outdoors. Out in the yard, beneath a clear blue sky and uphill from the devastation wrought by the flood, the congregation interspersed prayer with the testimonies of congregants who had pulled people from the water or been pulled from it themselves.

After the service, as congregants lingered to chat or sort donations, Elder Gordon Dasher recounted his church’s mission following the storm. “Our goal is to be the kingdom of God here on Earth,” the pastor said. “We’re getting into the filth, getting dirty, getting sewage and mud on our feet and hands, and helping people in the darkest moment of their life. That’s number one. And number two, what we want to see come out of that is we want people to see at least a glimmer of a light to come on that says God is real, because here are his people right here, side by side with us in our suffering.”

Dasher and his ministry in Swannanoa are part of a teeming community of faith-based organizations using their deep roots, vast networks of the faithful, and financial means to help in whatever way they can. Beyond the local congregations, Presbyterians, Catholics, Baptists, and many other denominations rushed in to help, as they so often do after floods, and hurricanes, and wildfires everywhere. Almost three months later, the sight of church volunteers clearing away rubble, handing out water, or gathering in prayer remains as common as the sight of damaged homes and washed-out roads. 

Those who descend on such places are eager to help, and many hope to realize their dreams of a different, better world. They often glimpse a chance to create from the wreckage an ideal based on their aspirations or ideologies. Right-wing militias see in post-disaster chaos ripe opportunities to recruit and fulfill their goal of undermining trust in the state. Those on the other end of the political spectrum often see a chance to build a more egalitarian society. Dozens have gathered each week at the anarchist bookstore in Asheville to read A Paradise Built in Hell, which explores how communities restructure and establish small utopias in the wake of disaster.
But none of them match the people of faith in scale, ambition, or determination to do good. Churches, synagogues, mosques, and other houses of worship are well-positioned to gather resources and mobilize quickly. In rural communities in particular, local churches are natural communal focal points, providing social structure and a trusted information network. 

“Strangers, complete strangers, just showing up to help because they love Jesus has been really inspiring.”

Many denominations, especially within Christianity, also feel divinely called to this work—they undertake it with the belief that they are building the Kingdom of God, a world they’re working toward in both the act of disaster relief and, for many, the act of proselytizing. This belief is particularly strong among the evangelically-driven Protestantism of the American South, where, in the aftermath of Helene, faith organizations have been on the ground doing both. 

“Strangers, complete strangers, just showing up to help because they love Jesus has been really inspiring,” Dasher’s daughter Jessica said. 

Churches and faith-based organizations can be nimble responders. As roads throughout the region became passable, churches opened their doors to receive donations and organized volunteers, some of whom came from as far as California, to deliver them.

Their efforts have expanded beyond serving immediate needs like providing food, water, and clothing to more ambitious efforts like repairing homes, donating campers and tiny cabins, and providing a bit of financial assistance. The decline in tourism has hit the city of Asheville hard, leaving Buncombe County with the highest unemployment in the state. Even before the county’s rent relief program got started, Grace Covenant Presbyterian Church was cutting thousand-dollar checks for residents desperate to avoid eviction.

They’re so nimble, in fact, that federal and state relief agencies, mired in the bureaucracy of their work—and whose jobs do not include mucking out or repairing houses, but rather providing the money needed to do so—have come to lean on them. The Federal Emergency Management Agency directs disaster survivors and works alongside long-term recovery groups, which is the government’s name for the churches, nonprofits, and businesses that provide the backbone of relief efforts. They are marshaled by what are called voluntary organizations active in disasters. In addition to providing and coordinating boots on the ground, they play key roles in long-term planning and recovery. Churches are so central to this work that the Obama administration established the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships to train and prepare emergency management officials and congregants to collaborate in the field. (President Trump shuttered the program in 2017; President Biden resurrected it in 2021.)

“They started out by holding a prayer circle, and I guess it made me uncomfortable. I was worried they weren’t gonna fill my driveway if I didn’t participate.” 

Although most everyone in western North Carolina is grateful for the help, several people expressed reservations about depending so heavily upon the faithful. Others recalled being surprised when volunteers showed up eager to help but wanted to give thanks to God first. “They started out by holding a prayer circle, and I guess it made me uncomfortable,” said one resident of Zionville, which is about 100 miles from Asheville. This person, who did not want to give their name for fear of antagonizing those helping the community, is not opposed to prayer, but felt uncomfortable doing something so intimate with strangers. Still, they relented. “I was worried they weren’t gonna fill my driveway if I didn’t participate.” 

The emphasis on faith and conversion can sometimes feel out of sync with people’s real needs. Mikaela Curry, a storm survivor and volunteer in Watauga County, North Carolina, recalled church groups offering to cook meals for flood victims and leaving stacks of Bibles behind. “Generally people aren’t taking them,” she said. “It’s kind of this weird dynamic.”

Curry has preferred to work with those who don’t place so great an emphasis on faith and proselytizing, and has made a particular point of avoiding Samaritan’s Purse. The organization, founded by the Reverend Billy Graham, makes clear in its foundational statement of faith, “We believe that marriage is exclusively the union of one genetic male and one genetic female.” That leaves Curry and others wondering if the group is truly interested in helping everyone.

Such a question can be fraught because in some rural counties, Samaritan’s Purse is essentially the only charitable organization providing vital help like rent relief assistance. 

Shannon Daley, who leads US disaster relief for the international organization, conceded that its volunteers must sign that statement of faith, but said they do not discriminate against anyone needing help. Still, they are, she said, “always wanting to share that message, and about how we can have a personal relationship with the Creator of the universe through his Son.”

Helpers may be told not to pass judgment, but that’s not to say they don’t, said Valentine Reilly. She helps coordinate volunteer efforts in Trade, a small town in the easternmost corner of  Tennessee, and recalled instances in which she felt volunteers questioned the morality of some victims, or set to work without finding out what was needed. “These people are all coming out here to help,” she said. “They’re all coming out here to do good work. And that’s a valuable thing. But some groups do more good work than others.”

On a blustery afternoon in November, Sarah Ogletree made tea and reflected on her experience coordinating relief efforts among churches with different social values and priorities. Ogletree lives in Bakersville and has spent more than a decade working at the intersection of faith and the environment—a role that has included bringing congregations throughout the region into the fight for climate justice.

Ministries and churches have many reasons to feel called to serve others in times of crisis, she said. She pointed out that the Bible commands it in Matthew 25: “For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.” It’s a verse that many denominations take as an instruction from Christ to help the poor and oppressed. 

“It’s that identification with those who are marginalized or who are in need. And I think different traditions within Christianity understand that passage differently,” she said. While some see their role as filling this directive through volunteering and community service, others see it as a way of bringing people to God. Some of the more evangelically minded organizations take the lessons a step further, believing that people are more reachable and more receptive to hearing the Gospel during a disaster—a point Fritz Wilson, the former executive director of Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, has made in the past. “Meeting a family’s physical needs with practical help starts their healing process, which leads to a sense of hope that things will be better,” he has said. “This gives us the opportunity to share a different type of hope that is only found in a relationship with Jesus.”

“I wish more churches showed up in communities simply to be a loving presence.”

Ogletree has been working with Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians, Mennonites, and other denominations to secure money, building supplies, and other necessities for her neighbors while following her vision of Christian service that overcomes ideological and denominational boundaries in times of crisis. She sometimes worries that faith-based organizations focus too much on “the pitch”—evangelizing and converting—to their detriment, alienating survivors who just want a roof over their head. “I wish more churches showed up in communities simply to be a loving presence,” she said.

Even as a religious person, she’s not always sure how to navigate that post-disaster dynamic, recalling an instance in which an organization that arrived from out of town with supplies asked to pray before delivering them. “It felt like it was the currency with which this transaction was allowed … like, it’s free, but you gotta pray with me. And that felt unfair.” The prayer, she said, was sweet, but she found the encounter difficult to process because she knew the prayer was meant to comfort flood survivors, not surprise or shock them. 

“Helpers that come into crisis-situations, whether you are faith-based or religious or not, you have a lot of power in that situation,” Ogletree said. “And you are dealing with people that have just been through something super traumatic.”

Not all interactions are transactional, of course, and some people truly are there only to help. For many people in the region, the support of church volunteers and local parishes has anchored them in these hard times.

Ogletree’s experiences working with churches in the wake of Helene have been largely positive. In helping people through their trauma, she’s found the kind of community she’s long dreamed of building, one that overcomes political fractures to assist people in need and meet them where they are. In the South and Appalachia, the church is not only an essential part of many peoples’ social life, but a trusted source of information and direction, making it particularly effective at disaster response. “They’re at the front lines,” Ogletree said. “People know where they are.” She dreams of ensuring churches have backup generators, solar power, even Expo markers and whiteboards, to be better prepared for next time. Because there’s always a next time.

That’s a point Zach Dasher, pastor Gordon’s son, made back in September as he preached to congregants still reeling from the devastation Helene brought. It is not unusual in such times for people to struggle with faith, and he clearly hoped to set their minds at ease. “Why all the evil in the world?” he asked. “Why all the natural catastrophes and devastation? Where is God in that?”

His answer provided congregants with a framework for understanding what had happened to them. “The kingdom of God is here,” he said. “Everything we build can be washed away. Everything can be gone, wind and water can wash it away, picking up whole houses and soil. But the kingdom is far more durable and eternal than that. The Kingdom of God cannot be shaken.”

Before ending his sermon, he asked his flock to please treat volunteers from out of state with kindness and respect, and expressed hope that those with damaged homes would take time to rest and let the helpers do their work.

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

From a toadstool with teeth to a vine smelling of marzipan and a flower that has cheated its way out of having to photosynthesize, a weird and wonderful host of new plant and fungus species have been discovered in 2024.

Other plants given scientific names for the first time include beautiful new orchids, a ghostly palm, and a hairy plant that appears to have stolen a gene from an unrelated family. The species are among the 172 new plants and fungi named by scientists from the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, and their partners.

The species come from every corner of the globe, from woods near Tunbridge Wells in Kent in England, to African sandstone cliffs in Guinea and the forests of Indonesia.

However, botanists are in a race against time to discover many plants and fungi before the continuing destruction of the natural world drives them to extinction. The loss of species does not only mean that their unique biology is gone forever, but also their potential for use as medicine, food, and even as plastic recyclers. Some of the new species in 2024 already face extinction because of cement manufacturing, cinnamon farming, and timber plantations.

There are 400,000 named plant species but scientists estimate there are another 100,000 yet to be identified. Every year, scientists name about 2,500 new species of plant and the same number of fungi.

“The sheer privilege of describing a species as new to science is a thrill that not many will ever get to experience.”

“The sheer privilege of describing a species as new to science is a thrill that not many will ever get to experience,” said Dr Martin Cheek, in RBG Kew’s Africa team. “Sadly, the devastating reality is that more often than not, new species are being found on the brink of extinction and it’s a race against time to find and describe them all.”

About 40 percent of named plant species are threatened with extinction, as habitats are razed for farmland and other human development, and as many as 75 percent of the world’s undescribed plant species are thought to be threatened with oblivion.

Toadstools most often have gills or pores under the caps to disperse their spores but those from the genus Phellodon have rows of teeth-like protuberances. This year DNA analysis revealed three new species in the UK, from woodland near Tunbridge Wells and Windsor in England, and Abernethy in Scotland. These fungi are harmed by nitrate pollution from farming and are disappearing across Europe.

Other new fungi include three species of toadstool from the genus Russula – which often give off a fishy whiff—from northern Sweden and Norway, the high Rockies in the US, and British Columbia in Canada.

Dr Anna Bazzicalupo, a fungi expert at RBG Kew, said: “Identifying new species of fungi is a colossal but increasingly important task as we estimate more than 2m species are waiting to be described. An overwhelming number of them are likely threatened with extinction, meaning they may disappear before they are even recognized.”

Three more new lianas were found in southern China. These flower only at night and are pollinated by moths. One, Cheniella longistaminea, can grow up to 80 meters tall but all are threatened by plantations of timber and cinnamon, with the latter being a big export to the US. Another new liana in Vietnam, Chlorohiptage vietnamensis, grows in a limestone landscape that is being cleared for cement quarries. Scientists do not know what kind of insect pollinates its strange green flowers.

Botanists also revealed a new family of cheats in 2024, called Afrothismiaceae. The rare plants, found mostly in forests in Cameroon, do not use sunlight to photosynthesize sugars and have lost their green color. Plants usually provide these sugars to mycorrhizal fungi in their roots in exchange for minerals. But the Afrothismiaceae species take all they need from their fungal partners, giving nothing in return, and only appear above ground to fruit and flower.

Another rule-breaker is a new herb from Guinea in West Africa, named Virectaria stellata, which grows on the remote sandstone cliffs of the Fouta Djallon. It has star-shaped clusters of hair, which have never been seen in this large family before. But these hairy stars do occur in plants from an unrelated genus called Barleria. The botanists think the genes that produce the stellate hairs may have jumped from one family to the other via sap-drinking insects.

Among the most spectacular new species, are a bonanza of orchids from Indonesia, which still hosts many unknown species across its 17,000 islands. A climbing palm in western Borneo was also named in 2024, Plectocomiopsis hantu. Hantu is the local word for ghost, used because the plant has grey stems and white undersides to its leaves and it is known from only three rainforest locations. Local communities, however, have long used it to make baskets and for its tasty and tender roots.

Cheek said: “Biodiversity loss is a crisis that affects us all. Every unknown species we lose could have been a potential new food or new medicine that we never even knew existed. We urgently need more funding, training, and public awareness of plant and fungal taxonomy.”

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.

I have always thought the music-for-charity genre was irredeemably corny. “We Are the World”? Far from “the greatest gift of all”—sorry! Band Aid’s, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” I hope they don’t know it’s Christmastime at all, because I’m returning this gift. Let’s not even get into that hauntingly bad celebrity cover of “Imagine” from the darkest days of March 2020. 

Music for charity is, often, just bad. And it can read as patronizing, frivolous, and a useless effort by out-of-touch celebrities who could help needy masses a lot more by giving money directly to everyone as opposed to donating a song. 

But this year, two different albums were different. In 2024, the Charity Compilation was good. 

Transa, a Red Hot release from November, is a four-hour, hundred-artist behemoth. Often heavy on the ambient, you should expect tons of reverb, harp, and flute. At its core, the record isn’t so much about being transgender as it is about loving trans people. Sade’s standout hymn to her trans son, “Young Lion,” distills that spirit. (So do the samplers from the New York City Trans Oral History Project included on the album, as does André 3000’s 26-minute instrumental track, with the unwieldy title, “Something Is Happening and I May Not Fully Understand But I’m Happy to Stand for the Understanding.”) 

Producer Dust Reid and artist and activist Massima Bell started developing the album in 2021. Since then, things for trans folks in America have gone from bad to worse. Twenty-six states have passed bans on gender-affirming care for young people. Adults are rationing hormones, and some are rushing through legal name and sex changes before President-elect Donald Trump comes to power again. Just last week, a provision banning gender-affirming care for the children of military families passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act, which caused a friend to text me, baffled, “What does that even have to do with defense?” 

It would be naive to suggest that music can do much to solve anti-trans law or even really counteract the reactionary wave we’re now caught up in. Transa won’t stop America from throwing people under the bus. But here’s the reason it’s important: This is good music. And good music matters. It tells the listener, we survived. We are still here, and we are making something beautiful.

Another mammoth compilation album released this year proves the same point. Cardinals at the Window, a 10-hour Bandcamp exclusive released 12 days after Hurricane Helene devastated Western North Carolina. The record—well over 100 tracks long, with over 100 artists pitching in—admittedly lacks the sonic cohesiveness of Transa. Instead, it sounds like a jam session among old friends meeting up after the storm passes. Thus far, the album has raised over $340,000 for organizations like Holler Harm Reduction and BeLoved Asheville, bringing tangible help to a region too often neglected. (North Carolina is still very much recovering from Helene: Some survivors are turning to yurts and tents for winter housing after their homes were destroyed.) 

Other musical aid efforts this year merit a mention, too. From cramped house shows to sold-out arenas, artists have raised money for the people of Gaza and Sudan—often at a cost to their careers. (One surprise: Macklemore, of “Thrift Shop” fame, has reinvented himself as a protest artist.) 

I can’t find a non-trite way to write about how music keeps us human when our worlds collapse around us. But I do know that from now on, I will not be disregarding Charity Compilation Albums. These artists aren’t heroes in the sense of saving lives, really, but I think that those who give us little moments of joy and hope in cataclysmic times deserve hero status, too.

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.

Camo hat, orange letters. The ever-present “Hot to Go!” dance. VMA alien makeout. Beyoncé covering Dolly Parton—and Dolly loving it in return. Feuds. Flirting. That shade of green.

There was a lot of buzz around pop music over the past year, and our younger colleagues have assured us that it wasn’t all hype. The music, especially the pop music, was legitimately good.

Even the numbers back it up. The data shows that 2024 was the year of the “pop star (re)emergence.” But the trend extended to other genres, from country to musical theater and the ’80s power ballads, experiencing a resurgence thanks to their association with pop stardom. The common denominator throughout? Women were at the forefront of all of it:

• Chappell Roan and Sabrina Carpenter rocketed to stardom (and brought sapphic energy with them).
• Charli XCX turned the internet green.
• Only for Ariana Grande to then turn it pink and green.
• Beyoncé revolutionized country.

We won’t attempt to explain all of the moments. Impossible! But plugged-in colleagues—Sam Van Pykeren and Henry Carnell, Mother Jones’ digital producer and fellow, respectively—take a crack at explaining why pop stars were so compelling and what about the music that kept our team returning.

Okay, hello, I am once again your stand-in Old Person (a la our Brat explainer—remember that!?), and I’m here, at the end of the year, to talk about pop. First question: Was it good this year? 

Sam Van Pykeren: I mean, I had a good time with this year’s lineup! Dare I even say a great time?

Henry Carnell: This was the first time a pop artist has ever been my No. 1 on Spotify Wrapped, which I think says I liked it.

Obvious question, Henry. Who was top?

Henry: Do you even need to ask? I’m a Gen Z queer person. It was Chappell Roan.

Great, as an Old, this gets to one of my key questions. What is a Chappell Roan, and why is it happening in my neighborhood?

Henry: Chappell was a breakout pop star—though she makes sure everyone knows she has been working at this for a long time—known for extravagant drag outfits and explicitly gay music.

Sam: THE diva, THE moment, a queer woman from Missouri who is arguably making some of the best pop in the game.

Henry: Sam’s response is better.

Sam: You nailed it with why I think she’s happening in the neighborhood. She’s quickly risen from a general unknown to amassing millions of fans worldwide.

Henry: The consensus is that Chappell changed the genre on multiple levels.

I’m scared, but go on if you have more to say about Ms. Roan. I am curious how she “changed the game.”

Henry: Musically, she imbued new sounds into the genre. She plugged synth, rock, disco, early-2000s punk, ’80s power ballads into the genre kinda all at once. Visually and lyrically, she brought queerness to the forefront. She performs in drag, she sings about queer clubs, explicit sex, and coming of age. And with viral moments around her canceling shows due to mental health, refusing to endorse Kamala Harris due to genocide, and calling out fans for creepy behavior—she has brought a “take no shit” energy that isn’t necessarily new but nevertheless noteworthy.

Sam: She was one of my top artists as well, and I had the privilege to be one of the hundreds of thousands who have seen her IRL this year. I think the excitement is warranted! One of the reasons is her dedication to theatricality and unflinching queerness—as Henry notes, the drag is not a gimmick, which can’t be said of many other artists these days. That, coupled with actual live vocal talent, brings an authenticity to her music in an era where we’re all craving more of that.

Who else this year for you both brought something to pop music that felt new?

Sam: Well, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention my No. 1: Beyoncé.

Henry: You may sense a trend for me, but Sabrina Carpenter and Billie Eilish. I want to hear Sam’s words on Beyoncé, though.

Sam: I mean, she’s Beyoncé. I don’t know if I have anything original or unsaid to add. But Cowboy Carter was a hit for me. I’ve always been a Beyoncé boy, and getting to be alive as she releases these projects and continues to push entire industries with projects like this and Renaissance (another top 10 album of the year for me) just feels like something really nice when the world is really hard. And, coming from a community where country music is hyper-masculinized, associated with racism more than not, and all that, it was nice to be reintroduced to the genre I’ve grown up with through her eyes.

Sam: I mean, because of her, I got really into Shaboozey, Tanner Adell, and Linda Martell. Which is what I think is really fun about pop. It’s a gateway into other communities and types of music. Even with Chappell and her queerness! I find even when it seems like the culture is pushing one way, the popularity of people like her and Beyoncé and others reminds me that many, many others in this country feel like I do! 

Henry: There is a lot of discourse about pop being superficial. But it is grappling with social and political change more so than other genres. I was thinking a lot this year about how “I Kissed a Girl” (circa 2008, and which Katy Perry has distanced herself from) felt so scandalous at the time. But now we have Billie and Charli singing “Guess.” There is a lot of movement and growth in the space. 

Sam: So, sorry to be the millennial in the chat, but “I Kissed a Girl” is a classic.

I like that song.

Henry: While I get the criticism of the lyrics, there is something undeniable about the impact of that song. Hearing it as a kid created space for the possibility of queerness in the world. Also, it’s a bop.

On present-day pop: You have given me a lot of names. I am excited to research these stars. But I want to talk about the other person you mentioned above. What is going on with Sabrina Carpenter?

Sam: She’s probably my biggest blindspot. I enjoy her and the hits when they’re played. But I’m not seeking out her entire album.

Henry: The quick bio: Sabrina was a Disney star–turned–Mean Girls lead–turned–pop icon. Sabrina’s song “Espresso” was the top-streamed song globally. Though Charli and Chappell have gotten a lot of pop-girl airtime, I actually think there is a strong case that Sabrina is 2024’s Pop Girl of the Year. I think her work is really summed up by her recent Christmas special, which adds lyrical quips to classic Christmas songs alongside skits. She is very clever and silly with her music.

Sam: I do think her whole Catholic scandal thing is pretty iconic.

Henry: Her response to that scandal—“Jesus was a carpenter”—is so irreverent, but also smart. Her songs are full of those fun turns of phrases. I’ll give the example of “Switch it up like Nintendo” from “Espresso,” too.

Sam: Her coming from Mean Girls, it really was the year of musical theater. I feel like that’s a separate hero. 

Henry: SO much to say about our girl Ariana and Wicked. I do think the crossover of musical theater with pop feels new, too. It was the year of pop finding harmony with other genres.

Sam: With Wicked, but that’s a WHOLE other can of worms. But there is Eternal Sunshine, which wasn’t a top listen of mine until I revisited it after seeing Ari as Glinda. And upon revisiting it, I wish I had given it a second chance sooner! But Chappell is also so musical theater-coded!

Henry: I would argue drag is the love child of pop and musical theater. Pop has just gotten more campy.

Sam: I think I would agree myself, and the history of the art of theater is dressed in drag.

Can I say one thing about Sabrina?

Sam: Please.

In the supermarket, I heard her sing a lyric that made my brain feel bad. And that was: “(Yes), I know I Mountain Dew it for ya.” My question is: That lyric is not criminal? If so, why is it not against the law?

Sam: I mean, “Wiggle Wiggle” by Bob Dylan exists, so I don’t get your point. ;)

Moving on. Don’t talk about him. I feel like we’ve talked about the Big Stars: Sabrina, Beyoncé, Ms. Roan, etc. Do we need to say anything about Taylor? Can we skip that this year?

Sam: I plead the 5th.

Henry: I don’t want Swifties to come at me, but the Eras Tour lasted for over a year. It had a lot of moments already.

Briefly, this has been discussed at length. But: Brat. How do you all feel about it after summer has faded and as winter takes hold? (Sam, I don’t care that you live in California, pretend you have weather.)

Sam: You’re talking to an original Angel here. Charli is always on repeat, Brat or no!

Henry: I was never huge on Brat. I will say that Brat was dampened by it being co-opted by Kamala, as discussed in the previous pub the chat. It is hard for a cultural moment to feel potent when it becomes a marketing strategy.

Sam: Glad she’s getting the recognition, the partnerships, the everything! She deserves it, and those who know, know! But I get she’s not for everyone, and I’m ready for her next stuff.

I am still a Cooker. I A. G. Cooked.

Sam: Those who know, know.

My Dad loved Britpop—like a lot. He talked about it a great deal.

[Cue confusion as we distinguish Britpop the album from Britpop the genre.]

Anyway, can I ask you all about a bigger idea? Something that…you’ll have to give me some leniency here.

Henry: I love a big idea.

Here’s my issue: When I listen to a lot of pop music, the weight of how it is synthesized to be sold feels heavier and burdensome. In the music itself, I feel like I can literally hear the capitalist machinations, and that makes it irredeemably mid. That’s true for a lot of stuff, but god, it feels prominent in pop music. And so I am curious, for you both, how you feel about how pop music is so marketed and so much about marketing. Does that tinge your experience?

Sam: I guess feel that way about everything, so pop music doesn’t feel particularly burdensome over things like reading the news, watching a film/television, even just going about my day. Every piece of our lives has been calculated to sell us something, so I guess it just blends into that noise.

Henry: I also think you forget that the artists work in medium knowing the bells, whistles, and scandals accompanied with it. Some pop artists are just bad and bogged down by that stuff. But the best ones, the ones we are talking about, use their skills to activate the marketing to say and do interesting things.

Henry: For example, Sabrina’s music video for “Taste” was so over the top in a way that wouldn’t be possible in any other genre. And so clickbaity in many ways. Pulling in [Jenna] Ortega, the horror, the kiss. But it was aware that it was doing all of that. I think there is some inversion of the aforementioned capitalist machine going on, too. 

Sam: Pop music, for me, feels like one of the few spaces where artists can still actively grapple with their awareness of such heavy commodification and use it to their advantage. Beyoncé and Chappell are probably the best examples.

Henry: I do think part of the reason Chappell soared is because she was intentional about how and when she marketed herself. She has a performance persona that she curates expertly, but she also holds complete creative control over it, as far as I can tell. There is something very authentic about that.

Sam: Chappell using this machine to introduce deep queerness into the mainstream…

Sam: Beyoncé using it to remind us of country’s roots…

Henry: Ultimately, they are performers. They don’t need to be “real.” But they do need to do real things with the performance. If that makes sense.

Sam: I see the critique, and I feel it. But I think I’ve only ever known music as an industry to sell us things.

That makes sense. Well, we can solve how to take pleasure under capitalism next year—finally. But for now, any artists we missed you want to shout out?

(In terms of pop and not the jazz bullshit I listen to, I was actually really charmed by “I LUV IT” by Camila Cabello and Playboi Carti.)

Henry: Nemo was the first nonbinary artist to win Eurovision. They are doing some cool and interesting things with genre and pop. They included opera, which I didn’t think I would love and did.

Sam: Have to shout out “JOYRIDE” by Kesha, one of my favorite singles of the year, and has me excited for her album next year! I also adored Omar Apollo’s album God Said No and Dua Lipa’s Tame Impala-produced Radical Optimism (the extended versions though!). And I would be amiss to not mention Doechii’s Alligator Bites Never Heal as another album I’ve had on repeat since its release (and so glad to see her get her flowers this year!).

Great stuff. Thanks for talking. The only thing left for me to say is everyone should listen to “Saaheem” by SahBabii. See you all next year?

Henry: I’ll put it on my queue right now. Happy New Year!

Sam: Thanks, old man!

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.

Destroyed by Watergate and vilified for suggesting that presidents are above the law, Richard Nixon died in disgrace in 1994.

But it turns out, he was right. The 37th president was quietly but resoundingly vindicated by the Supreme Court in its Trump v. United States decision in July, when Chief Justice John Roberts declared that “the President is absolutely immune from criminal prosecution for conduct within his exclusive sphere of constitutional authority.”

“When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.”

For Donald Trump—who was indicted for efforts to steal the 2020 election that were seemingly not part of his official duties—that ruling might not have been enough, had he not been bailed out by his November electoral victory. But Nixon could, and did, claim that his efforts to cover up the Watergate scandal were core parts of his duties. Indeed, on the so-called “smoking gun tape” from June 1972, Nixon told his chief of staff to order the CIA to tell the FBI to back off its investigation into the break-in at the Democratic National Committee headquarters because the probe would compromise national security.

That wasn’t really true. But 52 years later, the Roberts court made clear that judges should defer to presidents when their “core” powers are even arguably involved. Based on the justices’ new view of the presidency, Nixon’s infamous justifications would probably have been enough.

“Under Trump v. United States, Nixon’s statement would not amount to obstruction of justice because it related to his ‘official’ duties—that is, supervising the FBI and CIA,” legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin wrote in July.

Plus, what was the FBI even doing investigating a president for crimes? That may have flown in the 1970s, but these days, the Justice Department has a policy against prosecuting sitting presidents. And Roberts, in his ruling, warned against Justice Department activity that might cause presidents to hesitate from “bold and unhesitating” actions in exercising their vast powers. Fear that they might one day be held accountable for crimes could cause commanders-in-chief to fall prey, Roberts warned, to “undue caution.”

Take Nixon. Before Watergate, he exhibited the kind of “vigorous” decision-making that Roberts says leaders untroubled by potential prosecution can engage in. For example, Nixon fearlessly ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia without telling Congress. And he oversaw an extensive campaign of surveillance efforts aimed at suppressing domestic dissent.

By using the FBI for much of that surveillance, Nixon availed himself of the immunity that the high court has since revealed presidents enjoy when they engage in “investigative and prosecutorial decision-making”—a “special province of the Executive Branch”—where absolute immunity reigns.

As the Watergate scandal mounted, Nixon lost the vigor the Roberts court prescribes. The president was reportedly distracted, drinking heavily, and possibly suicidal. “Please don’t ever tell anyone that I cried and that I was not strong,” a sauced president supposedly told Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in 1974. He was a man left unable to “boldly and fearlessly carry out his duties”—as the Constitution turns out to demand.

Things only got worse for Nixon. After his resignation, during a televised 1977 interview with journalist David Frost, Nixon presciently explained: “When the president does it, that means that it is not illegal.” At the time, this reasoning was treated as a damning admission. Even in 2008, it was so widely accepted that Nixon was wrong that his line served as the climax of the Oscar-nominated film Frost/Nixon.

But things change. In January, Trump attorney D. John Sauer gave a “qualified yes” when asked by an appeals court judge if an ex-president would be immune from prosecution, even for having ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political foe. And the argument won! “The president is now a king above the law,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor later said in a dissent. Trump has said he will nominate Sauer as his solicitor general—the Justice Department official generally responsible for arguing before the Supreme Court.

Critics have accused Roberts and the other five justices in the majority in Trump v. US of ignoring the intent of the Constitution and inventing the “absolute immunity” doctrine in order to impose an ideological preference for expanded presidential powers—or maybe just to help Trump. But these critics fail to credit Nixon with concocting similar arguments a half-century earlier.

Nixon was not a crook; he was ahead of his time. Think he was wrong? Let’s see how Trump’s second term goes.

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. 

Subscribe to Mother Jones podcasts on Apple Podcasts or your favorite podcast app.

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?”