Is The Block leaving Pike & Rose? It certainly looks that way. The festively decorated food hall, which opened in 2019, includes a large bar and a rotating roster of mostly Asian vendors. While The Block is currently open and still listed as a tenant on the Pike & Rose website, its name has been removed from the property’s leasing brochure and its 8,500-square-foot space is now marked “TBD.” In the world of commercial real estate, “TBD” usually means a new tenant is on the way. Neither The Block’s owners nor Federal Realty could be reached for comment at press time. If we hear back, this article will be updated.
If you don’t know where to go when you need to go, some relief is on the way: High-tech toilet startup Throne Labs is bringing up to ten new public restrooms to DC this spring. The freestanding and free-to-use bathrooms will be in operation until the end of September (with the possibility of an extension) […]
This man is no longer one of the most powerful policymaking officials in the United States. | Courtesy of the Senate Judiciary Committee
The federal judiciary’s new rules target “judge shopping.” That’s terrible news for Matthew Kacsmaryk and other partisan judges.
Plaintiffs hoping to reshape federal or state policies will no longer be allowed to choose which judge will hear their case, at least in federal court. A new policy announced Tuesday bythe Judicial Conference of the United States, a government body that sets policy for federal courts, targets rules in some federal courts that the conference said “risked creating an appearance of ‘judge shopping.’”
At least in the short term, this policy is a massive victory for the Biden administration — and, indeed, for anyone who believes that federal and state policies should not rise and fall based on one outlier judge’s partisan views.
Texas’s Republican Attorney General Ken Paxton, for example, has been very aggressive in bringing lawsuits that challenge Biden administration policies before right-wing judges who have then issued sweeping, nationwide orders blocking those policies — sometimes on highly dubious grounds that are reversed, months later, by the Supreme Court.
Among other things, this practice turned Matthew Kacsmaryk, an obscure advocate on the Christian right appointed by former President Donald Trump to the Northern District of Texas, into one of the most powerful government officials in the entire country. Because Kacsmaryk is the only federal trial judge in Amarillo, Texas, any case filed in Amarillo was automatically assigned to him.
The Judicial Conference’s new policy is unlikely to strip Kacsmaryk, or any other judge, of jurisdiction over any case currently on his docket. But it does place significant new limits on litigants’ power to choose which judge will hear any new case that they file in the future.
How cases are assigned to judges in federal courts
The federal judiciary is divided into 94 different geographic districts, which normally encompass either all or part of a state. In many districts, newly filed cases are assigned randomly. So, for example, if a plaintiff files a lawsuit in a district with three Democratic appointees and three Republican appointees, they would have an equal chance of drawing a judge from either party (although some judges are partially retired and have a lighter caseload).
Some districts, however, have used different rules to assign cases — and one very notable example is the United States District Court of the Northern District of Texas. That district, like some others, is subdivided into multiple “divisions,” some of which only have one sitting judge. Any civil case filed in one of these Northern District of Texas divisions was automatically assigned to one judge: Kacsmaryk.
It didn’t take long for lawyers representing Republican causes generally, and the religious right in particular, to figure this out. Kacsmaryk’s courtroom became a magnet for lawsuits attacking federal policies, and he proved to be a rubber stamp for nearly any court order that a conservative litigant asked him to issue.
According to the Judicial Conference, the new policy concerns “all civil actions that seek to bar or mandate state or federal actions.” It does not apply to all lawsuits, but it does apply to any in which the plaintiff seeks either a “declaratory judgment” saying that a federal or state policy is invalid or “any form of injunctive relief” changing such a policy.
In these cases, “judges would be assigned through a district-wide random selection process.” So, a case seeking to block a federal policy that is filed in Amarillo would be randomly assigned to one of the 11 active judges or one of the six senior judges who sit in that district. It would not be automatically assigned to Kacsmaryk.
A spokesperson for the Judicial Conference of the United States confirmed via email that this new policy applies “to all 94 US district courts.”
The Judicial Conference did not explain why it decided to hand down this new policy now, but members of both parties have long complained about judge shopping — a problem that also arises in apolitical cases.
The press release announcing the new policy, for example, points to a November 2021 letter from Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) and then-Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) that “raised concerns about a concentration of patent cases filed in single-judge divisions.” It also notes that Chief Justice John Roberts expressed concerns about judge shopping in patent cases in his 2021 Year-End Report on the Federal Judiciary.
Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-HI) has also introduced legislation seeking to curb judge-shopping.
Over the long term, the Judicial Conference’s new policy is likely to benefit both Democrats and Republicans. So long as the Supreme Court is controlled by Republican appointees, however, it is likely to be more of a boon for Democrats: The Court’s GOP-appointed majority normally moved very swiftly to block lower court decisions that targeted Trump administration initiatives, while it has often left decisions blocking Biden administration policies in place for months.
The policy will prevent litigants challenging federal and state policies of all kinds from handpicking judges that they know will rule in their favor, but it will not be a panacea against all litigants shopping around for favorable judges. There will still be districts where the judges were appointed mostly by Democrats or mostly by Republicans — the Northern District of Texas is still overwhelmingly Republican, for example — and litigants will no doubt continue to choose districts based on where they think they will receive a favorable hearing.
Federal appeals courts (and the Supreme Court) are ordinarily supposed to defer to the factual findings reached by trial judges. So a litigant who can choose their trial judge gains a lasting advantage even if the case is appealed.
The policy also does nothing to protect against litigants who choose where to file a case based on which appeals court will eventually hear it. The United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, which hears federal cases arising out of Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi, is dominated by Republican appointees closely aligned with the MAGA movement. So Republicans like Paxton can still benefit from this right-wing court, even if they can no longer ensure that all of their trials will be heard by judges like Kacsmaryk.
Still, this is a significant policy change — one that will quell at least some concerns that federal litigation is a rigged game.
GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic turn down the dial on our loudest desires — seemingly for more than just food.
Marco Leyton, PhD, assures me the cocaine he purchased was legal. Plus, it wasn’t for him. Definitely not. It was for recreational cocaine users who had answered Leyton’s ad in a local newspaper to do drugs and collect 500 Canadian dollars — for science.
Leyton had jumped through many hoops to get to this point — getting an okay from the Canadian equivalent of the FDA, exempting him from criminal prosecution, and clearing his own university’s ethics approval. “I wasn’t asking people to bring in their own cocaine,” Leyton, an addiction neurobiologist at McGill University in Canada, tells me. Now that could be unethical.
It was all in pursuit of one of the deepest questions that haunts us as individuals: “Why do we really care about some things and not too much about others?” as Leyton says.
Really: Why do we want what we want?
With the drugs in hand, Leyton ran a small study for some insight. It involved just eight participants, but it’s noteworthy because it’s a relatively rare human experiment in a field that more commonly tests rodents (which have found similar results as the human studies).
Plus, it’s just wild. I have never read these words in an academic journal before: Participants “were presented with cocaine paraphernalia consisting of a mirror, a razor, a straw, and a bag with 3.0 mg/kg of cocaine hydrochloride.”
The study took place over four days. And while the cocaine is the eyebrow-raising component of the study, a special protein shake was the actual key.
On any given day, half the participants were randomly assigned to ingest a shake that was missing a key ingredient called phenylalanine, an important amino acid that helps your bodymanufacture the neurotransmitter dopamine. That’s the chemical released when your brain is expecting, or sometimes demanding, a reward, like a sweet treat or, well, cocaine.
So, if you’re like these study participants, and had been fasting before this experiment, and then only given a food source without phenylalanine, your body chemistry would subtly change. Leyton thought the participants who consumed this weird breakfast would have less dopamine available in their brains.
After their shake, the participants were then invited to do blow. Or, as the study plainly states, the participants “used the razor to divide the powder into three equal lines.”
Too many people have been put in an unfair battle against their wants. They’ve been told to somehow exert willpower over a system they have little conscious awareness of and control over.
They snorted it.
But remarkably, on the phenylalanine-free shake days, Leyton says “they decreased their craving for cocaine.” They said they were less interested in taking it.
But it was more than that: The special shake “decreased the ability of the cocaine itself to produce more desire for the drug,” he says.
And strangely, “it had no effect on the drug-induced euphoria,” Leyton says. In other words, they still liked cocaine. They just didn’t want it as much.
While talking to Leyton about his cocaine study, I wondered: Why isn’t the phenylalanine-free shake The Answer to addiction, to overeating, to similar problems of compulsive consumption?
Well, for one, because it’s impractical. Phenylalanine is in just about all protein food sources. So unless someone wants to solely eat speciality lab-generated shakes their whole lives, that’s not going to work.
But also because Leyton would expect it to decrease the motivation to do anything. “So now the whole world becomes kind of blah,” Leyton says. And what fun is that?
The reason why this cocaine study is so interesting is because it reveals where and how desire hides in the brain.
And desire is important. It’s a fulcrum on which our well-being balances.
Desire — for food, companionship, fun, sex, whatever — can bring excitement, joy, and even purpose to life. It’s the Good Stuff! But too much craving is the seed of addiction, of unhealthy eating habits, of the shameful feeling of being torn between what’s good for us and what we crave.
We cannot live without wants, yet we cannot be overcome with them.
The solution that has eluded researchers for a long while is a trick to help people reset the balance. A trick that turns down the dial of desire enough to be effective, but not too much, preserving our motivation to find joy in the world. And one that could work for a wide array of issues, including substance use disorders and overeating.
Scientists are starting to see the potential for GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic to pull off this trick.
You may be more familiar with some of their brand names, such as Ozempic, Wegovy, or Mounjaro. Or their generic names: semaglutide and tirzepatide. This class of drugs was first approved for use in diabetes, then for weight loss, and it is growing in popularity. In the last three months of 2022, clinicians wrote more than 9 million prescriptions for these drugs in the US, according to the health care market research firm Trilliant.
The drugs have made headlines for their use among the glitterati, and have been provoking important conversations about how society views and treats people with higher weights.
But they are also part of an emerging story that’s potentially much bigger: There are faint, early glimmers that they could be used for drug addiction, too.
We don’t fully understand how these drugs work. But they seem to be tapping deep into the brain’s wanting system and shining a light on a silent aspect of what it means to be human: What we want, and why we want it, is often not in our conscious control.
What is want?
After talking to several researchers for this story, I realized the English word “want” is imprecise to describe the psychological phenomenon Leyton has been describing.
“It’s not your desire for world peace,” says Kent Berridge, a neuroscientist at the University of Michigan. “It’s not my desire to exercise or lose weight.” Those are “real desires,” he assures. But they are not behind the sort of behavior that is facilitated by the dopamine system in the brain. “They don’t give you that kind of urge.”
Imagine this scenario. You’re at a house party, sitting on a sofa. In front of you is a bowl of peanuts. Humble, roasted, salted peanuts. Not a super exciting snack. And you’re not that hungry. But in a moment of fidgetiness, you take a peanut. A few moments pass. You take another. And then another. Do you even like peanuts? You know more food — tastier food — is coming when dinner is served. You don’t really want to eat these, but now, half the peanut bowl is gone. Still, there’s something inside you — wordless, noiseless, unceasing — compelling you to reach for more.
That’s want.
It’s a manifestation of our mesolimbic system, the reward pathway in the brain that’s facilitated by dopamine. It’s a system that’s trained, over time, to influence our decisions. It’s the system that compels you toward the peanut and also toward other things, like scrolling through endless TikToks or Instagram reels.
Leyton’s cocaine experiment highlights another key, unintuitive, way to define wanting — by showing that wanting is not the same as liking.
You might find this idea confusing. Scientists were once confused by it, too. “When I started in the field decades ago, we thought they were basically the same two words for the same psychological process,” Berridge says.
It made sense to conflate the two. In daily life liking and wanting ”go together really well,” Berridge says. We want things because we like the way they taste or how they make us feel.
It just seems so obvious that liking and wanting should go together. So it’s interesting to see the studies in which they can, indeed, be pulled apart. First, there were animal studies. Starting in the late 1980s, Berridge and colleagues surgically or chemically diminished lab rats’ ability to produce dopamine.
Without dopamine, “those rats won’t eat voluntarily, they won’t drink voluntarily, they won’t pursue any reward voluntarily,” Berridge says. “And it was thought that they had lost all pleasure.” But, studies concluded, they apparently did not.
There’s convincing evidence that this split between liking and wanting happens in humans, too. That’s what Leyton’s cocaine study demonstrates — the liking of cocaine and the wanting of cocaine can be disentangled.
Leyton has repeated the dopamine-reducing experiment with other drugs, “with alcohol, tobacco,” he says. When he puts people in a low dopamine state, they don’t just say they crave their drugs less, but they’re less willing to work on a tedious computer task to obtain them.
He’s even done a version of this study with money. “It’s not a drug,” he says, “it’s not even delicious!” But when Leyton put them into a low dopamine state, participants “were less willing to sustain the effort to obtain $5 bills.”
And in all these experiments with the dopamine-reducing protein shake, the same pattern emerged. “The motivation to seek out a reward was diminished, even though the pleasure was the same,” Leyton says. “The alcohol still tastes delicious,” he says. The cigarettes are “enjoyable as usual.” Extra money in your pocket is still great.
Another key thing about the wanting system — and arguably, its most frustrating aspect — is that it often exists beyond our conscious awareness.
“Many people would argue that we have very little [conscious] access to our motivational processes,” Leyton says. (Though he didn’t formally measure it in his studies, Leyton says his participants have a hard time guessing if they received the dopamine-reducing shake or a placebo shake. The low-dopamine days don’t seem all that abnormal. On the low dopamine days, it’s as though the participants just say “I’m just going to quit early today. That’s enough. I’m done.”)
With food, says Alexandra DiFeliceantonio, a nutritional neuroscientist at Virginia Tech, you could seek out a particular food because of conscious choice. “I think I’m going to want this because I’m trying to eat healthy,” she says as an example. Or we can like the flavor, texture, or memory the food conjures.
But there are likely also unconscious processes going on that train the brain’s reward system. For instance, it’s hypothesized there is a nervous system pathway that connects our guts to our brains, which tells the brain’s reward system about the nutrient content of food, creating a want for it. Why do you reach for the cocktail peanuts? You could tell yourself a narrative like, “I’m just feeling fidgety.” But maybe it’s because your want system has learned to associate the nuts with a lot of nutritious calories.
“There’s actually two pathways that bring rewarding signals to the brain,” says Dana Small, a neuroscientist at Yale University who studies the food choices we make. “One pathway is what you normally think about when you think of food reward — the taste, the smell, maybe how it looks. Then there’s another pathway — the signals that are generated during digestion that you’re never aware of.”
Annual Review of PsychologyConscious signals like taste and flavor can play a role in which foods we want to eat, but there are also subliminal signals coming directly from our guts.
To illustrate the subtle power of this unconscious pathway, she tells me about a type of study (done in both animals and humans) where researchers take two similarly flavored beverages, but surreptitiously infuse one with more calories than the other. In these studies, “the dopamine circuits really respond more to the flavors that were paired with calories compared to the ones that weren’t,” Small says.
A lot of our thoughts about why we want food, DiFeliceantonio argues, “is the narrative that we put on top of a subconscious process.” Stories like: “I like that meal because it reminds me of my grandmother’s cooking.” But that narrative isn’t necessarily correct or complete. You also might like that food because of its caloric content.
Sure, wanting can start off as a conscious liking, I’m told. Addiction, in a simplified sense, is the wanting system’s most extreme manifestation. And “addiction ... usually it starts with liking,” says Mehdi Farokhnia, a physician-scientist who studies addictive behavior at the National Institute on Drug Abuse. You do a drug because it’s pleasurable, you like it. But as the addiction progresses, “that liking aspect goes down.” You can detest a thing you crave. Or crave it not for pleasure, but to prevent something uncomfortable, like withdrawal.
Addiction reveals another of the wanting brain’s secrets: What we want doesn’t always reflect a physiological need.
“Older views presumed that our feeding, drinking, and other primary motivated behaviors were closely calibrated to our moment-to-moment physiological needs,” Leyton explains. But it’s not the case that if you miss a meal, you’re going to instantly die of malnutrition. “The great majority of food-seeking behaviors are unrelated to nutritional needs,” Leyton says.
Instead, the want system anticipates and preempts our physiological needs. But it can easily overshoot, or even choose targets seemingly without reason. For instance, sometimes patients with Parkinson’s disease, whose brains struggle to produce dopamine, will often go on dopamine replacement therapy. With these therapies, weird side effects can pop up. Sometimes, the want systems focus intensely on sex, binge eating, gambling, or shopping. “It’s like an addiction has developed,” Berridge says.
But why shopping, why gambling? What makes a person compelled toward one over the other? “We just do not have a clear understanding of how that happens in the brain,” Berridge says.
Turning down the dial of want
Sometimes wants seep into the conscious portion of our brains, shouting intrusive thoughts. But conscious does not mean the same as “in control of.”
“The messages I get from my brain are ‘you’re dying, you’re starving, you’re dying’ and they are constant,” says Sara, who was recently telling me about her “food noise” — i.e., intrusive thoughts about food — and whose last name I’m withholding for privacy reasons. Whenever she’d make progress in losing weight, the “food noise” in her brain would intensify.
“When I’m trying to do anything,” she says, there would be constant thought about food.
It’s not a pang of hunger, per se. “I think it’s more of an urge,” she says. “Like my body tells me ‘I need this.’”
Sara explained to me it was impossible to ignore. It was very hard to sleep when her brain was telling her “you need food right now” — even when she wasn’t hungry.
Stories like Sara’s underscore why asking people to engage in sheer willpower to subdue strong urges is a recipe for failure. Just look around. The US drug and opioid crisis continues unabated. Studies consistently find dieting and exercising are, in practice, ineffective solutions for weight management. It’s not that diet and exercise can’t work. There are success stories. But, arguably, if you were to evaluate the effectiveness of diet and exercise as a prescription for weight loss alone, you’d find they don’t help a lot of people.
When people engage in self-control to curb behaviors, they are fighting to use their conscious brain against their unconscious one. That’s never been a fair fight.
Remarkably, GLP-1 drugs could be leveling the playing field.
These drugs are called “GLP-1” because they mimic a naturally occurring hormone called Glucagon-like peptide-1. This hormone does a lot in the body, but in circuitous ways.
Primarily, it works on the pancreas to stimulate insulin, which lowers blood sugar. From there, it suppresses appetite through a few proposed mechanisms, including increasing the amount of time it takes for the stomach to empty, leading to feelings of fullness. “What they are doing is producing a sense of early satiety,” Small says.
These drugs aren’t perfect when it comes to weight loss. Many people struggle with side effects, such as nausea, or see their progress plateau. So far, GLP-1 drugs have mostly been studied in people with diabetes, heart disease, and obesity, so less is known about their effects on other populations.
Like any drug, they come with some risks. They’re known to increase the risk of developing thyroid cancer, for instance; they shouldn’t be taken during pregnancy; and despite more than a decade’s worth of safety data from diabetes patients (which show these drugs are, for the most part, very safe), scientists still don’t precisely understand how they work.
But a curious piece of the puzzle resides in the brain. GLP-1 drugs appear to work directly in the brain as a neurotransmitter, influencing neurons in the brain’s reward system, and in the hypothalamus, which regulates the body’s metabolism. The drugs are “probably not acting primarily on dopamine neurons per se,” Berridge says. “But they’re acting on the neurons that dopamine neurons are talking to.”
So, it’s complicated. But however the drugs are working, they seem to pull off a neat trick. They seem to tap into the wanting system, dialing it down while leaving liking intact.
“I still like food,” says Sara, who was prescribed the GLP-1 drug Mounjaro a few months ago after learning she was prediabetic. “Food tastes great to me. I just get to experience it in a way that I haven’t before.”
Most importantly, she gets to experience eating without that cruel voice in her head.
“About 24 hours after I took the first dose, there was just a calmness in my body and in my brain,” she says. “I wasn’t thinking about food.”
Finally, she was able to eat at mealtimes and not have intrusive thoughts in between. “That’s a very different way of living than I have been living for most of my life,” she says. Sara has lost 65 pounds with the medication. “And that is wonderful. But the peace part of it — that’s the best part of it.”
Researchers are now exploring whether this quieting of the wanting mind on GLP-1 drugs extends beyond food. Remarkably, this class of drugs has been showing promise in reducing cravings for other substances — like alcohol, nicotine, cocaine, and even opioids.
Theoretically this makes sense. “We only have one reward system,” DiFeliceantonio says. “There’s not a special reward system for food, and a special reward system for sex, and a special reward system for drugs.”
So, tapping into the reward system via appetite ought to impact cravings for other things. “There really isn’t a universe where we can impact food motivation and nothing else,” she adds. (Indeed, scientists have shown that the reverse is also true. Being hungry “increases motivation for drugs in many animal studies,” Berridge says.)
A lot of the evidence that GLP-1 drugs reduce cravings for drugs and alcohol is anecdotal. “There have been a lot of medical reports from patients,” Farokhnia, the NIH physician-scientist says. “People who took these GLP-1 drugs ... for their diabetes, obesity, other indications.” He says he’s heard reports from patients and colleagues that “they completely or almost completely lost their desire to drink alcohol or use drugs.”
Stories like this are starting to filter into scientific journals reporting on cases. Users have also taken to social media,where they marvel at their reduced cravings for alcohol.
The anecdotes are supported by evidence in animal studies, going back to the early 2010s. Rats on GLP-1 drugs seek out drugs and alcohol less than similarly addicted controls. Monkeys on GLP-1 also drink less. But human studies are starting to trickle out. One randomized control trial funded by Novo Nordisk (the maker of Ozempic and Wegovy) found that the GLP-1 drug exenatide decreased heavy drinking days, but only in obese patients.
At the recent American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Denver, Colorado, researchers from Penn State presented unpublished data on a very small randomized control study (just 20 participants) using the GLP-1 drug liraglutidein an in-patient opioid withdrawal clinic.
The study found a 40 percent reduction in cravings among the participants taking the GLP-1 compared to people who did not (all participants in the study were also offered other medication for withdrawal, such as buprenorphine). Patricia Grigson, the Penn State scientist presenting the data, emphasized that reduction of craving is usually equivalent to 14 days of treatment as usual, which would cost around $15,000 in her clinic. “We do need to evaluate it in a larger population, but it’s very hopeful,” Grigson said.
Some words of caution: these data are not conclusive. But it is hopeful and could be huge if validated.
More clinical trials in humans are underway for a variety of substances — including alcohol and nicotine. And while scientists in this space feel these drugs can be a breakthrough, they urge caution. “I think it’s one of the most promising medications and targets we have had in the addiction field,” Farokhnia says. “But to make a conclusion, we do need to wait until data from clinical trials come out.”
Until then, the emerging picture is this: Though working primarily on appetite, GLP-1 drugs are potentially able to turn down the overall volume on the most intense wants.
GLP-1 drugs aren’t reducing wants for everything. The evidence suggests they are just tweaking the volume on the dial of desire.
“I’m looking at the preclinical data [i.e., animal studies], that’s how I interpret them,” Elizabet Jerlhag Holm, a pharmacology researcher who has conducted animal studies on GLP-1 and addiction behavior, says. GLP-1s tend to work on the most intense urges and cravings — perhaps even in areas like sex addiction, Holm notes.
Berridge agrees. “It may not be turning down the amplitude of all wants,” Berridge says. Instead, he thinks, “it’s sort of lowering the ceiling. Particularly strong wants, urges like addictive cravings and things, they might be blunted a bit.”
Are our desires purely chemical?
I asked Sara, the Mounjaro user, if she felt like a different person since starting the drug. “100 percent,” she said.
There’s already a pathway for GLP-1 drugs to become some of the most prescribed medicines in the US. They help with obesity and heart disease — each impact millions of people. Further research might see them more commonly used for people with substance use disorders, making the potential prescription pool for these drugs even larger. JP Morgan projects these drugs might reach 30 million US users by 2030.
In that case, how might they change our wants, collectively?
Might many people be nudged into feeling like a slightly different person, with different wants? Might they make a mark on society, economies? Already there’s evidence GLP-1 users are buying different products at the grocery store. Anecdotal reports abound on the drugs changing compulsive behaviors in subtle ways: users stop biting their nails, stop picking their skin. (As these drugs are tested in wider populations, Farokhnia says he’ll be looking out for instances of anhedonia — or a lack of interest and enjoyment in life.)
In all my conversations about wanting and liking, I couldn’t help but think about free will. If we’re so impacted by subconscious forces, so silently influenced by pharmaceuticals, are we just the sum of these chemical interactions?
“If you and I go for a drink together tonight, maybe I would answer that,” Leyton jokes, saying the question of free will is beyond his pay grade.
“Certainly we can exert free will over these processes,” he says when pressed. “When we walk by the fridge, and we find ourselves opening believing that we’re not hungry, we can stop ourselves. As an amateur, I think there is such a thing as free will even though much of our behavior, even though many of our tendencies, reflect preconscious phenomena. We can control things.”
Yes, we can control things, but when you have a voice in your head telling you you’re starving, like Sara did, you have to engage in that sense of control all the time, and it grows exhausting.
“I had kind of given up,” she said of her weight challenges. “I had decided if I don’t live a long life, then I don’t, because this is too painful.”
Sara told me that being on Monjouro changed that for her.
Too many people have been put in an unfair battle against their wants. They’ve been told to somehow exert willpower over a system they have little conscious awareness of and control over. This might be the most remarkable thing about GLP-1 drugs: At least in the realm of appetite, they can potentially tip this battle, giving people a dependable dial to turn down the wanting noise in their brain.
“It’s not just about our willpower,” Sara says of obesity. But the sentiment ought to be the same for people with addictions. “This is a disease that requires treatment, and there’s treatment that can now help us. And I think for a lot of people, that is really liberating.”
Enlarge (credit: Pavlo Gonchar/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Waze, the navigation app owned by Google, is adding some new features. Some of these are safety-oriented, like alerts about first responders or speed limit changes. Others are convenience-minded, like help navigating roundabouts or parking information. It's also expanding its use of crowdsourcing to determine road conditions.
When Google bought Waze in 2013, the navigation app was already well-liked for adding a slightly social aspect to in-car navigation—something that seems adorably quaint and perhaps unthinkable these 11 years later.
Over the years, Google has slowly incorporated more of Waze's features into its own Google Maps platform and taken away Waze's autonomy, too. In 2022, it was formally merged into the same division at Google that runs Maps, and last year, Google laid off some workers and ditched Waze's own ad platform for Google ads.
Oregon has joined the small but growing list of states that have passed right-to-repair legislation. Oregon's bill stands out for a provision that would prevent companies from requiring that official parts be unlocked with encrypted software checks before they will fully function.
Bill SB 1596 passed Oregon's House by a 42 to 13 margin. Gov. Tina Kotek has five days to sign the bill into law. Consumer groups and right-to-repair advocates praised the bill as "the best bill yet," while the bill's chief sponsor, state Sen. Janeen Sollman (D), pointed to potential waste reductions and an improved second-hand market for closing a digital divide.
"Oregon improves on Right to Repair laws in California, Minnesota and New York by making sure that consumers have the choice of buying new parts, used parts, or third-party parts for the gadgets and gizmos," said Gay Gordon-Byrne, executive director of Repair.org, in a statement.
Nine days after a Russian-speaking ransomware syndicate took down the biggest US health care payment processor, pharmacies, health care providers, and patients were still scrambling to fill prescriptions for medicines, many of which are lifesaving.
On Thursday, UnitedHealth Group accused a notorious ransomware gang known both as AlphV and Black Cat of hacking its subsidiary, Optum. Optum provides a nationwide network called Change Healthcare, which allows health care providers to manage customer payments and insurance claims. With no easy way for pharmacies to calculate what costs were covered by insurance companies, many had to turn to alternative services or offline methods.
The most serious incident of its kind
Optum first disclosed on February 21 that its services were down as a result of a “cyber security issue.” Its service has been hamstrung ever since. Shortly before this post went live on Ars, Optum said it had restored Change Healthcare services.
Enlarge / A view of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention headquarters in Atlanta. (credit: Getty | Nathan Posner)
COVID-19 is becoming more like the flu and, as such, no longer requires its own virus-specific health rules, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said Friday alongside the release of a unified "respiratory virus guide."
In a lengthy background document, the agency laid out its rationale for consolidating COVID-19 guidance into general guidance for respiratory viruses—including influenza, RSV, adenoviruses, rhinoviruses, enteroviruses, and others, though specifically not measles. The agency also noted the guidance does not apply to health care settings and outbreak scenarios.
"COVID-19 remains an important public health threat, but it is no longer the emergency that it once was, and its health impacts increasingly resemble those of other respiratory viral illnesses, including influenza and RSV," the agency wrote.
Enlarge / Florida Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo speaks during a press conference at Neo City Academy in Kissimmee, Florida. (credit: Paul Hennessy/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
A sixth student at Florida's Manatee Bay Elementary School outside of Fort Lauderdale has a confirmed case of measles, health officials announced late Tuesday. However, health officials are not telling unvaccinated students who were potentially exposed to quarantine.
The letter, signed by Ladapo, noted that people with measles can be contagious from four days before the rash develops through four days after the rash appears. And while symptoms often develop between eight to 14 days after exposure, the disease can take 21 days to appear. As such, the normal quarantine period for exposed and unvaccinated people, who are highly susceptible to measles, is 21 days.
Today is Leap Day, meaning that for the first time in four years, it's February 29. That's normally a quirky, astronomical factoid (or a very special birthday for some). But that unique calendar date broke gas station payment systems across New Zealand for much of the day.
As reported by numerous international outlets, self-serve pumps in New Zealand were unable to accept card payments due to a problem with the gas pumps' payment processing software. The New Zealand Herald reported that the outage lasted "more than 10 hours." This effectively shuttered some gas stations, while others had to rely on in-store payments. The outage affected suppliers, including Allied Petroleum, BP, Gull, Waitomo, and Z Energy, and has reportedly been fixed.
In-house payment solutions, such as BP fuel cards and the Waitomo app, reportedly still worked during the outage.
GitHub is struggling to contain an ongoing attack that’s flooding the site with millions of code repositories. These repositories contain obfuscated malware that steals passwords and cryptocurrency from developer devices, researchers said.
The malicious repositories are clones of legitimate ones, making them hard to distinguish to the casual eye. An unknown party has automated a process that forks legitimate repositories, meaning the source code is copied so developers can use it in an independent project that builds on the original one. The result is millions of forks with names identical to the original one that add a payload that’s wrapped under seven layers of obfuscation. To make matters worse, some people, unaware of the malice of these imitators, are forking the forks, which adds to the flood.
Whack-a-mole
“Most of the forked repos are quickly removed by GitHub, which identifies the automation,” Matan Giladi and Gil David, researchers at security firm Apiiro, wrote Wednesday. “However, the automation detection seems to miss many repos, and the ones that were uploaded manually survive. Because the whole attack chain seems to be mostly automated on a large scale, the 1% that survive still amount to thousands of malicious repos.”
For some, having to work from home during the COVID-19 pandemic was stressful. Parents balanced job duties while caring for children. Some struggled to set up a home office and adjust to new tools, like video conferencing. Lonely workdays at home added to social isolation. The line between work and life blurred.
For others, working from home was a boon—comfort, convenience, flexibility, no commuting or rush-hour traffic, no office-environment distractions. When the acute aspects of the pandemic receded, some who at first struggled began to settle into a work-from-home (WFH) groove and appreciated the newfound flexibility.
Then, bosses began calling their employees back to the office. Many made the argument that the return-to-office (RTO) policies and mandates were better for their companies; workers are more productive at the office, and face-to-face interactions promote collaboration, many suggested. But there's little data to support that argument. Pandemic-era productivity is tricky to interpret, given that the crisis disrupted every aspect of life. Research from before the pandemic generally suggested remote work improves worker performance—though it often included workers who volunteered to WFH, potentially biasing the finding.
DCist has been shut down. Its owner, WAMU, broke the bad news to staffers Friday. A banner appeared over DCist’s homepage Friday morning that says that the site “will no longer publish new content. It advises readers to “visit WAMU.org for local news and programming.” DCist’s archive is unavailable to the public at the moment, […]
Gordon Cormier stars as Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender. | Robert Falconer/Netflix
The hugely anticipated remake delivers on the drama, charm, and spectacle of the original.
Reader, you can relax: They nailed it.
Halfway through the third episode of Netflix’s tremendously anticipated live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender, we’re treated to a slickly choreographed fight through a town square between our title character, Aang (Gordon Cormier), and his self-declared nemesis, Prince Zuko (Dallas Liu). This hand-to-hand combat through a colorful, chaotic street scene ends not with a victor but with a different coup de grâce: a cameo from a fan-favorite produce vendor wailing over his ruined cabbages.
Between the rocky history of the franchise and uncertainty about the current production, fans’ anxiety around this Netflix release might well be at an all-time high. The previous attempt to adapt Nickelodeon’s beloved animated show, which ran for three seasons from 2005 to 2008, for a mainstream live-action audience resulted in infamy. M. Night Shyamalan’s 2010 movie sparked a notorious controversy over his decision to cast his main characters with white actors, a move that resulted in years-long protests from fans and contributed to the movie being released to utter ignominy. A gutsy 2012 series expansion following the exploits of Aang’s successor, Korra, renewed the franchise, though it garnered plenty of controversy in its own right for featuring a (gasp!) messy female protagonist. With so many fans still burned by the film, the news of Netflix’s eight-episode live-action adaptation spawned plenty of worry. That wasn’t helped when the original show’s creators, Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko, walked away from the project in 2020, two years after it was first announced. Between their departure and the delays caused by the pandemic, fans wondered whether the show would even be released at all.
The wait, it turns out, has been worth it. Although there are plenty of things to quibble with in successor showrunner Albert Kim’s version of the series, so many things go right that this adaptation of Avatar not only rejuvenates the whole franchise but elevates Netflix’s flagging live-action project.
I am unabashedly Avatar-pilled; I think the Nickelodeon original is one of the greatest TV shows ever made. It pulls off in just three seasons the kind of epic world building and character evolution that shows double its length never manage to achieve. It does so by balancing its family-friendly ethos with a story that deals openly with war, genocide, fascism, trauma, and child abuse.
The result is a show that’s routinely as devastating as it is delightful. Our heroes each grapple with deep personal loss while trying to stop a powerful military force, the Fire Nation, from colonizing the rest of the world. That world is inhabited by fantasy creatures, steampunk cities, and four distinct groups characterized by their relationship to the traditional four elements: besides the Fire Nation (inspired by imperial Japan, China, and other East Asian cultures), there is the Water Tribe (inspired by Inuit and other subarctic cultures), the Earth Kingdom (inspired by imperial Chinese culture), and the Air Nomads (inspired by Buddhist and Hindu cultures in Tibet and parts of Southeast Asia). Among these tribes, people known as benders can control the element they’re associated with.
Only one human, known as the Avatar, has the ability to master all four elements — an ability passed down to them through generations in an unbroken chain of previous avatars. The disappearance of the most recent Avatar, Aang, a century ago has allowed the Fire Nation to lay waste to the other nations, including completely wiping out all the Air Nomads, the tribe into which Aang was born. Aided by Katara and Sokka, two Water Tribe siblings whose mother died in the Fire Nation’s ethnic cleansing and whose father is away at war, he has to make up for lost time and defeat the Fire Lord once and for all. This is heady stuff, especially for a kid’s cartoon. But the show, which won a Peabody for “adding thoughtful substance to [the] genre,” has the writing, creativity, and deep characterization to pull it off.
That’s not to say that Avatar as a franchise and artistic product needs no reckoning with. The show’s status as an artifact of millennial nostalgia has become complicated over time. The degree to which its homage to anime and borrowing of Asian culture veers into cultural appropriation rather than tribute has been a source of debate among fans and critics. So has the degree to which, as a show made by white creators incorporating elements of colonized cultures, it reifies the very thing it attempts to rebuke.
Still, unlike other shows of its time, Avatar has largely managed to hold on to its fans. This is partly because it’s never quite reached the mainstream. (In fact, its lack of a household name complicates things for us: Do we editorialize with the longstanding shorthand Avatar, which was preferred until it was usurped by James Cameron, forever turning it into “Avatar — no, not that one”?)
It’s also partly because Avatar remains one of the most unapologetically antifascist shows ever made. It’s not even generically pacifist — it frequently depicts acts of violent resistance as necessary. For all the time Aang spends proselytizing about things like morals, friendship, and the benefits of riding an air scooter, Avatar never resorts to empty platitudes; its moral and political lessons are usually hard-won.
Complicated? Yes. But that’s also why, in the current political climate, a live-action remake of Avatar can’t afford a single ideological misstep. Its moral clarity about the absolute necessity of resisting genocidal regimes, political isolationism, and governments of conquest matters now more than ever.
At their core, both the original and the new Avatar are travelogues — stories that evolve their characters and their universe through a literal journey through that universe. It’s a format shared by countless works, including fantasies ranging from Gulliver’s Travels to Star Trek. This works on multiple levels, expanding our understanding of the world while also allowing our characters to grow and change through each interaction with a new culture.
The animated Avatar’s three seasons follow three phases of Aang’s journey to master all four elements, after which he can hopefully defeat the Fire Nation. The first season of Netflix’s adaptation faithfully aligns with the first season of the show (“Book One”) — though because it has to truncate much of the action, the first two episodes feature a lot of clunky exposition. The new show also suffers from a tendency to repeat the exposition we’ve already heard, to the extent of showing flashbacks to moments that happened earlier in the same episode. At times, the combination of overexposition and overmoralizing turns hokey.
Still, the writing is stronger and more enjoyable than these choices imply. Netflix’s Avatar preserves the original’s plot, and its changes work to tighten the narrative, deepen characterization, and strengthen the impact of heart-clenching moments in the storyline. Crucially, it retains the balance of the original: depth and darkness, levity and light.
The production design is opulent and rich with detail, carefully incorporating Avatar’s cultural influences, from architecture to costuming. The CGI is primarily an unobtrusive enhancement rather than a distraction (Appa the sky bison being a disappointing exception). The action is backed by a lush, beautiful score, and the fight scenes are excellent. The artificial nature of the CGI fight scenes was one of the things that really torpedoed Shyamalan’s version; here, however, particularly during all of the waterbending fights, the CGI and the live-action choreography integrate seamlessly, generating visually spectacular climactic battle sequences.
Courtesy of Netlix
Paul Sun-Hyung Lee and Dallas Liu as General Iroh and his nephew, Prince Zuko.
All of this bolsters the impeccable casting decisions that went into creating this ensemble, which features cameos from a host of geek faves like Danny Pudi, Arden Cho, George Takei, and Osric Chau but never feels like pandering or stunt casting. Overall, this Avatar manages to avoid succumbing to “the Netflix look” and instead serves as an exemplar of how to cast and visually adapt animated characters without looking ridiculous or feeling fake.
The standouts in this regard are exactly who they should be: Zuko, the willful, stubborn Fire Nation prince in exile, and his uncle, General Iroh (The Mandalorian’s Paul Sun-Hyung Lee). No Avatar adaptation can succeed unless the audience invests in this relationship; luckily for us, Dallas Liu exudes just the right mix of brashness and vulnerability and restless energy from the first moment he’s onscreen, while Lee unveils Iroh’s layered complexity one careful degree at a time. If one or the other doesn’t break your heart individually, the two of them together definitely will.
Kiawentiio, who plays our waterbending heroine Katara, is so much better than everyone around her for most of her time onscreen that she inadvertently highlights how little attention her character gets. Book One focuses on developing her much less interesting older brother, Sokka. In the hands of actor Ian Ousley, who plays him with precise smarm and hamminess, Sokka is the epitome of the wisecracking sidekick: You either love him or hate him. Given all the material this season has to cover, the time we spend watching him chase cute girls and debate what career track he should be on feels like filler — especially since, by contrast, Katara is dealing (mostly offscreen) with the trauma of having watched her mother be burned alive. By the end, however, Katara gets her moment, with Sokka in full support.
Eclipsed by so many bright and colorful side characters and a plot that gives his archnemesis the centerpiece hero’s journey, Aang has never been the most compelling part of his own story. For most of Book One, he’s still a naive 12-year-old who spends most of his time fleeing Fire Nation soldiers instead of learning to bend elements. Here, Gordon Cormier does his best, but he’s usually saddled with a mouthful of either moralism or exposition. The show also suffers from a failure to integrate Aang into the trio; we spend far more time hearing Aang and Katara talk at each other about the importance of friendship than we do watching them actually become friends.
Because so many of these weaknesses are imposed on the series by the constraints of the eight-episode Netflix format, it’s worth asking whether we even need more Avatar. Can this shortening really do justice to the original’s complex themes?
For me, so far, the answer is yes. It turns out I did need more from this story. I did need to see Cormier’s face collapsing in grief and love when he reunites briefly with the monk who raised him. I did need the show to retcon a tiny offscreen romance in order to show us that the conservative earthbending city of Omashu was quite literally built on a lesbian relationship. I did need Zuko’s soldiers dramatically saluting him because they’ve finally realized he’s had their backs all along. I definitely needed to see Katara ice-surf during a battle to prove her worth as a bender.
Is it perfect? Nah. But it might be a perfect way to rekindle your love for Avatar — and remind the world why it deserved to be remembered in the first place.
Living with food allergies can be a fraught existence. There is no cure, and the standard management is to be ever vigilant of everything you eat and have an emergency shot of epinephrine constantly handy in case an accidental ingestion leads to a swift, life-threatening reaction. But, for the millions of people in the US who live with such allergies, a new drug may dull the threat.
On Friday, the Food and Drug Administration approved the antibody drug omalizumab (brand name Xolair) as an injection to lessen allergic reactions to foods in people ages 1 and up. In a trial of 168 children and adults with multiple food allergies, participants who received shots of omalizumab for 16 to 20 weeks were much more likely to tolerate a test dose of allergy-inducing foods at the end than those who received a placebo.
Omalizumab—which was previously approved to treat asthma, hives, and nasal polyps—works by binding to a class of antibodies in the body called immunoglobulin E (IgE) that are specifically involved in allergic responses. The monoclonal antibody drug binds IgE, blocking it from binding to its target receptor, thus preventing it from triggering the immune responses that lead to allergy symptoms.
After months of resisting, Air Canada was forced to give a partial refund to a grieving passenger who was misled by an airline chatbot inaccurately explaining the airline's bereavement travel policy.
On the day Jake Moffatt's grandmother died, Moffat immediately visited Air Canada's website to book a flight from Vancouver to Toronto. Unsure of how Air Canada's bereavement rates worked, Moffatt asked Air Canada's chatbot to explain.
The chatbot provided inaccurate information, encouraging Moffatt to book a flight immediately and then request a refund within 90 days. In reality, Air Canada's policy explicitly stated that the airline will not provide refunds for bereavement travel after the flight is booked. Moffatt dutifully attempted to follow the chatbot's advice and request a refund but was shocked that the request was rejected.
Enlarge / A woman with Long COVID who is completely bedridden, requiring the use of a wheelchair to move between rooms of her home. (credit: Getty | Rhiannon Adam)
Over four years after SARS-CoV-2's debut, researchers still struggle to understand long COVID, including the ostensibly simple question of how many people have it. Estimates for its prevalence vary widely, based on different study methods and definitions of the condition. Now, for the first time, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has attempted to estimate its prevalence among adults in each US state and territory. The results again show a wide range of prevalence estimates while revealing the states that were hardest hit as well as those that seem relatively spared.
Overall, the CDC found that seven states in the South, West, and Midwest had the highest prevalence of long COVID in the country, between 8.9 percent and 10.6 percent: Alabama, Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Tennessee, Wyoming, and, the state with the highest prevalence of 10.6 percent, West Virginia. The results are published today in the CDC's Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report.
On the other end of the spectrum, New England states, Washington, and Oregon had lower prevalence rates, between 3.7 percent and 5.3 percent. The lowest rate was seen in the US Virgin Islands with 1.9 percent. Washington, DC, and Guam had ranges between 1.9 percent and 3.6 percent.
Construction of the new Twinbrook Quarter development has made significant progress in the past couple of months on Rockville Pike. But the tenant everyone is waiting for — an 80,0000-square-foot Wegmans grocery store — still hasn’t begun its buildout. A spokesman tells us Wegmans is looking to start construction this spring, with a projected opening in 2025. The uber-popular grocery store will be the jewel of Twinbrook Quarter, a sprawling retail/residential/office project that will ultimately encompass 18 acres.
On a November day in 2021, Tony Lewis Sr. walked to a phone bank inside the federal correctional institution in Cumberland, Maryland, and placed a call to his son. Over the prior three decades, these conversations had become the highlight of his daily routine, an essential 15-minute escape from the austerity of prison. But on […]
On Tuesday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) published guidance on inventorship for AI-assisted inventions, clarifying that while AI systems can play a role in the creative process, only natural persons (human beings) who make significant contributions to the conception of an invention can be named as inventors. It also rules out using AI models to churn out patent ideas without significant human input.
The USPTO says this position is supported by "the statutes, court decisions, and numerous policy considerations," including the Executive Order on AI issued by President Biden. We've previously covered attempts, which have been repeatedly rejected by US courts, by Dr. Stephen Thaler to have an AI program called "DABUS" named as the inventor on a US patent (a process begun in 2019).
A US district judge in California has largely sided with OpenAI, dismissing the majority of claims raised by authors alleging that large language models powering ChatGPT were illegally trained on pirated copies of their books without their permission.
By allegedly repackaging original works as ChatGPT outputs, authors alleged, OpenAI's most popular chatbot was just a high-tech "grift" that seemingly violated copyright laws, as well as state laws preventing unfair business practices and unjust enrichment.
According to judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín, authors behind three separate lawsuits—including Sarah Silverman, Michael Chabon, and Paul Tremblay—have failed to provide evidence supporting any of their claims except for direct copyright infringement.
A piece of GOOD Meat’s cell-cultivated chicken cooks on a grill at the company’s California office in July 2023. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
The political beef over cell-cultivated meat, explained.
Earlier this month, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis declared his support for banning a food product that barely exists — cell-cultivated or “lab-grown” meat — by dismissing the very concept at a press conference.
“We’re not going to do that fake meat,” DeSantis, a Republican, said to the crowd. “That doesn’t work.”
DeSantis was referring to a Florida state bill to ban the production and sale of cell-cultivated meat — which is different from products made by companies like Impossible Foods that use plant ingredients to mimic meat. Instead, cell-cultivated meat is real meat, but made without slaughtering an animal. It’s produced by taking a small sample of animal cells and feeding them a mix of amino acids, sugars, salts, vitamins, and other ingredients for a few weeks until it grows into edible meat.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
Chef Nate Park slices a piece of GOOD Meat’s cell-cultivated chicken.
The Florida bill’s lead sponsor, Republican state Rep. Danny Alvarez, claims the novel technology’s “unknowns are so great,” despite a multiyear review from the US Agriculture Department and US Food and Drug Administration that deemed products from two cell-cultivated meat startups safe to eat.
Florida state Rep. Tyler Sirois, another Republican who introduced a similar bill late last year, stated a different — and perhaps more honest — motivation for banning cell-cultivated meat: to protect the state’s farmers from competition. “Farming and cattle are incredibly important industries to Florida,” Sirois said in an interview with Politico in November.
What’s happening in Florida is part of a broader political strategy to hinder the nascent cell-cultivated meat industry. Last month, lawmakers in Arizona introduced a similar ban, with one Republican supporter saying, “We want to protect our cattle and our ranches.” One of the co-sponsors is a rancher himself. The bill is advancing through the legislature, having passed out of two committees this month.
Meanwhile, politicians in Tennessee are pushing a cell-cultivated meat sales ban that imposes a $1 million fine on violators.
Federal lawmakers in heavy farming states, mostly Republicans but also some Democrats, are also putting up roadblocks to cell-cultivated meat with the support of the conventional meat industry.
In late January, US Sens. Jon Tester (D-MT) and Mike Rounds (R-SD) announced a federal bill to ban cell-cultivated meat in school cafeterias. “Tester champions Montana’s ranchers,” reads part of the headline of Tester and Rounds’s press release about the legislation, which has been endorsed by beef trade groups.
Days later, a bipartisan group of farm-state members of Congressintroduced legislation — also endorsed by a number of meat trade groups — in both chambers that would require any cell-cultivated or plant-based meat product to be labeled as “imitation” meat or poultry.
Last year, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, signed a similar bill into law that restricts how cell-cultivated meat companies can market their products. Arizona is now considering even more restrictive labeling legislation.
Such protectionism runs counter to the routine platitudes that elected officials — especially those on the right — typically espouse about competitive free markets, regulation, and innovation. DeSantis has boasted that Florida ranks first in the nation in entrepreneurship, yet he’s supportive of a bill that would stifle entrepreneurship.
But the bills also ring hollow when you consider that cell-cultivated meat isn’t even available for sale.
Cell-cultivated meat has a long way to commercial viability (and it may not get there)
Last summer, two cell-cultivated meat startups made their product available in extremely limited quantities at a couple of high-end restaurants — one in San Francisco, the other in Washington, DC — for less than a year. Both have been phased out.
While plenty of the startups have demonstrated proofs of concept, it’s far from certain they’ll be able to scale and compete with factory-farmed meat; their products certainly won’t be showing up in school cafeterias anytime soon. Its advocates argue the field needs government funding, like the renewable energy and electric vehicle industries have received, to advance its research and development.
Jeff Chiu/AP Photo
A scientist works in a cellular agriculture lab at the headquarters of GOOD Meat in Alameda, California, in June 2023.
On the surface, bills aiming to ban cell-cultivated meat could be waved away as mere political theater, a ratcheting up of the culture war by attacking alternatives to factory-farmed meat as a cheap way to own the libs during an election year.
But there’s something more troubling at play here. The proposed bans are part of a longtime strategy by the politically powerful agribusiness lobby and its allies in Congress and statehouses to further entrench factory farming as America’s dominant source of protein.
The political engine to protect factory farming, explained
Cell-cultivated meat is the latest flashpoint in a long-running fight over the future of protein; meat and dairy analogues made from plants, like oat milk and pea-based Beyond burgers, have already been targeted by hostile politicians.
Over the last decade, as these products entered the mainstream, lawmakers in around 30 states have introduced legislation to restrict how companies can label them, and over a dozen have passed. Some laws went so far as to ban companies from using words like “burger” and “milk” even when their labels already made clear that the products were free of animal-derived ingredients, creating a costly, complicated patchwork of labeling requirements.
The bipartisan federal DAIRY PRIDE Act — short for “The Defending Against Imitations and Replacements of Yogurt, milk, and cheese to Promote Regular Intake of Dairy Everyday Act” — would codify these restrictions nationwide for plant-based dairy products.
The proliferation of state restrictions has led some companies to use awkward descriptors that probably confuse more than clarify, like Trader Joe’s almond milk, which it calls “Almond Beverage.”
Some of the companies making these products have brought First Amendment challenges to push back. Louisiana and Mississippi each softened their regulations after lawsuits, and in 2021, a California judge ruled that the plant-based dairy company Miyoko’s Creamery could use terms like “butter” and “cheese” after the state’s agriculture department tried to prohibit it from doing so. In 2022, a federal judge ruled Arkansas’s labeling law unconstitutional. Challenges to other state laws are ongoing, but the bills keep coming: About eight states are currently considering restrictive labeling provisions.
If lawmakers are really concerned with deceptive labeling, they may want to focus their efforts in the meat and dairy aisle, where consumers have long been misled by warm and fuzzy terms like “sustainable” and “humanely raised,” both of which have no legal definition. Some terms that are defined and verifiable, like “free range,” often don’t meet consumers’ expectations.
The cell-cultivated meat bans and the plant-based labeling restrictions represent one side of agribusiness’s policy coin: proactive measures to weaken upstarts that could one day threaten its bottom line. The other side of that coin is sweeping deregulation that has made meat abundant and cheap, but at terrible cost to the environment, workers, and animals.
Agriculture is exempt from the federal Animal Welfare Act, and most farms are exempt from the Clean Water Act and Clean Air Act, loopholes that have resulted in awful conditions for animals and widespread pollution.
Edwin Remsburg/VW Pics via Getty Images
Chickens in cages at a conventional egg farm.
Every state has a “right to farm” law, aimed at preventing rural Americans from suing factory farms for pollution, odor, and other nuisances. And about 10 states have passed “ag gag” laws, which make it a crime to document and investigate animal abuse on farms. Many have been struck down as unconstitutional, but some remain in place.
The sad irony of all the chest-thumping over meat alternatives is that farmers do face many real threats, like a changing climate that makes harvests less predictable and corporate consolidation that has put the majority of America’s meat supply in the hands of a few massive companies that hollow out rural economies and treat some of the farmers who contract for them like serfs.
Addressing these would take serious political courage, but it’s much easier to rile up the base by banning a perceived threat than taking on a real one.
You’ve probably heard various renditions of The Star-Spangled Banner, and sometimes singers put a little extra something in the anthem. A bit of flourish. Some attitude. For The Pudding, Jan Diehm and Michelle McGhee quantified that extra something into what they’ve dubbed a Diva Score.
Out of the 138 versions they scored, the highest belong to Chaka Khan at the 2020 NBA All-Star game and Patti Labelle at the 2008 World Series.
For NYT Opinion, Nate Silver compares consumer confidence between two surveys. The University of Michigan’s Index of Consumer Sentiment focuses more on personal spending, whereas the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Survey. Usually, the estimates follow each other, but there’s been a split the past few years, as shown in the difference chart above.
A 268-unit mixed-income, mixed-use, new construction project known as The Laureate in Montgomery County, Maryland. | Montgomery County’s Housing Opportunities Commission
Local governments are trying a new way to address the housing crisis.
Quietly and with little fanfare, the idea of building new publicly owned housing for people across the income spectrum has advanced in the United States.
Governments have successfully addressed housing shortages through publicly developed housing in places like Vienna, Finland, and Singapore in the past, but these examples have typically inspired little attention in the US — which has more restrictive welfare policies and a bias toward private homeownership.
Then one US community started exploring social housing with a markedly more American twist: Leaders in Montgomery County, Maryland — a suburban region just outside Washington, DC, with more than 1 million residents — said they could increase their local housing supply not by ramping up European-style welfare subsidies but through essentially intervening in the traditional capitalist bidding process. Government, when it wants to, can make attractive bids.
Now, with an acute nationwide housing shortage, and declining home construction due to high interest rates, the idea is spreading, and more local officials have been moving forward with plans to create publicly owned housing. They are very clear about not calling it “public housing”: To help differentiate these projects from the typical stigmatized, income-restricted, and underfunded model, leaders have coalesced around calling the mixed-income idea “social housing” produced by “public developers.”
“What I like about what we’re doing is all we have effectively done is commandeered the private American real estate model,” Zachary Marks, the chief real estate officer for Montgomery County’s housing authority, told me in 2022. “We’re replacing the investor dudes from Wall Street, the big money from Dallas.”
By offering private companies more favorable financing terms, Montgomery County hoped to move forward with new construction that they’d own for as long as they liked. They had plans to build thousands of publicly owned mixed-income apartments by leveraging relatively small amounts of public money to create a revolving fund that could finance short-term construction costs. Eighteen months ago, this “revolving fund” plan was still mostly just on paper; no one lived in any of these units, and whether people would even want to live in publicly owned housing was still an open question.
Answers have since emerged: The first Montgomery County project opened in April 2023, a 268-unit apartment building called The Laureate, and tenants quickly came to rent. It’s not the kind of public housing most Americans are familiar with: It has a sleek fitness center, multiple gathering spaces, and a courtyard pool. “We’re 97 percent leased today, and it’s just been incredibly successful and happened so fast,” Marks said.
Encouraged by the positive response, Montgomery County has been barreling forward with other social housing projects, like a 463-unit complex that will house both seniors and families, and another 415-unit building across from The Laureate set to break ground in October. While construction has lagged nationwide as the Federal Reserve worked to rein in inflation, private developers in Montgomery County have been able to partner with the local government, enticed by their more affordable financing options.
As word started to get around, city leaders elsewhere began reaching out, curious to learn about this model and whether it could help their own housing woes. Montgomery County was getting so many inquiries, they decided to host a convening in early November, inviting other officials — from places like New York City, Boston, Atlanta, and Chicago —to tour The Laureate and talk collectively about the public developer idea. Roughly 60people were in attendance.
“I am very bought into the Zachary Marks’s line that there is every reason for cities to be building up a balance sheet of real estate equity and we should be capturing that and using it to reinvest in public goods,” said one municipal housing leader who attended the Montgomery County conference and spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk to the media. “That’s the vision — and you can just describe it in so many ways. You can say we’re socializing real estate value for public use, or you can describe it as we’re doing public-private partnerships to invest in our communities.”
Paul Williams, who leads the Center for Public Enterprise, a think tank supportive of social housing, said growing interest in the public developer model has even led to new conversations with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. “Public agencies are clearly hungry for tools that allow them to produce a lot more housing, and in the past year and a half we’ve gone from working with Montgomery County and Rhode Island to establishing a working group with a few dozen state and municipal housing agencies who come to our regular meetings,” he told Vox. “That’s gotten HUD’s attention, and we’re now talking with them about ways the federal government can support this kind of innovation.”
Atlanta’s leaders are on track to implement the Montgomery County model
Perhaps no city has run as fast with the Montgomery County idea than Atlanta, Georgia. The city’s mayor, Andre Dickens, took office in early 2022 and set an ambitious goal to build or preserve 20,000 affordable housing units within his eight-year term. The Dickens administration wanted to find ways to do this that didn’t depend on the whims of Republicans in the state legislature or federal government.
One of the key strategies Dickens’s team has embraced is making use of property the city already owns, such as vacant land. “We did not have a good sense of what we had, what we did not have, and what was the best use for any of it,” said Josh Humphries, a senior housing adviser to the mayor.
The Dickens administration convened an “affordable housing strike force” to get a better understanding of the city’s inventory and started studying affordable housing models around the world, including social housing in Vienna and Copenhagen. Atlanta leaders also participated in a national program called Putting Assets to Work and learned about the efforts in Montgomery County.
Humphries said what “really sealed the deal” on social housing for them was simply the scarcity of alternative tools to build affordable housing, since they were already exhausting all the available funding they had from the federal Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC).
By the summer of 2023, armed with money from a city housing bond, the Atlanta Housing Authority’s board of commissioners voted to create a new nonprofit that would help build mixed-income public housing for the city. Leaders estimate it could lead to 800 new units by 2029.
Atlanta’s first bid for private-market developers to construct social housing went out last month, and Humphries says they’re excited about how their new financing could spark new partnerships. “The combination of tools that we plan to use that are similar to what they’re doing in Montgomery County, like being able to decrease property taxes and have better interest rates in your financing, is very enviable,” Humphries said. “It has allowed us to have conversations with market-rate developers who maybe otherwise wouldn’t be interested because they haven’t been able to figure out how to make their other [private-sector] projects work.”
Boston wants to move forward with social housing, and Massachusetts might help
Since 2017, Boston has been working to redevelop some of its existing public housing projects by converting them into denser, mixed-income housing. Kenzie Bok, who was tapped by the city’s progressive mayor last spring to lead the Boston Housing Authority, said that existing work helped pave the way for leaders to more quickly embrace the Montgomery County model. As in Atlanta, Bok and her colleagues have been trying to figure out how to build more affordable housing when they have no more federal tax credits available.
“I think everyone in the affordable housing community is looking around and saying, ‘Gee, we have this [low-income housing tax credit] engine for development but it doesn’t have capacity to meet the level we need,’” Bok told me. And while the federal government could increase the tax credit volume, that requires action in Washington, DC, that for years has failed to materialize.
Bok grew interested in the Montgomery County model since it seemed to offer a way for her city to augment its affordable housing production without Congress. Bok was also intrigued by the potential of the revolving fund to spur more market-rate construction in Boston, which has slowed not only because of rising interest rates but also because institutional investors typically demand such high rates of return.
“The default assumption is that affordable units are hard to build and market-rate ones will build themselves from a profit-motive perspective,” Bok said. “In fact, we have a situation now where ironically it’s often affordable LIHTC units that can get built right now and other projects stall out.”
Bok and her colleagues realized it’s not that mixed-income projects don’t generate profits — those profits just aren’t 20 percent or higher. Mixed-income affordable housing wouldn’t need to be produced at a loss, Boston leaders concluded, they just might not be tantalizing to certain aggressive real estate investors. By creating a revolving fund and leveraging public land to offer more affordable financing terms, Boston officials realized they could help generate more housing — both affordable and market-rate.
In January, in her State of the City address, Boston Mayor Michelle Wu pledged to grow the city’s supply of public housing units by about 30 percent in the next 10 years, with publicly owned mixed-income housing being one way to get there.
To help move things forward, state lawmakers are also exploring the idea. This past fall, Massachusetts’s governor put placeholder language in a draft housing bond bill to support social housing and a revolving fund. The specifics are likely going to be hashed out later this spring, but the governor’s bond bill is widely expected to pass.
In Rhode Island, too, state-level interest in supporting the notion of publicly developed affordable housing has grown. Stefan Pryor, the state’s secretary of housing, attended the Montgomery County, Maryland conference in November, and Rhode Island recently announced it would be contracting with the Furman Center, a prominent housing think tank at New York University, to study models of social housing. “We look forward to the study’s observations and findings,” Pryor told Vox.
Can mixed-income housing help those most in need?
Lawmakers intrigued by what Montgomery County is doing praise the fact that publicly owned mixed-income housing units theoretically offer affordable units to their communities forever, unlike affordable housing financed by the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit that can convert into market-rate rentals after 15 years. Leaders also like that after some initial upfront investment, the publicly owned projects start to pay for themselves, even delivering economic returns to the city down the line.
Charles Arrington
Inside an apartment unit at The Laureate complex in Montgomery County.
But while housing complexes like The Laureate can offer real relief to struggling middle-class tenants — a quarter of The Laureate’s units are restricted to those earning 50 percent or lessof the area median income — an outstanding question is whether the social housing model could also help those who are lower-income, who might require even more deeply subsidized housing.
In Washington, DC, some lawmakers have been exploring the social housing idea, and one progressive council member introduced a bill calling to support mixed-income housing accessible to those making 30 percent or less of the area’s median income. But critics of the bill say that the rents of those living in nonsubsidized units would have to be so high to make that rental math work.
A housing official speaking on the condition of anonymity told me they think it’s okay if the social housing model can only really work to support more middle-class tenants in neighborhoods that charge higher rents because leaders still have financing tools to build more deeply affordable housing in lower-cost areas. In other words, social housing can grow the overall pie of affordable units throughout a city.
Other leaders, like in Boston and Atlanta, told me they’re exploring how they could “layer” the mixed-income social housing model with additional subsidies to make them more accessible to lower-income renters.
Marks, from Montgomery County, knows there’s still a lot of stigma and reservations about American public housing, which many perceive as being ugly, dirty, or unsafe. Few understand that many of the woes of existing public housing in the US have had to do with rules Congress passed nearly 100 years ago, such as restricting the housing to only the very poor. Besides getting his message out, Marks said he likes to just have people come see for themselves what’s being done.
“The temperature immediately comes down when people can walk around, see how attractive it is, how it’s clearly a high-quality community with nice apartments,” he said. “It’s why getting proof of concept is so important.”
When big pharmaceutical companies are confronted over their exorbitant pricing of prescription drugs in the US, they often retreat to two well-worn arguments: One, that the high drug prices cover costs of researching and developing new drugs, a risky and expensive endeavor, and two, that middle managers—pharmacy benefit managers (PBMs), to be specific—are actually the ones price gouging Americans.
Both of these arguments faced substantial blows in a hearing Thursday held by the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, chaired by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). In fact, pharmaceutical companies are spending billions of dollars more on lavish executive compensation, dividends, and stock buyouts than they spend on research and development (R&D) for new drugs, Sanders pointed out. "In other words, these companies are spending more to enrich their own stockholders and CEOs than they are in finding new cures and new treatments," he said.
And, while PBMs certainly contribute to America's uniquely astronomical drug pricing, their profiteering accounts for a small fraction of the massive drug market, Sanders and an expert panelist noted. PBMs work as shadowy middle managers between drugmakers, insurers, and pharmacies, setting drug formularies and consumer prices, and negotiating rebates and discounts behind the scenes. Though PBMs practices contribute to overall costs, they pale compared to pharmaceutical profits.
Death is coming for the old-school gas furnace—and its killer is the humble heat pump. They’re already outselling gas furnaces in the US, and now a coalition of states has signed an agreement to supercharge the gas-to-electric transition by making it as cheap and easy as possible for their residents to switch.
Nine states have signed a memorandum of understanding that says that heat pumps should make up at least 65 percent of residential heating, air conditioning, and water-heating shipments by 2030. (“Shipments” here means systems manufactured, a proxy for how many are actually sold.) By 2040, these states—California, Colorado, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, and Rhode Island—are aiming for 90 percent of those shipments to be heat pumps.
Enlarge / Whether the toilet lid is up or down doesn't make much difference in the spread of airborne bacterial and viral particles. (credit: Peter Dazeley)
File this one under "Studies We Wish Had Let Us Remain Ignorant." Scientists at the University of Arizona decided to investigate whether closing the toilet lid before flushing reduces cross-contamination of bathroom surfaces by airborne bacterial and viral particles via "toilet plumes." The bad news is that putting a lid on it doesn't result in any substantial reduction in contamination, according to their recent paper published in the American Journal of Infection Control. The good news: Adding a disinfectant to the toilet bowl before flushing and using disinfectant dispensers in the tank significantly reduce cross-contamination.
Regarding toilet plumes, we're not just talking about large water droplets that splatter when a toilet is flushed. Even smaller droplets can form and be spread into the surrounding air, potentially carrying bacteria like E. coli or a virus (e.g., norovirus) if an infected person has previously used said toilet. Pathogens can linger in the bowl even after repeated flushes, just waiting for their chance to launch into the air and spread disease. That's because larger droplets, in particular, can settle on surfaces before they dry, while smaller ones travel farther on natural air currents.
The first experiments examining whether toilet plumes contained contaminated particles were done in the 1950s, and the notion that disease could be spread this way was popularized in a 1975 study. In 2022, physicists and engineers at the University of Colorado, Boulder, managed to visualize toilet plumes of tiny airborne particles ejected from toilets during a flush using a combination of green lasers and cameras. It made for some pretty vivid video footage:
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Courtesy of Netlix
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Montgomery County’s Housing Opportunities Commission
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Charles Arrington
