Mother Jones

Moments after scoring Belgium’s fourth goal against the hapless US men’s national soccer team, Romelu Lukaku ran to the corner flag and joined his teammates in a mocking “Trump dance.” The scene was repeated soon after in the Belgium locker room, this time as they sang the Village People’s “YMCA”—a staple of President Donald Trump’s political rallies. It was a final humiliation on one of the worst days in US soccer history.

It was also a sign of how quickly things have changed—of how toxic the US president’s attempts to rig everything from the economy to soccer tournaments have become. Back in 2024, right after Trump was elected for the second time, his signature dance move was everywhere. NFL stars, third-tier British professional soccer players, and even Team USA’s Christian Pulisic and his teammates were seen celebrating with the stunted boogie. The dance’s cultural emergence was an indicator of Trump’s personal soft power as he reclaimed the White House in the wake of the January 6 insurrection and multiple criminal prosecutions. But now—18 months into a second term marked by chaos, corruption, and war—Trump’s brand has been reduced to a symbol of American failure.

WATCH: Belgium players do President Trump’s ‘YMCA’ dance after eliminating the US from the World Cup pic.twitter.com/dA2rAbDwRR

— Politics Global (@PolitlcsGlobal) July 7, 2026

But as this fiasco makes clear, Trump’s no longer able to convince the world to dance along.

The US men’s national team is not new to humiliation or drama. The team crashed out of World Cup group stages in 1998 and 2006 and failed to even qualify for the tournament in 2018. Its 2022 campaign ended in the bizarre “ReynaGate” controversy. But none of that compares to what happened in the week between the team’s triumph against Bosnia-Herzegovina and its lopsided loss to Belgium on Monday night.  

In the Bosnia-Herzegovina game, US striker Folarin Balogun received a controversial red card just past halftime, leaving the US down a man as it clung to a narrow lead. Throughout the rest of the match, the team showed a fight and grittiness that propelled it to a historic win. But the red card meant that Balogun—the team’s leading scorer—would miss the round of 16 match against Belgium. 

The next day, Trump called Gianni Infantino—the FIFA president who infamously awarded Trump a knock-off “peace prize”—to discuss Balogun’s red card, according to Politico. This was followed by days of lobbying and legal maneuvering as US government and US Soccer Federation officials explored arguments to convince FIFA to overturn the decision. This reportedly included White House FIFA World Cup Task Force Executive Director Andrew Giuliani and Scott Goodwin—a hedge fund founder who personally contributed the salary of US coach Mauricio Pochettino—researching other controversial calls from the referee who dished out the red card. Trump would soon describe the referee as “very suspect.”

Then came Sunday, a day before the Belgium game. Suddenly, FIFA announced that an independent committee had decided to “suspend” Balogun’s red card suspension and he would be allowed to play after all. As news spread about the lifted suspension, fingers started to point to Trump and his close relationship with FIFA—a relationship that Mother Jones’ Tim Murphy laid out in a recent Reveal episode about the World Cup. 

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FIFA’s announcement sparked an uproar. The Royal Belgian Football Association appealed the decision, and Belgium’s coach, Rudi Garcia, portrayed the fight as an existential one for the sport itself. Belgium was “defending football,” Garcia said. Europe’s governing soccer body, UEFA, said FIFA’s move “crossed a red line.”

“Where does this start and where does this end now?” England coach Thomas Tuchel asked reporters as he discussed the implications for other refereeing decisions in the tournament. One reporter asked, presumably jokingly, whether Harry Kane could persuade Trump to reverse a red card issue to an England fullback. “Maybe, yeah,” Tuchel said with a smile.

At the White House on Monday morning, Trump spoke triumphantly about the outcome, acknowledging that he’d reached out to Infantino but insisting FIFA made its decision independently. “All I did: I asked for a review because I didn’t think it was a foul,” the president said. “I didn’t tell him what to do.” Trump said it would be a “big stain” on the World Cup if the best players didn’t get to play. The president was apparently oblivious to the inevitability that it was his own actions that would leave the biggest stain on US soccer and the World Cup itself.

Trump: "I didn't know what the hell a red card was. When I found out, I said, 'You gotta be kidding!'" pic.twitter.com/SsTrMwLVDg

— Open Source Intel (@Osint613) July 6, 2026

After the US lost in a 4–1 blowout, Belgian players said the scandal gave them additional motivation, with midfielder Nicolas Raskin stating that “there’s always a justice somewhere in life.” Announcers from around the world mocked Trump’s intervention. The Belgian football association tweeted, “Overturn this.”

It would probably be unreasonable to blame Trump for the US loss on the field. But the president’s attempt to insert himself into the game—and the international blowback it caused—was a far bigger blunder for the sport and the country than the shambolic defending by Matt Freese and Tim Ream.

Another look at Belgium's third goal pic.twitter.com/71ldzuhbAk

— FOX Sports (@FOXSports) July 7, 2026

Trump still has the ability to corruptly wield power. But as this fiasco makes clear, he’s no longer able to convince the world to dance along. After the game, Balogun approached Belgium’s coach and attempted to clean up at least some of the political stain. “It is not his fault,” Garcia told reporters, praising the US forward’s gesture. “He is not the one to blame.”

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

In brief remarks to reporters Monday at the White House, President Donald Trump noted that he was shocked to learn how much energy developing artificial intelligence requires and said his administration is now approving plans for energy facilities to power data centers in “a matter of weeks.” 

After first describing his investment accounts for children, Trump responded to a question on cryptocurrency and said Big Tech leaders racing to develop artificial intelligence have told him they need access to double the country’s existing energy capacity in order to advance technologies and outpace foreign competitors. 

Trump also said that Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin had told him tech companies weren’t taking advantage of the administration’s promise to get fast approvals for private power plants supporting AI development. 

“An industry of the future should not be chained to dirty fuels of the past.” 

Trump said he then called Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and SpaceX’s Elon Musk to ask why they hadn’t submitted plans for power plants alongside their data center developments. 

“They thought we were kidding,” Trump said Monday. “They can’t believe it, that they’re approved in a period of a matter of weeks.” 

The White House did not immediately respond to questions about how the administration is approving power plant plans in a matter of weeks. 

While the administration has sought to waive environmental protections, expedite permits, and loosen construction rules for gas plants and data centers, there are a slew of state and local requirements both power plants and data centers must satisfy that even in the fastest permitting environments take months. 

Although Trump said it was his idea to allow tech companies to build their own “behind-the-meter” generating units on site to power data, it’s a mainstream practice to ensure they always have access to power. Dedicated power plants for data centers have only grown in popularity as companies race to get the facilities online. 

The president said tech companies can use whichever type of energy they want to use—he specifically mentioned only nuclear, oil and gas—except wind. “We don’t allow wind,” Trump said. “Wind is terrible, it just doesn’t work.” 

Trump has sought to end wind energy, the resource that generates a tenth of the electricity generated in the US, according to the US Energy Information Administration. 

The race to develop AI, which requires data centers to handle the energy-intensive computing, has resulted in plans for 74 new or expanded methane gas plants across the US, according to a new report from the Environmental Integrity Project, a national nonprofit founded more than 20 years ago by a former director of the EPA’s civil enforcement office.  

These proposed gas-fired plants, which would be dedicated to serving data centers, are expected to generate 143 gigawatts of electricity, enough to power the state of California nearly three times over, according to the report. 

Of those 74 gas plants, 32 are in Texas, 10 are in Ohio, and seven are in Pennsylvania. 

The power plants would also release nearly 662 million tons per year of greenhouse gas pollution, according to the report, which equals the emissions of Australia. This wave of power plants for data centers could also release air pollutants that contribute to smog and lung damage.

Data centers have become very unpopular, prompting some politicians to try and distance themselves from the industry.

Jen Duggan, executive director of the Environmental Integrity Project, said in a statement that “an industry of the future should not be chained to dirty fuels of the past.” 

“While data centers may be needed to accommodate shifts in technology, the public has a right to transparency and accountability, clean air, and common sense controls to protect water supplies, especially in areas already struggling with water shortages,” Duggan said. Data centers can use copious amounts of water to keep servers cool.

As the data center industry seeks rural parts of the US to roll out the supercomputer warehouses, and the fossil fuel power plants and generators accompanying them, the facilities have quickly become highly unpopular in communities across America. 

Some lawmakers have long been vocal with their concerns about data center construction. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) introduced legislation in March proposing a moratorium on all new data center construction until AI safeguards, including worker and environmental protections, are in place.

Other politicians, who have responded to protests from their constituents with the midterm elections approaching, are seeking to distance themselves from the industry. 

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, called for blocking new data center developments in rural parts of the state during a campaign stop in East Texas last week. It’s a step further than his recent calls for data centers to pay for their own infrastructure costs, reuse their water, add new power generation to the state’s independent electric grid and other measures aimed at limiting the impact on residential communities. 

The New York State Legislature passed a one-year moratorium in June on data center permits. If Gov. Kathy Hochul signs the bill, New York would become the first state to restrict data centers in such a way. But Hochul, a Democrat who is up for re-election this year, has said that she believes it should be left up to municipalities.

Monterey Park, California, and Ashville, Ohio, are among the US communities that have passed temporary bans or pauses on new data centers.

The Trump administration announced last month that it would not set nationwide environmental requirements or recommendations for the data center industry. 

While there are technologies and practices that reduce air pollution and water usage, states and communities know what works best for them, EPA chief Zeldin said at a Politico energy summit in June.

By not enforcing federal regulations, said Clara Vondrich, senior policy counsel with Public Citizen’s Climate Program, the EPA gave Big Tech the green light to build polluting power plants and water-intensive facilities without any environmental protection enforcement. 

“Big Tech executives have lobbied hard to ingratiate themselves into the Trump administration’s orbit,” Vondrich stated. “Zeldin made clear that their investment was money well spent.”

When Lucy found out she was pregnant in the summer of 2025, she might have been delighted. Instead, the news added to the uncertainty she’d been facing since that February, when she was among the first crop of federal workers fired by the Trump administration.

Her old bosses at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) wanted to rehire her, but human resources offered nothing in writing, and given how the administration had treated her already, she just couldn’t trust the proposal. (She would eventually return as a contractor, hence her request that I use a pseudonym—one former colleague, after all, had been fired for putting up a protest sign.)

The survey of fired federal workers “came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was.”

President Donald Trump has claimed repeatedly that the career workers his minions drove out—roughly 317,000 were fired, quit, or took a buyout since he returned to the White House—are “getting private sector jobs” and making “twice as much money, three times as much money.” Even the judge who ruled those early firings illegal was under that impression. The workers “have moved on with their lives and found new jobs,” he stated last fall. “Many would no longer be willing or able to return to their posts.”

That wasn’t Lucy’s experience. She’d applied for at least 80 positions, resulting in just two dead-end interviews, though her PhD and ample work experience had made her well-qualified. By the time she knew she was expecting, she’d accepted a retail gig without health insurance. Similar stories abounded among her former colleagues.

I, too, left a job at the NIH last year—voluntarily, having seen the writing on the wall. My old workmates and I keep in touch via a group Signal chat, which, in addition to hand-drawn protest signs and pictures of pets, has been populated with tips for job seekers, mutual aid info, and countless employment postings.

Lucy, whom I hadn’t met prior to reporting this story, figured she wasn’t an outlier in terms of her difficulties finding suitable work. As the anniversary of the so-called Valentine’s Day Massacre approached, the members of one of her Signal chats began talking about designing a survey to assess how ejected workers were really faring.

Among the laid-off workers were plenty of people skilled in collecting and analyzing data—including Lucy, an epidemiologist, who raised her hand to help. “It came from me not being okay and wanting to see if other people were as not okay as I was,” she says.

“I’ve done a lot of different analysis projects, worked with a lot of data. I’ve never done something that was personal like this,” says Christa Reynolds, another fired NIH employee who helped crunch the numbers. “In one way, it was validating. In another way, it just was terrible.”

The data they collected—300 responses across 14 federal agencies and nearly every state—suggested that the fired workers had not, by and large, settled into high-paying private sector jobs. Many struggled to find work, with about 40 percent searching for at least six months. A year after Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) cut them loose, almost 17 percent remained unemployed.

“Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college,” said a former IRS chief, but “a lot” of the fired workers had “very sophisticated backgrounds.”

And not for lack of trying. Brier Ryver, who also helped design the survey, said they applied to at least 110 jobs after getting fired as a park ranger for a federal wildlife refuge in Florida. Wildlife conservation “is an extremely competitive field,” Ryver told me. Most of their applications were for local government positions, in dozens of states.

“Every single county government and every single state government and every single university has a different website to apply through, so I had to create accounts for every single one,” Ryver says. “I’d stay up till 3 a.m. applying and overthinking and making my materials look as good as I can.”

Seasonal work was a nonstarter—at first. “I need benefits in some way, shape, or form,” Ryver explains. But as rejections piled up, their expectations grew more flexible: “I’m going to take little money over no money.”

In the survey, more than two-thirds of the workers who had found jobs reported taking a pay cut. One interpretation might be that federal salaries were “bloated,” as House Republicans misleadingly put it in a 2024 proposal to slash benefits for civil servants. But a fairer interpretation is that they took what they could get in a hostile job market—even if overqualified. “There are a lot of families who are two-fed households, one was probationary and the other was RIFed,” Lucy notes, using the acronym for “reductions in force,” a.k.a. layoffs.

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The survey focused on probationary employees, whom the administration went after first. Legally, they were easier to terminate because they’d been in their roles less than two years, though many were longtime contractors or seasoned civil servants transferring from other positions. “Probationary sounds like they’re just out of college,” former IRS chief John Koskinen told one of my Mother Jones colleagues as DOGE hit his agency. “A lot of them came with very sophisticated backgrounds…They weren’t 25-year-olds. They were filling important positions.” 

Either way, many of the fired workers shouldered financial risks for the opportunity to serve the public. “I uprooted my life and moved across country to take this new position to a place where I had no community,” one of them, a single mother, wrote in her survey response. Another said their spouse had quit their job to enable the move. Nearly a third of the surveyed workers reported financial losses related to moving or housing instability. Some drew down their retirement savings—nearly one in six took out a loan.

The Federal Harms Tracker, a project of the nonprofit Partnership for Public Service, estimates that Trump’s layoffs have cost taxpayers more than $70 billion, and that’s not even counting the inevitable fallout when the country’s largest employer sheds more than 7 percent of its personnel. Nearly half of respondents in the probationary workers’ survey said they’d delayed major life events, like getting married or buying a home. “It’s comparable to the pandemic,” notes Tracy Hadden Loh, a fellow at the Brookings Institute who tracks economic indicators in the DC area to study the layoffs’ impacts.

Trump’s firings have been terribly wasteful. “They lost all this money that they spent training us and recruiting.”

A recent report by Loh and her colleagues found that home prices in DC, which boasted the nation’s highest unemployment rate in 2025, have dropped by a quarter compared to 2019, and inflation-adjusted rents have plummeted, though “no tenant feels like the rent went down.” Housing remains expensive relative to incomes, and as fired federal workers tightened their belts, the researchers saw declines in all types of spending.

But the majority of federal workers resided outside the capital, and unemployment spiked in states where they had the biggest presence. Locales with strong federal ties were also vulnerable. Ryver, for example, worked at the only wildlife refuge designated for the protection of Florida’s manatees: “The local economy was very based on manatee tourism.”

Ryver managed the commercial permits that allowed tour groups to operate, and assessed buildings, boardwalks, and other facilities to ensure they were safe for public use. The refuge was understaffed even before DOGE came along. “We were already drowning in work and deferred maintenance,” Ryver says.

Beyond the inevitable deterioration of government services, the firings have been terribly wasteful—a serious brain drain. “They lost all this money that they spent training us and recruiting,” Reynolds explains, and rehiring fired workers as contractors, which happens a fair bit, is generally more costly—and less stable. “I don’t feel secure,” Lucy told me. “I feel like any day they could pull my contract.”

“There can be people who, of course, get new jobs, and they can look fine from the outside, and they can feel better, but the nervous system is really changed,” says Rosalyn Beroza, a therapist who specializes in trauma. “It’s a state where none of the givens held, and you can draw a line between before and after—nothing feels the same afterwards. That’s what has happened to federal employees.”

Beroza, a DC local and daughter of a government scientist, has spent her entire life around civil servants. And so, in early 2025, she began assembling a network of therapists willing to offer free or low-cost therapy to departing federal workers. “The demand was huge,” she says. “I got so many people wanting help, and it was so sad.”

The mass firings were “essentially a natural disaster, because you lose everything. You lose finances, but you also lose your identity, your sense of purpose.”

Russell Vought, director of Trump’s Office of Management and Budget, had promised to put federal workers “in trauma” and the data suggest he succeeded: In the survey Lucy and her colleagues designed, 95 percent of the fired employees reported new mental health symptoms, including nervousness, insomnia, difficulty concentrating, and thoughts of self-harm. “If it weren’t for my family, if it weren’t for my friends, my community around me, I would not be here,” Lucy says.

When I reached out to Reynolds, the mental health stats were the first thing she wanted to talk about, but she wasn’t sure the public would care. “I’ve heard other people be like, ‘Oh, well people lose their jobs every day,’” she says. “It’s hard to explain. Like, this is not a normal job loss.”

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Beroza agrees. “It’s not an overreaction, because of the way that these firings took place,” she says. “It’s essentially a natural disaster, because you lose everything. You lose finances, but you also lose your identity, your sense of purpose, your sense of the future.”

If there were any guardrails, federal workers no longer trust them. “I expected some bad things to happen, but I thought that they would follow laws,” Reynolds recalls. If not, she figured Congress or the courts would step up. But Congress demurred and the courts were too little, too late.

Another survey, conducted last year by the Federal News Network, suggested that 95 percent of federal employees who stayed on have experienced increased anxiety and depression since Trump came back to office. More than four out of five considered quitting for mental health reasons.

In a recent analysis, the Government Accountability Office classified more than three quarters of last year’s federal departures as voluntary. But though opting into the deferred resignation program—Musk’s notorious “fork in the road”—was technically a choice, it wasn’t much of one. “Many people did that because they were told that their jobs were going to be eliminated, so how voluntary is that?” Loh, the economic analyst, asks.

I can relate. A few weeks after Trump returned to office, my government-supplied laptop wouldn’t let me log in. It turned out to be a technical issue, but for 30 minutes I thought I’d been fired. Colleagues had already been placed on administrative leave, articles and educational materials I’d worked on were scratched off federal websites, and I’d been all but prohibited from doing my job.

A third of the fired employees, including people with chronic diseases, said they had delayed medical care. “My life was in danger,” wrote one.

Once my first colleague was axed, I’d been jumpy at every email and increasingly nauseous every day I clocked in. When the password to my work computer was suddenly defective, I mostly felt relief. I put in my resignation a few days later. On paper, my departure was voluntary, though I wouldn’t have left if not for the hostility Musk, Trump, Vought, and the rest leveled at dedicated civil servants.

Like Lucy, despite countless applications, I spent more than six months unemployed, resorted to gig work to pay my bills, and (like one in four fired workers surveyed) began taking a psychiatric medication—in my case to deal with new heights of anxiety. It helped, but that period still haunts me.

Roughly 90 percent of the survey respondents reported that mental health symptoms triggered by their job losses were still affecting them a year later. Ryver recalls “some skill regression” as a result. “It erodes your cognitive abilities, your problem-solving abilities, to have to operate at such high levels of activation,” says Beroza, the trauma therapist.

Many fired federal workers say they wouldn’t go back to working for the government. Lucy, who did so out of necessity, can understand that. Her reinstatement process, too, was anxiety inducing. It lasted half a year, for most of which she couldn’t reach anyone in human resources and had nothing in writing—and no functional health insurance.

Which is why she had to find an obstetrician willing to see uninsured patients. During her first appointment, the doctor couldn’t detect a fetal heartbeat, and Lucy was told to schedule a followup. “Those were the longest two weeks of my life,” she remembers.

Her pregnancy, it turned out, wasn’t viable, which threatened to become a financial blow in addition to an emotional one. Lucy required a procedure the doctor’s office said would cost $5,000 out of pocket. She and her partner hit the phones and eventually learned she could get the same treatment at Planned Parenthood for $650—which still wasn’t easy. “That time would have been a lot less stressful if I had insurance,” she recalls.

In the workers’ survey, a third of the fired employees said they had delayed medical care. Those with chronic diseases reported worsening symptoms, one writing, “My life was in danger during that time.”

DOGE officially came to an end on July 4, according to the executive order that created it. The passing of this expiration date feels weirdly anticlimactic—perhaps because Musk and his underlings haven’t been active in the onslaught for some time now, or because some parts of the government are showing signs of returning to normalcy, at least on paper. Hard-hit agencies, including the IRS, are now hiring, sometimes at rates surpassing the earlier layoffs. Health and Human Services, where Lucy and Reynolds both worked, is looking to add 12,000 workers—20 percent more than it shed.

Agencies are recruiting former federal workers for many of the roles, but the vast majority of those workers are wary—if not shellshocked. When the Partnership for Public Service surveyed more than 11,000 remaining federal workers last fall, 58 percent said they were “less engaged” than a year earlier, and only 10 percent trusted the political leadership—which, as Reynolds points out, has “been upfront about not respecting us and not caring for our work.”

Reynolds doubts the damage this administration has wrought—on institutional knowledge and the trust and dedication of career employees—is reversible. “It gets beyond that personal feeling of hurt for being fired,” she says. Because even if federal agencies are repopulated, it’s hard to be confident they’ll adhere to the public-facing missions that once motivated Reynolds and other civil servants. “The long-term effects” of the layoffs, she says, “are definitely one of the more stressful things for me.”

Last summer, I noticed a shift: I was calmer and happier than I’d been in years.

This was puzzling, since my life didn’t look particularly calm. I was planning a solo cross-country move, and my days were full of bubble wrap and goodbye dinners and Craigslist alerts. But as I packed up boxes in Boston, and then adjusted to life in San Francisco, I marveled at the ­little changes. Feeling content, rather than lonely, on nights cooking a new recipe by myself. Pausing to chat with baristas instead of rushing to order a latte. I couldn’t remember crying out of happiness before, but there I was on a morning walk, eyes welling at the way the sun hit a cypress tree. Friends and family said I seemed lighter. As the summer progressed, I wrote journal entries like, “felt relaxed/happy a lot of the day for no particular reason” and “surprised by how ok I am.”

Since I was a teenager, I’ve grappled with a tangle of anxiety, depression, and insomnia: feeling a knot at the base of my ribs, weeping in the fetal position for no obvious reason, waking up in the middle of the night, simultaneously exhausted and wired. Over the years, I have, as therapists like to say, amassed the tools in my toolbox. I’ve spent countless hours with psychiatrists and therapists, gravitating toward cool grandma types, taking their advice to cultivate a mindfulness practice. I’ve talked to my actual grandma, a vivacious 102-year-old psychologist who has a way of asking pointed questions over ­breakfast. (On insomnia: “Does sex help?”) I’ve tried Prozac and Zoloft and Ambien. I run a few miles every day after work—the best mood booster I’ve found so far. I’ve even tried some of the more out-there stuff, like working with a coach to ask my stomach why it’s so tense.

But when the knot and the crying jags and the inexplicably wired nights persisted, I came to think of them as just how I was built. In the same way that I have dark hair and brown eyes, I thought, I was a person with a low hum of anxiety and bouts of depression.

So it was particularly noticeable when things shifted. It wasn’t that I suddenly transformed; rather, it felt like the temperature of the anxiety came down, and sadness became a feeling that passed rather than a state of being. My Oura ring told me that the quality of my sleep was “Fair” or “Good,” and not the dreaded “Pay attention.”

It took a couple of months for me to realize that these changes dovetailed with another event: the removal of my IUD.

Like many millennial women, I’ve been on hormonal contraceptives for most of my adult life. I got my first intrauterine ­device after graduating from college. I loved that I didn’t have to worry about getting pregnant or bother with taking a pill every day. I loved that, like many women with hormonal IUDs, I didn’t get my period. And I loved that, with the exception of when I had to replace it every so often, I didn’t think about having an IUD much at all for the next 14 years.

“I think this is a real thing. I don’t think it was just in your uterus or just in your head,” said Dr. Tamar Gur, adding: “Your experience, unfortunately, is very common.”

One morning last August, I decided to do some digging into whether my newfound equilibrium was related to going off birth control. I’d heard that the pill could cause mood changes for some users, but what I found shocked me: For years, research in well-respected scientific journals has found that people on hormonal contraceptives—especially those using non-oral contraceptives, like IUDs—are much more likely to experience depression, suicidality, anxiety, insomnia, and other psychological effects rarely discussed by the doctors who prescribe them. While the likelihood of ­severe mood changes from hormonal contraceptives is relatively low, even a small increase in risk can have profound consequences when a group of products is used by more than 300 million women worldwide.

“There are subsets of women who are ­exquisitely sensitive to hormonal shifts,” says Dr. Tamar Gur, a psychiatrist and neuroscientist who directs the women’s health research program at Ohio State University. “I think this is a real thing. I don’t think it was just in your uterus or just in your head,” she told me, adding: “Your experience, unfortunately, is very common.” Like many doctors I spoke with, Gur often paused midsentence to rephrase what she was saying. “I just want to be so careful with my words, because I don’t want someone out there who would benefit from hormonal contraception to feel scared of it or feel like they’re doomed to experience it.”

Indeed, some important caveats are in order. Again and again, scientists stressed to me that, while some women on ­hormonal contraceptives experience dramatic mood effects, the vast majority do not. Some, in fact, report feeling happier on contraceptives than off them. On top of that, the potential consequence of not using birth control—namely, unplanned pregnancy—can have immense psychological repercussions. And finally, the large studies are observational, meaning they show correlation, not causation. It’s challenging, for ethical reasons, to do randomized, controlled studies on the effects of birth control by placing some participants on placebos, and the science is complicated by the fact that there are hundreds of formulations of contraceptives and little funding to study drugs already on the market. Even my story isn’t exactly linear: My college years were by far my most depressed, and I wasn’t on contraceptives most of that time.

And yet it’s an undeniably jarring experience to realize, at 36, that I may be a significantly calmer and happier person than I thought I was. Did my IUD contribute to or prolong my depression and anxiety? And of the many mental health specialists I saw over the years, why didn’t anyone ask about my birth control?

I’ve been mulling this at a time when birth control is under attack. In October, the Department of Health and Human Services laid off the staff administering Title X, which provides contraceptives and other family planning services to millions of low-income Americans annually. The agency recently released guidance on ­family planning projects it expects to fund in the coming year—with the goal of reducing “overmedicalization” and promoting “natural family planning” approaches.

On social media, misinformation about contraceptives is rampant, with videos on TikTok—generating billions of views—leading some women to come off birth control in favor of “natural” alternatives. Turning Point USA podcaster Alex Clark has called hormonal birth control “poison.” Candace Owens calls it a “Machiavellian, evil design to keep you stupid.” Celebrities from Gwyneth Paltrow to Joe Rogan and Elon Musk have used their platforms to suggest birth control is dangerous.

At virtually every gathering where the subject came up, at least one woman—and often many—told stories of stopping or changing birth control because of the side effects.

At a time when abortion is unavailable to many and contraceptives could be next on the chopping block, it can feel like there are only two camps: those who champion birth control, warts and all, and those who criticize it with hopes of making it go away. But there is a quieter third camp: scientists, doctors, and public health researchers who are scrutinizing birth control not to get rid of it, but to make it better.

I hadn’t appreciated just how much support there was for this last group until I started telling women in my life that I was working on this story. Nervous that friends would think I’d gone off some sort of Goop–ey deep end, I came to dinner parties and book clubs prepared to rattle off study stats and assure them that real scientists said this was a thing. I needn’t have worried. At virtually every gathering where the subject came up, at least one woman—and often many—told stories of stopping or changing birth control because of the side effects. I learned of friends who went off hormonal contraceptives after thoughts of harming themselves, or having thoughts of harming others, or spiraling in anxiety. This shouldn’t have surprised me: Roughly a fifth of women stop using birth control or switch methods within the first year because of side effects, many of them mood-related.

While researchers know that some women will suffer from dramatic reactions, they’re still learning who and why. “We’re in the murky middle,” said psychology professor Adriene Beltz, who studies the cognitive effects of sex hormones at the University of Michigan.

Beltz was among the many experts I spoke with who worried, in this political climate, that their research would be weaponized. It can feel, she said, like “you’re either gaslighting the experiences of folks or you’re limiting folks’ options at a time when options are already limited.”

This isn’t altogether a new challenge. When Beltz started her research more than a decade ago, people would ask what she would do if she discovered something negative about contraceptives. Her response: “I would say, ‘Women deserve to know all possible risks and benefits.’”

Vanessa Saba

In June 2011, when I was 21, I showed up to my gynecologist’s office in Minneapolis to discuss contraception. My medical records note that I was leaning toward a Mirena IUD. “Had a tough year depression/anxiety-­wise and is concerned about mood effects with hormonal contraceptives,” the records say. Still, after a discussion about pros and cons, I elected to have it inserted that day.

I don’t doubt any of this, but I also have no recollection of this appointment. It was the summer after I graduated from college, and I’d talked to friends who had IUDs and liked them. My understanding of the devices was that they operated locally, without the far-reaching effects of oral contraceptives. At the time, Bayer, which makes the Mirena, explained on its website that the IUD “delivers small amounts of hormone directly to the uterus.”

The fact that the insertion of an effective, long-acting contraceptive was so unremarkable to me was, in its own way, extraordinary. For millennia, women in ­ancient societies had gone to extreme lengths to prevent pregnancy: inserting acacia gum or crocodile dung in Egypt, cervical sponges made of bamboo tissue paper in Japan, wads of wool in Greek and Islamic cultures. Starting in the 1900s, douches containing Lysol were marketed as “feminine hygiene” products to get around laws limiting the sale of contraceptives.

All of which made the first-ever birth control pill, which hit the market in the summer of 1960, such a game changer. Here was the “magic pill” that reproductive rights crusaders like Margaret Sanger had been dreaming of. Sex before—and after—marriage became less fraught. Women could study and pursue careers without fear of unplanned pregnancy. The pill suppressed ovulation by supplying a constant dose of synthetic estrogen and progesterone (called progestin)—the sexual hormones that rise and fall with each menstrual cycle. Within five years, it had become the most popular form of birth control in the country.

Plenty of women “were happy to have the choice, but they were unhappy that this great new thing came with so many downsides,” said historian Judith Houck, “and that they were told, ‘You should be happy.'”

But as its popularity soared, concerns among patients and doctors grew about troubling complications, from blood clots to strokes and depression. As it turns out, the Food and Drug Administration’s approval of the pill had been based on a study of low-income women in Puerto Rico—17 percent of whom reported dizziness, nausea, vomiting, and headaches and three of whom died without further investigation. So strong were the side effects that Dr. Edris Rice-Wray, who oversaw the trial, concluded that while the pill protected against pregnancy, it “causes too many side reactions to be acceptable generally.” Her concerns were dismissed by the male heads of research.

When Congress held a series of hearings about the pill’s potential dangers in 1970, doctors testified about its extreme psychological effects on some of their patients, describing how these women became psychotic or suicidal. One doctor said he was fielding calls from husbands, saying, “Do something about my wife—my God, she’s just turned into a bitch.” No women were invited to speak about their personal experiences, prompting feminist protesters to persistently interrupt the proceedings, calling out questions like, “Why are 10 million women being used as guinea pigs?”

Plenty of women “were happy to have the choice, but they were unhappy that this great new thing came with so many downsides,” said Judith Houck, a historian of women’s health at the University of ­Wisconsin, Madison, “and that they were told, You should be happy.”

The hearings, together with feminist ­organizing, helped push the FDA to require drug manufacturers to include possible side effects in the pill’s packaging. In the following years, drugmakers introduced oral contraceptives with significantly lower doses of hormones and fewer risks. Meanwhile, nonhormonal IUDs, including copper versions, arrived in the ’60s and ’70s, but the disastrous Dalkon Shield—linked to infections, infertility, sepsis, and death—turned Americans away from them for years to come.

Starting in the 1900s, douches containing Lysol were marketed as “feminine hygiene” products to get around laws limiting the sale of contraceptives.

In many ways, that’s how things stayed for the next three decades in the United States. Research into new contraceptives stalled. Pharmaceutical executives concluded that the litigation risks were too high, the products too politically charged. They seemed to assume—correctly—that many women would simply put up with the side effects in exchange for reproductive autonomy. The number of American women on the pill steadily climbed; in 1987, 4 out of 5 women in their mid-30s had used oral contraceptives. By 1990, all but one of the large American pharmaceutical companies that had previously been doing research on new contraceptives had stopped.

“The outlook for new contraceptive development is bleak,” Dr. Luigi Mastroianni, a University of Pennsylvania professor of obstetrics and gynecology, said in 1990. While some Europeans could choose from a variety of implants, injectables, pills, IUDS, and sterilization techniques, “we in the United States make do with the same range of options available 30 years ago.”

That changed in 2000, when the nation’s first hormonal IUD hit the market. The Mirena was a small, T-shaped piece of plastic, inserted into the uterus in a quick outpatient procedure. Like the pill, it offered a steady dose of synthetic hormones—in this case, only progestin. But unlike the pill, patients didn’t have to think about it daily or refill prescriptions. That helped make it far more effective: The rate of unplanned pregnancy in the first year of typical use with a Mirena was 0.2 percent, compared with 9 percent for women on the pill.

Bayer sponsored promotional parties featuring a nurse practitioner passing around a Mirena—the nation’s first hormonal IUD—and a presentation by a fashion stylist.

The American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the field’s leading professional group that issues clinical guidance, soon embraced IUDs. In a 2005 bulletin, ACOG said they “should be considered for all women who seek a reliable, reversible contraceptive that is effective ­before coitus,” adding that side effects were “minimal.” This stamp of approval came despite the fact that the package insert noted that “5 percent or more” of users experienced abdominal pain, back pain, decreased libido, depression, nervousness, or a host of other side effects.

By 2011, ACOG’s guidance was even more effusive, saying that “almost all women are eligible for implants and IUDs.” The logic was simple: IUDs are exceedingly effective at preventing unplanned pregnancy. Doctors often ranked contraceptives in terms of efficacy, with IUDs and other long-acting methods in the top ­category. (ACOG later acknowledged that this approach failed to consider the broader needs and values of the patient, including concerns about side effects.)

After the Mirena, Bayer came out with IUDs with lower doses of progestin, each sounding like a sperm-slaying goddess of war: the Skyla in 2013, the Kyleena in 2016. The company marketed them as a convenient option for busy moms. Bayer sponsored promotional parties featuring a nurse practitioner passing around a Mirena and a presentation by a fashion stylist. “How would you categorize yourself?” the nurse practitioner was coached to ask attendees. “Hot and sexy with a lot of spontaneity or too tired with little time to be intimate?”

In some cases, doctors promoted IUDs with enthusiasm that bordered on overzealousness. In a 2017 study, public health researchers interviewed a dozen primary care providers at clinics in the Bronx. They found that when patients requested to have their IUDs taken out because of side effects, providers often pushed back.

“I never want to have anyone remove their IUD unless they want to have a planned pregnancy and they’re ready for it,” one physician told the researchers. “Every other case, I feel like they should keep it in if they can, obviously.”

Around 2013, epidemiologist Charlotte Wessel Skovlund heard from a friend who’d become depressed after having an IUD inserted. At the time, Skovlund was the data ­manager for Dr. Øjvind Lidegaard, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Copenhagen. For years, Lidegaard had been studying the effects of hormonal contraceptives on rates of heart attacks and stroke. Skovlund approached Lidegaard with a research question: Was it possible, she wondered, that her friend’s IUD and her depression were connected?

Lidegaard was intrigued. The existing research was inconclusive, but over the years, he’d had patients who would return weeks after he’d prescribed hormonal contraceptives, saying their moods had changed and they needed an alternative. “We have always known that some women feel that way,” he told me, “but we have generally considered it to be a little minority of women.”

Teens using progestin-only IUDs were three times more likely than non-users to be diagnosed with depression and to be prescribed antidepressants.

In Denmark, as in several other ­European countries, a national registry tracks residents’ anonymized medical histories, enabling large observational studies. Skovlund, Lidegaard, and a team of scientists decided to embark on a multiyear research project, examining the records of more than a million women between 1995 and 2013.

Their landmark study, published in JAMA Psychiatry in 2016, found that most common hormonal contraceptives were ­associated with higher rates of depression and antidepressant prescriptions—with particularly high rates among those using progestin-­only contraceptives, those who started as teenagers, and those using non-oral contraceptives, like IUDs. At gravest risk were teenagers using progestin-only IUDs like the Mirena, who were three times more likely than non-users to be ­diagnosed with depression and to be prescribed antidepressants.

After the study came out, Lidegaard received “not hundreds, but thousands of emails” from women around the world about their own experiences. One that stuck with him was from an 18-year-old American who had no history of ­mental health problems, but, two days after starting the pill, found herself on the Brooklyn Bridge, about to jump. She was dissuaded by an onlooker. Eventually, she stopped taking the pill at a family ­member’s suggestion and hadn’t experienced depression since. “It’s of course an extreme ­example,” Lidegaard said, “but it illustrates that the sensitivity to these things are so different. For some women, it can be an almost overnight change.”

Lidegaard is quick to note that depression rates among people using hormonal contraceptives, while elevated, are still quite low overall. The Mirena’s package insert today estimates that 6.4 percent of users experience depression as a side effect; similarly, Lidegaard said about 7 percent of women stop using hormonal contraceptives within the first few weeks because of psychological side effects.

On the flip side, contraceptives are used by so many people that a small increase in depression risk can have dramatic impacts. In Denmark, according to Lidegaard’s math, hormonal contraceptives are responsible for more than 1,200 episodes of depression among teenage girls each year.

More studies followed. In 2017, the ­Danish team found that women using hormonal contraceptives—or who even recently used them—were about twice as likely to attempt suicide compared with those who’d never used them. Studies using medical data banks from the United Kingdom found progestin IUDs to be associated with higher rates of anxiety and sleep problems compared with nonhormonal IUDs, and users of oral contraceptives to have higher rates of depression compared with those who’d never taken them.

Critics often note that observational studies should be taken with a grain of salt. It could be that there’s something about the lifestyle of contraceptive users that is ­causing them to be depressed—or to seek medical intervention for depression—rather than the birth control itself. (One scientist joked with Lidegaard that women on contraceptives were probably more depressed because they were more likely to be interacting with men.)

“What maybe the companies would like you to believe is: Oh, it’s just totally local. Nothing is getting out of that uterus,” said Dr. Andrew Novick. “In reality, there is systemic exposure.”

But a 2024 study led by Skovlund suggests that progestin has something to do with it. The researchers looked at the ­depression rates of hormonal IUD users only, separating participants into groups based on which IUDs they used. They found that depression rates were significantly higher among those using contraceptives with the largest dose of progestin. (This is echoed by the package inserts of Bayer’s three IUDs: As the hormonal doses go up—from Skyla to Kyleena to Mirena—so too do the reported depression rates.)

These findings fly in the face of a longtime selling point of IUDs: that they operate locally and therefore their effects should be more confined.

“What maybe the companies would like you to believe is: Oh, it’s just totally local. Nothing is getting out of that uterus,” said Dr. Andrew Novick, a psychiatrist at the University of Colorado Anschutz who studies the impact of reproductive hormones on the brain. “In reality, there is systemic exposure.” Women with non-oral birth control may be more susceptible to mood changes than those on the pill because of the differences in the way the hormones are processed—namely, the pill is filtered by the liver, whereas progestin in IUDs and other non-oral contraceptives makes its way directly into the bloodstream. From there, it binds with hormone receptors in cells across the body, including those in the brain. (A recent Bayer training guide instructs healthcare providers to tell patients that “only small amounts of hormone enter your blood,” though a Bayer spokesperson told Mother Jones that the company consistently has noted the systemic hormonal exposure in IUDs’ product information.)

What happens next is still murky, but some studies suggest that hormonal birth control changes the body’s stress response. Those on contraceptives have blunted cortisol responses to individual stressors, but higher cortisol levels overall—an effect similar to what’s seen in individuals under chronic stress, Novick said.

Additional studies have found that women with a history of depression are more likely to experience mood-related side effects. Also at higher risk are women who start contraceptives as teenagers. That’s notable, since nearly a fifth of American teenage girls use hormonal contraception—often for reasons other than pregnancy prevention, like treating acne or heavy periods.

“Children are not small adults,” said Gur, the Ohio State researcher. They have “wildly different central nervous systems, and so it’s not surprising to me, just as a scientist, that they might respond differently.”

Search “birth control” on TikTok, and you’ll see clip after clip of women bemoaning hormonal contraceptives and suggesting natural alternatives. In a video with 1.6 million likes, a “holistic nutritionist” who posts under the handle “beingwellis­hot,” and who, indeed, has perfect skin and doe eyes, suggests that eating papaya seeds can induce your period to avoid pregnancy. Some influencers promote the oil from neem plants as a natural contraceptive. (“Kills sperm in 30 seconds tops,” promises one.) Others suggest seeds from wild carrots: “You might have birth control growing in your backyard!”

Prominent conservatives, from the late Charlie Kirk to podcaster Alex Clark, have suggested that birth control causes fertility problems. “If you want women to be feminine again, and soft again, and beautiful,” Clark said last year in a conversation with anti-abortion internet personality Seth Gruber, “women need to be ovulating.”

The top 100 TikTok videos about reproductive health received nearly 5 billion views in a single month in 2023.

It’s no secret that what’s so pernicious about misinformation is that it’s often nestled among kernels of truth. The claims above lack evidence, but they’re alongside reels about well-documented birth control side effects: women in crop tops showing weight they’ve gained; teary women talking to the camera; women laid up with back pain.

Birth control TikTok is hugely influential; the top 100 videos about reproductive health received nearly 5 billion views in a single month in 2023, and only 10 percent of them came from medical professionals. A KFF survey the following year found that 1 in 7 women between 18 and 25 made a change to their birth control, or considered making a change, based on something they saw on social media.

In an ideal world, one could turn to medical professionals to separate the signal from the noise. And indeed, in 2024, ACOG unveiled a website aimed at combating misinformation about contraceptives. But rather than diving into the nuance, the organization took a different approach.

On the subject of weight gain, ACOG’s site said “there is no causal link” between birth control and weight gain, with the exception of hormonal injections. Claims about changes in mood or libido, meanwhile, were branded “myths” and “misinformation.”

This all struck me as odd, considering that pharmaceutical companies themselves list changes to mood, libido, and weight as possible side effects for many brands of birth control—disclosures feminists fought for back in the ’70s.

When I asked ACOG about the effects of contraceptives on mental health, I was connected with Dr. Rachel Jensen, a ­gynecologist and ACOG fellow focusing on complex family planning. On average, she said, birth control “has not been shown to cause significant mood changes.” If a patient reports a shift in demeanor after starting contraceptives, Jensen makes sure the cause isn’t something “more severe,” like anemia or thyroid disorders. “I’m all for discontinuing [birth control] or taking a break, but I can’t guarantee that that will fix whatever is going on, because the research that we have doesn’t tell us that birth control would necessarily be causing that,” she said.

On social media, influencers warn about the dangers of contraceptives and promote “natural” alternatives, from carrot seeds to papaya.

When I asked why the group lists mood changes from contraceptives as a “myth,” she acknowledged that some IUDs are known to be associated with depression. “I think our goal here is to talk about the aggregate,” she said. “Most people do not experience mood changes based on the studies that we have.”

A few days after our conversation, an ACOG spokesperson emailed to say that our interview had sparked an internal discussion; the group, she said, had decided to remove changes in mood and libido from the list of birth control myths. “As the statement is written, it does not feel patient-­centered or inclusive of experienced symptoms that may not be borne out in the data,” she wrote in mid-November.

The “relentlessly positive framing” of birth control by medical organizations can come off as “medical gaslighting,” says biological anthropologist Kathryn Clancy.

Two months later, the website was indeed updated—but not by much. According to the new language, it was no longer a myth that birth control leads to mood changes; rather, it was a myth that birth control “routinely” causes mood changes. These myths “frighten people away from well-studied, clinically proven, safe, and effective choices that can improve their health and their lives.”

The “relentlessly positive framing” of birth control by medical organizations may come from a desire to protect access to contraceptives, but this “toxic positivity” can come off “as medical gaslighting,” said Kathryn Clancy, a biological anthropologist at the University of Illinois who wrote ­Period: The Real Story of Menstruation. “What I don’t think sometimes these doctors realize is how it reads to a patient who has had a negative experience—which is a very large number of people who’ve been on hormonal contraception,” she told me. When they feel dismissed by mainstream medicine, she said, many flock to the internet for birth control advice. Charlatans on social media are “stepping into a place where there is medical mistrust,” she said, “and until we address those, there will always be people who take advantage and then come up with bananas things.”

So, how should doctors talk with patients? Dr. Aaron Lazorwitz, a gynecologist and pharmacogeneticist at Yale who studies how genetic differences shape patients’ responses to birth control, stresses the importance of transparency. “The biggest thing is being open and honest about what we know and what we don’t know,” he said. “‘Here are the potential side effects you could ­experience. I can’t tell you what you’re going to experience beforehand, unfortunately. We have to closely monitor how you do, and if it’s not going well, I need you to tell me.’ That’s the biggest thing.”

This sounds basic enough, but it’s not particularly common. One survey in 2021 and 2022 found that 83 percent of women said their provider never mentioned the possibility of psychological side effects during contraceptive counseling.

There are signs of change. Lazorwitz said he hears more mentions of mood and contraceptives on social media. Reporters are asking him about it. He likens the issue to pain during IUD insertion—a topic that was rarely discussed by doctors until a surge of complaints about it on social media and in news stories prompted ACOG to release new pain management guidelines last year. The groundswell “really forced providers who weren’t talking about it to start talking about it more,” Lazorwitz said. “I imagine that something like that may be coming up with mood symptoms and birth control as well.”

Vanessa Saba

When I spoke with Dr. Neill Epperson, chair of psychiatry at the University of Colorado Anschutz, I started with my own story. She laughed a knowing laugh.

“Yeah, the good old progesterone IUD,” she said. Then she told a story about a patient who was stable, got an IUD, and came back to her office with suicidal ideation. “And I said to her, ‘You need to take it out,’” Epperson recalled. “‘I know you just put it in, but you need to take it out.’ And within days, it was resolved.”

Some medical disciplines may downplay the mental health effects of contraceptives, but reproductive psychiatry, the emerging subspecialty that Epperson helped pioneer, is the exception. Reproductive psychiatrists focus on how the dramatic hormonal fluctuations across women’s lifespans can affect ­mental health—including mood changes from menstruation, pregnancy, the postpartum period, and menopause. (­Notably, women are about twice as likely to ­experience depression as men.)

Hormonal contraceptives are psychotropic medicines, Epperson said, because they affect your brain. Too often, doctors don’t treat them as such—and don’t even ask patients whether they’re on birth control when asking for lists of medications. “I think that’s wrong,” she said. “I think you’re really ­remiss in your evaluation of that patient.”

We don’t quite know how the menstrual cycle affects mood, a former senior NIH official said, let alone when you add contraceptives to the mix.

Epperson’s interest in the subject was sparked in the early 1990s, when she was one of the only female psychiatry residents in her program at Yale. She was referred a patient who, she was told, had postpartum depression—a condition that Epperson admits she “knew nothing about.” The symptoms didn’t fit Epperson’s limited understanding of the disorder; the patient was having intrusive thoughts of harming her kids and was so distressed that she was spending less time with them. Epperson started wondering whether hormones were having a more complicated impact on patients’ mental health than she’d learned in her training.

Epperson was stepping into a research void. Until the ’90s, reproductive-age women were mostly banned from clinical studies, and until 2016, female animals were routinely left out of preclinical studies—in part because scientists worried that hormonal fluctuations would complicate scientific findings. The result is that scientists know little about the impact of hormonal changes in women. Public funding structures have compounded the research gap. A recent National Academies report found that many women’s health conditions are not prioritized by any of the 27 branches of the National Institutes of Health—leading the authors to call for a new institute dedicated to women’s health.

The basics that remain unknown are myriad: We still don’t know what triggers a pregnant woman’s body to deliver a baby. We’re not entirely sure why hormonal IUDs work. (Bayer says it’s “most likely” by thickening cervical mucus, inhibiting sperm movement, and thinning the uterine lining, but “it is not known exactly how these actions work together to prevent pregnancy.”) When I asked a former senior NIH official about the safety of contraceptives, she told me to back up: We don’t quite know how the menstrual cycle affects mood, she said, let alone when you add contraceptives to the mix. This information gap has ramifications far beyond reproduction. A 2024 ­Nature study, for example, suggests that breast cancer treatment may be more effective during certain parts of the ­menstrual cycle.

Reproductive psychiatry is still a relatively young field, with fewer than 20 fellowship programs across the country. I didn’t know it existed until I started reporting this story, and I’ve since wondered if my life would have been different if I’d talked to someone like ­Epperson years ago. Was it possible that my mood improved because my IUD was removed?

“Yes,” she said. “That is quite, quite possible.”

I had my IUD taken out last summer on something of a lark, after learning from a friend that she uses Natural Cycles, the first app cleared by the FDA to be used as contraception. It works by tracking basal body temperature—in my case, using my Oura ring—to identify fertile periods.

This is, to be clear, far from a full-throated endorsement for using fertility awareness apps. They’re not as effective at preventing pregnancy as hormonal contraceptives—with failure rates between 2 and 23 percent—in part because they rely on the user consistently wearing a temperature-­tracking device, remembering to check their fertility status before sex, and using protection during potentially fertile periods, which happen to be when women’s sex drives are at their peak. They’re also pricey: I paid $499 for my Oura ring, in addition to annual fees for Oura and Natural Cycles.

When I signed up for 28, the Peter Thiel–backed fertility awareness app, it promised me fewer PMS symptoms and a “sexier body” in 90 days.

Despite all this, fertility awareness technology is booming. About 1 in 5 women ages 18 to 25 reported using menstrual tracking methods like Natural Cycles as contraception in 2024. The menstrual health app market, already worth $1.7 billion in 2024, is expected to triple by 2030. The apps appeal to a wide and eclectic range of users, from wellness influencers to MAHA supporters and women who are simply sick of the side effects of other contraceptives.

Chelsea Polis, a principal scientist at the reproductive think tank the Guttmacher Institute, said fertility awareness apps, while not as effective as other options, can be a tool to avoid pregnancy. The problem is, they’re supported by lots of people who want to get rid of the other tools, too, from hormonal contraceptives to abortion.

For some proponents—think free birthers, trad wives, and anti-vaxxers—womanhood means living as “naturally” as possible, rejecting not just hormonal contraceptives, but also other trappings of modern medicine. A period-tracking app backed by Peter Thiel, called 28, recommends cycle-­based health plans and sells an herbal supplement, Toxic Breakup, to help women discontinue hormonal ­contraceptives. The app features close-ups of dewy, bikini-­clad models meditating on the beach. (When I signed up, it promised me fewer PMS symptoms and a “sexier body” in 90 days.) Brittany Hugoboom, the ­conservative influencer who co-created 28, has said, “We wanted users to feel like a fertility goddess.”

Screenshots from 28, the Peter Thiel–backed fertility wellness app.

“There are so many other things that are being stripped away and constricting choice and wellbeing, and this is being thrust forward,” Polis said, “like, ‘Here’s your choice for contraception, this is what you should use.’”

But what she’s hoping for—innovation in contraceptives—is slow-moving at best.

The pharmaceutical industry continues to have little appetite for investing in new forms of birth control. Typically, pharmaceutical companies spend around 20 percent of their sales revenue on the research and development of new products, but for contraceptives, that figure is just 2 percent. There were only about 25 industry-funded clinical trials for new contraceptives between 2017 and 2020—in comparison, there were more than 60 clinical trials for hair thinning.

One big reason for the discrepancy: ­liability. Traditionally, pharmaceutical companies develop drugs to treat a medical condition. But contraceptives aren’t necessarily treating an illness—rather, they’re temporarily stopping the reproductive cycle. “What you’re doing with a contraceptive is suspending a function that is very important to people and trying to guarantee that you will give it back,” said Heather Vahdat, a public health researcher. “If your job is purely risk analysis, that’s crazy cakes.” There’s a pervasive sense, she said, that the products are good enough and women should quit their complaining: “That’s where the misogyny starts to eke in a little bit.”

As public funding has remained stagnant and private investment has fallen, philanthropy has filled the gap. The largest donations have come from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which made up an estimated 44 percent of all contraceptive research and development in 2022—far more than the NIH and three times more than industry. Last year, the foundation announced plans to spend $2.5 billion on women’s health by 2030. About a fifth of that will go toward research into new hormonal and nonhormonal contraceptives, though they’ve estimated that the latter is likely decades away.

And then there’s the Male Contraceptive Initiative, which, as the name suggests, supports innovation in birth control for men. The products furthest along in the clinical trial process include a hormonal gel that men rub on their shoulders and a polymer that is injected into the vas deferens, with an effect similar to a temporary vasectomy. (MCI funds the latter.) Vahdat, who directs the initiative, said the products could be on the market in about five years, though she’s hesitant to make any promises. “They’ve been saying male birth ­control is around the corner for like 50 years, so there’s a lot of exhaustion,” she said.

What if men across the globe took contraceptives that caused some of them to experience bleeding, pelvic pain, back pain, and headaches? And what if some small but meaningful fraction of those men experienced depression?

Research has found that there’s overwhelming interest across the globe in male contraceptives, not just from disgruntled women, but from men, too. Vahdat recalled men whom she’d talked to over the years: the husband in a Delhi slum who said he wished he could take a pill so his wife wouldn’t have to; the Bay Area high schooler who wished he could take something to protect himself from the ramifications of an unintended pregnancy; the man in the Frankfurt airport who, seeing Vahdat’s shirt reading “Male Birth Control Now,” came up and hugged her. 

It’s not a new thought experiment, but a telling one all the same, to imagine what might happen were the gender roles ­reversed. What if men across the globe took contraceptives that caused some of them to experience bleeding, pelvic pain, back pain, and headaches? And what if some small but meaningful fraction of those men experienced depression?

A version of this thought experiment played out in an actual experiment, between 2008 and 2012, during a male contraceptive clinical trial. More than 300 men across the world received hormonal injections every eight weeks. The injections were overwhelmingly effective at preventing pregnancy, and overall, men were satisfied with them—more than 4 out of 5 participants said they’d use the product if it were available. But the injections caused frequent side effects, like acne, muscle pain, increased libido, and emotional changes. Nearly 5 percent of the participants reported mood swings, and nearly 3 percent reported depression. One man attempted suicide. After that, the scientific review panel cut the study short, determining that the risks outweighed the benefits.

This concern over participant side effects draws a sharp contrast to the early birth control studies for women. “I think there’s a case to be made,” Vahdat said, “that I don’t know that female contraception would pass through today’s drug development.”

I’m still surprised by the lightness I’ve felt since my IUD was removed—still half-­convinced that this version of myself is a yearlong aberration rather than my baseline. My period has come back, and with it, PMS: when progesterone is peaking and, I’ve learned, I’m far more likely to feel down and anxious and to wake up wired in the small hours.

I mean this in a purely matter-of-fact way, not a woo-woo, Fertility Goddess–worshipping one: There’s something ­reassuring about getting my period. I like being able to anticipate and understand my moodiness, rather than constantly searching my psyche for an underlying cause. For now, this system works for me, but given the failure rate of fertility awareness tracking, I’m not sure if I’ll stick with it or ­eventually try something else.

Some of the experts I spoke with—women who’ve spent years studying the effects of contraceptives on the brain—were similarly lost when it came to their own birth control use. Without more clinical research to guide them on which contraceptive might suit them best, they had taken to testing the available options on themselves, like reluctant guinea pigs in their own tiny experiments. One postdoctoral research psychologist said she’s tried seven or eight different contraceptives to see how they would affect her. “Because I’m a ­researcher, I’m interested in trying out that kind of thing,” she said. “But, man. That’s a process to go through, right?”

A public health expert who recently switched to an IUD said she’s thrilled that she doesn’t have the bleeding that she had on other forms of contraception, but she’s been worried about her own mood. “The bar is so low,” she said, that she finds herself thinking, “Well, I’m not bleeding out my eyeballs, so this is a great method.”

One epidemiologist told me that she recently came off contraceptives and was shocked at how much better she felt. Now she doesn’t know what to do. She doesn’t want to get pregnant, but she also doesn’t want to feel depressed. “I feel so good,” she said, “and I’m terrified of screwing something up.”

Last month, the Supreme Court issued a number of landmark opinions involving transgender rights, campaign finance, executive power, and immigration. Those decisions were issued in the traditional way many of us recognize: pages and pages of arguments and citations, with each justice on the record voting yea or nay. But over the last decade, the court—led by Chief Justice John Roberts—has increasingly relied on a fast-track way of making decisions that was once rarely used. It’s known as the shadow docket.

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Few reporters have done more to shine light on the shadow docket than New York Times investigative journalist Jodi Kantor. Along with her colleague Adam Liptak, Kantor recently published a number of previously undisclosed memos detailing the shadow docket’s unprecedented expansion under the Roberts court.

“So many major decisions about presidential power are being made on the shadow docket,” Kantor says. “And the question for the Supreme Court is why they’re doing business in this way and why in a lot of these decisions they are not writing opinions.”

On this week’s More To The Story, Kantor talks to host Al Letson about what’s driving the Roberts court to bypass the traditional ways of issuing decisions and how that’s affecting public trust in the court. Plus, Kantor looks back at her Pulitzer Prize–winning reporting on sexual abuse allegations against Harvey Weinstein that helped set off the #metoo movement and argues that obituaries for the movement almost 10 years later are dead wrong.

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

The Department of Homeland Security has purchased two privately-run detention facilities from the for-profit prison company CoreCivic, the company announced Monday, in a move that may serve to shield the facilities from state oversight.

DHS bought the two Southern California prisons, Otay Mesa Detention Center and California City Detention Center, for about $1.5 billion on Monday. But the facilities will still be operated by CoreCivic employees, meaning the company will still generate income, over and above the sale price, from both prisons. 

California law requires that privately held detention centers be subject to oversight by local and state authorities, as well as members of Congress. 

Now that DHS owns the buildings, finding out what’s going on inside of them is likely to become harder.

“It seems like a very clear attempt to evade oversight and accountability,” said Alexa Van Brunt, a civil rights attorney with the MacArthur Justice Center. “If they own the building, then there is a very good argument that a state law cannot trump federal ownership,” Van Brunt explained. That sets up a potential oversight battle between California’s state government and the Trump administration. 

DHS said as much. “ICE can not rely on local state and county partners for detention space in California,” where “politicians continue to push legislation to outlaw or make private prisons financially infeasible,” an agency spokesperson said in response to a request for comment. “Now, with federal ownership of these detention centers which are crucial to ICE’s detention network on the west coast ICE retains the detention capacity needed to arrest, detain, and remove illegal aliens,” the spokesperson concluded.

The purchase could also protect the detention centers from legal attacks. As Katya Schwenk of The Lever put it in March, when the plans were first reported, federal ownership may help ICE evade not only state monitoring but “some lawsuits tied to alleged abuse, including labor violations.” 

One such lawsuit concerns Otay Mesa: Owino v. CoreCivic, ongoing since 2017, is a massive class-action suit alleging forced labor practices there. It’s one of many attempts to curb or regulate ICE detention in California: just this week, the state sued to stop the construction of a new detention center outside the town of Gilroy. 

“California created oversight for private detention facilities because we have seen too many abuses, including deaths, behind closed doors,” said state Sen. María Elena Durazo, who co-sponsored legislation to strengthen state oversight. “It is shameful for any government agency to try to sidestep basic health and safety protections for people in its custody. If the federal government believes that purchasing these facilities allows it to avoid oversight, that is unacceptable.”

CoreCivic representative Ryan Gustin did not respond to questions about how federal ownership of the facilities might impact oversight. “Asset transactions of this nature are not uncommon for government,” Gustin said in a written statement. “We have previously completed facility sales to government partners, and operating government-owned facilities is a well-established model within our business.” 

Other firms are indeed exploring the model. George Zoley, CEO of GEO Group—the other major ICE detention contractor—said on an earnings call in May that “as some blue states are considering more active involvement in oversight of facilities, I think the logical solution to much of that is federal ownership,” as The Appeal’s Elizabeth Weill-Greenberg reported.

If the federal government owns the buildings, it will “provide stronger credibility in the courts,” Zoley added, such that “states can only have very limited involvement in those policies and programs.” 

ICE facilities across the country, both privately and publicly owned, have been slammed with lawsuits over detainee mistreatment, forced labor, health code violations, and deaths in custody. At least 21 people have died in ICE custody this year, according to data collected by lawyer and journalist Andrew Free, as the number of people detained by ICE skyrockets from around 45,000 last year to more than 63,000 as of this week. Denying state officials the right of inspection makes investigating those deaths—as UN human rights chief Volker Türk demanded this week—far harder. 

Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) conducted oversight visits at Otay Mesa when it still belonged to CoreCivic—and, like lawmakers in other states, was sometimes denied entry.

“Too many people who pose no threat to public safety and should not be in detention are nevertheless being held in unacceptable conditions with inadequate access to medical care, legal counsel, clean water, nutritious food, and other basic necessities,” Padilla said. “Whether these facilities are operated by a private contractor or owned by the federal government, my expectations remain the same.”

Setareh Ghandehari, of the advocacy group Detention Watch Network, described the purchase as one facet of ICE’s mass expansion of incarceration: converting warehouses into detention centers, buying existing jails, and contracting to build new ones, all of which will “intensify the already cruel and inhumane conditions in ICE detention and streamline the agency’s ability to target and dehumanize immigrant communities to achieve its stated goal of ‘Amazonification’ of mass detention and deportation,” Ghandehari said. 

“There still will be avenues for accountability,” Van Brunt, of MacArthur Justice, said. Even without the right of inspection, ICE-owned detention centers could be sued on constitutional grounds. But this purchase “does make it harder for people to get in those detention facilities at the state level and find out what’s actually going on,” Van Brunt continued. “It makes it much more of a black box, and it makes the people who are held there much more vulnerable to abuses and to poor conditions.”

During his 2015 State of the Union address, then-President Barack Obama announced what he promised would be an ambitious public health project. “Tonight, I’m launching a new Precision Medicine Initiative to bring us closer to curing diseases like cancer and diabetes, and to give all of us access to the personalized information we need to keep ourselves and our families healthier,” Obama said with confidence. “We can do this.” He was met with applause. 

That announcement introduced the National Institutes of Health’s “All of US” initiative, designed to organize and provide to researchers the health data of up to a million Americans who opted in to donate their blood, general electronic health records, and more. People’s names are replaced with a code before researchers access their data, and NIH asserts that only a few people have access to the list of codes that correspond with names. As of late June, data from nearly 750,000 participants is available to researchers who are studying such diseases like Alzheimer’s disease and diabetes, as well as overall health patterns like sleep.

Since then, proponents of the program have highlighted how it has addressed urgent issues. A 2022 study from the University of California, Irvine, study that used the NIH data, for instance, was the first to find that Latino immigrants have higher rates of liver cancer than Latino people who were born in the United States. In a 2024 speech, the head of the All of US initiative said that 87 percent of its participants belong to “underrepresented groups in biomedical research,” such as Latino and Black people.

“Palantir is not a company that is pro–public interest or welfare, or public health.”

What many participants may not know is that the defense technology and data giant Palantir, which has deep links to both the intelligence community and the Trump administration, is one of the firms involved with the project—the same Palantir that the Trump administration has tapped to gather information for ICE and which already worked extensively with the Department of Defense.

Palantir’s involvement with All of US is a matter of public record; it has been announced in press releases. However, experts I spoke with about the firm’s connection to the massive federal health data project have raised ethical concerns about what it means for a company involved in Trump’s deportation machine—a choice that has reportedly troubled even some of Palantir’s own employees—to manage such sensitive information. 

Palantir’s involvement with All of Us was announced in 2023, through its role in the Center for Linkage and Acquisition of Data, which is now hosted at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The company was brought in by an NIH awardee, the University of Colorado Anschutz, a major medical research center. An NIH press release from October 2023 announcing the center boasted that the sub-awardees were “comprised of leading academic, data, security, and software organizations.”

“That it was approved during the Biden administration only underscores how much unfortunate buy-in the tech industry has across both Democrats and Republicans,” said Anita Chan, chair of Indiana University Bloomington’s department of information and library science and author of a 2025 book that looks at the use and misuse of data.

“Palantir’s CLAD role is limited and non-research: no participant interaction, no study administration, no scientific analysis,” an NIH spokesperson said in response to a request for comment, adding that “data aren’t owned by Palantir or available for independent use, and can’t move into external corporate databases,” and that Palantir “doesn’t control the data, use it independently, or decide how it’s shared or analyzed.

“To be clear, there’s no partnership with Palantir,” the spokesperson said, emphasizing that the firm was a subcontractor.

A University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill spokesperson noted in response to a separate request for comment that “Protecting privacy is a top priority for the university while using technology in research,” and that “Every action on the data is captured in tamper-proof audit logs, and because the data stays inside this controlled environment, it cannot be copied out, sold, or used for any purpose” not approved by the research project.

Palantir’s involvement in the sphere of personal health data is fairly expansive. In 2020, near the end of the first Trump administration, NIH awarded Palantir a contract to work with data related to Covid, a database that has also been used for Long Covid research. Palantir also has a contract worth the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars with the UK’s National Health Service to create a health data platform.

“[It] is concerning to have one company that has such a large role in [handling] so many different kinds of data,” Center for Genetics and Society executive director Katie Hasson told me. “I don’t think people hoping to benefit public health by sharing their genetic data were really thinking that that’s the kind of company that would be handling their information.”

Kenny Morris, of the American Friends Service Committee, which is running a campaign to encourage divestment from Palantir, said he was concerned that the company was “involved in health data at all,” citing its relationships with the Israeli military, which has used Palantir technology in Gaza, the US military, which has employed it in attacks on Iran, and the Department of Homeland Security, which relies on Palantir’s “ImmigrationOS” and other software to help carry out the dictates of Palantir stockholder and White House deputy Stephen Miller.

A still from a March 2026 protest in New York City against Palantir. Camara Porter/AdMedia/Zuma

A Palantir spokesperson said that the firm was “not in the business” of storing, collecting, mining, or selling data: “We don’t ‘use’ data from customers for other efforts,” the spokesperson said. “In all cases, our customers control and retain their own data. We are simply the software that helps them make sense of it. And in all deployments of our software, we strictly uphold our enduring commitment to protecting privacy and civil liberties.”

All of Us has been able to attract a diverse set of participants through the outreach of community engagement partners, including the Asian Health Initiative, the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, and the American Association on Health and Disability. (The University of California, San Francisco’s hospital system reached out to me in 2024 to ask if I wanted to participate Palantir’s potential involvement wasn’t mentioned.)

“I don’t know if all of the hospitals or institutions that have been involved in recruiting people into the study at various times would necessarily even know” about Palantir’s involvement, Hasson said.

There are many questions about how visible Palantir’s involvement is, including if any hospitals disclose it to patients and if researchers are acutely aware of Palantir’s involvement, despite the public press releases. Sample consent forms for patients on NIH’s website do not mention Palantir.

“Palantir is not a company that is pro–public interest or welfare, or public health, or sort of traditional obligations of democratic institutions and states,” Chan said. “Its vision of civic accountability is non-existent.”  

A woman who dated Graham Platner said he sexually assaulted her, allegations that followed the stories of several other women who reported abuse at the hands of Maine’s democratic nominee for US Senate. 

The woman, Maine resident Jenny Racicot, provided substantiated details of the alleged incident in a Monday Politico report. 

“These allegations are troubling, serious, and false,” Platner responded in a Monday statement. “Any accusation of non-consensual behavior is categorically untrue.”

While several Democrats have begun dropping their endorsements of Platner as their US Senate nominee following Racicot’s credible rape allegations, many have not, as of Tuesday morning.

The Democrats who have pulled their endorsements since Monday did not do so after several women detailed Platner’s abuse in a June New York Times report. Some even campaigned for Platner. Perhaps they believed the Democratic nominee’s repeated denials. Perhaps they simply didn’t care.

They did not rescind their endorsements when reports revealed Platner’s tattoo with Nazi paramilitary organizations, including Adolf Hitler’s SS police. Perhaps they believed Platner when he dismissed it as just a design he got while drunk with fellow US Marines during his third deployment, or were satisfied when he said he later covered the tattoo. Perhaps they simply didn’t care.

Prominent voices across the “left–of–center” political spectrum backed Platner—from Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) to the hosts of the popular podcast Pod Save America (Both Sanders and Pod Save America have since called on Platner to drop out of the Senate race). Some called the allegations against Platner politically motivated. Many justified their endorsements with Platner’s so-called progressive values and the idea that the party must oust Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) to have a better chance at winning a majority in the November midterms.

“We all say Democrats should fight harder, but what does it mean to fight harder?” Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) said at a June campaign event for Platner regarding the effort to flip the Senate. “To me, it means you show up when an ally who challenges power is under attack.” The event took place one day after the New York Times report, which detailed Platner physically assaulting one woman he dated, Lyndsey Fifield, and trapping her in a bedroom during an argument and saying he would rape or kill people he considered a threat.

One only has to look at the reaction to Platner’s Monday announcement that he would continue his campaign, taking time “to reflect on the best path forward.” Considering his denial of “non-consensual behavior,” Platner’s statement suggests public relations strategizing rather than accountability. The Senate nominee and others have spread conspiracy theories that political opponents are actively coordinating the allegations.

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But this perspective only considers the good abusive men like Platner can contribute and dismisses the people they abuse. It treats survivors with disdain, devaluing what they add to their communities. It slams shut any pathway to speak out and denies survivors personhood by condemning them for even daring to exercise the right to speak. It forces survivors to feel like they should stay silent due to fear that it could hurt others.

“One of the reasons I didn’t come forward sooner was, the huge moral conflict that I had between supporting his politics, but not supporting him as a person,” Racicot told Politico. “I just want the truth out there. I just want people to have a whole scope of who he is as a person.”

As many have stated, Platner already hurt his chances of becoming a senator with his abuse. The Democratic Party must reckon with how it continued to support an abusive man and prop up a system that allows those in power to skirt responsibility and actively harms survivors.

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

Donald Trump has blamed everything—from “national security” issues, the deaths of birds and whales, and cancer—in his decades-long campaign against windfarms. But as the Trump administration continues to undermine the industry, what worries workers most are their jobs.

Since taking office for a second term, Trump has issued an executive order aiming to halt all wind-energy leases and permits, attempted to issue stop-work orders on wind projects under construction, and paid more than $2.6 billion in settlements to buy out wind energy leases. And hundreds of workers have been affected.

Thomas Kilday, a furnace electrician with IBEW local 99 in Providence, Rhode Island, was in the midst of a four-week shift onboard a vessel off the Atlantic coast working on the Revolution Wind Project in August last year when the Trump administration issued a stop-work order on the project.

“No one really knew what was going on. We didn’t know what it meant for us. We just knew that everything was up in the air,” said Kilday. “You plan your whole life around being gone for 28 days, and to come out here and have it thrown up in the air, worrying what does this mean for me, for my pay for the next four weeks, what’s going to happen? There’s a lot of uncertainty.”

Construction on the project is done on shifts of 28 days on and 28 days off, with workers residing on a vessel on the ocean and taking helicopters to work on the turbines.

“What the Trump administration is doing is just throwing money away for the sake of their ideology.”

A federal court granted an injunction to block the stop-work order in September last year. In December, the Trump administration issued another 90-day stop-work order, citing national security, before a second judge issued an injunction in January.

When the second stop-work order was issued, Kilday was celebrating Christmas with his family and preparing for another four-week shift. “That was really difficult,” he said. “I just spent a bunch of money on Christmas gifts for my family, and it was not what I wanted to be thinking about. Six months out of the year we’re away from home, and for what little time we do have at home, not to be able to just focus all of that time and energy on our families, it’s tough. It’s not a great feeling to be worried about your job when you’re supposed to be home.”

“We’re proud of the work that we do out here, and we want to be able to continue to do it. We think it’s important work,” added Kilday. “When I’m at home, and I drive down my street, I look up at those power lines. I helped create the power that’s running through those power lines, and I’m proud of that.”

Revolution Wind announced in March that it began delivering power to New England, citing the work of more than 1,000 local union workers, and is expected to power more than 350,000 homes and businesses. The project’s construction is over 90 percent complete.

In June, the Trump administration abandoned an effort to try to halt all wind projects and leases across the US, giving up a challenge in court to a judge tossing Trump’s executive order to freeze all permitting and leasing for wind projects.

Instead, the Trump administration has opted to buy out wind project leases.

Trump’s Department of Interior has completed four deals so far to cancel wind project leases, paying energy corporations a sum of more than $2.6 billion, including paying $765 million to Invenergy to abandon four wind projects in California, New York, and Maine and nearly $900 million to Bluepoint Wind and Garden State Wind to cancel offshore wind leases in New York and California.

“I think it’s a foolish policy that the Trump administration is engaging in trying to buy out these leases,” Pat Crowley, president of the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, told the Guardian. “These projects are not only helping to reduce our carbon emissions, they’re providing good-paying union jobs for thousands.”

Crowley said that workers would have had long-term job stability from working on these projects. He noted the Trump administration had lost in court in its attempts to issue stop-work orders on five wind projects in the Rhode Island area.

“It’s a personal vendetta… Good union jobs—we shouldn’t be trying to take those off the table. That just doesn’t make any kind of sense.”

“We’re five for five taking on the Trump administration,” he said. “What the Trump administration is doing is just throwing money away for the sake of their ideology.”

Will Gonzalez, a construction laborer with the Laborers’ local 385 in Fairhaven, Massachusetts, worked on the Vinyard Wind 1 project off the coast of Martha’s Vineyard, a project the Trump administration attempted to halt in January. The project is now completed and fully operational.

He criticized the Trump administration’s efforts to halt wind turbine projects, claiming the opposition from Trump stems from his experiences trying to stop a wind turbine project near his golf course in Scotland, losing an appeal in December 2015. “It’s a personal vendetta,” said Gonzalez. “Good union jobs—we shouldn’t be trying to take those off the table. That just doesn’t make any kind of sense. Families obviously need good jobs…Why take those jobs away?”

Gonzalez said he and his co-workers were leaving training and certifications unused because of the halting of wind power projects. “All of us that worked on that Vinyard Wind 1, obviously, we would have loved to segue right into another project,” he said. “We’re fully trained, ready to go, willing and able, so it directly affected us. But you move on. You [have] got to move on. You can’t sit and dwell on that, because that’s not going to pay the bills.”

The White House directed comment to the Department of Interior.

A spokesperson for the department denied the cancellation and stop-work orders of projects had had any impact on jobs, even on projects under construction when halted. The spokesperson did not respond to a question asking for clarification and did not comment on Trump’s prior animus toward wind turbine projects involving his golf courses.

“No jobs were eliminated because none of these leases were operational or supporting employment,” the spokesperson said. Rather than waiting years for the projects to materialize, they added, the Trump administration is prioritizing investments in existing infrastructure and functioning supply chains that can create jobs now and deliver economic benefits faster. “This approach puts more people to work more quickly, using proven, affordable, and reliable energy rather than relying on projects tied to leases that were not producing jobs in the first place.”

Eucalyptus trees have been scattered across California since the 1850s, when they were brought over by Australians flocking to the Gold Rush. The trees are now considered invasive, and their bark contributes to wildfire risk. But even so, they’re a staple of the area, their scent and stature intrinsic to the California coast. 

In 2023, author and poet Victoria Chang watched as the massive eucalyptus tree across the street from her home in Los Angeles was cut down. As the men lopped off the tree’s limbs, Chang realized she hadn’t spent much time really looking at it. She reflected that the tree had probably taken years to grow and was so easily cut down in just a few days. Chang felt compelled to write poems about this feeling that would later evolve into her latest poetry collection, which asks what it means to be human in the face of nature.

With the same name as Swedish artist Hilma af Klint’s painting series, Chang’s new book Tree of Knowledge is a meditation on abstract art, mortality, language, home, and history. Chang writes in both absolutes and inquiries she artfully taps into what it means to be human while parsing through both personal and collective histories. 

At the core of the collection is the long poem, “Eureka” which examines the violent expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California. On February 6, 1885, about 300 Chinese residents were ordered by a committee of 15 men to leave their homes within 48 hours after a white city council member was killed by a stray bullet from a shootout near Chinatown. Through the poem, history collapses, we’re both in the present and past. We, as readers observe Chang try to process the atrocities Chinese Americans faced as they were forced onto two steamboats and shipped to San Francisco amid threats of hanging. We see this processing throughout the collection in the images of Chinese Americans working in canneries around the Eureka area that have red thread stitched through them.

In our conversation, Chang discussed the earth’s memory, the experience of first generation Americans, and motherhood. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity. 

The collection has so many genres of history wrapped in it. There’s a personal history, collective history, and art history. In the book, you also talk about how art and writing are acts of archival. Could you speak more to that sort of collective history that you’re highlighting?

I’m interested in all sorts of things. I love visual art. I love to make art. I love to go to any museum or gallery or just anything to look at. For me, I started noticing there’s so much artwork that had these gorgeous trees in them. And once I started noticing that I couldn’t unnotice it. 

That’s something I love about being human, is once someone points something out to you, once you start seeing something, you start seeing it everywhere. I think that is maybe partially, a key to empathy. Once you start seeing people, different kinds of people, you really start humanizing them in ways that are not a form of othering or objectifying in terms of people as objects. 

So once I started seeing trees and artwork, I started seeing it everywhere. Then I started sort of writing in conversation with these paintings and other sculptures and artworks.

I think that’s the beauty of art and nature. If you actually start talking to these things, just like if you start talking to people that might seem different from you, things start opening, the aperture widens, and that’s how my mind works, and that’s kind of how this book feels. There’s a little bit of everything in here because I like looking at things, reading things, meeting trees, meeting art, and they all end up being a part of my life experience in my art too.

I wondered about the environmental politics in this collection. How much it seems that, especially now with AI data centers, we’re taking the earth for granted. What role did that play for you as you were writing?

While I was writing this collection, I was also traveling a lot. I wrote a whole bunch of poems related to my visit to Alaska. I was so struck by how we are stewards of this earth. We are guests, and it’s our job to actually be good stewards to what we have. It occurs to me every single day how we are all absolutely awful stewards of this earth. 

I went to [the redwood trees in Eureka, California], and there was not a single car in the parking lot. I walked amongst these massive trees that had been here for so long, by myself. I realized I’m just sort of energy, like my time here is so short. These trees are really going to be here long after my time, anyone’s time, and that it’s our role to respect them and to kneel before them. 

In the poem “The Bird Cage,” you write about the tension surrounding immigration, which reminded me of a similar conversation in your 2021 memoir, Dear Memory. That feels especially urgent right now. 

Ever since we’ve been alive, and especially recently in this administration, every day, there’s so much conflict and there’s so much anger. 

I think so much about how my parents came [to the US] during a time period where people like them were welcomed. I was just pulling out some of my parents’ archives, and my mother sponsored all of her relatives to come here after she came here as a technical person during the 60s. 

Once she got here, she filled out these forms to sponsor all of her siblings, and it was so easy and welcoming. Some of my uncles and aunts were approved to come here in like five days after filling out this form. It seemed so different than it is now. I just don’t understand where that hatred comes from because I think about my own parents and how they did so much in this country and experienced so much, but also gave a lot back and how I’m a direct result of that.

There’s nothing wrong with people coming here and wanting to experience this beautiful place. When I wrote [“The Bird Cage”], I thought about how some people have to leave countries they’re born in, like my parents. Other people, like me, have to leave countries they’ve never seen. And others have to install their own countries; they have nothing, I’m the latter. 

So, I was thinking about how I’m so grateful to be here and to have been born in this country and to live here, but in order for me to live here, I’ve had to leave countries that I’ll never know. Which is like a weird thing to think about, because this is my country, but I don’t ever feel like it’s really my country. 

I think many people of color are interested in hearing different perspectives of America, and want to see more representation. How does it feel to think about this book in the context of the 250th anniversary of the US? 

Since I was a very young child, I’ve been so confused as to why the history that we were presented in school and in the media was always one thing. I didn’t understand why so many things weren’t talked about. As I became older, I started learning more and more about my own history, about all the marginalized people in this country, and how there are so many incredible stories that weren’t being told and still aren’t being told. 

It’s such a short history now that you’re mentioning it. Our country is so short and we’ve done so much damage in such a short time, which is quite frightening. But being an optimist by nature, it’s never too late to change things. As a person with a historian kind of background, the only way we can move forward is to learn about the past. So, I’m interested in the past and stories from the past, and it’s our obligation to try and tell those stories as much as we can.

In the center of the collection, there’s a long poem about the violent expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California in 1885. I know you also tackled this topic in your 2026 children’s book of the same name, Eureka. Why has this specific moment in history stuck with you so much?

It struck me once I learned about it. It struck me how few people knew about it, including myself. My parents were not from the part of China that a lot of these Chinese people were from, but obviously, I’m a Chinese person, and I felt completely struck and horrified by what I read and what I learned. The more I read, the more I learned, the more I realized that there were actually a lot of people in Eureka, California that were working to keep this history alive and to tell these stories. 

Before I wrote this long poem, I wanted to go find these people. I wrote a children’s book [about the expulsion] 10 years ago. In typical publishing, no one was really interested in that story. It just kept on bothering me and so I wanted to keep learning about it. Ten years later, I went up to Eureka, California and met all these people that were trying to keep the story alive. So I wanted to do my part, and so I wrote this long poem that explores these themes and also explores my time when I was up there. I think when I wrote this adult poem, I didn’t know that the children’s book was going to be published, so the timing just kind of worked that way.

In the long poem, you write, “Who has the rights to imagination? Who has the rights to illumination? What if history must travel through us?” I think that those sorts of questions illuminate these ideas of what a lot of marginalized people feel in America about who owns history, and who can tell history.

My parents aren’t from this area, which is in the southern part of China, where these Chinese people came from. My mother was from a different region of China and spoke a different dialect. My father was Taiwanese.

So I thought a lot about, should I even tell this story, do I have the right to tell this story, and how do I do it in a way that feels respectful, and that honors these people and honors the differences between myself and those people who are no longer here. 

Because they have ancestors who are still here, who maybe aren’t writers or artists. If you’re going to speak in another’s voice that’s not your own, how do you do that with the utmost care and respect? 

So even though I know other people would say, “Oh, she’s a Chinese person, of course, she has the right to speak about these things,” I am much more nuanced than that as all marginalized people are. We know the nuances and the subtle differences between all of the people that other people clump in one category, and I wanted to be very careful thinking about those things. 

It’s really interesting what you do with grief and this acceptance of death, and how that makes us recontextualize history and time. I was also thinking about the themes of motherhood and raising children and how that sort of affects our idea of time too. When you’re talking about grieving your parents and then raising these children who will one day leave to live their own lives, how does it feel to put that out there and have your daughters engage with it?

It goes back to some of the environmental things we were talking about earlier, like “What does it mean to move toward leaving the earth and help bring the next generations? Raise them and help grow them in ways that they could be good stewards to this earth, both environmentally, historically.” 

I think about that all the time. Every day, I’m thinking about that and what can I do, as more of a senior person, with a lot of life experience, to sort of help the next generation who are going to be here much longer than I will. My own children are now like older teenagers, one is 19, and the other is 17. They’re young adults and every day, I think about what I could say to them, or how I could show them through my actions, or the things I do to sort of help them become better citizens of this earth, in this country, in this world. 

I think these are things we all should be doing, no matter how old we are and where we come from. It’s a job of ours. 

How do you not pass down racism and hate and misogyny and consumerism and capitalism? How do you actually help the next generation be aware of their own complicity, and how do you do that as one human being, whether you’re a parent or not? I think that’s the big question for us as adults, to be honest with you. 

I think it’s our responsibility to be communal and to build community and to pass along whatever knowledge, wisdom, ideas, offerings that we might have. That to me is so important as a human being, but especially important as an artist. Today it’s like, “please read,” like just getting younger people to read, to think more deeply in the age of AI, where everything is being stripped down and simplified. To know we want complexity, we want nuance; those are the things that I feel like I’m fighting for now.

As the US men’s national soccer team prepares to face off against Belgium on Monday night, the question isn’t whether their aggressive and quick play style can defeat an opponent that humiliated them 5-2 back in March—it’s what Donald Trump’s role in the decision to suspend star striker Folarin Balogun’s one-match ban means for the integrity of the World Cup.

FIFA, the international soccer governing body, on Sunday suspended the red card Balogun received in Wednesday’s match against Bosnia-Herzegovina, which would normally bar him from the next game as well. In case you haven’t followed the flurry of developments since, here’s a non-exhaustive list of events as of Monday afternoon:

First, FIFA suspended Balogun’s one-match ban by applying Article 27 of its disciplinary code, which allows it to cancel or delay a suspension without explanation. The governing body could have easily just stated that the match officials’ video review system was not applied correctly by showing slow-motion and still images to evaluate the severity of Balogun’s foul, which is typically against protocol—but it didn’t.

The other side was, unsurprisingly, outraged.

Reports came out the same day that President Trump called Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, just hours after the Wednesday match, asking him to review the suspension—the first of what were reportedly three such calls.

By Sunday, Trump was thanking FIFA in a Truth Social post for “reversing a great injustice” by suspending Balogun’s ban. On Monday morning, FIFA granted Belgium the right to appeal against its decision—and promptly dismissed Belgium’s challenge the same day, stating that since the soccer federation was “not a party to the proceedings,” it had “no standing to appeal the decision.” 

UEFA, the soccer governing body in Europe, said that FIFA crossed “a red line” with the move. “When the certainty of rules is no longer guaranteed by its guardians, the integrity of the game is at stake and the credibility of a competition is undermined,” it added.

Belgium’s soccer federation released a statement, saying that “to safeguard the legitimate rights of all participating teams and to protect the fundamental principles of fair play in our sport,” it was “investigating all potential options” to push back against the move. Even the country’s foreign minister risked Trump’s ire, saying bluntly, “If a phone call really is what explains this incomprehensible decision, it would amount to undermining the most basic rules of soccer and sports.”

Belgium’s soccer federation said that it did not receive an explanation of the decision and would leave “all further actions open,” suggesting a potential dispute at the Council of Arbitration for Sport.

While this is not FIFA’s first in-game controversy—including allegations of match-fixing in favor of host Argentina in 1978—the debacle has already set an alarming precedent. France has now asked FIFA to rescind their talented player Michael Olise’s yellow card against Paraguay. England coach Thomas Tuchel joked that Trump could help overturn defender Jarell Quansah’s red card against Mexico. 

As Christina Unkel, a former soccer referee and current sports executive, wrote on X on Sunday, FIFA’s refusal to state any reasons both raises a variety of questions and invites other countries to bring their political weight to bear to appeal calls by referees, although no other leader shares Trump’s close relationship with FIFA’s top official.

Regardless of how Belgium’s appeal and France’s request shake out, the White House’s role in the controversy will likely follow Folarin Balogun—who didn’t ask for the reversal—throughout the rest of his international career. Balogun was a good sport about the red card: He shook all the match officials’ hands after the match on Wednesday, and later told reporters that he accepted the referee’s initial decision.

“You can feel something unjust has happened to you, but it’s not an excuse to not do the right thing,” Balgun said. “Every game I try to shake the referee’s hand and this game was no different. It’s important to give the correct example to people watching.”

It’s an idea that FIFA should take into consideration.

“The more I read, the more embarrassed I am for everyone involved.”

Secondhand humiliation was the looming theme of a group chat on July 3, as friends and I, like the rest of the world, took in the details that emerged from Taylor Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce inside Madison Square Garden. There was the couple’s own logo, a personalized T&T that appeared on everything from wedding handkerchiefs to custom furniture, before dramatically showing up on the “JUST&T MARRIED” signs that flashed outside the venue. Nearby, the Empire State Building lit up as Swift’s “something blue.” The raffled off luxury gifts that included Cartier watches and a vintage car. The blown-up couple photos that draped across walls.

It’s easy to imagine the superstar going feral as she brainstormed all the ways she could bend the world’s most famous arena to her local prom queen sensibilities. Swift, after all, is a billionaire, and the possibilities for cringe are endless. Plus, people tend to lose their minds when they’re planning the most heteronormative, ordinary, domestic thing anyone can do. How else do you explain inviting 1,000 people to a wedding?

It’s easy to imagine the superstar going feral as she brainstormed all the ways she could bend the world’s most famous arena to her local prom queen sensibilities.

Yet for all the skin-crawling aesthetics, there was something joyful about watching the most famous woman alive so unapologetic in the same corniness that has always accompanied her meteoric fame and throw a giant-ass party. Was it intimate? Wasn’t there, couldn’t tell ya. Is beer-soaked MSG my idea of romance? Yuck. But these are the choices of a woman who has been singing about imaginary weddings for an entire career, and the stress of whittling down the guest list for a small event was something she already told us she’d be avoiding. (“I’m not gonna do that,” is what Swift told Graham Norton, one of the 1,000 guests eventually invited.) It was as if by drenching her wedding in extreme ridiculousness, Swift was confirming, as Tyler Foggatt wrote in the New Yorker, that she, like her fans, viewed her nuptials as the grand “narrative closure” to years of public heartbreak and pining. That might seem embarrassing to admit for some. But that’s probably one of a billion reasons why you and I aren’t Taylor Swift.

Still, do storybook endings grant unlimited license to committing some of the goofiest wedding details I’ve ever come across, when private islands for the ultra-wealthy are right there? Some of the sneering has been justified; the extravagant details from Swift’s wedding are indeed the consequences of what happens when billionaires exist. Others, mad about the event, blamed Swift for causing power outages in the area. (It “absolutely did not,” a Con Ed spokesperson later confirmed.) But did you really expect anything less? Creating a spectacle out of romance is bread and butter to Swift’s lore, and even for all the tackiness, I can’t help but admire Swift’s dedication to decidedly unhip, unabashed romantic kitsch when everyone’s in an arms race to exercise taste these days.

That’s especially true for the other billionaires of the same set. Take, for instance, Lauren Sánchez Bezos, a try-hard who operates under the assumption that style can be purchased; Mark Zuckerberg palling it around with Kylie Jenner after sitting front row of Prada like that’s not awkward as hell; the AI overlords who think taste can be developed and sold for profit. Sure, Swift’s own proclivities might be steeped in the same luxury. But the context in which Swift’s money appears, at least when it comes to her wedding, is rooted in something different, a quality that can’t be bought or machine-learned: earnestness. It’s the same quality that has been central to both Swift’s art and enormous popularity. How else do you explain a 20-minute vow that leaves a grown man in tears? It certainly wasn’t anywhere in the last headline-making billionaire wedding.

Taylor Swift might be the uncoolest bride on earth, and that’s refreshing. Then again, to be unbothered with externally imposed notions of what a “cool” bride should look like is its own kind of luxury.

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

For the past two years, more than a dozen major banks have been not only reneging on their climate commitments, they’ve been actively making the crisis worse. 

In 2024 and 2025, during the leadup to President Donald Trump’s second inauguration, all six of the nation’s largest banks abandoned the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, a voluntary climate coalition, precipitating the Alliance’s complete shutdown in October. Since then, others including Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank, HSBC, NatWest, Santander, and JPMorgan Chase have either weakened or scrapped their decarbonization targets.

Now, new evidence shows banks are ramping up spending on fossil fuels. Beyond helping companies extract more oil and gas, they are bankrolling the industry’s pivot to plastics, fertilizers, and other petrochemical products.

“Petrochemicals are a deliberate and pivotal strategy to ensure that we continue using fossil fuels.”

Two reports released earlier this month illustrate the trend. An analysis from the Rainforest Action Network (RAN), and other environmental groups found the world’s top 65 banks contributed $508 billion to companies expanding fossil fuel development in 2025. That’s a 27 percent increase since 2024, and more than any other year since at least 2016, based on the organization’s past analyses.

The second report comes from the nonprofit Center for International Environmental Law. It found that, between January 2019 and June 2025, big banks gave the world’s top 15 petrochemical companies at least $591 billion in loans and underwriting. Some of that benefited integrated oil and gas corporations; the amount CIEL could directly attribute to petrochemical activities was $252 billion. (For context, New Zealand’s GDP is about $279 billion.)

Together, the reports suggest that large financial institutions are enabling a long-term viability strategy for the fossil fuel industry, one in which declining demand for oil and gas in energy systems and transportation is offset by a boom in petrochemicals. Indeed, in recent years oil majors including ExxonMobil, Shell, and Saudi Aramco have invested heavily in that field by, among other things, acquiring majority stakes in plastics and chemical companies and retrofitting oil refineries to accommodate a shift in production.

These investments reflect projections from the International Energy Agency that plastics, agrichemicals, and other petrochemical products will account for more than one-third of the growth in oil demand through 2030, and nearly half of it by 2050—much more than other sectors like aviation and shipping. 

“Petrochemicals are not just a general growth area for fossil fuel companies,” said Ximena Banegas, a plastics campaigner for CIEL and the author of the organization’s report. “They are a deliberate and pivotal strategy to ensure that we continue using fossil fuels.”

“Banks are unfortunately continuing to put profits over responsible societal action.”

Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and the Japanese bank Mizuho Financial were among the top banks increasing financing for fossil fuel expansion last year, RAN’s analysis found. All 65 banks it analyzed boosted funding across the board for new oil and gas exploration, transportation, and refining. But the largest growth by far was for transportation—including new pipelines and capital-intensive LNG export terminals, which can create a decades-long commitment to using methane gas. 

“It’s overall disappointing,” said Allison Fajans-Turner, a senior energy finance campaigner for RAN. “Banks are unfortunately continuing to put profits over responsible societal action.” She noted that fossil fuel financing is becoming more concentrated among a smaller number of large banks, primarily those based in North America and Japan, as several European banks have begun to scale back funding.

RAN’s report didn’t look directly at financing for the production of petrochemicals, but some of its findings indicate growing interest in this portion of the industry. A significant increase in loans and underwriting for coal expansion, for example, is at least partially linked to a recent spike in the number of coal-to-chemical plants planned globally—mostly in China and India. Environmental advocates say these investments risk giving coal “a new lease of life.”

Bank of America, Citigroup, JPMorgan Chase, and Mizuho Financial are also among the top funders of petrochemical activities, according to CIEL’s report. The top 15 recipients of this funding include a mix of oil and gas, agriculture, plastics, and chemical companies, such as ExxonMobil, Syngenta, LyondellBasell, and Dow.

Although CIEL didn’t compare each year between 2019 and 2025, it did notice a significant jump in petrochemical finance in 2024, the last full year examined. As evidence of the industry’s ongoing expansion, Banegas pointed to a recent report estimating that 127 new polyethylene projects will come online between 2025 and 2030. 

CIEL’s report also notes the petrochemical industry’s outsize contribution to toxic chemical pollution and global warming. As of 2020, petrochemicals’ annual greenhouse gas emissions amounted to 1.9 billion metric tons, more than twice that of aviation and shipping.

“If we’re serious about sustainable materials, then we need to put our money where we want to go.”

Fredric Bauer, a senior lecturer at Lund University in Sweden, has conducted similar research on petrochemical financing between 2010 and 2020. He said it’s not surprising to see continued interest in big plastics and chemicals projects, although it is perhaps counterintuitive. Despite warnings from industry analysts that the petrochemical industry is in “structural decline”—as shown by a large number of canceled or delayed projects, downgradings from multiple credit rating agencies, and the recent plastics and agrichemicals price shocks due to the war with Iran—companies keep investing because they often “do not respond to conventional market signals,” he said.

Rather than say, ‘“Oh, there’s oversupply, we should probably not invest in more supply or production capacity right now,’” their priority is “to ensure long-term markets for oil and gas.”

A coalition of advocacy groups including CIEL are calling on big banks to end their support for fossil fuel and petrochemical expansion. They’d like to see policies against financing companies building facilities to produce virgin plastics and fossil fuel-derived fertilizers. They also want banks to require clients to adopt credible transition plans to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees C, which may include targets to reduce plastics use and phase out some pesticides. 

Fajans-Turner said the upward swing in fossil fuel financing reveals the weakness of voluntary sustainability commitments and reinforces the need for regulation. She suggested that, in addition to mandating more robust decarbonization plans from financial institutions, governments should require improved incorporation of climate risks when determining a borrower’s creditworthiness. “That would actually have many downstream consequences about who gets funding and who does not,” she said.

Joel Tickner, a professor of public health at the University of Massachusetts Lowell and founder of an independent research initiative on sustainable chemicals, said it’s important that governments scale back loans and tax incentives supporting the fossil fuel industry, subsidies that amount to more than $1 trillion annually. Some of this money could help finance the development and commercialization of greener chemistry.

Fossil fuel companies “have received decades of subsidies and financial support,” Tickner said. “If we’re serious about sustainable materials, then we need to put our money where we want to go.”

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

Sylvie Andrews and her partner didn’t just lose the new house they’d helped build when the Eaton Fire ripped through Altadena, California, in January 2025. They lost an entire decade’s worth of sacrifices they’d made to put down roots in their hometown, and the community they’d created. “We put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into it,” Andrews said. “That’s what we lost in the fire.”

That fire, along with the Palisades Fire to the west, destroyed over 16,000 structures and killed 31 people. But while Andrews and thousands of Angelinos were racing to evacuate, other people saw a financial opportunity. Using Polymarket, the world’s largest prediction market platform, they made bets on the fires—how they would grow, how long they would last and how much they would destroy.

Prediction markets are essentially gambling websites where people bet on the outcome of events, including elections, sports, the weather and more. Anything is fair game, from oil prices and the spread of infectious diseases to international incidents. Markets usually frame questions in a “yes” or “no” fashion, with the price of a “contract” fluctuating between $0 and $1. A price of 50 cents on a “yes” contract means that the people doing the betting collectively believe the event has a 50 percent chance of happening. Market hosts make money by charging a fee on wagers.

“When you start gambling on somebody’s potential death or harm, you’re really diminishing the value that you’re placing on human life.”

In January 2025, Polymarket listed almost 20 questions, created by the platform’s “markets team,” related to the wildfires burning up Southern California. How many acres will the Palisades Fire burn by Friday, three days after it ignited on a Tuesday? Will the Palisades Fire reach Santa Monica by Sunday? When will the Palisades fire be 50 percent contained? Will the Palisades and Eaton fires be contained before February?

People spent $1.2 million betting on these queries, according to Aeon Magazine. “Wow,” Andrews said repeatedly when she learned the figure. “My first take is that it’s morally reprehensible,” she said. “The fact that someone would feel OK doing that flabbergasts me.”

“The prediction markets are just the wild, wild West,” said Susan Sherman, who grew up in the Pacific Palisades. She lost her childhood home in the Palisades Fire; her late parents had owned it since 1963, and now, it was gone. She sold the empty lot a few months ago. “I look at (betting on the fires) as just being very crass and heartless.”

As prediction markets boom and a new wildfire season begins, fire survivors and ethicists say that the betting encourages and rewards callous thinking—and dangerous behavior, too. 

One major concern stemming from wildfire prediction markets is arson. “That’s what has me nervous,” Sherman said. Theoretically, making a bet could give someone the perverse incentive to start a fire, or help one grow. Unlike other disasters, such as hurricanes, flooding or extreme heat, a fire can be manipulated in minutes by just one person. “Systems that tie financial gain to wildfire outcomes risk encouraging misuse, including arson, and are not compatible with our mission,” a spokesperson for the US Forest Service said.

“Imagine what a bad actor might do,” said Ann Skeet, the senior director of leadership ethics at the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics at Santa Clara University. “A market that might support that kind of activity, I think, is a dangerous market.” Firefighters or land managers with exclusive information about a fire’s behavior or an agency’s firefighting plans could even be tempted to bet on a fire, which would be considered insider trading.

But the biggest dilemma is largely an ethical one. “When you start gambling on somebody’s potential death or harm, you’re really diminishing the value that you’re placing on human life,” Skeet said.

Betting on a wildfire’s outcome isn’t just limited to general prediction market platforms anymore. This year, ahead of what’s likely to be a busy fire season in the West, a new prediction market specifically focused on California fires was launched. Called “Wyldfyre,” it bears the tagline: “You can’t predict wildfire. But you can trade on it.” High Country News was unable to determine the platform’s owner or the owner of its website’s IP address; the website is opaque, with no contact information listed.

Currently, Wyldfyre users can only simulate trading, but according to the site, the ability to bet with real money is “coming soon.” The platform purports to be the first prediction market of its kind, pricing county and city wildfire risk in real time. “California burns. Every year. And it’s getting worse. The question isn’t if— it’s where and when,” the site reads. It includes hotspot data from NASA and National Interagency Fire Center fire perimeters to help gamblers make predictions.

“If someone won money in gambling with our fate, I would hope that they might be ashamed of themselves.”

Proponents of prediction markets say the platforms generate useful information through crowdsourcing. Wyldfyre frames its platform as providing a public good. “Wyldfyre turns collective intelligence into better wildfire forecasting—one trade at a time,” the site reads.

But entities with a real need for wildfire forecasting, including federal and state firefighting agencies, say they aren’t interested in prediction market data. “The Forest Service does not use information from prediction markets for wildfire forecasting, and we do not rely on any system that treats wildfire as an event for speculation,” an agency spokesperson told High Country News. “Our priority is protecting firefighters, communities, and public lands, and our fire analysts use validated science, proven predictive tools, and data from federal partners such as the National Weather Service, NOAA, and the National Interagency Fire Center.”

California’s state firefighting agency has a similar policy. “CAL FIRE does not use prediction‑market-derived data in wildfire forecasting or operational decision‑making, nor are we currently evaluating that type of system,” said Phillip SeLegue, staff chief of CAL FIRE’s intelligence program.

The agency uses a “scientifically based fire-behavior modeling” program to generate a fire-spread prediction when a 911 call for a wildfire is processed, SeLegue said. The automated program uses weather observations, forecast data, fuel and vegetation conditions, topography, location data and information on available resources. “Our modeling is deterministic and physics‑based; it is not informed by markets, wagering systems, crowd predictions, or any other form of prediction‑market mechanism,” SeLegue said.

As prediction-market betting soars in popularity, politicians are beginning to try to rein it in. Representatives from Utah and California introduced federal legislation in March that would prohibit betting “related to terrorism, assassination, war, gaming, or illegal activity,” according to a press release. A California senator introduced companion legislation that would also prohibit contracts about “an individual’s death.”

Meanwhile, Minnesota just became the first state to outlaw hosting or advertising (though not betting on) prediction markets; the federal government promptly sued the state for over-stepping its authority. None of the proposed restrictions at a state or federal level explicitly include wildfire—at least not yet.

While state and federal governments struggle to control prediction market betting, Andrews has an idea. “If someone won money in gambling with our fate, I would hope that they might be ashamed of themselves,” she said, “and take that money and donate it directly to fire survivors.”

In the leadup to the semiquincentennial, President Donald Trump has waged a war on topics he deems “divisive,” from DEI to critical race theory. As a reporter and fact-checker, I’ve examined this attack on our history closely. I’ve interviewed historians about how our past shapes our current moment, observed the spectacles put on by administration, and chronicled an organization’s fight to preserve local historic memorials. 

Through this work I’ve realized how much my own personal relationship to patriotism and history has evolved. As a kid in school, learning about the disproportionate amount of violence marginalized people faced throughout history made me pessimistic about the future. It was bizarre to read textbooks that minimized and dehumanized those moments of oppression along with the moments of achievement by anyone who wasn’t a white man. In American history marginalized people’s stories are often asides or relegated to stereotypes— if mentioned at all. Over time I became almost desensitized by the erasure as a way to focus on the ever-changing present moment.

In September, I spoke to former Alabama poet laureate Ashley M. Jones about her book, Lullaby for the Grieving, where she described “political grief”—the feeling of “being in a place which never wanted you to be human and reminds you every day that it still doesn’t consider you a human.” I realized that my political grief created a skepticism about how American history is told and those who chose to celebrate it at all.

Though I was skeptical, speaking with historians, nonprofit organizers, and protestors about America’s 250th birthday has made it clear to me that “celebrating” American history doesn’t have to mean ignoring historical moments that the Trump administration says “undermine the remarkable achievements of the United States by casting its founding principles and historical milestones in a negative light.” Telling an honest and complete history that actually acknowledges the harm marginalized people endured in this country helps us reckon with what we’ve been through in the nation, and what we’d like to see in the next 250 years. 

Culling American history also just leaves gaping holes in the American story that make it unintelligible. I keep returning to one of the administration’s most literal displays of this erasure: an animated show projected onto the Washington Monument itself which tells the American story from the Declaration of Independence to space exploration, while blatantly omitting historic systemic oppression like the expulsion of Native Americans or marginalized people’s contributions to the nation, like the three Black women who were essential to the space race.

The alternative to these revisionist displays is to accept that history is more complex and ambiguous than we often like to see it. As historian and American Association for State and Local History senior staff member John Garrison Marks noted during our conversation in April, when we use American history as a tool to win political and cultural fights, that argument over the past prevents us from seeing the future. Marks hoped that this anniversary would be an opportunity to bring people together and have complex conversations, an idea I heard echoed by many others.

Kitcki Carroll, the United South and Eastern Tribes executive director and I connected in April to talk about how to honor Native American perspectives during this anniversary, and he told me that for many Indigenous people, the semiquincentennial and events surrounding it are an opportunity to “course correct and make sure that for the next 250 years we’re not dealing with the same shortcoming and failures.” 

While historians and community leaders have reminded me of the importance of keeping our eyes on the past for our future, I’ve been inspired by those who continue to fight for preservation as a link between the two. In response to Trump’s 2025 executive order to get rid of materials that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living,” a group of librarians, public historians, and data experts created Save Our Signs. Through this online archive, people take pictures of National Park signage and inform others of ones that have been removed. There’s also a map that highlights materials that were flagged for removal from leaked NPS Data. This effort has created a database of over 15,000 photos from 422 sites, an archive of material that is otherwise at risk of disappearing. 

I got to see resistance to the administration’s erasure in person, too, when the Philadelphia organization, Avenging the Ancestors Coalition fought for the reinstallation of the President’s House slavery exhibit they helped get installed 15 years ago. During one of the rallies, Hannah Gann, a high school African American history teacher, said when her students heard the memorial was torn down, they were “upset that their real history was being erased and a huge part of our city’s history was being taken away and covered up.”

Though we often picture history as a stagnant thing that can be engraved on plaques, behind plexiglass in museums, or written in textbooks, really our story belongs to all of us, and there are numerous ways to preserve it. In art and literature, I’ve talked to creatives and academics like Jones, Carmen Emmi, Victoria Chang, Isaac Butler, and Kimberlé Crenshaw who’ve emphasized the importance of personal histories to the larger historical canon. Their art highlights lesser known events, like the 1885 expulsion of Chinese Americans from Eureka, California or overpolicing and history of entrapment of queer people. These artists’ perspective on the American story also adds personal weight to the historical moments the public is already familiar with, like censorship during the AIDS crisis or the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. 

These sorts of personal stories are a reminder of the inherent humanity in history that sometimes gets lost in the big picture of it, and show how honoring a diversity of perspectives helps connect us back to it. Diversity isn’t just about race or ethnicity, for many it’s about where they’re from. As a former resident of Alabama, when I first learned about the 250th I thought I’d be more of a spectator to the celebration happening in DC. Yet, I realized the semiquincentennial isn’t just about the founding, and although Alabama has its share of shortcomings, it has a complex culture and history, from its pivotal role in the Civil Rights movement to being home to the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio where legends like Aretha Franklin and the Rolling Stones recorded hit songs. 

It’s cliche to say that “those who don’t remember history are doomed to repeat it,” but the more reporting I’ve done, the more I’ve found it to be true. San Francisco State University history professor Marc Robert Stein told me that history isn’t cyclical—it has patterns. Often, in interviews with historians, I ask them where they think our society stands and where they think we’re headed, and usually they start by pointing out the patterns they’ve seen over time, highlighting how the past can’t be removed from our present or future. 

Despite what’s happening on the National Mall, in many ways, the necessary conversations about how we mend our relationship with history and move forward are happening. To me, the hope of this semiquincentennial is that more people are listening. 

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

As New York City braces for an extreme heat wave amid the July 4th weekend and World Cup festivities, government officials and local hospitals are ramping up efforts to prevent heat-related illness.

Temperatures were expected to reach 100 degrees F on Thursday, with a heat index between 105 and 110 degrees—unusually hot for New York. Friday was expected to be just as sweltering. “These are extremely dangerous conditions, and they will affect every part of our city,” New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani said in a press conference on Tuesday.

Many major cities have heat emergency plans that involve setting up cooling centers, conducting outreach to vulnerable populations, and sending out emergency alerts. With heat waves becoming more intense and common as the planet warms, more cities are writing and implementing these types of plans to keep residents safe.

The risk of heat-related death and illness is expected to grow as extreme heat events become more frequent and intense.

This year, New York City first activated its heat emergency plan on May 19—the earliest it’s ever done so—due to a severe spring heat wave that pushed temperatures past the 90-degree mark across the Northeast. It activated that plan again in preparation for this latest heat wave.

As part of that emergency plan, the city will have more than 650 cooling stations up and running, including at libraries, recreation centers, and Petco stores, as well as some extra “nontraditional” cooling stations, which include government buildings, says Christinia Farrell, commissioner of the New York City Emergency Management Department. She says excessive heat warnings are becoming more common in New York.

The Mamdani administration is deploying cooling vans across the city to provide wellness checks, medical care, water, electrolytes, sunscreen, as well as transportation to cooling centers or health care facilities. LinkNYC kiosks, which have replaced old pay phones throughout the city, will also be programmed to display walking directions to the nearest cooling center, another new initiative under Mamdani.

To help the grid cope with more residential cooling demand, business owners are being asked to set their thermostats to 78 degrees, which the Department of Energy recommends during peak summer months.

Workers with the city’s Department of Social Services will be conducting in-person outreach to unhoused people. Individuals who need short-term housing will not be required to go through the typical intake procedure at shelters under the heat plan.

Philadelphia is also bracing for high heat. The city—which is hosting a World Cup match on July 4—has activated its heat emergency plan and has moved the hours for its FIFA Fan Festival to the evening. The city will have cooling and tents, free water refill stations, shaded areas, and multiple medical stations for fans. Still, the match between Paraguay and France will kick off at 5 pm ET, when it’s forecast to still feel well above 100 degrees with the heat and humidity.

The risk of heat-related death and illness is expected to grow as extreme heat events become more frequent and intense. A recent study from Yale University found that deaths associated with high temperatures nearly doubled in the US over the past two decades, from an annual average of 2,670 between 2000 and 2009, to more than 4,000 between 2010 and 2020. Most heat-related deaths occur indoors after prolonged exposure to heat without air-conditioning.

“Anybody who has an altered mental status who is hot, that is an indicator that they may be critically ill.”

New York emergency departments say they’re preparing to handle an increase in patients with acute heat illnesses in the coming days.

Erik Blutinger, an emergency medicine physician at Mount Sinai Queens, says the hospital is stocking up on towels, fans, and other supplies to make sure patients with heat sickness can be adequately treated. He says it’s important for people to be able to recognize the symptoms of heat-related illness so they can seek treatment as soon as possible.

Heat exhaustion can cause excessive sweating, nausea and vomiting, muscle cramps, and weakness. While it can often be managed outside the hospital with hydration and cooling down the body, heat exhaustion sometimes turns into heat stroke, which is more severe and can be life-threatening. People with heat stroke have dry, hot skin and a rapid pulse. They may feel confused, have slurred speech, or become unconscious.

“Anybody who has an altered mental status who is hot, that is an indicator that they may be critically ill,” says Reed Caldwell, chief of service at Tisch Hospital’s emergency department, part of NYU Langone Health.

When a person’s body temperature gets dangerously high, clinicians mimic sweating using a technique called evaporative cooling that involves stripping away clothing, misting the patient’s skin with water, and fanning them continuously. Cold water immersion and even ice-filled body bags can be used for the same purpose.

Excessive heat also worsens heart conditions, lung disease, and kidney problems, and people with chronic diseases are more vulnerable to severe heat sickness. Babies and older adults are also at higher risk because their bodies are less efficient at regulating temperature.

Prevention is key. “It’s important that we all drink water before we are thirsty,” Caldwell says. Sunscreen is also important, he says, since sunburns make the skin feel hotter and pulls fluid from other areas of the body, which can lead to dehydration. Limiting alcohol before going out in the heat is also a good idea, since alcohol causes dehydration—advice that’s particularly salient on a holiday and during World Cup matches, both of which feature plenty of day drinking. “There’s great value in pre-hydration and even greater value in not being dehydrated before you go somewhere.”

Back in March, I wrote about the late Sarah Keys Evans, a Black veteran who played a key role in desegregating interstate travel. Before the summer of 1952, the 23-year-old private first class had never even taken part in a civil rights protest—but after she was arrested and jailed overnight in her Women’s Army Corps uniform for refusing to give up her bus seat to a white Marine, Keys Evans spent years fighting for justice through the courts, paving the way for Rosa Parks and the Freedom Riders.

I discussed Keys Evans’ underappreciated but important case with the author Amy Nathan, whose latest book, Riding Into History, tells her story. Her profile had risen in recent years, as I wrote at the time:

In 2020, nearly 70 years after Evans’ arrest, Roanoke Rapids installed a series of murals about the veteran’s fight for justice, which Evans told a Time reporter she saw as a tribute to all the overlooked women who “kept the spark going” during the Civil Rights Movement.

But weeks after that first piece ran, I received a tip that the Army had removed an article about Keys Evans from its official website. Based on screenshots captured by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the article by T. Anthony Bell, first published in February 2014, was taken down last July, at the height of the second Trump administration’s campaign to scrub Black history from public monuments, institutions, and records. It remains unavailable.

Keys Evans’ story is one of thousands about women and people of color to be removed since Trump’s return to office.

That effort has hit military history particularly hard. Keys Evans’ story is just one of thousands about women and people of color in the armed services to be removed since Trump returned to office in January 2025. That February, at the behest of the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs issued a memorandum ordering senior Pentagon leadership to wipe military websites of any content promoting “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” 

“In accordance with recent policy changes and renewed digital content guidance, the Army temporarily unpublished content featured on cultural observance months webpages,” Christopher Surridge, an Army spokesperson, told Mother Jones in an emailed statement.

“We are tirelessly working through content featured on these webpages, and historical articles will soon be republished to better align with current guidance,” Surridge added. “As this is an ongoing process requiring a manual content review, article restoration might take some time.”

Following public outcry, some webpages were quickly restored, like an article about baseball player Jackie Robinson’s service in World War II and another about the highly decorated 442nd Regimental Combat Team, composed mostly of Japanese Americans. But many more articles about the contributions of marginalized communities to US military achievements are still hidden. 

Hegseth’s attacks on DEI go beyond censoring history. In the past year and half, the defense secretary has ordered the military to end its observance of heritage months, proposed strict grooming standards that would disproportionately impact Black and brown soldiers, and personally blocked women and Black service members from promotions.

On the eve of the nation’s 250th anniversary, which the administration has commemorated through sanitized displays seemingly designed to paper over the country’s complex past, the lessons of Keys Evans’ fight for justice and equality feel especially pertinent. Her story serves as a reminder that, in the words of T. Anthony Bell, the author of the Army’s now-spiked article:

The modern civil rights movement was much broader than the contributions made by the likes of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the NAACP or Rosa Parks in changing America’s unjust racial climate.

It was more about the thousands of unheralded, everyday citizens whose brave actions and collective voices blended together to create rumbles that shook the country’s consciousness, giving rise to individuals and organizations that would lead the struggle.

Pfc. Sarah Louise Keys was one such citizen.

When Bryan Stevenson moved to Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1980s, the city—one of America’s most prominent slave trading spaces before the Civil War—had dozens of Confederate monuments and memorials, but nothing commemorating slavery. 

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Today, thanks to Stevenson’s efforts, the city looks much different. Over the last decade, the executive director of the nonprofit Equal Justice Initiative has transformed parts of Montgomery through markers acknowledging the legacy of slavery while building the Legacy Sites, a museum and memorials that commemorate the nation’s history of lynching, enslavement, and racial terror across the South. 

“We have to now fight to correct the historic record, to have an honest accounting of what happened to our parents and grandparents and their parents,” Stevenson says. “Because without an honest accounting, we will not make it to the next step.”

This week on Reveal, host Al Letson travels to Montgomery to interview Stevenson as America marks its 250th anniversary. He talks about the importance of memorializing the nation’s darkest chapters as the Trump administration attempts to erase slavery from America’s museums and explains why he sees today’s narrative struggle for racial justice as a generational battle.

On New Year’s Eve, fireworks bloomed behind the Washington Monument. Along the side of the 550-foot structure, a birthday candle was projected, flickering as “The Star-Spangled Banner” played. This spectacle kicked off Freedom 250’s countdown to the semiquincentennial and was followed by animated neoclassic-style graphics overlaid with audio narrating the nation’s “discovery, expansion, independence, and future.” As the narrative unraveled and onlookers watched Christopher Columbus sail across the sea and settlers in wagons push westward, there was no mention of women or people of color.

This display, along with the announcement of a UFC fight on the White House lawn, an IndyCar grand prix near the National Mall, and the Great American State Fair, made it clear that this year’s semiquincentennial is more about creating spectacle in service of President Donald Trump’s idea of America than it is about honoring American history. With each event, the complexities that have brought America to where it is today are erased or sidelined in favor of blind patriotism—a celebration of an uncritical American story centering predominantly white men. 

The Freedom 250–backed Great American State Fair on the National Mall runs through July 10. Al Drago/Getty An equestrian performs during a rodeo on the first day of the Great American State Fair. Anna Moneymaker/Getty

But state commissions are also celebrating the anniversary. And some of them are doing a far better job honoring the country’s complexity. These groups, formed by state governor appointments, legislation, and executive orders, are also political and flawed. But they are focusing on their communities, choosing to use the semiquincentennial as a moment to embrace diversity and make history more accessible. This anniversary is more than a celebration; it’s a chance to reexamine America’s story and take stock of those the federal government would rather censor from the larger narrative. 

As these separate state commissions facilitated conversations with local communities, they found that more than any spectacle, people wanted to see themselves and their ancestors in the celebrations of 250 years of the United States. 

In Rhode Island, one of the original 13 colonies, locals know their history and take pride in it. Lauren Fogarty, the commission’s program coordinator, said there’s been an opportunity to hear from more families about their personal connections to the Revolution, including from descendants of the 1st Rhode Island Regiment, the first Black battalion in US military history. Although the history of the regiment has often been overshadowed, the anniversary and one of the commission’s grant recipients, the Rhode Island Historical Society, provided an opportunity for author John Rees to discuss the experiences of those soldiers during and after the war at an April event at the John Brown House Museum.

North Carolina’s commission has drawn attention to the Edenton Tea Party, where a group of 51 women gathered to pledge that they wouldn’t buy British goods, one of the earliest instances of women’s political activism. This history is presented in one of the children’s books the commission created in celebration of the semiquincentennial. The commission has sold roughly 3,700 of the three children’s books. It recently secured funding for another children’s book, this one focused on Martin Black, one of the 14 Harlowe Patriots, a group of free Black men who fought in the Revolution.

In Illinois, the state commission created a free passport, similar to the National Parks Passport, that includes nearly 60 sites across the state, illuminating how “people in Illinois have made good on the ideals of the Declaration of Independence,” said Gabrielle Lyon, the Illinois commission chair. “The idea is to connect things that have happened locally here to the formation of our national story.” They’ve distributed 100,000 of them as of June. The passport includes the Elijah P. Lovejoy memorial for the journalist and abolitionist, who was killed by a mob for wanting a free press. It also includes Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site, the remnants of the largest pre-Columbian Native American civilization north of Mexico. 

State commissions have also bolstered the work of the expert agencies and organizations that already had programming planned around the semiquincentennial. “No one really needed a commission to say, ‘Hey, here’s what you do and how you do it,’” said Cameron Bean, Georgia’s commission chair. He said people, organizations, and nonprofits needed to “have a commission that said, ‘Hey, how can we serve you?’”

So rather than investing a large portion of its funds into hiring staff or a planning committee, Bean said the Georgia commission decided to focus on giving out grants, helping raise sponsorship money, and promoting events like the African Film Festival Atlanta, the African American Heritage Symposium, and a musical about pioneer women that uses traditional quilt patterns as a storytelling tool. Jason Mancini, vice chair of the Connecticut commission, said over the last three years, his commission has been able to award over $800,000 to over 80 organizations in the state.  

“We didn’t want to make this about drums and guns. This has to be something more, so that people see their children and grandchildren as part of this story.”

Locals have responded positively to this grassroots approach. It doesn’t pull people out of their counties or municipalities to celebrate somewhere else; it allows them to celebrate where they are. As Ansley Herring Wegner, director of North Carolina’s state commission, put it, locals might “see the Washington Monument lit up like a birthday candle on their TV, but we’re going to be at their events. We’re at their parades. We’re at their soccer tournaments.” These grants can also help revitalize third spaces, bring new audiences to organizations that have been working in the state for years, and reinforce the idea that every place has played a part in this country’s history.

Lyon, the Illinois chair, remarked that this year’s celebration has taken a more inclusive approach, setting it apart from previous milestone anniversaries. She said that in 1776 and 1976, festivities left out many Americans, but in 2026, Illinois was committed to inviting as many voices as possible into the commemoration. 

In Rhode Island, Fogarty said she spoke to all 39 municipalities to tell them about the semiquincentennial. The Utah state commission held monthly meetings at which community members could share national and local updates, giving them a chance to amplify each other’s work, draw inspiration from one another, and collaborate with groups they hadn’t worked with before. 

These conversations resulted in events and programming across the states that spoke directly to local history and culture. In Connecticut, an exhibit of different artists’ depictions of the American flag opened at the Fairfield University Art Museum. Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution loaned the Continental Army’s North Carolina brigade sketch to the state. In Boulder, Utah, a local artist spent 250 hours carving handprints into a boulder to commemorate a yearlong commitment to volunteering.

Bean, of Georgia, noted that this variety in programming is a good way to meet people where they are. The hope is that there is something in which everyone can find value and enjoyment.

Some programming also resulted from more complex conversations with communities about reckoning with American history. Mancini has had a long history of working with tribal communities and communities of color, both in Connecticut and outside the state. So when it came time to plan as a commission, he said the group had some hard conversations with Black and Native community members who expressed that they didn’t feel they had been seen as a part of America’s story thus far. 

He recalled one commissioner who represented a Black community organization that had been vocal about the hundreds of Black men who served in the Colonial militia but hadn’t been recognized. “We want to tell those stories,” Mancini said. “We didn’t want to make this about drums and guns. This has to be something more, so that people see themselves today and they can see themselves tomorrow, and they can see their children and grandchildren as part of this story.” 

Cyndi Tolosa, the Connecticut commission’s project manager, listed other initiatives members had hoped to do to make things more inclusive, such as translating more materials into Spanish and doing more outreach in Spanish-speaking communities. She also noted organizations like Integrated Refugee & Immigrant Services, which was working to create dialogue about immigrants’ and refugees’ contributions to Connecticut and the US.

Although there have been positive responses to this approach, some, like tribal communities in Connecticut, still express apprehension. The founding documents the semiquincentennial celebrates refer to “merciless Indian savages,” and the political and legal framings for much of America’s history have leaned on erasure and extermination. Mancini noted that while some tribes wanted to be vocal, others wanted to keep the commission at arm’s length, a sentiment he understood. Lyon dealt with similar conversations in Illinois with many marginalized communities.

“I think complexity is where we need to be and get comfortable,” Lyon said. “And that’s what’s most interesting and important about this moment. So some people want to be involved, some people choose not to. The commission’s approach has tried to be inclusive and specific and historically accurate to the best of our ability, but also to connect what’s happening now.” 

A year ago, after participating in a panel about Indigenous perspectives on the 250th for a Virginia state commission event, Kitcki Carroll, executive director of United South and Eastern Tribes, met Virginia’s honorary chair, Carly Fiorina. As the event wrapped up, the two continued a conversation about Indigenous perspectives and the anniversary that would later evolve into an event in April that will be released as a documentary this week.

It included a panel surrounding tribal nations’ inherent sovereignty and the United States’ treaty obligations to them, a conversation about creating greater visibility for Native Americans, and a fireside chat with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Carroll noted that the day was meant to be an opportunity to pause and understand the costs associated with the establishment of this nation.

Having more discussions about the ugly side of America’s history serves to “make sure that for the next 250 years that we are not dealing with the same shortcomings and failures that we dealt with during the first 250 years,” Carroll said.

Despite all the work state commissions are doing, it hasn’t been a seamless process. Some commissions have had to navigate funding shortfalls. DOGE cut the funding of the humanities organization unofficially coordinating the celebration in Illinois. Since North Carolina hadn’t passed a budget since 2023, when it ran out after two years, its state commission had a “base budget” of $0. Both commissions have been fundraising and using their own funds and networks of resources to move forward with events.

“From my view, the opportunity is not just about celebrating the 250; to me, the drive, what keeps me going, what I’m inspired by is the idea that the legacy of this moment is the strengthened cultural infrastructure that is at the heart of the American experiment,” Illinois’ Lyon said.   

Many of the state commissions see this commemoration as a moment to honor the value of community. It’s a reminder of all this country has been through, a time to celebrate our differences, and an opportunity to rely on one another. North Carolina’s Wegner said that as a public historian, the semiquincentennial is about giving history to the public in ways they can understand. This happens through the networks they’ve created, the evergreen educational resources that people can reference, and the highlighting of libraries, museums, and nonprofits whose work doesn’t stop after the semiquincentennial. 

As the Fourth of July fast approaches, the state commissions’ efforts to give texture and complexity to American history are a reminder that America’s story belongs to all of us and doesn’t start or end with the founding—or a fireworks show. While thinking about our history, we can consider what, and maybe who, we hope will be displayed on the Washington Monument in the next 250 years. 

On a glorious morning walk about a week before America’s 250th birthday, I was listening to Jon Stewart’s podcast on that theme. I recommend it. One of the things he discusses with his historian guests, Yale’s David Blight and Harvard’s Annette Gordon-Reed, is the Declaration of Independence, which both historians called a “dangerous document” in terms of its focus on the right of the people to overthrow an unjust ruler.

Indeed, as my colleagues David Corn and Tim Murphy pointed out exactly one year ago, certain of the tyrannical acts my co-author, Thomas Jefferson, cited as grievances in that founding document are uncannily evocative of the usurpations of our current presidential administration.

You can agree with that or not. But whether you are MAGA or a democratic socialist, it’s worth reading our founding document in full. It’s not too terribly long, and—problematic language notwithstanding—it offers some perspective as to the frustrations of the men, flawed as they may have been, who laid down a case for independence and a foundation for the American experiment.

Ben Franklin famously responded, in 1787, to the question of whether we had a republic or a monarchy: “A republic, if you can keep it.” And with that, I turn over this post to Mr. Jefferson and his peers.

In Congress, July 4, 1776 — The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

John Hancock [et al]

Happy Birthday, America!